1

THE COMMUNITY THAT COUNTS:

Parts & Places, Maturity & Emancipation, and Scenes/Stages in Jacques Rancires
Account of Art, Pedagogy, and Politics


Le plus simple serait de ne pas
commencer. Mais je suis oblig de
commencer. Cest dire que je suis oblig
de continuer.

Samuel Beckett, Linnommable



Where to begin? At the beginning, it goes without sayingor so the saying goes. The
injunction to begin at the beginning is a recurrent trope in Western political thought, from
Platos Republic (let us begin again at the beginning (348a); the first step, as you
know, is always what matters most (377a)) and Aristotles Politics (In this field, as in
other fields, we shall be able to study our subject best if we begin at the beginning
(1252a24); as the proverb goes, The beginning is half the job (1303b17))these two
texts being commonly held as marking something like the beginning of political
philosophyto the writings of someone like Jacques Rancire (Commenons par le
commencement (1995, 19; 2003, 9)), for instance, who uses it more playfully.
Interestingly, and althoughor rather, becausethey are usually presented as necessary,
the beginnings in question often appear puzzling (at least in the beginning, that is until
what follows starts to make sense) and in need of further justification. Where one begins
does not quite go without saying, then, for it is only determined by a singular decision
that makes a given beginning something that is precisely not given.
In this paper, I attempt to delineate some of the stakes involved in the decisions
about where and how to begin to think and write about the relations between art,
2
pedagogy, and politics. This means that I am attemptingthis is literally un essaito
make beginnings into a question and a problem, rather than into a given (for arguably,
givens are also made). In that sense, this essay can be contextualized within an array of
scholarly works where the questioning and problematization of beginnings and related
notions of origins, founding, novelty, and emergence, to name but a few, have already
been engaged by many and in a variety of ways (more rigorously and with much more
amplitude than I can master), in political philosophy (e.g. Arendt 1998; Walker 2010) as
well as in other more or less disciplined disciplinary fields (e.g. Derrida 1974; Said
1975)not to mention the importance that beginnings are given in the founding texts
of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, etc. If such critical inquiries constitute a
marginal fraction of what is published in the social sciences and humanities, they
nevertheless partake in making the givenness of beginnings into a proper question, or at
least in making the unquestioning of beginnings into a slightly more uncomfortable
posture in contemporary academe. Responding to this uncomfortableness, I am
principally interested, here, in questioning beginnings in relation to a series of concerns
about the interrelations taking place between the practices of art, pedagogy, and politics
in the present moment (putting aside for now the problematic character of this very
expression). More precisely, I am trying to think these interrelations as a field of
problems by investigating the very uses of the notions of art, pedagogy, and politics as
qualifications, especially when they take place at sites where associations operate
between the three and where, in return, something of the limitsof the beginnings and
endsof each notion might be expressed. I thus assume that thinking through what is at
3
stake in the decisions about where and how to begin engaging this field of problems is an
interesting point of departure for actually engaging it.
A beginning implies an end, and now I ought to begin by the end for it is that
which can justify in advance the present work. In the end, my objective is twofold: on the
one hand, I want to understand how specific notions of art, pedagogy, and politics are
mobilized together in contemporary claims about the possible and plausible effects of
practices of cultural research dealing with biotechnologies. This is the general research
orientation within which this intervention is situated; it responds to the observation that,
in the discourses intertwined with the practices at stake, their effects are recurrently
qualified as more or less political through the use of the analogical trope: art as pedagogy
as politics, the implications and effects of which are worth unfolding, I argue, if only
because what it puts into play are aspects of our political imagination. On the other
hand, I want to test the usefulness of Jacques Rancires work on the logics of art,
pedagogy, and politics for starting to build this understanding. In effect, I read Rancire
as one of the most stimulating and rigorous thinkers to have written about the logics of
these manifold practices and their interrelations in recent years, in both francophone and
anglophone academe. It is this second (yet preliminary) objective that I explore below
with a critical intent, for critique is called for even more against what seduces us that
against what repels us (Musil 1990, 267). I proceed by way of two main gestures. First, I
address where and how, according to Rancire, one can and ought to begin, namely by
considering a certain given on the ultimately ungrounded ground of what he calls the
presupposition of equality. I address this claim by engaging the (now famous) distinction
that he makes between a logic of the police that presupposes and reproduces inequality,
4
and a logic of politics that verifies equality as both the condition of possibility of
inequality and as what possibly undermines it. What is at stake in these reflections is a
sensibility to what different beginnings enable and disable. Second, I thus try to delineate
what the mode of thought that sustains the distinction between police and politics cab
itself enable and disable for thinking the beginnings of art, pedagogy and politics. I
insist that these beginnings are best thought formally, that is in terms of practical
operations, and that engaging them calls for an account of how artistic, pedagogical, and
political practices have been and remain linked with the notion of emancipation in
Western thought. This brings me to critically address the Rancires work as a thought of
emancipation that both displaces canonical understandings of this processual notion as a
passage to a maturity or an adulthood of sorts, but that nonetheless maintains a place,
in the last analysis, for a certain figure of maturity. Finally, I bring this exploration to
an end by briefly reassessing the critical role played by the notion of scnes (meaning
both scenes and stages) in Rancires account, and I insist on its usefulness for thinking
about beginnings as a problem when art, pedagogy, and politics are at stake.

To Start With: The Distribution of Parts & Places and the Question of Equality
La fin est dans le commencement et cependant on continue.

Samuel Beckett, Fin de partie

In order to understand where and how one can and even ought to begin, according to
Jacques Rancire, when thinking and writing about the interrelations between artistic,
pedagogical, and political practices, lets begin by considering where and how he himself
begins in his practices of writing. If Rancire does not explicitly incite his readers to
5
follow his example, to begin just where and as he begins, it is nonetheless useful to ask if
and how his mode of writing is in line with the implications of his claims, to question
how his own beginnings relate to his insistence on the importance of the decisions about
where and how one begins for what can possibly and plausibly follow, and to assess
whether where and how he begins constitutes an interesting example to take into account
(unsurprisingly, I already presuppose that it is indeed an interesting example). The
philosophers starting point is most often the description of a polemical configuration that
characterizes academic conversations and/or broader commonsense discourses: an
alleged return of a restored political philosophy (Rancire 1995, 9); a broad
displacement of claims about emancipation from the political to the aesthetic terrain
(2000, 8); a profusion of assertions about a disappearance of reality behind images and
images behind reality (2003, 9); recurring diagnostics of an end of politics mixed with
celebrations of its return (2004a, 9); denunciations of democracy as the reign of the
unlimited desires of individuals in modern mass society (2005, 7); reiterated dismissals of
spectatorship as the opposite of both knowledge and action (2008, 8); etc. Starting from
such diagnostics enables Rancire to construct and present his texts as situated
interventions, as a series of contingent analyses that do not add up to a system or a theory
but that nevertheless have wider implications in that they reconstruct the conditions that
made these configurations thinkable in the first place. More specifically, what the
philosopher first and foremost questions in his polemical interventions is how idealities
are produced, or in other words, how configurations of concepts and claims, perceptions
and interpretations, diagnostics and solutionsthat is, configurations of sensesuch as
those evoked above are rendered possible, plausible and operative, his premise being that
6
[i]deas always are material realities, taking over bodies, giving them a map of the visible
and orientations for moving (Rancire 2009a, 114)
1
. This is where Rancire begins: this
question constitutes a starting point that enables him to critically engage a plurality of
singular configurations of idealities (those of art, pedagogy, or politics, for instance) by
describing, mapping and formalizing the operations by way of which they are effected
and through which they function so as to enable possible senses and disable others.
As far as beginnings are concerned, it is noteworthy that the question how
idealities are produced relies on at least one premise (the materiality of ideas at work),
that is, on a proposition that, by definition, comes before the beginning. This observation
is hardly new but it nonetheless expresses a difficulty that is rapidly encountered when
one tries (or at least, when I try) to circumscribe beginnings: there is no, or at least there
appears to be no absolute beginning, no ultimate and neutral ground, if only because it is
always possible to go back a little further; it always seems possible to identify one more
unacknowledged premise in a given argument, for example
2
. Ex nihilo nihil fit: one
necessarily starts from some where and some when, from something and not from
nothing, from a singular situation and trajectory, a contingent ground and a given
background, a multiplicity of prejudices, presuppositions and preliminaries. There is thus
a before to any beginning, an ante- or a precedence that enables a particular beginning
to take place as such and that, at the same time, makes the very beginning infinitely out
of reach. But [t]o identify a point as a beginning is to classify it after the fact (Said
1975, 29), and despite the principial inaccessibility of any pure commencement, lines
of discrimination that enable certain classifications and disable others, that produce the
identification of certain beginnings as factsauthorizing their facticity, as it werewhile
7
effacing other possible ones are effectively drawn and redrawn through a complex
multiplicity of authorizing practices (Walker 2010, 215-6), so that it becomes possible,
among other things, to clearly see, in retrospect and if one is serious enough, where this
or that argument begins and ends in both the literal and figurative senses, although some
would (rightly) insist that discerning sharply where literality begins and figuration ends
can become quite difficult
3
. For my part, I argue that thinking beginnings as complex
sites of authorizing practices requires taking into account not only where one begins but
also how, insofar as the two can be satisfyingly distinguished. Thinking how beginnings
take (and make) place calls for the delineation and mapping of the multiple gestures
enacted around supposedly dimensionless points of departure in order to pose and fix
them as such, to de facto evince all other possible debuts, and to enable what follows to
make sense. This delineating and mapping gesture is similar to how Rancire writes
about how idealities are produced. More to the point, here, I argue that addressing
Rancires important distinction between police and politics in a delineating and mapping
(yet hopefully not too sketchy) mode can allow to address this concern for the how of
beginnings and to start engaging the question of how the problem of beginnings might be
related to that of thinking through the interrelations between art, pedagogy, and politics.

Beginning with the Given, Naturally
In his work on each of the multifaceted practices of art, pedagogy, and politics
and on their historical-logical intertwinements as produced idealities in Western
cultural, social, and political thought, Jacques Rancire frequently takes as a starting
point not only a situated polemical configuration, but also a specific distribution: a
8
distribution of parts (in both senses of shares and roles) and places that stands as a
given in the polemical configurations at stake and the givenness of which he then puts
into question. This situated distribution of parts and places is most often presented as a
binary, as a dual relation formulated according to a certain commonsensethat is,
according to a particular definition of what can be seen, said and done that is informed
by a broader configuration of sense (Rancire 2009a, 120)that one encounters
apparently inevitably, if not automatically, when one thinks about practices like art,
pedagogy, and politics. This type of distribution constitutes the given with which one
ought to begin, if only because polemical configurations are polemical precisely because
they involve disagreements about the givenness of particular givens, about who has
the authority to decide on such givenness, and about how its constitution further
enables and disable an array of (il)legitimate claims. One ought to start this way, in the
reiterating mode of a ventriloquist, but merely re-inscribing the given distributions of
parts and places as such is also how one risks to stop thinking critically, if not altogether.
What stands as a distribution of parts and places? Arguably, when one thinks of
art or aesthetics, one commonly thinks of a distinction between artist and spectator; when
one thinks of pedagogy, one thinks of a distinction between schoolmaster and student;
and when one thinks of politics, one thinks almost automatically of a distinction between
ruler and ruled, or leader and follower. These three given distinctions frame what can
be seen and said about art, pedagogy, and politics, and within this framework, what
can be done is to address the particular instances, the actualizations of these relations.
After all, these distributed roles and positions designate legitimized and apparently
objective parts and places in our societies: there are artists, schoolmasters, rulers,
9
spectators, students, followers, etc., meaning that there are titles and qualifications that
enable the identification and differentiation of individuals and groups, of what people are
given what they do, and inversely but also more problematically, of what they (can) do,
given what they are. In principle, the titles and qualifications are not mutually
exclusive, either vertically or horizontallyalthough there seems to be more chances
that a same person will simultaneously or alternatively be/bear the last three titles listed
above than the first three, nor do they exhaust the possible titles to be found in a
community in general, or even in the specific spheres of art, pedagogy, and politics
(these distinctions leave space, in particular, for mediating roles between the two terms of
each binary)
4
. What matters, however, is that in principle every-one is effectively
assigned a (or many) part(s) and place(s) of this sort, the nature of the parts and places
depending on the singular idealities produced in the situated community at stake.
The three distributions of parts and places presented above impose themselves as
givens in Western cultural, social, and political thought. At least in contemporary
social sciences, not starting from them or even overlooking them completely when
speaking and writing about art, pedagogy, and politics is to expose oneself to the
criticisms of not considering concrete practices, of indulging in metaphysics and
speculation, of being blind to how art, pedagogy, and politics are truly experienced in
something like a real world, a lived reality, and to how they have been thought
historically. In that sense, the suggestion to begin with these distinctions, to begin there,
is not Rancires most original claim. But starting from there, many different types of
claims can be made, in many different ways. In a manner that legitimizes the assignment
of proper, orderly and ordered identities, it can be argued, for instance, that the types of
10
practices that define the three spheres as distinct spheres operate as active attributes
of the first three titles or occupations: art is what the artist makes; pedagogy is what the
schoolmaster performs; and politics/ruling is what the politician/ruler does. This appears
to be mere commonsense, although it could be argued that each relation is far more
complex and that the property of those qualifications remains debatable. Mobilizing a
more teleological mode of thought, each type of practice can further be understood as
what each one of the first three title-bearers succeeds to really practice if and when s/he
does his or her job well, and each practice can moreover be ordered in relation to the
others: to put it negatively, if a non-artistic artist is merely a bad artist (something which
is not so worrying for many), a non-pedagogical schoolmaster is ineffective at best
(which is regrettable), and a non-political ruler is tyrannical at worst (which is seemingly
more problematic)although it could also be claimed, inversely, that a bad artist is one
that is too artistic, that an ineffective schoolmaster is one that is too pedagogical, and that
a tyrannical politician is one that is too political. In both arguments, however, the
acquisition and the lossthe beginning and the endof the titles and qualifications
are at stake. What these and similar considerations show, most importantly, is that the
distributions of parts and places are articulated to and further articulate normative claims
from the start and that both the distribution(s) within each sphere and the distribution of
the spheres themselves can be hierarchicalized, apparently without much difficulty, on
the ground of their respective share in the determination of the form of life of a particular
common. In effect, the logic of parts and places at work is such claims posits less an
incommensurability than a (in principle debatable) difference in degrees of importance
for the community as a whole between what is at stake in the practice of a good or bad
11
artist and in that of a good or bad ruler, this distinction overlapping with the (polemical)
differentiation of the banal from the vital for the community. Or at least, this is one
possible and plausible way to go about thinking the interrelations between art, pedagogy,
and politics when starting from the distributions of parts and places that allegedly
characterize each sphere of practice as such, as separate and ordered spaces.
Jacques Rancire asserts, for his part, that these distributions of parts and places
(and the related array of possible and plausible claims that they enable) with which one
can and does habitually begin to think and write about art, pedagogy, and politics,
belong to what he calls the consensual logic of the police. What is common to all three
relations is that they operate as more or less legitimate relations of inequality from which
proper identities are deduced; it is this logic of police that thus puts these relations on a
same plane. These evident distinctions operate not only a hierarchicalization but also a
naturalization of the assigned parts and places: each role is taken not only to require
particular abilities and qualifications that can in principle be acquired and that define
specific superiorities and inferiorities in each sphere, but these abilities and
qualifications are further understood to naturally belong to, or be possessed by some
individuals or groups in general and not others, therefore determiningor legitimizing
the assignment ofunequal shares in the functions they are supposed to enable one to
perform regarding the common of the community
5
. In that sense, for Rancire [t]he
essence of the police is to be a distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible)
characterized by the absence of void and supplement: society therein consists in groups
dedicated to specific modes of doing, in places where these occupations are exercised, in
modes of being corresponding to these occupations and places (Rancire 2004a, 241;
12
my translation and italics). These groups, these positions and these modes of being are
enabled as interrelated givens on the ground of a distribution (which is also a
sharing, un partage) of the sensible, that is according to a singular and delineable way in
which the symbolic forms that govern the life of a community offer themselves under the
form of sensible data and, even more so, of the very conditions of the exercise of the
senses: the relation between speech and action, visible and speakable, visible and
invisible, etc. The distribution of the sensible is what separates the sensible as an
experienced common world from the sensory as a system of responses to stimulations
(Rancire 2009b, 549; my translation)
6
. A distribution of the sensible, or what above I
called a configuration of sense, can thus be understood as a singular regime of inclusions
and exclusions, of evidence and rationalizations about what is common that fixes at the
same time common and exclusive parts (un commun partag et des parts exclusives)
(Rancire 2000, 12; my translation). Policed distributions of parts and places are not only
enabled by, but they also sustain specific distributions of the sensible, if only because the
precondition for one to have a part and a place is that one or ones practice be first
visible, audible, and countable in the count of the experienced common world (e.g.
there can be no artist without art, that is without a first visibility of art as a
differentiated practiceone that implies specific ways of linking words, images, sounds,
etc., without a singular concept of art that is itself produced through multiple
practices). That in order to be counted, one or ones practice first has to be visible,
audible, and countable means that it has to be differentiated from what is perceived and
constituted as the private, particular, incommunicable (less idiomatic than literally
idiotic) and quasi-animal world of the sensory to which, it must be remarked, many
13
individuals and practices are thus relegated and confined in many ways. This realm of
the sensory is the constitutive outside of the sensible and of the count of parts and
places that its distribution further enables as a given whose givenness is normalized,
naturalized, effaced through practices of authorization and legitimation. Outside of this
count, there is nothing that properly is for the police: if not any-one is counted in the
specific distributions mentioned above (except, one could argue, in the political
distribution of ruler(s) and ruled), in principle every-one can be counted within the
general distribution of parts and places that makes the whole of the policed
community, or more precisely, that makes the community as a whole of countable
parts (without remainder) that actively counts, organizes, and polices its parts
7
.
As an abundant contemporary literature suggests, the problem of politics and of
political thought then becomes that of exclusion (or of inclusion), namely the problem of
being part of a community, of belonging, of recognition, of becoming visible and audible
for obtaining and maintaining a part and a place for oneself and others within, and of
eventually adjusting and displacing its share, its role and its position in relation to the
others. This, however, is not quite Rancires problem. For one, it is arguably
overdetermined by the identitarian logic of the police order, and if the philosopher begins
with the police, this is not where he ends. In effect, what Rancire attempts to
problematize can be situated upstream, as it were, from the internal organization of
the distribution of parts and places: he is first and foremost concerned with delineating
and mapping the multiple operations through which this policing account of
community as the finite space within which politics has to take place in the form of
antagonisms and struggles between identifiable parts (between individuals and groups
14
identical to themselves) under the headings of interest and recognition is itself produced
as a finite field of problems, as a material assemblage of signs that produces the
individuals and groups at stake and its own, ingrained set of possible and plausible
questions and answers. Following Jean-Luc Nancy, it should then be asked: why [is] the
fiction of the natural [in general, and of the naturalness of the order of police in
particular] not one of the possible and acceptable mode of this assemblage (and,
ultimately, of the distribution of the sensible) (Nancy 2009, 86; my italics)? Rancires
answer, as Nancy rightly points out in his own vocabulary, is somewhere along those
lines: the designation of a natural destination of man [aligns] itself with a nonpolitical
operation, somehow prior to or exterior to political animality, thus prepolitical or
archaic. More precisely, the operations correlating functions, places and ways of being
(Rancire 2004a, 241), both inaugurally and repeatedly in Western cultural, social, and
political thought, presuppose and reiterate the opinion of inequality (161) and it is as
such that they are policing and not political operations; for Rancire, the heterologic of
politics is, in contrast to the homologic of the police, a logic of difference and equality: it
startsand it might thus end upwith the opinion of equality. It is at this point, where
equality comes into play, that the importance of where and how one decides to begin
becomes graspable and starts to bear on the conditions of possibility of what can possibly
and plausibly be seen, said and done when thinking and writing about artistic,
pedagogical, and political practices. But before addressing more directly what Rancire
places under this name of politics, and in fact in order to get at this question in a way that
will enable a more precise delineation of how the problem of beginnings can be brought
to bear on that of the interrelations between art, pedagogy, and politics, it is useful to
15
reconsider more precisely how Rancire operates in concreto when he starts from the
policed distribution of parts and places as a given.
More specifically, I deem it important to address the somewhat puzzling status
that this distribution receives in the philosophers work as a singular multiplicity of
produced idealities. In effect, the general distribution of parts and places is recurrently,
and somewhat surprisingly, qualified as naturalthe quotation marks being
Rancires, in many (though not in all) cases. What is at stake in this naturalization?
How, if at all, does it differ from the naturalizations operated by the logic of police? One
way to answer this last question is to argue that the naturalization of the distributions of
parts and places operating under the logic of the police is circular: it begins with the
claim that the hierarchicalized assignment of unequal shares in the common is
dependent upon and in line with an evident and indisputably natural inequality of
qualifications, capacities and position (it is its premise) that is further solidified by the
necessarily finite amount of time available to every individual
8
, and it simply ends with
this tightly knit claim
9
. However, this same naturalization, as it is re-presented and re-
described by Rancireand here, what is at stake is in effect the construction of different
fictions that make any same never quite exactly the same, stands explicitly as a
produced ideality that is not self-sufficient insofar as its very efficacy and effectiveness
are refigured as logically enabled by principles that are outside the circular claim to
inequality and on which its operations rely, and materially enabled by virtue of reiterated
operations and (discursive and extra-discursive) practices
10
. In other terms, in the
policing account of the givenness of the general distribution of parts and places, the force
of the appeal to nature lies in its presentation as a (maybe ultimately groundless but
16
arguably grounding) ground, as a powerful starting point that enables claims to proceed
on the assumption of that ground, as one would do from an axiom in mathematics,
without worrying too much about what takes place beyond, around, before or beside that
point. How Rancire operates with the appeal to nature, on the other hand, consists in two
distinct yet interrelated gestures. First, to continue the analogy, it consists in the
acknowledgement of the axiom as an axiom, of the opinion of inequality as a
produced given to which the philosopher appeals only in a suspensive mode
(expressed by the use of quotation marks, for instance). However, this tentatively
suspensive reiteration risks merely re-inscribing the opinion of inequality as a natural
given. Rancires second move thus consists in the proposition of another ultimately
groundless ground, of an alternative point of departurethe opinion of equalitythat is
arguably more forceful than that of the opinion of inequality because it can account for
both the functioning of that first ground and supplementary occurrencesit covers more
ground, as it were. In my reading, this is the sense of Rancires recurrent claim that
inequality is dependent upon a presumed equality (e.g. Rancire 1995, 37; 2004a, 235;
2004b, 160; 2005, 55). The presupposition of equality, the challenge or injunction to
try and start from equality instead of inequality, is a new axiom asserted not only on
the ground of its explicative force, on what it covers, but also in reason of how it can
allow one to think and of who it authorizes, in the last instance, as a thinking being (for
Rancire, anyone at all). Engaging this alternative presupposition will allow to address
more directly what Rancire means by politics, to further discuss the singularity of his
claims about where and how to begin thinking and writing about art, pedagogy, and
17
politics, and to map a first link between the three types of practices on the basis of their
plausible relation with the verification of equality.

The Interruptive Character of Politics as the Verification of Equality
Among the authorizing practices through which beginnings are asserted as points
of departure that enable one to proceed without further ado, the posing of definitions
might be one of the most efficient, forceful and, at least in the critical reading that I am
attempting to unfold here, problematic way to begin. The possible efficiency and
forcefulness of the gesture of defining as a first gesture is most easily grasped in the
exemplary starting point of Euclids Elements, which begins by the positing of 23
Definitions, the first four of which are precisely: 1. A point is that of which there is no
part; 2. And a line is a length without breadth 3; And the extremities of a line are points;
4. A straight-line is (any) one which lies evenly with points on itself (Euclid 2008, 6).
These definitions are prerequisites for what follows to be understandable at all, for what
follows to follow naturally in a straight-line of reasoning, as it were; they enable what
comes afterward to make sense, though outside the (in principle finite) field of
possibilities they open, outside the realm of applicability of the definitions in the
delimitation of which the definitions themselves play a defining role (in Euclids case, the
geometry of flat space), it becomes problematic to assess whether or not they can pretend
to make any sense. It is noteworthy, however, that the appeal of the Euclidian mode of
definition has largely exceeded the field of geometry and has been held to this day as an
exemplary procedure to follow in the production of scholarly work, if not of knowledge;
isnt it important that one clearly defines ones terms and that ones argument, if not
18
ones thought, runs smoothly in a straight-line? In line with some of the preoccupations
expressed by R.B.J. Walker (2010) on these points, I consider it an important gesture to
remark how (in particular, but far from exclusively), in the field of political philosophy,
the authorizing practices of definition have operated and operate as practices of
legitimation and de-legitimation that both enable and disable a multiplicity of
possibilities and plausibilities, allowing the production of forceful claims and effacing
among other things the complex work done at the sites of borders, boundaries and limits
by normalizing them into frictionless Euclidian lines and points
11
.
More to the point, so to speak, and yet in line with the attempt to take seriously
the working of authorizing practices in the context of the reading of Jacques Rancires
account of the interrelations between art, pedagogy, and politics that I am engaging
through Rancires own claims about where and how one can and ought to begin thinking
through those practices, I argue that the philosopher interestingly displaces the
authorizing practices of definition by an overbidding of sorts, by holding definitions as
inherently polemical sites that his work partakes in multiplying. In effect, his writings are
notably filled with claims about what politics is and what it is not, about what conditions
enable and disable it to happen, about what it does and how it does it, about when and
where it is properly at work, etc., while at the same time he recurrently insists that what
is at stake is not a matter of re-giving to words their true meaning or to attack a
fraudulent usage of words. It is not a matter of dissimulation; it is a war on the meaning
of the notions. There is a war about (sur [literally: on]) the word democracy that is
already within the word itself [since it was first coined by its opponents as an insult],
there is a war about the word republic; these are wars of principle (Rancire 2009c, 573;
19
my translation; italics in the text). In that sense, there is also an open war or a fight
about the meaning of the word politics that is always already an utterly political matter
that no Euclidian definition can pin down and settle once and for all
12
. If the identitarian
operations of the logic of police strive to ascribe the proper words to the proper things,
the proper names to the proper individuals and groups without remainder (Rancire 1995,
173), politics, for Rancire, begins with the acknowledgement of the constitutive distance
of every identity to itself, of every name to what or who it names. Politics stands in a
relation of reciprocal implication with the police, since it happens as an interruption of
the definitionnist police order by its cleaving from within, when the equality of
anyone at all with anyone at all upon which the functioning of inequality depends is
verified through its putting to work, its mise en oeuvre through singular scenes of
dissensus. This is the singularity of politics, but considering its polemical functioning is
also a way to construct a route towards the investigation of the polemical uses of the two
other words and practices that interest me here: art and pedagogy.
These dense claims should be unpacked so that what it might mean to begin with
the presupposition of equality becomes clearer. First things first, what does it imply to
speak of equality as a presupposition? Rancire is worth quoting at length on this point:
that equality is a presupposition means, first and foremost, that
[] it is not a founding ontological principle, but [a] condition that only
functions when it is put to work (mise en oeuvre). In consequence, politics is not
founded on equality in the sense that others want to found it on this or that
general human disposition, like language or fear. Equality is effectively the
necessary condition for us to be able to think politics. But, first, equality is not
political in itself. It has effects (fait effet) in a variety of circumstances that have
nothing political about them (by the simple fact that two individuals speaking to
one another can understand one another, for example). Second, it only creates
politics when it is put to work under the specific form of this or that case of
dissensus (Rancire 2009d, 503-4; my translation).

20
The claim that equality is the necessary condition for us to be able to think politics is
grounded on the assertion that inequality is dependent on a presumed equality. In effect,
if politics is unthinkable outside the order of police from which it constitutes a rerouting
or deviation, an interruption (Rancire 2009a, 118), the efficacy of the logic of inequality
that sustains the functioning of that order is itself unthinkable outside the premise of a
prior equality. This provoking assertion, which I briefly addressed above, can now be
engaged more directly. Lets start with the given, as one can only do: consider a
relation of inequality par excellence, that between an alleged superior giving an order to
an alleged inferiorthe relation between a commanding officer and a soldier, or between
a parent and a child, if you wish
13
. Now, by giving an order, the superior seemingly
ascertains his or her superiority within the distribution of parts and places insofar as the
inferior obeys that order, a process that can happen with more or less friction but that
generally happens nonetheless. What Rancire claims, however, is that what is effectively
expressed through this process and what can be gathered from it is actually quite different
from the confirmation of the effective legitimacy of the relation of inequality in question.
In effect, by positing that, and by acting as if the inferior will understand his or her own
subordination and the order given as an order that needs to be obeyed (Rancire 1995,
37), that is by taking for granted that the inferior understands in just the same way as the
superior does, the latter demonstrates that s/he effectively presupposes that both of them
are equals at least in that they share a common ability to understand, and even a common
share in reason
14
. It is in this sense that the functioning of inequality is dependent on a
presumed equality and that the presupposition of equality can be said to account for the
occurrences that follow from the opinion of inequality.
21
To put it differently, and to get at what this presupposition might entail for art and
pedagogy, by saying to someone or to some group of people you are only making noise
(phn), you have no voice (logos), therefore you must obey, at least two things (that
are not mutually exclusive) can take place. Under the identitarian logic of the police, one
might thus grant the addressees a certain consistency as an identifiable individual, group
or party that has a part and a place in the hierarchical distribution of parts and places even
by way of its very exclusion from the conversations that determine the parts that count
and those that do not, or lessthis might legitimize the assignment of that party to a state
of tutelage on the ground of immaturity, for instance. But at the same time, beyond or
beside the question of inclusion and exclusion (which, again, is not an irrelevant question
but one that does not account, given its very formulation, for different planes and
occurrences that are arguably relevant politically), this situation can also be perceived
and refigured as the construction of a polemical scene from which the people partaking in
the speech situation can gather that they too have a (uncounted) capacity to hear and
understand the language of reason(s) they are said to lack. Thus, the very construction of
such an explanatory scene ruins in advance the explanation that is formulated as to the
legitimacy of the unequal order at stake and as to the unquestionable necessity to
accept it as a given; it ruins it in principle, even if the material inequality remains.
The performative demonstration of the equality that underlies inequality can perforate the
tightly knit thread of legitimizing claims to inequality by exposing its sheer contingency,
its absence of reason in the last instance, and as such it can constitute a ground for
political engagement. This line of argument can also be brought to bear on the
understanding of the pedagogical and artistic relations. In effect, the understanding of the
22
pedagogical practice of teaching as the linear transmission of the schoolmasters
knowledge to the ignorant student describes what apparently happens in every efficient
classroom, but it obliterates the presupposed equality that enables the schoolmaster to
expect to be understood by his or her student in the first place when the former has to
repeatedly explain to the latter that what s/he ignores first and foremost is his or her own
ignorance. This ignorance is understood as a distance that only the schoolmaster knows
and that he can allegedly bridge by his or her explanations, but this distance is effectively
recreated with every explanation (Rancire 2004b). What the student can effectively
gather from the words of the schoolmaster, however, is utterly unpredictableas anyone
involved in teaching might acknowledge, and in that sense the possibility of
understanding the sheer contingency of the pedagogical relation as a relation of inequality
from the very attempt to explain it pedagogically stands as an exemplary instance of the
irreducible adventures that constitute the practices of language and the making of
sense. Similarly, the understanding of the spectators practice as the passive perception
and understanding of just what the artist has put in his or her work or action seemingly
describes how the knowledgeable creator can instruct the ignorant observer about his or
her unacknowledged situation in the world, but it thus effaces how the work or action
stands just in-between the two as something that belongs to neither, as a third term in the
relation, a common object the sense of which is possessed by none but can be equally
interpreted and constructed by anyone (Rancire 2008, 20-1). Hence, it appears that a
first relation between art, pedagogy, and politics can be traced to their shared reliance on
a prior equality that is presumed by the logic of inequality operating in the hierarchical
distribution of parts and places and that can be made manifest, or expressed, through the
23
practical construction of polemical scenes of dissensus, although the effects of such
scenes are in the last analysis also unpredictable.
What can possibly be verified through those scenes, those speech situations is an
equality that enables inequality to function and that always already undermines the
frictionlessness of this functioning by demonstrating the ultimate absence of reason of the
unequal distributions of parts and places, by expressing its oblivious reliance on the
ungrounded ground that is the equality of anyone at all (nimporte qui, literally: no-matter
who) with anyone at all that complicates any sharp distinction between voice and noise.
What is at stake in every case is not any equality, however, but what 19
th
-century French
emancipator Joseph Jacotot named the opinion of equality formulated in terms of an
equality of intelligences. This means two things:
first, that any said or written sentence only has sense (prend sens) in posing a
subject capable, by a corresponding adventure, to guess (deviner) its sense, the
truth of which is assured by no code or primary dictionary; second, that there are
not two ways to be intelligent, that any intellectual operation follows the same
routethe route of the materiality that is traversed by form or sense, that its
home (foyer) is always the presupposed equality of a will to speak (vouloir dire)
and a will to hear (vouloir entendre) (Rancire 2004a, 159; my translation).

In that sense, the arbitrariness of languagethe fact that no reason is immanent in
language, that there is neither a divine language nor a universal language but only a mass
of sound (masse sonore) that each one, each time, has to make significant (faire
signifier) (158; my translation)operates from the start under an inherently egalitarian
logic within which unequal distributions of abilities and qualifications can then take
place. In its own way, this (radical and uneasily acknowledged) equality of intelligences
defines, draws a community, but to the condition that it is understood as a community
that has no consistency. It is each time borne by someone for any other, a virtual infinity
of others. It happens without having a place (elle a lieu sans avoir place) (160; my
24
translation). A community of equals, or equality in general is thus not a goal to reach,
but a presupposition to ceaselessly reactivate and reactualize in concrete polemical
scenes. However, this arbitrary of language supposes another arbitrary, the social
arbitrary defined by the fact that the social order is without any immanent reason, that
it is simply because it is, without any intention that sets it (my translation). What
differentiates it from the arbitrary of language is that this material arbitrary of the social
weight of things, no subject can pass through it for another subject (aucun sujet ne peut le
traverser lintention dun autre). There is no reasonable collective subject. Only
individuals can have reason. A collectivity does not want to say anything to anyone.
Society orders itself as bodies fall. What it asks from us is simply to incline with it, it is
our consent (160-1; my translation). Starting from the presupposition of equality implies
to distinguish these two separate logics, while starting from inequality, even in order to
reduce it, is to confound them. But while Jacotot maintained that the process of
equality (or what he called intellectual emancipation) and the process of inequality
(the aggregation of social bodies) must remain absolutely estranged from one another
lest equality turns into its opposite, Rancire claims, for his part, that the process of
equality is not political in and of itself, neither is it a transcendental of sorts that would
govern all spheres of activity (Rancire 2009d, 504; my translation). This is why he
asserts that there can be many equalities at stake and that the literary equality is not the
same as the democratic equality or the universal exchangeability of commodities (505).
Insofar as politics is concerned, Rancire argues that something (an action, a
claim, a posture, etc.) can only become political if it becomes the site of, or if it gives rise
to (si elle donne lieu ), the encounter of the two logics or processes, the outcome of
25
which can never be known in advance: For there to be politics, it is necessary that the
logic of police and the logic of equality have a point of encounter. [] for there to be
politics, it is necessary that the apolitical emptiness of the equality of anyone at all with
anyone at all produces the emptiness of a political property like the liberty of the
Athenian demos (Rancire 1995, 57-8; my translation)
15
. This emptiness of the political
property of the demos (liberty) constitutes itself as the part of those who have no part (la
part des sans-part), meaning that those who have no proper, exclusive part in the
community universalize this singular part that is not one into the figure of a specific
subject, supernumerary in relation to the count of groups, places and functions of a
society (Rancire 2009d, 502-3; my translation). Acknowledging a part of those who
have no part does not quite mean to give a part within the distribution of parts and
places to those who have none; it means to acknowledge that politics takes place beside
this count, because this is necessarily a miscount, and it operates as a polemical
engagement with what it means to count in the first place
16
. Thus, the egalitarian process
of emancipation that takes place as the verification of the equality of anyone at all with
anyone at all turns into politics only if and when it operates a universalization of the
capacity of anyone at all, a multiplication of the demonstration that political action is a
capacity of anyone at all (Rancire 2009e, 495). This implies the action of hitherto
uncounted capacities that emerge as an interruption of and as a supplement toas a
supplement that interruptsthe arithmetical and geometrical count of parts, places, and
capacities that is allegedly without remainder, the action of improper names/misnomers
are put to work to displace and provoke a torsion in the distribution of proper names
17
.
What can this type of polemical scene look like? Consider an event that happened in
26
France in 1968, during what has been called les vnements de mai. After the publication
of newspaper articles in which anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was condemned by both the
extreme-right and the Secretary of the Communist Party through dubious mentions his
origins, French students began to declare en masse We are all German Jews!; taking
to its word the stigmatizing sentence of the adversary, attached to track down the intruder
on the stage (sur la scne) where the classes and their parties were counted, they turned it
on its head to make it into an open subjectivation of the uncounted, a name that could not
possibly be confused with any real social group, before any identity statement (relev
didentit) (Rancire 1995, 173; my translation; italics in the text). Anyone at all can
have the capacity/ability to demonstrate that s/he is not completely circumscribed by his
or her social identitiesalthough enacting this demonstration can be far more difficult
for some, and it is something akin to this constitutive distance of any identity to itself
that has been multiplied by a plurality of voices on the stage thus constructed. According
to Rancire, events of this kind are rareand thus politics itself is rarebut they occupy
a central place in his analyses of the moments of politics as limit-moments: they embody
what it might mean to speak of processes of political subjectivation as the action of
uncounted capacities (capacits) that come to cleave the unity of the given and the
evidence of the visible to draw a new topography of the possible (Rancire 2008, 55; my
translation), as processes of de-identification that poses political subjects as misnomers
and in-betweens whose presence can never be fully present(ed) or produced (as one could
be asked by a court to produce evidences). These processes constitute the supplementary
occurrences that can be accounted for by the presupposition of equality and that remain
invisible, inaudible, indifferent or irrelevant for the opinion of inequality. What this
27
definition raises, in return, are the difficult questions of who decides what constitutes the
action of hitherto uncounted capacities?; what constitutes a cleaving and a redrawing, a
rerouting and a deviation and not merely a reiteration of the given topography of the
possible pertaining to the police order?; and just what is part of this unity of the given
and [this] evidence of the visible, and what transforms it? Answering these questions,
however, is what is always already at stake in processes of political subjectivation
18
.
Rancires accounts of how the presupposition of equality can function and of
politics itself as the interruption of the order of the police by way of the verification of
equality constitute, in my reading, the singularity of his work on what is at stake in where
and how one can and ought to begin thinking and writing about the interrelations between
the practices of art, pedagogy, and politics. It remains problematic, however, in that on
the one hand, there seems to be a fundamental and similar equality at work in the very
enablement of the inegalitarian distributions of parts and places that characterize art,
pedagogy, and politics, while on the other hand, Rancire carefully poses strict conditions
for the process of equalityinterchangeably called process of emancipationto be
plausibly qualified as political. Addressing this difficulty calls for a more direct
engagement with the question of the interrelations between art, pedagogy and politics,
with where and how each type of practice begins, ends, and overlaps with the others,
with their respective and mutual relations with the notion of equality and, most
importantly, with this notion that crept in, as it were, when the presupposition of
equality was duly considered: emancipation.



28
Debuts and Departures: (Re)Commencing to Displace Emancipation as Maturity

on les croise dans la rue et on se dit dabord ce sont des jeunes
les vieux, pareil, avant quoi que ce soit on se dit en pense voil un vieux
mais un adulte, cest tout sauf vident
ils ne sont jamais tout nus si vous voyez ce que je veux dire
il leur faut une histoire
[]
un adulte, a nexiste pas

Jean-Luc Godard, loge de lamour

There is an idiomatic expression in French, lenfance de lart, which is usually applied to
something deemed easy and simple, if not simplistic, much like the English childs
play. Interestingly, the association of art and childhood opens in at least two directions
that imply pedagogical concerns. First, it points to the (dis)qualification of easiness, if not
of facility and triviality, as being caused by a lack of education, instruction, or
qualification and as something to be looked upon with a more or less condescending, if
not paternalistic smile, and cast aside as non-serious, as infantile; a child couldve done
this, anyone couldve done that, as some utter in front of contemporary art. Second,
however, it also points to a creativity loosely associated with youth and often idealized,
if not celebrated, either in the retrospective tone of nostalgiaalthough some would
insist that nostalgia is itself immature, something entertained especially by the old on the
verge of reverting into childhoodor in the notion of a purity that it might well take
a lifetime to reach (back) by overcoming ones education or instruction; It took me 80
years to paint like a child, Picasso is reputed to have replied. Now, childhood is a very
delicate matter to deal with in a few lines. For one, the distribution of entitlements to
speak about it is highly debatable, to say the least, if only because anyone at all can in
29
principle claim to have some experiential authority on the matter, be it in the form of
negation. If I nonetheless begin by evoking this notion, here, it is not only because it
relates to beginnings in a rather literal wayeach singular life being divisible into a (and
many) beginning(s), middle(s) and end(s), but also because I think it can raise useful
complexities as to what emancipation can mean, complexities that are effaced in what I
consider to be the canonical understandings of emancipation as a straightforward passage
to an adulthood of sorts. Picassos alleged reply, the positing of the child as the last and
most affirmative of the three transformations of the spirit with which Nietzsche begins
the presentation of the discourses of his Zarathustra
19
, and even the claim that anyone
couldve done that all suggest the possibility that emancipationin Nietzsches words,
willing ones will and attaining ones world, yet without falling prey to nihilism; or in
Arendtian terms, becoming not the author but the actor of ones deeds while acting/
beginning-in-common (Arendt 1998, 184-5)might be thought otherwise than as a linear
progression towards the overcoming of a lack of wisdom, knowledge, and mastery, as a
jump from here to there, from an initial immaturity to a final maturity that can
allegedly be the fact of both individuals and communities.
I argue that this possibility to think emancipation differently is most interestingly
developed in Rancires critical accounts of the logics of art, pedagogy, and politics,
especially in the context of what he calls the pedagogization of the world operating
through the extension of a specific understanding of the pedagogical relation from an
inter-individual plane to a world-historical one. The force of Rancires accounts resides
in how they displace the canonical understandings of the produced ideality of
emancipation while nonetheless maintaining the notion itself by refiguring its importance
30
for cultural, social, and political practices in terms of equality and of re(con)figurations of
the possible. Engaging Rancires account of the beginnings of art and pedagogy in a
delineating mode, in line with how I already engaged the beginning of politics as an
interruption of the order of the police, might allow to think how artistic, pedagogical and
political practices can be related both to one another and to the presupposition of
equality. Investigating these practices out of [their] limits, that is out of the situations
in which [their] birth or [their] disappearance are staged (Rancire 2009a, 117), can be
the occasion to put into play a notion of emancipation that stands less a definite and
definitive end than as a point of departure. It can also constitute, most crucially, a way to
begin reading Rancire himself more critically.

Lenfance de lart and the Delineation of Operative Regimes of Identification
Jacques Rancire recurrently insists that there is no necessary relation between art
and politics, or more precisely, between what happens within and as art and what
happens within and as politics. The philosophers central claim is that the possibly
political effects of artistic practices are utterly indeterminate, fundamentally incalculable
(Rancire 2008, 73)which does not mean that they are inexistent and unimportant,
however. The most precise relation that can be delineated between art and politics is first
and foremost a relation of analogy: art is analogous to politics and politics is analogous to
art in that both concern the possibilities of re(con)figuring specific distributions of the
sensible; both consists in the production of interruptions of the allegedly normal course
of the given that sharply discerns between the visible and the invisible, the audible and
the inaudible, the speakable and the unspeakable, etc., and in that sense, engaging artistic
31
practices can offer an interesting way to address the tensions that characterize the relation
between the police and politics, between the given and its re(con)figuration
20
. But if art
and politics can be determined as analogous, that is if they can be qualified as similar
(semblables) under certain aspects and if this similarity can in principle be delineated
with a minimum of precision, it is only because they differ from the very beginning; they
can be alike precisely because they are not, in fact as in principle, the same. A problem
then arises when this primary difference has to be unfolded with some clarity: the
difficulty, in effect, is to discern the specificity of both art and politics when each notion
is arguably not identical to itself and cannot be addressed in general: art and politics
are contingent notions. The fact that there always are forms of power does not mean that
there always is politics and the fact that there is music or sculpture in a society does not
mean that art is constituted as an independent category (Rancire 2009d, 502; my
translation; italics in the text). Engaging Rancires singular account of politics has
shown some of his grounds for the claim according to which this practice is most usefully
thought not in terms of relations of power but in terms of relations between worlds that
operate as a verification of equality through a universalization of the capacity of anyone
at all. As for art, it can mean many things not only because there are many arts and
tekhnai, but because the very notion of art in the singular has a particular history. In
effect, the identification of art in the singular began at the end of the 18
th
century, in
Europe, and it is intimately intertwined with what Rancire calls the aesthetic regime of
art; no history of Art as an essence or a substance is thus plausible, or rather,
essentialist forms of History of Art constitute a problem to engage more than an assured
given. More broadly, the philosopher claims that what can be delineated in relation to
32
art are many regimes of identification of the arts. Addressing the ones he formalizes
can allow a better grip on the relations between art and both politics and pedagogy, and
on how emancipation has been and can be brought to bear on these interrelations.
Rancire defines a particular regime of the arts as a specific type of link between
modes of production of works (oeuvres) or practices, forms of visibility of these practices
and modes of conceptualization of the ones and the others (Rancire 2000, 27; my
translation). In that sense, this operative (if not formalist) notion is akin to what was
designated above, in a more general sense, as configurations of sense or distributions of
the sensible. Within the Western tradition, Rancire distinguishes three great regimes
of identification of the arts. Each one can be related to the problem of beginnings in that
it poses a singular point of departure and draws lines of demarcation from which the
artistic qualification becomes thinkable as such; it enables claim like this is art and
this is not
21
. Moreover, each regime also enables a singular delineation of the possible
politicity of art, and it is this politicity that is generally the specific object of Rancires
investigations, for the philosopher first and foremost starts with political concerns,
including in his work on art and on pedagogy. Although they are historically produced
configurations of sense, it is crucial to reiterate that the regimes of the arts do not stand as
distinct stages on a linear, teleological history of Art. Rather, each one persists
horizontally, as it were, and they often comingle, even in a single work, practice, or
interpretation. The three regimes identified by Rancire are the following:
1. The ethical regime of images, within which art is not identified as such but finds
itself subsumed under the question of images as a type of beings that are the objects of
a double question: that of their origins and, in consequence, of their truth-value; and that
33
of their destination: of the uses they serve and of the effects they induce. What is at
stake is thus to know how the manner of being of images concerns the ethos, the manner
of being of individuals and collectivities. And this question prevents art from
individualizing itself as such (27-8), meaning that under this regime, art never quite
begins. This ethical (and thus, not properly political in Rancires sense) regime is
exemplified by Platos account of images as either authentic imitations of models for
definite ends or simulacrums of mere appearances, the make-believe or allegorical aspect
of which cannot yet be distinguished by children (Republic 378d-e), and by his account of
the possible effects of images (and of stories as images) on the supreme good that is the
unity of feelings of the community (462b). This regime is also at stake in discussions
like the Iconoclasts debates, in the polemics about the nature of images taken in and
from Auschwitz (Didi-Huberman 2004) and, more generally, whenever what is in
question are the ways in which images give to the children and the spectators-citizens a
certain education [and] inscribe themselves in the distribution of the occupations of the
city (Rancire 2000, 28) in function of their determinate nature;
2. The poetic or representative regime of the arts, which identifies not the being but the
fact of the arts in the couple poiesis/mimesis [] within a classification of the manners
of doing (manires de faire), seeing and judging. This classification is organized by the
notion of representation and defines in consequence manners of doing well, and of
appreciating imitations. This logic of representation enters into a relation of global
analogy with a global hierarchy of political and social occupations (29-31), as in
Aristotles archetypical account of the cathartic and educational role of different genres
of music in the Greek polis (Politics, 1339a11ff.). Under this regime, different arts
34
begin at different and clearly identifiable points. The question is not only that of
representing and imitating, but of doing it in accordance with a hierarchical distribution
of correlated subjects and genres that defines, for instance, a specific genre of painting or
of writing for the representation of monarchs, another for the representation of the life of
the working class, etc. This regime enables the politicization of certain art forms on the
ground of their specific characteristics as distinct forms and techniques, and in relation to
political objectives and concerns that are proper to different groups and that are all
allegedly best served by a specific form. It is thus at stake in claims about a communal
immediacy associated with theater but not with cinema and that puts theatre above as
more directly political, in the cases of Brecht and Artaud for example; in claims about
an absence of signification associated with music but not with painting and that puts
music at the top of the hierarchy of the arts, either severing any link with political
concerns or displacing the question of political affects on a vitalist plane, in the case of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for instance; or in contemporary claims according to which
documentary film is suited for oppressed, exploited and dominated groups while fiction is
only possible, relevant and responsible for mature and autonomous people (this last
claim already shows how the ethical question of the nature of images can readily be
articulated to representative and hierarchical distributions of parts and places); etc.;
3. The aesthetic regime of art which properly identifies art in the singular and unties this
art from any specific rule, any hierarchy of subjects, genres and arts. This identification
is not anymore [made] through a distinction [of art] among the manners of doing [as in
the representative regime], but through the distinction of a sensible mode of being (mode
dtre sensible) proper to the products of art. As such, the aesthetic regime begins
35
with reinterpretations of historical works of art that make them effective in novel ways: it
begins with Lessings Laocoon in 1766, with Schillers Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Man, Kants third critique, Hegels (re)interpretation of early-modern Dutch
painting, etc. However, if this regime asserts the absolute singularity of art, it destroys
at the same time any pragmatic criterion of this singularity. It founds at the same time the
autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with those through which life forms itself
(31-3). Under this last regime, differentiating rigorously between an artistic and a non-
artistic practice, art and non-art (say, between a performance art event and someone that
sleeps on a park bench) thus becomes increasingly difficult, if not in principle impossible,
and this difficulty is itself at the core of the practices of many artists (think not only of
Marcel Duchamps iconic urinal, but already of Flauberts Madame Bovary, cest moi
and of the virulent condemnations of the novel as democratic). This does mean that art
is everywhere but that it can be everywhere. Anyone at all is subject to seize it (nimporte
qui est susceptible de sen emparer), but also anyone at all and anything at all can give
rise to art (donner lieu lart) (Rancire 2009b; my translation).
The boundaries of art as such, and even of who is an artists and who is a spectator,
are thus drawn and blurred at the same time. Yet, the possible politicity of art also
becomes most interesting, for it is refigured in terms of distances from, and suspensions
and interruptions of, the normal perceptual and experiential order of the representative
regime of the arts from which it departs most immediatelythe latter and the ethical
regime of images are thus continuously (re)constituted as the given, in a way that is
akin to how the order of police is framed as natural by Rancire. It is this aesthetic
regime that renders plausible the crucial (and characteristically Rancierian) claim that:
36
Art is not political first and foremost by virtue of the messages and sentiments it
transmits on the order of the world. Neither is it political by the way in which it
represents the structures of society, the conflicts or the identities of social groups.
It is political by the very distance (lcart mme) that it takes from these
functions, by the type of time and the type of space it institutes, by the manner in
which it divides (dcoupe) this time and populates (peuple) this space (Rancire
2004c, 36-7; my translation)
22
.

This implies that the allegedly pedagogico-political effects attributed to many
contemporary artworks and artistic practices cannot properly be foreseen. What will be
gathered from the distances that those works and practices introduce in relation to what
they are expected to accomplish cannot be predicted, if only because what is expected
is itself a situated contingency that depends on a multiplicity of produced idealities. As
such, one cannot plausibly build a general theory of the orientation of the relations
between what happens in art, in pedagogy, and in politics. More generally, however, and
most importantly for the present paper, it is important to acknowledge that this aesthetic
regime of the arts (which goes hand in hand with an aesthetic regime of thought
23
)
nonetheless constitutes the distribution of the sensible that enables Rancires own
accounts not only of the possible politicity of art, but also of politics itself as an
interruption that cleaves the given from within, and of the analogical character of the
relations that can thus be formalized between art and politics as practices of
re(con)figuration of the possible.
In the last analysis, the name given by Rancire to any re(con)figuration of the
possible is emancipation. To re(con)figure what and how one perceives what one can
possibly do and, more broadly, how one perceives and thinks ones world is to possibly
escape the assignment of oneself to ones proper place(s), position(s), and count(s) of
capacities; as such, it is emancipating oneself in a manner that cannot be definitive.
Rancire thus displaces the understanding of emancipation from the Marxist framework
37
of ideology and the Bourdieusian framework of misrecognition (mconnaissance) that are
grounded in the opinion of inequality, towards an acknowledgement that emancipation is
neither the passage from an ignorance to a knowledge, nor the expression of a proper
culture and identity that could be fostered by science and by specific aesthetic
practices on the ground of a sharp distinction between reason and affects, but rather a
manner to cross the borders that define identities (Rancire 2009c, 572-3; my
translation)
24
. Emancipation is thus re(con)figured less as a passage to an adulthood or a
maturity than as a practice that is itself rendered possible by a positive lack of
knowledge of ones supposedly proper place, an ignorance that effectively enables an
array of movements beside and beyond this assigned position (in more figurative terms,
emancipation would be akin to a childish question in return or a stubborn ignorance
when faced with the patronizing injunction to act your age!). Through this gesture, the
philosopher links the notion of emancipation to the tropes of suspension and interruption
enabled and fostered by the aesthetic regime of art as a regime that operates of the
groundless ground of a presupposition of equality. In effect, the aesthetic suspension of
the hierarchies of genres and subjects, of parts and places, of positions and possibilities,
of modes of being and necessary effects borne by the ethical and the representative
regimes is itself rendered operative by the prior introduction of a notion of equality
within the configurations that make sense of art and of related practices, an
introduction that is reiterated through a multiplicity of practices
25
. What happens within
aesthetics (the politics of aesthetics, the politics of this or that artwork or artistic practice)
thus overlaps with what happens within politics (the aesthetic of politics that enables it
to take place as polemical interventions in the relations between perceptible worlds), but
38
the politics of aesthetics do not operate the universalizing gestures that are the proper-
improper of politics itself as the construction of collective forms of enunciation; if
they partake in the formation of this dissensual fabric where are cut out the forms of
construction of objects and the possibilities of subjective enunciation proper to the action
of political collectives (Rancire 2008, 73; my translation), the precise weight of their
effects on politics proper cannot be calculated and fixed in any determinate way insofar
as they take place, precisely, through an aesthetic interruption, a contingent
re(con)figuration of the sensible. This renders problematic the assessment of how artistic
practices appropriate political concerns and projects, but in the last instance, Rancire
argues that [o]ne must reverse how the problem is generally posed. It is for politics to
appropriate, for their own use, the modes of presentation of things or of segues of reasons
(denchanements de raisons) produced by artistic practices rather than the contrary
(Rancire 2009d, 515; my translation). This, in return, renders problematic the
assessment of the extent to which such an appropriation can be said to have taken place.
Rancire ultimately starts from political concerns. In that sense, in most of his
writings on the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics it appears that while
aesthetics is implicated in every refiguration of the sensible and of the possible (artistic
practices being counted, among others but with no privilege (Rancire 2000, 73) in the
horizontal distribution of practices that partake in the production of novel configurations
of sense), politics retains a principial priority as a terrain of reconfiguration. Mobilizing
an etymological mode of thought, there is effectively a sense in which the con of
reconfiguration points to a togetherness of sorts that is virtually absent from the notion
of refiguration. This apparently trivial remark constitutes an interesting way to start
39
engaging what could be named the problem of the dichotomy between the individual and
the collective in Rancires work, in a manner that attempts to put into play the problem
of beginnings when art, pedagogy, and politics are at stake. This engagement is best
achieved, in my view, through a closer consideration of the practices of pedagogy.

Instructing Ignorance, Ignoring Instructions
Among the three main types of practices considered in this paper in relation with
the problem of beginnings, pedagogy arguably appears to have been cast aside; it
certainly remains to be considered in and for itself. Pedagogy seemingly stands as the
parent pauvre, the poor relation of the triad. In fact, it is also of a marginal importance,
quantitatively, in Rancires own work. This statement, however, overlooks its qualitative
importance for the philosophers understanding of the notion of emancipation, and the
general importance of the chance discovery of the work of Joseph Jacotot in the
construction of this understanding. The pedagogical work of Jacotot on and around the
notion of intellectual emancipation enabled Rancire to argue that if one is looking for
equality, be it in art, pedagogy, or politics, one first has to start from the opinion of
equality, since beginning with the opinion of inequality is bound to only enable and
strengthen the circular logic of inequality. As I showed above, this is a crucial point for
Rancire regarding where and how one can and ought to begin thinking about art,
pedagogy, and politics. Jacotots work further enables Rancire to construct a critical
account of the pedagogization of the world as a process that extends the inter-
individual pedagogical relation into a societal, if not a world-historical one. Most
importantly, it is on the basis of the pedagogical relation that the displacement of the
40
understanding of emancipation from an exceptional passage to a maturity or to an
adulthood of sorts towards a much more mundane and far less exclusive work of
re(con)figuration of the possible becomes plausible. These concerns can usefully be
addressed, in my view, through an engagement with the practices of Rancire himself as
a professor-researcher, the premise being that there is a possible coherence to be found
between his claims and the ways in which they are presented (or professed) in writing.
The pedagogization of the world implies a particular extension of what Jacotot
named the stultifying conception of pedagogy to the community as a whole, and
even to world-history. This understanding was first described above as a positional
logic within which what the schoolmaster first teaches to the student is that s/he (the
latter) is ignorant, and that this ignorance is a difference of position between knowledge
and non-knowledge, a distance that only the schoolmaster can measure and bridge but
that s/he in fact has to reinstate with each explication (Rancire 2004b). While this logic
of inequality presupposes an equality of intelligences that enables it to work in the first
place, this equality is arguably effaced by the multiple practices of authority and
authorization that make pedagogical institutions into the sites of inegalitarian relations
between individuals that bear either the title of schoolmaster or that of student (putting
aside those involved in the administration of the institution). The pedagogization of the
world, however, begins from the moment that the institution itself is considered unequal
or inegalitarian, even if it is in order to better reform it, to turn it into an egalitarian
institutiona contradiction in terms, according to Jacotot. The idea that institutions, and
furthermore, the community or society itself can be instructed and educated, is
prevalent in Western cultural, social, and political thought, from Platos Republic (see
41
note 7 above) to Kants understanding of Enlightenment as mans emergence from his
self-incurred immaturity, which is further specified by the claim that since only a few,
by cultivating their own minds, have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity
and in continuing boldly on their way, [t]here is more chance of an entire public
enlightening itself (Kant 2008, 55; italics in the text). For Rancire-Jacotot, any idea of
world-historical Progress is akin to the generalization of the understanding of ignorance
as lateness, and the great social project of helping society (or any institution) to
transform itself into an egalitarian one runs up against a point of departure, against
this first principle that can be summarized into a very simple and very old
metaphysical axiom: the nature of the whole cannot be the same than that of its
parts. What we give to society in terms of rationality, we take it from the
individuals that form it. And what it refuses to individuals, society could well
take it for itself, but it would never be able to give it back to them. The same
goes for reason as for equality, which is its synonym. One must choose to
attribute it to real individuals or to their fictitious reunion. One must choose to
make an unequal society with equal men or an equal society with unequal men.
[] It would suffice to learn being equal men in an unequal society. This is what
to emancipate oneself means (Rancire 2004b, 220-1; my translation and italics).

This argument asks the question who decides of the emancipation of others, who decides
who has effectively learned to be equal in an unequal society, and it expresses what one
could call the methodological individualism that runs through Rancires work, for it is
not without reminding the infamous claim that There is no such thing as society! How
is Rancires individualism different from that of the neoliberal vulgate and from the
economicist paradigm of the rational agent that occupies a central place in the
curriculum of most faculties of social sciences nowadays, especially in departments of
political science? And does the philosopher places himself in the position of he who can
legitimately decide who is emancipated?
42
Rancire claims that he attempts to think not in terms of surface and depth, but in
terms of horizontal distributions, of combinations between systems of possibilities
(possibles). There where we search for the hidden under the apparent, we instigate a
position of mastery. I try to think a topography that does not imply this position of
mastery (Rancire 2009d, 501; my translation). His commitment to a mode of thinking
that formulates horizontal topographies is expressed most visibly in his general
mapping of the relations between art, pedagogy, and politics as practices that take place
on planes that are in principle not hierarchicalized and that communicate with one
another in a multiplicity of ways, although as I have indicated above, the plane of politics
often appear to remain the most important one for Rancire. Furthermore, Rancire
asserts that there is no single space-time where emancipation has to take place and no
ultimate determination to escape definitively; rather, the refiguration of the possible can
happenand does always already happen in a multiplicity of wayswithin any
sphere of practice for it implies to put into play the very boundaries that are drawn
between supposedly finite spheres, including the ones that assign their proper objects
and methods to different academic disciplines. The development of this understanding of
emancipation is closely related to the philosophers work on the archives of the 19
th
-
century workers movements in France. Faced with the limitations of the Althusserian
framework, Rancire came to the conclusion that addressing the question of emancipation
required acknowledging that the very separation between the world of thought and a
social world that would only be its object, between theory and practice, is the first
philosophical and political question, for it puts into place a distribution of parts and
places, a particular distribution of who is considered apt to think and who is considered
43
inapt. If emancipation [has] a sense, Rancire writes, this sense [is] precisely a
claiming of thought (une revendication de la pense) as belonging to everyone, which has
for correlate that there is no natural division of the objects of thought and that a discipline
is always a provisory gathering, a provisory territorialization of objects and questions that
do not have by themselves a proper localization or domain (Rancire 2009f, 477-8; my
translation). What I called Rancires methodological individualism differs from the
theory of the agent of rational-choice on this key point, on the non-division of the
world(s) into an objectified social and an objectifying science of the social. In a
similar sense, there is not description on one side and prescription on the other, the
first being the fact of the (mature or immature) scientist and the second the fact of the
(mature or immature) militant (the militant and the scientist accusing each other of
immaturity, of submitting him- or herself to dubious imperatives). Rather, s/he who
describes reconfigures the possibilities of a world, s/he who prescribes presupposes a
specific state of the world that is itself made of sedimented prescriptions (477). What
both gestures compose are landscapes of the possible, and this composition is always
an expression of the common resources of thought. If this composition is a refiguration of
the possibleif it starts with the opinion of equality or verifies the equality of anyone at
all with anyone at all instead of reiterating the opinion of inequality, it can be qualified
as emancipation; and if this composition can give rise to collective forms of enunciation
that universalize the capacity of anyone at all, it turns into politics, into a reconfiguration
of the collective perceptions of the possible; but emancipation itself cannot be the fact of
a collective as such, only of the individual that partake in it, and the collective does not
perceives as such either. Individuals do.
44
Most importantly, the judgment on emancipation and reconfiguration is itself a
polemical site. It is utterly debatable and it partakes in the constitution and
reinterpretation of givens. The action of a given artist or group of student, for instance,
can be judged political at this moment and place, but not, or differently political at that
other moment in that other place. Moreover, this judgment is inherently dissensual; no
consensus is to be found on the qualification of politicity and emancipatedness. In all
cases, the prerequisite for being able to question, to critique, and maybe to interrupt and
displace the division of disciplines, or any other configuration of sense, is a sense of how
these givens operate, that is a relative mastery of their language. This mastery will
necessarily be judged differently given the configuration(s) of sense within which the
questioning, critique, interruption or displacement takes place; but in the last analysis, the
very givenness of these configurations is a possibility to assess, not a historical
necessity to accept. There is thus no general recipe for developing a sense of how a
singular configuration of sense works, although it seemingly happens just as every
process of learning happenslearning is precisely to engage a specific configuration of
sense, that is by operations of comparison, imitation, trial and error, tentative gestures
and hasty decisions, perseverance and abandonment, late beginnings and early endings,
etc. In Rancires account, this involves a particular form of maturity that he associates
with that of the democratic man: for the philosopher, as speaking beings human beings
are poetic beings and the maturity that this poetic character requires is the capacity to
assume that the distance between words and things is not letdown or deception but
humanity, to assume the unreality of representation (Rancire 2004a, 95; my
translation). This poetic virtue is a virtue of confidence, one that takes responsibility
45
for starting with the presupposition of equality, for asserting it and working with it all
along to test what it can give.

In Guise of a Conclusion: Building Stages, Making Scenes
On serait tent de croire que nous avons chaque minute
le commencement en main, et que nous devrions tirer des
plans pour lhumanit.

Robert Musil, Lhomme sans qualits


Directed Reading courses have won the reputation of being interminable. Not only do
they begin before they actually begin, but they mobilize materials that can remain useful
long after their official ending, unless the exercise end up in the negative finding that
what was first intuited as useful is now judged inversely after a reasonable engagement.
Now that the beginning of the end of this essay has arguably begun, I can assert that its
writing has proven useful for testing Rancires thought on the interrelations between
art, pedagogy, and politics. I will now put an end to my exploration of the stakes involved
in the decisions about where and how one can and ought to begin thinking and writing
about these practices by presenting a brief recapitulation of the route traveled thus far
through the writings of Jacques Rancire. I will mainly insist of the usefulness of his
notion of scnes, which has recurrently appeared in this essay. In the last analysis, I
consider that this might be his most useful notion for engaging any given practice,
including Rancires own practices of writing.
Questioning where to begin thinking and writing about the interrelations of art,
pedagogy, and politics has led me to engage Rancires account of these interrelations
from a singular starting point of departure constituted by the attempt to problematize
46
beginnings themselves. I have shown that Rancire has something interesting to say on
beginnings in that he claims that one can and ought to start about anywhere, but that it
will necessarily be with the given. This implies to take a polemical stance in regard to
what is done in the academe and to adopt a polemical views of what ideas at work do,
of how they partake in the construction and reconstruction of configurations of sense, of
distributions of the sensible that constitute the given as such and that enable one to put
its very givenness into play. Engaging art, pedagogy, and politics is to engage such
configurations and distributions of givens. Most importantly, I have insisted on the
complication that Rancire adds to his injunction to start at the beginning: if you can
begin anywhere, the how of this beginning is crucial for what can possibly and
plausibly follow, and in order to find equalitywithout which politics is arguably not
thinkable, lest it is reduced to power relationsyou ought to start with the presupposition
of equality. In effect, equality is both what enables relations of inequality and practices of
authorization and legitimation to function in the first place, and what can also account for
the occurrence of processes of political subjectivation that are deemed irrelevant and
trivial when starting from the opinion of inequality. What these processes put into play,
be it in art, in pedagogy, or in politics, is a particular understanding of emancipation that
is not formulated as a passage to maturity but as a reconfiguration of the possible.
Within this framework, the interrelations between art, pedagogy, and politics are assessed
horizontally, as it were, and this constitutes an interesting way to displace the prevalent
understandings of the pedagogical aesthetic of politics, the political pedagogy of
aesthetics, and the aesthetic politics of pedagogy. Addressing more directly the operative
regimes of the arts that Rancire delineates has allowed to assess how his own thought
47
relies on the aesthetic tropes of interruption and suspension of the given in order to
think emancipation and politics. Further addressing his own pedagogy has shown the
importance of the emancipating understanding of pedagogy in the development of
Rancires thought on the presupposition of equality as the place where one ought to
begin; pedagogy is the keystone of the Rancierian edifice, if there is one.
Rancire writes: it is possible, from an indifferent point, to try and reconstitute
the conceptual network that makes a statement thinkable, a painting or a music effective,
or reality perceived as transformable or not transformable. It is somewhat the red thread
of my research. I do not mean that it is a principle or a starting point. I, too, started from
the stereotypical vision of science as the research of what is hidden (Rancire 2009d,
501; my translation). Now, I think it is interesting to ask what can happen when one starts
not from inequality but from Rancires allegedly egalitarian or anarchist theoretical
position that does not suppose [a] vertical rapport of an above to a below (dun haut un
bas). One answer to this question is that by enacting such a gesture, one will find oneself
without a proper ground, especially within the framework of a political philosophy that
proceeds in the manner of a history of ideas that requires to relate the writings of any
given writer, the more or less hidden questions or problems on and with which s/he
works, to an array of overdetermined questions and problems. I think, however, that this
answer overlooks how any beginning implies the construction of a singular site, the
building of a stage and the making of a scene that opens a terrain on which it becomes
possible to make sense, no matter the ground (it might not make much sense, but still it
makes some sense). In that sense, the notion of scnes that Rancire uses and that I
reiterated many times, most often through his ventriloquized voice, is probably the
48
most useful one for further engagements with the interrelations between art, pedagogy,
and politics in my research work. It is interesting to read the present in this light, for my
appreciation for the Rancierian notion of site/scene/stage began before this project, and
in fact it even held back a direct and broad engagement with Rancires thought as
such. In effect, in all preceding instances I preferred to engage particular practices
especially cases of practices of cultural research dealing with biotechnologies, here
and to think them through with only an eye on Rancires writings, for they assuredly
helped me to make some sense of the practices in question, but addressing these practices
responsibly and rigorously required a great amount of precision in their description,
which did not leave much space for engaging thoroughly Rancires ideas themselves.
Each engagement creates a scene through which other scenes are given a voicethus the
relevance, in my reading, of the figure of the ventriloquist to describe the work of those
who assert that their work is to think, and engaging practices that already create a
multiplicity of scenes rapidly produce a spiraling effect and affect. Thus, engaging
Rancires own insistence on scenes and concrete sites of polemical engagement,
especially in regard to the spiraling problem of beginningsof how to begin to make
beginnings into a problem in relations with practices whose beginnings and ends are quite
blurry but that clearly claim to begin, to instigate novel reconfigurations one way or
anotherdoes not lend itself easily to a rapid treatment. Nonetheless, it constitutes an
interesting point of departure for reading Rancires texts themselves in a polemical way
and to make them into polemical sites. It is not mine to judge the polemical qualityand
the qualityof such a work of ventriloquism, but it is what I will have attempted to make
from the beginning to the end.
49

Notes

1
(In order to minimize a certain interruptive violence that is necessarily implied in the use of
explicatory notes, especially given their length in the present paper, I decided to place them at the end.
The text should stand on its own without the notes, which mainly offer clarifications, illustrations by
examples and citations, and openings through the construction of parallels with the work of others.)
In a text that offers a remarkable overview of the method of Jacques Rancire, Rancire writes,
in the third person: [] his books are always forms of interventions in specific contexts. He never
intended to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature, cinema or anything else. He thinks that
there is already a good deal of them and he loves trees enough to avoid destroying them to add one
more theory to all those available on the market. His interventions have always been provoked by
situations in which the question where am I now? appeared to him to overlap with a wider question
where are we now?. Where are we? means two things at once: how can we characterize the
situation in which we live, think and act to-day?, but also, by the same token: how does the
perception of this situation oblige us to reconsider the framework we use to see things and map
situations, to move within this framework or get away from it?; or, in other words, how does it urge
us to change our very way of determining the coordinates of the here and now? (Rancire 2009 a,
114-5; italics in the text). It is interesting to remark that Rancire articulates the (spatial) question of
where he begins to the apparent necessities of a singular (temporal) moment: he intervenes when the
questioning of his own situatedness overlaps with the questioning of a situated we. In that sense, I
consider that Rancires work is, or at least attempts to be, truly responsive to the worlds we live in
(Shaw and Walker 2006, 158; my italics), that is to what is perceived and said to happen and to the
conditions of possibility for this to be thinkable at all.
Moreover, this sensibility to the interrelations between what one might call theorywhat is
thoughtand practicewhat takes placein fact involves a refusal of this very distinction: This
is the main intuition underpinning Rancires method: there is not, on the one hand, theory which
explains things and, on the other hand, practice educated by the lessons of theory. There are
configurations of sense [effective forms of linkage between perceptions, discourses and decisions that
create a specific commonsense which defines what can be seen, said and done], knots tying together
possible perceptions, interpretations, orientations and movements (120). These operations produce
idealities whose meanings are polemical sites. Critically engaging a given problem in a Rancierian
way thus means to take into account the operative configurations that enable it to work as a problem
and that enable at least some of its aspects to be held as significant givens.
2
This is in fact widely considered a legitimate gesture of scholarly critique, a normal way to
intervene in polemical conversations that, in return, fosters the at times obsessive attention given by
(some) scholars to the (necessarily incomplete yet hardly avoidable) reflexive acknowledgement of
ones own premises in the writing of a scholarly work for it to qualify as scholarly.
3
This example is exemplary in that the discussions about the possibility to discern sharply between
the literal and the figurative and between the serious and the non-serious, which points to the broader
question of language in general, took a great amount of space (and time) in scholarly works,
within the field of political philosophy as well as in the Anglo-American humanities more generally,
from the end of the 1950s onward. Discussions about language have shaped for a large part what
could now be considered the contemporary commonsense of the disciplines, and many threads within
these discussions concerned the authorizing practices implied in the drawing of lines and in the
beginnings and ends of meaning, signification, intention, sense, etc. This literature is far too abundant
to be engaged here in any other way than through the mention of evocative names (and even as names
go, almost any contemporary writer could be mentioned one way or another, and the list of ancients
and classics that have been dragged into these discussions is virtually endless). Complex lines of
descent can be traced, for instance, from the now emblematic argument between John Searle and
Jacques Derrida about J.L. Austins iconic How to do things with words to Judith Butlers reworking
of the notion of performativity, in both Gender Trouble and Excitable speech, through readings of
50

Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu; or from Austin again, and the second
Wittgenstein, to the works of Quentin Skinner, Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor and James Tully,
passing by the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, the work of Jrgen Habermas
and Michel Foucault, Nietzsche and Heidegger, etc. What has been called, in a necessarily reductive
manner, the linguistic or the interpretative turn of the social sciences and humanitiesthe
turning quality of which is not for me to judge hereshaped a large part of the landscape in relation
to which Rancires work was produced. Thinking through how speech is distinguished from noise,
how different fictions are assigned different legitimacies, and how, more generally, speech (la parole)
can be considered the paradigm of political action (Giroux 2008, 559) all constitute crucial aspects
of Rancires account of art, pedagogy, and politics, that I will start to unfold in what follows.
4
Note that throughout this paper, no operative distinction will be made between the concepts of
community and society (the first term will be preferred). For one, both terms are now quite often used
interchangeably, and most importantly, they are both understood in terms of levels where multiple
practices of counting parts and places operate. My premise is that although these levels are
considered distinct in many ways, not least because they effectively frame the distinctiveness of
different academic disciplines (in a tentative order for the social sciences, from the bottom up:
psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations), the logic of counting
itself arguably operates in a similar manner within all of them. I think that the versatility of
Rancires concepts, their uncertain level of application should thus be preserved precisely because
they might then partake in displacing or cleaving from within the distributive logic of counting.
5
It is the easiness of this last deduction, the easiness with which this therefore is employed that is at
stake in the automaticity with which particular abilities and qualifications are associated with
legitimate parts in the common. A sign of the commonsensical character of the naturalizations at
play here might be found in the ordinary use of expressions such as a born artist or a person born to
leadtwo examples given in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language under born.
(One could also speak of a born student or a born follower, which indicates that the naturalizations
operate on both sides of the binaries questioned here.) In the field of political philosophy, claims
about the recognizability of natural abilities and qualifications that make one fit or unfit for a certain
function in a given polis play a crucial role in the allegedly inaugural arguments of the discipline,
i.e. in both Platos Republic, where justice is defined as the requirement that in our state one man [is]
to do one job, the job he [is] naturally most suited for (433a)hence, those who can be Guardians
shall be rigorously bred, trained, tested, and selected for their fitness to do just and only that, and the
same principle shall apply for craftsmen, slaves, etc., and Aristotles Politics, where slavery is
exemplarily legitimized on the ground that wherever there is a compound, a ruling element and a
ruled can always be traced (1254a17), and that it follows that some are by nature born to be slaves
and others to be free (1254b16-39)hence, only free men, who by definition have a proper access
to reason, shall partake in politics-as-rule.
6
It is because of this fundamentally sensible distribution of an experienced common world that
Rancire claims that there is a primary aesthetic dimension to practices like politics and pedagogy (not
to mention, of course, art). The concept of the distribution of the sensible is not without evoking the
treatment of the transcendental aesthetic of space and time with which Kant begins the first Critique
(Kant 2008a [1781/1787], 53-75), although Kants account can itself be understood as inscribed in and
as inscribing a singular distribution of the sensible that sustains a very specific account of what
Reason is and can do, of how it relates to intuition and to the senses, of what can be said, seen, and
done about the world as such. (Of course, Rancires own account also pertains to a specific
distribution of the sensible; this concept allows for no proper outside.) In that sense, Rancire
writes: If one whishes to draw the analogy, we can hear [this primary aesthetic dimension of politics]
in a Kantian senseeventually revisited by Foucault, as the system of a priori forms determining
what lends itself to experience (ce qui se donne ressentir). It is a delimitation (dcoupage) of times
and spaces, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise that define at the same time the place
(lieu) and the stake (enjeu) of politics as a form of experience. Politics concerns (porte sur) what we
51

(on) see and what we can say about it, on who has the competence to see and the quality to say, on the
proprieties of spaces and the possibles of time (Rancire 2000, 13-4; my translation).
In my reading, the concept of the distribution of the sensiblealthough it could be deemed more
fundamental or primarylargely corresponds to what I have designated until now as
configurations of sense (see in particular note 1 above). When trying to delimit and order Rancires
concepts, one should remember that the philosopher thinks his own work as the construction of a
moving map of a moving landscape, a map that is ceaselessly modified by the movement itself. This is
why, indeed, his concepts are instable: police and politics, distribution of the sensible, aesthetics,
literature, etc. dont mean the same thing from the beginning of the travel to the end; firstly because
the travel is a fight, too, a multi-waged fight where the emphasis can be put on different aspects;
secondly because the travelor the fightcontinuously discovers new landscapes, paths or obstacles
which oblige to reframe the conceptual net to think where we are (Rancire 2009a, 120). This renders
problematic any general account of Rancires thought, and this is why working with a specific
problem (what is at stake in the decisions about where and how one begins to think and write about
art, pedagogy, and politics, for instance) appears not only preferable, but rigorously necessary.
7
How the logic of the police functions in concreto can be usefully illustrated by further considering
what the policein the more usual sense of the term, designating agents of the stateactually does:
policing in public space does not consist first and foremost in the interpellation of demonstrators but
in the dispersion of demonstrations. The police is not the law that hails (interpelle) the individual
(Althussers hey! you there), except to confuse it with religious subjection. It is first and foremost
the recall to the evidence (le rappel lvidence) of what there is, or rather of what there is not:
Move along! Nothing to see here. The police says that there is nothing to see on the pavement,
nothing to do except to move (circuler). It says that the space of traffic (circulation) is nothing but the
space of traffic (Rancire 2004a, 242; my translation). By contrast, politics for Rancire consists in
something like the refiguration of a policed space, of what there is to do, to see, and to name therein;
it is an intervention on a given distribution of the sensible and on the distribution or the count of
parts and places it further grounds.
Note that the conception of a community as a whole made of countable and organized,
manageable parts echoes first and foremost the metaphor of the body politic that is central to Western
political thought, both ancient and modern, as well as the conception of the body itself as a
regulated organismbe it hierarchically regulated by the head or, more horizontally, by the
immanent feedback loops described by contemporary biology. The analogy between individual and
community inscribed in the metaphor of the body is still prevalent, most importantly in the idea,
already found in Plato, that both an individual and a polis can possess the quality of justice (or of
equality, or liberty, or health and sickness, etc.). In relation to the practices authorizing beginnings, I
think it is important to underline the remarkably efficacious way in which, in the Republic, Plato poses
the analogy between individual and community in just one line (or more precisely, in two, that is in
one question by Socrates and a simple acknowledgement by Adeimanus), and then deduces
possibilities from it that give the general orientation that the dialogue will follow from that point:
[Socrates:]Justice can be a characteristic of an individual or of a community [polis], can it not?/
[Adeimanus:]Yes./ And a community is larger than an individual?/ It is./ We may therefore find
justice on a larger scale in the larger entity, and so easier to recognize. I accordingly propose that we
start our inquiry with the community, and then proceed to the individual and see if we can find in the
conformation of the smaller entity anything similar to what we have found in the larger (368e-369a).
I will come back to this analogy below, for it is a decisive target of Rancires critique of pedagogy
and, more broadly, of the idea that equality can characterize a community or a society as such.
8
This constraint is exemplarily expressed in Platos Republic under the idea that one man can only
do one job well, and it is reiterated in Aristotles Politics under the positing of the availability of
leisure time, of freedom from economic necessities as the necessary condition for taking part in
politics.
52

9
This logic is at work, for instance, in the argument that workers are workers, scholars are scholars,
bosses are bosses, and even though they might misapprehend or ignore the objectivity of their position
in this factual order of the world, social-scientific inquiry shows that they are truly overdetermined by
it down to their tastesan argument put forward (in an arguably more nuanced form) by Pierre
Bourdieu in his social critique of the judgment of taste (Bourdieu 1979).
10
Another way to put it would be to assert that Rancires nature is a constructed one, while the
nature of the order of police is perceived and affirmed as truly natural. This simplified formulation
would, however, miss the complexity of the practices of police and that of the notion of nature itself in
Western thought. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes: One must not forget that in philosophy or metaphysics,
nature never has the naturalwithout quotation marksstatus that an exceedingly summary
representation of metaphysics, accredited by the post-Nietzschean and post-Heideggerian vulgate,
would like to impose upon it. Metaphysics, according to this vision, is considered a totalizing system
of thought in its organicnesswhether transcendental, sublime, or ecstaticof the real and men
within it. However, beginning with Aristotles first reflections on phusis, nature is insufficient for
arriving at mans ends; these must be pursued through tekhn. It follows that the zoon politikon can
exist only insofar as political life denatures the animal in man (Nancy 2009, 87; italics in the text).
What is at stake in the difference between Rancires appeal to a certain naturalness and the
policing naturalizations of the distributions of parts and places might, in that sense, best be understood
as a functional and operational difference between two modes of fictionning, rather than as a
difference of... nature.
11
Exemplary instances mentioned by Walker include, most significantly: Thomas Hobbes claim that
the cause of absurd conclusions to which (especially) philosophers arrive is that they no not
begin their ratiocination from definitions; that is, from settled significations of their words: as if they
could cast account, without knowing the value of the numeral words, one, two, and three (Hobbes
1996, Ch. V; italics in the text), and the way he accordingly began Leviathan by a defining gesture:
Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world); Max Webers typical beginnings
through the strict definition of the terms he employs in the context of sociology understood as a proper
science, before pointing to the wider implications of the plausible claims that the terms enable (e.g.
Weber 1978, 7); and Carl Schmitts iconic first line in Political Theology: Sovereign is he who
decides on the exception (Schmitt 2005, 5). Note, also, that a definition can also be the end of a
work, an end to be reached on the ground of other definitions; definition can a works point, as it
were. Here again, Platos Republic is exemplary in that it arguably revolves around the search for a
true definition of justice. In my view, these observations all point, either directly or indirectly, to a
rather large field of problems that concern, among other question, the (im)possibility for language to
ever be satisfyingly formalized into a set of calculable rules and procedures on the model of
mathematical reasoning, and, ultimately, to what can be designated as the problem of language and
world, of the relation between human beings as speaking beings and the world; I deem, however,
that these crucial problems are far too complex to be treated here, even if I had the competence to do it
satisfyingly (which I do not pretend to hold), in any other way than through this general evocation.
This is why the consideration of the presupposition of equality as an axiom, in this text, should be
understood only in a figurative, metaphorical sense that nonetheless points to the important sites of
questioning mentioned above.
12
On this point, Rancire seems to reiterate the Schmittian idea that the determination of whether
something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons
are advanced (Schmitt 2005 [1922/1934], 2; italics in the text). In both cases, the question is
effectively one of discernment, of limits: The point for [Rancire] is: how do we determine what is
political in a situation, a gathering, a statement, an action? How can we determine to what extent a
political organization does politics (Rancire 2009e, 118)? This determination is the subject of
scenes of dissensus that are informed by, and might partake in the reconfiguration of, distributions of
the sensible. The question then becomes: what counts as a re(con)figuration, and moreover, who
53

decides what counts as a re(con)figuration and what counts as a mere repetition or even as a
reinforcement of the police order? Knowing Rancires repeated critiques of the hierarchical,
stultifying approaches of Althusser, under whom he studied, and of Bourdieus sociology, which
he explicitly rejects time and again as an instance of the police order, one can at least gather that the
answer to this last question cannot in principle, for Rancire, be that such a decision is the privilege of
social scientists, philosophers (including himself) or political leaders as such, that is as qualified
experts; expertise as the monopolization of legitimate voice on a given matter is inherently policing.
Rather, the scenes of dissensus in which (and on which, since in French scne means both scene and
stage) the decision about what is political and what is not puts into play the capacity (to discern) of
anyone at all. It is in that sense that Rancire explicitly distances himself from Schmitt, stating that
[i]f division is at the heart of his [Rancires] texts on politics, this has nothing to do with any
vision of politics based on the distinction between friends and enemies. Disagreement and
dissensus do not imply that politics is a struggle between camps; they imply that it is a struggle
about what politics is, a struggle that is waged about such original issues as: where are we?, who are
we?. What makes us a we?, what do we see and what can we say about it that makes us a we,
having a world in common?. Those paradoxical, unthinkable objects of thinking mark for him the
places where the question: How is this thinkable at all? points to the question: who is qualified for
thinking at all? This question, he thinks, is ultimately what is at stake in the war of discourses which
is the field of theoretical practice (Rancire 2009a, 116).
Nonetheless, it remains tempting to interpret the privilege that Rancire gives to limit-moments as
the sites at which politics becomes visible and thinkable as a reprise of what I would call Carl
Schmitts juridico-epistemological exceptionalism, according to which The exception is more
interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not
only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception (Schmitt 2005
[1922/1934], 15). Interpreting police as the rule and politics as the exception would be one (admittedly
fashionable) way of understanding what Rancire means by the rarity of politics and of assessing
the principial limits put to its generalizatibility. However, because I am not fully convinced of the
necessity and relevance of referring more extensively to Schmitt, here, the incomplete consideration of
a certain parallelism between the two thinkers will remain confined to this very note.
13
These two examples are exemplary precisely in that they suppose institutions that are in principle
closed and traditionally hierarchical by virtue of their nature, or more precisely, of their alleged
continuity with nature, just like the police understanding of the political relation in terms of power
relationsand not in terms of relations between worlds, as Rancire insists it should be understood
(Rancire 1995, 67)and that of community as a whole made of countable parts.
In a manner that generalizes the implications of the preceding note, above, it should be remarked
that if Rancires thought can be situated within the tradition of political philosophy for which
conflict is the constitutive and irreducible core of politicsa tradition that could include almost any
figure of the Western canon of political thought, but especially Hobbes, Machiavelli, Marx, Nietzsche,
Weber, Schmitt, and Foucault, to name but a few, the singularity of his account can be said to
consist in the claim that conflict in politics pertains first and foremost to the very constitution of the
groups and camps in conflict, to the mapping of the very terrain on which confrontations can take
place, and to the delineating of what qualifies as a conflict. Once these givens are constituted and
left unquestioned, what happens no longer belongs to politics but to the order of the police; they
can, however, be reconstituted, questioned again, disrupted, displaced, etc.
14
Rancire points to an important difference between the classics and the moderns (again, the
quotation marks are his) regarding this last specification. If the classics circumscribe this claim
about equality in understanding, they evade deducing political consequences from it by virtue of their
conception of liberty, which is strictly defined in relation to a specific contrary, slaveryan institution
Aristotle legitimizes on a natural ground, as I mentioned above. Now, The slave is precisely the
one who has the capacity to understand a logos without having the capacity of the logos. It is that
specific transition between animality and humanity which Aristotle defines exactly thus: the slave is
54

the one who participates in the community of language only under the form of understanding
(aiesthesis), not of possession (hexis) (Rancire 1995, 38; my translation). (Barker and Stalleys
translation of the relevant passage of Aristotles Politics reads: Someone is thus a slave by nature if
he is capable of becoming the property of another (and for this reason does actually become anothers
property) and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute
of it himself (1254b22; my italics).) Moderns, on the other hand, have a hard time arguing that one
can understand logos (either as a language or as reason) without possessing it at least to some
degree. However, Rancire further indicates that what the classics have nonetheless the merit to
define in a way that will remain incomprehensible to the modern thinkers of the contract and the state
of nature, is the torsion that this principle that is not one produces when it has effects (lorsquil fait
effet) as the liberty of people of nothing (gens de rien) (Rancire 1995, 38; my translation). This
torsion will be treated below as the universalization of the capacity of anyone at all.
15
On the demos as the scandalous bearer of an empty property-that-is-not-one (liberty), a property
that was de facto possessed by all other classes of citizens and thus the exclusive property of
none, and on how the demos thus introduced a suspension, a torsion between the arithmetical and
the geometrical order of the polis that counted parts and places without any remainder, see the first
chapter of Disagreement (Rancire 1995), The beginning of politics. This suspensive meeting of the
two opposite logics of the order of things and of the equality of anyone at all is effectively where
politics begins, for Rancire. Most importantly, this claim must be understood more as a formal
statement that as a historical one: this is always, so to speak, where, when, and how politics begins
when it does begin, for it is not a necessary occurrence.
16
The notion of the part of those who have no part has often been associated with the actions of the
French sans-papiers (e.g. Panagia 2006, 119-24)and their Frenchness is precisely what is at
stake in their actions, in terms of citizenship. Acknowledging a part of the sans-papiers understood as
those who have no part does not quite mean to give them the papiers in question, the identity
documents that are required since the Pasqua laws. Davide Panagia thus writes: It would be a noble
gesture of a beautiful soul to respond to the plight of the sans papiers by giving them papers, by
baptizing them with new names and inducting them into the rule of mimesis. Indeed, such a gesture
would address one dimension of the sans papiers claim: repapering would admit inclusion. But there
is a secondary problematic at work that insists on the simultaneous importance and inadequacy of
mimesis. The paradoxical status of the sans papiers and no vox requires us to rethink our
understanding of democratic equality. The emergence of this new form of political subjectivity begs
us to question the established partitions that bind the borders not simply of nation-states but of
equality itself (122). Although I agree with Panagia, I would add that acknowledging a part of those
who have no part might imply to question the very bordering of equality within national-statist spaces.
Furthermore, obtaining papers can be considered as pertaining to the order of police in Rancires
terms, which does not mean that it is futile or irrelevant, far from it; it means that politics is not quite
there but beside, within the very processes through which these claims reconfigure the audible,
the speakable, and the thinkable, and within the supplementary questioning of what it means from
the start to require identity papers for being able to work, to have a roof over ones head, etc.
17
The sense of what universality means here should be unfolded: Universality is not the principle of
the community to which one would oppose particular situations. It is an operator of demonstrations.
The mode of efficacy of universality in politics is the discursive and practical construction of a
polemical verification, a case, a demonstration. The place of truth therein is not that of the foundation
or the ideal. It is always a topos, the place (lieu) of a subjectivation in a procedure of argumentation.
Its language is always idiomatic. But the idiomatic is not the tribal. It is its contrary. When groups that
are victims of an injustice enter into the treatment of a wrong (tort), they generally refer to humanity
and to its rights. But universality does not reside in the concepts thus invoked. It reside in the
argumentative process that demonstrates these consequences, that says what results from the fact that
the worker (ouvrier) is a citizen, the Black a human being, etc. The logical schema of social protest in
general can be summarized thus: do we belong (appartenons) or not in this categorycitizens, men,
55

etc.and what results from it (quest-ce qui en rsulte)? Political universality is not in man or in
citizen. It is in the what results from it?, in its discursive and practical implementation (mise en
oeuvre) (Rancire 2004a, 116-7; my translation; italics in the text). It is in that sense that the question
of belonging (of inclusion/exclusion) is not a general problem that can be treated in a quasi-
ontological framework; it is a problem insofar as the consequences of a specific inclusion or exclusion
are expressed and addressed, formulated and questioned in a way that puts into play the very
constitution of the matter at hand into a political problem, into a problem that concerns the very
commonality of the experienced common world and of its possibilities.
18
Rancire understands the fact that We are all German Jews! would today be condemned as
inexact and obscene as a sign that the police order of proper names has somewhat been reinforced in
the meantime. What this renewed order first fails to see is that this claim was inexact, absurd and
provoking from the start; in Paris and Strasburg, in 1968, French students were arguably well aware of
the inexactitude of their identity statement and of what was mobilized by the evocation of the
identity German-Jew. The contemporary renewal or reinforcement of the consensual police
does not mean, however, that similar events of political subjectivation cannot and do not take place
nowadays and that politics has somewhat come to its end; rather, such events are by definition
unpredictable and momentary, and in order to have any chance to find something similar (yet
necessarily different) happening where one stands, one ought to start from the presupposition of
equality; otherwise, all that is to be found is the inegalitarian order of the police, for it is surely there,
at work.
19
In Zarathustras first discourse, the first transformation is into the camel, the reverent beast of
burden, which then transforms into the predatory lion, which then becomes the child: To create new
valuesthat even the lion cannot yet do: but to create for itself freedom for new creationthat is
within the power of the lion. To create freedom for oneself and a sacred Nay even to duty: for that, my
brothers, the lion is needed. [] But say, my brothers, what can the child yet do that even the lion
could not do? Why must the predatory lion yet become a child? Innocence the child is and forgetting,
a beginning anew, a play, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying. Yes, for the
play of creating, my brothers, a sacred Yea-Saying is needed: the spirit now wills its own will, the one
who had lost the world attains its own world (Nietzsche 2005, I-1; italics in the text).
20
This claim is reiterated in many texts in many different phrasings. In my view, its most compelling
formulation might be the following: It is that politics is similar (semblable) to art on an essential
point. It, too, consists in slicing through (trancher) the great metaphor that endlessly makes words and
images slide on one another to produce the sensible evidence of an order of the world. It, too, consists
in constructing novel (indits) montages of words and actions, in rendering visible (faire voir) words
that are borne by bodies in movement to render audible (faire entendre) what they say and produce
another articulation of the visible and the speakable (Rancire 2001, 197; my translation).
21
What this count of three regimes asks in return is the open question of whether other ones than those
identified (apparently quite easily) by Rancire could be outlined, even within the Western
tradition. I do not pretend to answer this question here, but I deem it important to underline that the
apparently exhaustive character of the philosophers account can itself be thought as a complex
practice of authorization that enables an array of claims to follow but that also renders other possible
frameworks quite difficult to formulate, since they can easily be accounted for by either one or a
contingent combination of the three regimes.
22
In a joint questions and answers session with Peter Sloterdijk held in 2008 at the University of
Warwick, Rancire gives a contemporary example of what it can mean to speak of a reconfiguration
of the given through artistic practices. This is especially interesting given his broad critique of the
work of many artists and critics who anticipate the political effects of contemporary art within a
framework that most often pertains to the representative regime of the arts, especially in the guise of
Marxist-oriented conceptions of critical art as a pedagogical unveiling of a truth behind appearances
that is supposed to lead to consciousness-raising and political mobilization (Rancire 2008). Rancire
56

mentions the case of many politically inclined Lebanese artists who are expected, within the
Lebanese context and according to the understanding of the Lebanese context that marks the
international world of art, to produce works that bear witness to the horror and suffering caused by
the wars that marked the history of the country from the end of the 1970s onward. This demand for
witnessing is most often articulated to the idea that the documentary form is the most suitedand
even the only ethically responsibleform of art for artists in such situations. But precisely, many
Lebanese artists choose an entirely opposite way, you know: Walid Rahad chose to deal with this
history by producing fictional archives []. Those artists decided precisely that their political role
was not to be witnesses of the horror, but to play, in a certain sense to play with it, or to substitute a
kind of metaphorical construction for that reality. For me this is an example [not of what art has to do,
but] of what artists can try to do now, and I would say that the minimal efficacy that we can expect
from art today is to change, as slightly as it may be, one point or one overpoint of the topography of
the territory, of the count of populations or distribution of places, the consensual framing of a
situation, etc., etc., but there is no general formula for this (Rancire and Sloterdijk 2008,
1:47:43ff.). The (partly) fictional archive produced by Walid Rahad and The Atlast Group can be
consulted at http://www.theatlasgroup.org/ (Accessed August 27, 2010).
23
On the relation between the aesthetic regime of art, Rancire writes: It is a regime of thought of art
(un rgime de pense de lart) that also expresses an idea of thought [itself]. The latter is not anymore
the faculty to imprint ones will (volont) within objects. It is the faculty to equate one- or itself with
ones or its contrary (la facult de sgaler son contraire). This equality of contraries was, in
Hegels time, the Apollonian power (puissance) of the idea that comes out of itself to make itself into
(qui sort delle-mme pour se faire) the light of the painting or the smile of the stone god. From
Nietzsche to Deleuze, it became, inversely, the Dionysian power through which thought abdicates the
attributes of the will, loses itself within the stone, the color or the language, and equates its active
manifestation to the chaos of things (Rancire 2001, 157; my translation). This passage indicates
quite clearly that the aesthetic regime is not unitary, be it as a regime of art or a regime of thought, and
how it can enable and disable different configurations of sense through the interruption or suspension
of the representative regime; this interruption or suspension is never complete(d) but always partial,
reiterated and re-instigated through a multiplicity of practices that can be delineated and mapped.
24
To put it more succinctly: The question has never been for the dominated to become aware
(prendre conscience) of the mechanisms of domination, but to make for oneself a body (se faire un
corps) that is dedicated to something else than domination (Rancire 2008, 69; my translation).
25
Although he insists that he is not proposing equality as a thought-category of art (catgorie de
pense de lart), Rancire indicates that the notion of aesthetic equality allows to rethink some
confuse categories of what we call artistic modernity, like that of intransitivity for instance, which
is supposed to mean that from now on the writer cares for (soccupe du) language [itself] instead of
telling a story or that the painter distributes colored planes instead of painting warhorses or naked
women. Now, this supposed revocation of the subject first supposes the institution of a regime of
equality between subjects. In literature as in painting, but also in music, theatre, cinema, etc., the
equality of subjects and the indifference of the modes of expression are prior to the possibility of not
having a subject (Rancire 2009d, 504-5; my translation; my italics).
57
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition [1958], 2
nd
edition with an introduction by
Margaret Canovan. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.
Aristotle. 1995. Politics [c. 330 BC], tr. Ernest Barker, revised with an introduction and
notes by R.F. Stalley. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford
Worlds Classics).
Beckett, Samuel. 1953. Linnommable. Paris: ditions de Minuit.
_____. 1957. Fin de partie, suivi de Acte sans paroles. Paris: ditions de Minuit.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement de gout. Paris:
ditions de Minuit (Le sens commun).
Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Introduction [1962] (2
e
edition revue). In Edmund Husserl,
Lorigine de la gomtrie, tr. Jacques Derrida, 3-171. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de Frances (pimthe).
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2004. Images malgr tout. Paris: ditions de Minuit.
Euclid. 2008. Euclids Elements of Geometry [c. 300 BC], Greek text J.L. Heiberg (1883-
1885), ed. and modern English tr. Richard Fitzpatrick, revised and corrected
edition. http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/euclid.html (Accessed August 19, 2010).
Giroux, Dalie. 2008. Lespace, le temps et lmancipation. Essai sur la parole. Canadian
Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique (41 :3,
September), 549-67.
Godard, Jean-Luc. 2001. loge de lamour. Phrases. Paris: ditions P.O.L.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1996. Leviathan [1651], ed. with an introduction and notes by J.C.A.
Gaskin. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press (Worlds Classics)
Kant, Emmanuel. 2008a. Critique de la raison pure [1781/1787], tr. and notes A.
Tremesaygues & B. Pacaud, preface Ch. Serrus. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France (Quadrige).
_____. 2008b. An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? [1784]. In Political
Writings, second, enlarged edition, ed. H. S. Reiss and tr. H. B. Nisbet, 54-60.
Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Musil, Robert. 1990. [Lecture. Paris] [1935]. In Precision and Soul: Essays and
Addresses, eds. and tr. Burton Pike and David S. Luft, 264-7. Chicago; London:
University of Chicago Press.
_____. 1995. Lhomme sans qualits, tome 1 [1930], tr. Philippe Jaccottet. Paris: ditions
du Seuil (Points).
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2009. Jacques Rancire and Metaphysics [2006], tr. John Hulsey. In
Jacques Rancire: History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds. Gabriel Rockhill and Philip
Watts, 83-92. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2005. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody
[1885], tr. with an introduction and notes by Graham Parkes. Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press (Oxford Worlds Classics).
Panagia, Davide. 2006. The Poetics of Political Thinking. Durham; London: Duke
University Press.
58
Plato. 2007. The Republic [c. 375 BC], tr. Desmond Lee, with an introduction by Melissa
Lane, 2
nd
edition. London; New York: Penguin Books (Penguin Classics).
Rancire, Jacques. 1995. La msentente. Politique et philosophie. Paris: ditions Galile.
_____. 2001. La fable cinmatographique. Paris: ditions du Seuil.
_____. 2003. Le destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique ditions.
_____. 2004a. Aux bords du politique [1998], augmented and revised edition. Paris:
Gallimard (Coll. Folio essais).
_____. 2004b. Le matre ignorant. Cinq leons sur lmancipation intellectuelle [1987].
Paris: Fayard-10/18 (Coll. Fait et cause).
_____. 2004c. Malaise dans lesthtique. Paris: ditions Galile.
_____. 2005. La haine de la dmocratie. Paris: La Fabrique ditions.
_____. 2008. Le spectateur mancip. Paris: La Fabrique ditions.
_____. 2009a. A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancire. Parallax 15 :3, 114-23.
_____. 2009b. Il ny a pas davenir en attente (avec Jean-Baptiste Farkas) [2006]. In Et
tant pis pour les gens fatigus. Entretiens, 549-60. Paris: ditions Amsterdam.
_____. 2009c. Les territoires de la pense partage (avec Jacques Lvy, Juliette Rennes et
David Zerbib) [2007]. In Et tant pis pour les gens fatigus. Entretiens, 572-86.
Paris: ditions Amsterdam.
_____. 2009d. Le coup double de lart politis (avec Gabriel Rockhill) [2004/2006]. In Et
tant pis pour les gens fatigus. Entretiens, 500-16. Paris: ditions Amsterdam.
_____. 2009e. Universaliser la capacit de nimporte qui (avec Marina Garcs, Raul
Sanchez Cedillo et Amador Fernandez-Savater) [2006]. In Et tant pis pour les gens
fatigus. Entretiens, 490-9. Paris: ditions Amsterdam.
_____. 2009f. Jacques Rancire et la-disciplinarit (avec Mireille Rossello et Marie-
Aude Baronian) [2007]. In In Et tant pis pour les gens fatigus. Entretiens, 474-89.
Paris: ditions Amsterdam.
Rancire, Jacques and Peter Sloterdijk. 2008. [Debate on Aesthetics and Modernity].
University of Warwick, May 20. Recording available online at
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/research/phillit/ranciere/ (Accessed
August 27, 2010).
Said, Edward W. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books.
Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
[1922/1934], tr. and introduced by George Schwab, with a foreword by Tracy B.
Strong. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press.
Shaw, Karena and R.B.J. Walker. 2006. Situating Academic Practice: Pedagogy, Critique
and Responsibility. Millenium: Journal of International Studies (35 :1), 155-65.
Walker, R.B.J. 2010. After the Globe, Before the World. New York: Routledge.
Weber, Max. 1978. The Nature of Social Action [1922]. In Selections in Translation, ed.
W.G. Runciman, tr. Eric Matthews, 7-32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.