Alain Badiou: Rancire and Apolitics

Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, 114-123

In Disagreement Rancire pursues a complex undertakingbecause he attempts to

weave together, with the addition of somenew operators, all the essential motifs of
his thought. Let us recall these motifs.
1. A subtle variation on the anti-Platonism of the twentieth century, an antiPlatonism shared by Rancire, who in so doing deploys his work in a sharply antiphilosophical tone. There was, we have said, a classist occurrence of this tone (The
Philosopher and His Poor, or even the conviction, explicit in La Leon dAlthusser,
that philosophers always draw their inspiration from a fictitious proletariat). In
Disagreement Rancire proceeds a little differently. He opposes real politics (not the
one we want, but the one that has taken place) to the politics of philosophers, or the
politics of truth. He maintains that the politics of philosophers is inevitably
undemocratic, a fact they are either aware of and admit (which is the paradoxical
virtue of Plato) or, as is the case today, they imagine their politics to be more
radically democratic than real politics. But, in this second case, political philosophy
is in fact only the melancholic accompaniment of an absence of real politics,
obscurely informing the desire to have done with politics altogether.

2. An egalitarian methodology which, as Rancire says, is the nonpolitical condition

of politics. 3 What Rancire calls politics is not of the order of the prescription or
the organised project. It is a historical occurrence of equality, its inscription, or its
declaration. It is the axiom that affirms the equality of anyone and everyone that is
exercised within inequality or the wrong.

3. A theory of the gap, considered in terms of an act of exclusion [Une thorie de

lcart, comme mise lcart]. Politics exists (in the sense of an occurrence of
equality) because the whole of the community does not count a given collective as
one of its parts. The whole counts this collective as nothing. No sooner does this
nothing express itself, which it can do only by declaring itself to be whole, than
politics exists. In this sense the we are nothing, let us be everything of The
Internationale sums up every politics (of emancipation, or equality).

4. A theory of names. Politics presupposes the sudden appearance of a name, in

which case the nothing is counted as a gap [cart] between the whole and itself.
This is the case with the name proletarian. The downfall of a name, as with the
political significance of the name worker nowadays, amounts to a termination of
the politics bound to this name. Rancire will say that our time is nameless. In this

respect the community as a whole declares itself effectively total or without

remainder, which means that it declares itself without politics.

Overall, Rancires doctrine can be defined as a democratic anti-philosophy that

identifies the axiom of equality, and is founded on a negative ontology of the
collective that sublates the contingent historicity of nominations.

To begin with I can say, along with a few others, that I recognise myself in important
parts of Rancires work. And all the more so since I have the literally justifiable
feeling of having largely anticipated, along with a few others, these parts. As far as
the notion of domination is concerned or the counting of parts of a whole as
substructure of the unequal this I named not long ago, in my own jargon, the
state of the situation and Rancire names the police (playing on the Greek word
). That it is necessary in order to think change to think the correlation
between the counting and non-counted, the State and insecurity (what I call the on
the edge of the void), between the all and nothing, is indeed my conviction.
Everything hinges on the nominal summoning, through an event, of a sort of central
void at the surface of a situation statified by a counting procedure.

One could say that our agreement on this question is ontological, except that
Rancire takes no risk to ensure the speculative cohesion of the requisite categories
(whole, void, nomination, remainder, etc.), and only instils them with a sort of
historicist phenomenology of the egalitarian occurrence. Admittedly, no one is
obliged, in order to do politics, to deploy an underlying ontology. It may even be
advisable to do without one. But Rancire doesnt do politics. If, on the other hand,
one does philosophy, there is an obligation to make use of explicit ontological
categories and to argue their cohesion. However, all things considered, Rancire
doesnt do philosophy either.

With regard to politics as occurrence or singularity, and never as structure or

programme, Rancire ends up by saying that politics is a mode of subjectification. In
this case I can only recall the theses, examined at the beginning of this book and
deployed by Sylvain Lazarus some time ago, which announce that politics is of the
subjective order, and is thought in terms of its rare and sequential existence.
According to the category of historical mode, politics is an irreducibly singular
thought.

I shall accept on this occasion that our agreement concerns the doctrine of
singularities, except to say that Rancires under- standing of singularity, as pure
historical occurrence, is not established in its internal consistency, and must be
carried as it were by the unequal or the State, or in other words by history. This is

not the case with my thought of politics as a truth process, for singularity is
determined in its being (this is its generic reality) and has no relation as such to
historical time, for it constitutes its own time through and through.

As far as the declaratory dimension of politics is concerned, which proclaims its nonpolitical condition (equality) within the space of inequality, our agreement is equally
tenable. Indeed I believe that, in the field of politics, a declaration is the
simultaneous eruption of a nomination of wrong on the one hand, and a previously
invisible and fully affirmative subjective point on the other. I should at least report
that in 1988 the Organisation Politique published a collection of worker, popular and
student
declarations touching on very diverse situations (in other words where the
aforementioned wrong and subsequent affirmation involved disparate situations).
Therefore we can only agree with Rancire when he argues that the declaration is
fundamentally an identifiable form of politics.

As to the fact that politics makes visible the invisible peculiar to the state of the
situation, I must say that there exist explicit political occurrences of this
determination, often significantly prior to Rancires historicist systematisation. Let
us mention, for example, a conference held by the Organisation Politique dating
back to 1987 whose title was, quite simply: The Invisibles.

We should also add several agreements on points of conjuncture. For example,

Rancire takes up the analysis, which we have been proposing for a good while,
according to which the main function of the word immigrant has been the abolition
of the word worker from the field of politics. Moreover, from this perspective, it was
an operation that drew complicity from all the parliamentary parties, the outcome of
this consensus being the obliteration of the PCF by the Front National.

Similarly, Rancire demonstrates in the wake of my Ethics, to which he refers

amicably, that the mainspring of the effervescent promotion of human rights and
humanitarian interventionsis a political nihilism, and that its real aim is to have
done with the very idea of an emancipatory politics.

This shows the extent of the overlap. And yet as so often is the case when
everything appears similar, nothing really is. I would like to set out the radical
discord between us, which so many similarities conceal, in four points.

1. To begin with, let us consider the relation of philosophy topolitics. Of course,

there cannot be politics in philosophy, and the project of a founding or reflexive
political philosophy is futile, since it merely ratifies its ideological subordination to
a real politics (I have demonstrated as much in respect of the contemporary
readings of Hannah Arendts work, which in fact amount to abstract promotions of
parliamentarianism). But it by no means follows that philosophy is disqualified on
this question. I previously mentioned that even Plato knows perfectly well that for
the philosopher to become king would require real political circumstances
intransitive to philosophy and that, therefore, what he says about the city is in the
final analysis conditioned by effective political processes. The correct thesis is that
all philosophy is conditioned by instances of politics, to which philosophy gives
shelter through a particular transcription destined to produce strictly philosophical
effects. The thesis cannot come down to a formal opposition between politics (the
just practice of equality within inequality) and philosophy (as melancholia of
principles bearing on the absence of a true politics).

2. Rancire takes up the idea, with little or no alteration, that power is above all the
power of the counting of parts of the situation. This was the definition that I gave, in
1988, to the state of the situation, and it is the one that Rancire, in 1996, gives in
his Eleven Theses on Politics 4 to what he calls the police, which is partition of the
perceptible and counting of parts of a society. He even takes up the central idea
of my ontology, i.e. that what the State strives to foreclose through its power of
counting is the void of the situation, while the event always reveals it: the principle
of the police, he says, is the absence of void and of supplement. Very good! The
initial consequences of this are that a real politics holds itself at a distance from the
State and constructs this distance (Rancires variants: politics is not the exercise
of power, and politics is a specific rupture of the logic of arkhe); after which,
following Lazarus on this point, politics is rare and subjective (Rancires variants:
politics happens as an always provisional accident in the history of forms of
domination, and its essence is the action of supplementary subjects inscribed as
surplus in relation to any counting of parts of a society). We couldnt repeat things
any better than that ourselves.

However, one will observe that Rancire avoids the word State, preferring
alternatives of the society or police type. Even less does he set out to consider
the actual State, the one around which parties, elections and, finally, democratic
subjectivity are organised. This State remains unnamed through the singular
exercise of the counting of parts, such as is practised today.

And yet, today, every real (non-philosophical) politics is first of all to be accounted
for in terms of its verdicts on this State. It is quite paradoxical that Rancires
critical thought breaks off just before the qualification, in respect of the political
supplement, of the parliamentary State. And I suspect that it is a question for

Rancire of never exposing himself, whatever the trajectory of his argument, to the
mortal accusation of not being a democrat.

Having endured the effects of this accusation for twenty years I can understand his
speculative prudence. The trouble is that it is precisely here that the line of
demarcation passes between the intellectual effectiveness of a free politics and the
self-restraint of political philosophy. Moreover, to establish a distance from the State
so that a few prescriptions concerning it are possible would of itself demand that
one declares oneself foreign both to the parliamentary State and to electoral rite, as
well as to the parties that are shaped by it. Short of bringing about the practice of
such a declaration, Rancire transforms his reflections on the distance, the
supplement, the interruption of counting and so on, into ideological motifs, which
indicates that they are nothing if not purely and simply compatible with the logic of
parliamentary parties. It is a bit like the way in which, throughout the final phase of
their existence, the PCF and its Trotskyist satellites were able to handle the
revolutionary motif while merely mobilising their troops for the local elections. It is
not possible, and Rancires suspended enterprise proves it, to determine the
formal conditions for a politics beyond the State without ever examining how the
question is posed for us, whose task it is to pursue the question in respect of the
parliamentary State.

3. Much of this is explained by the fact that Rancire shares the common idea of a
retreat or an absence of politics, and yet is willing to put this idea on trial when it
comes to its philosophical consequences. Given that Disagreement concludes with
strictly negative reflections, it is quite possible that Rancire wants to have done
with politics as well. For neither the escalation of identity politics rendered
amenable to consensus (which Rancire knows, as we do, includes the Front
National) nor the politically radical experience of the inhuman is enough to found
any progressive politics whatsoever. Agreed! We expect nothing good or politically
correct from communities, or from the eternal shadow of Auschwitz. But so what? Is
the capacity to deal with the egalitarian axiom within a situation, in singular
statements, on this basis unworkable? Rancire borrows from the Organisation
Politique one of its most important themes: that the word immigrant has in fact
served, in a consensual manner, first to conceal and then to drive out the word
worker from the space of political representations. But what he forgets to say is
that if we were able to discern this logic it was because we were bound [attachs],
in concrete factory-places, to the definition and political practice of a new use for
the figure of the worker. For the identification of a politics (on this occasion the
consensual will to eliminate all reference to the figure of the worker) is only
achieved from the perspective of another politics. We thus find in Rancire the
means for taking up political results by cutting them off from the processes that
give rise to them. This practice ultimately relies upon what he himself highlights as
a philosophical imposture: forgetting the real condition of ones speech.

4. Rancire fails to say that every political process, even in the sense in which he
understands it, manifests itself as an organised process. He has the tendency to pit
phantom masses against an unnamed State. But the real situation demands instead
that we pit a few rare political militants against the democratic hegemony of the
parliamentary State: the stage on which the contest is being played out is far
removed from the one on which Rancire is trying to describe it.

The central subjective figure of politics is the political militant, a figure totally
absent from Rancires system. Here we touch upon the most important debate of
the late twentieth century: can politics still be thought in the form of the party? Is
the political militant inevitably the party militant? The crisis of the communist
parties, including their evolution into the party-State, is as yet no more than an
indication. For the electoral and subjective mediation of parliamentary politics
remains indubitably that of parties. Its all very well for the run-of-the-mill
intellectual to deride political parties and their activists; they still receive his vote
when he is asked to cast it. But when Le Pens party gains parliamentary successes
and begins to make inroads into the State, the intellectual is the first to whine about
the weakness of the traditional conservative parties and the crisis in which they find
themselves.
Rancire would no doubt agree with us that, ultimately, parties, entirely under State
control, incapable of rigorous or innovative prescriptions, can only persist in their
crisis. As we have been repeating for several years, the question worth high-lighting
is one of a politics without party, which in no sense means unorganised, but rather
one organised through the intellectual discipline of political processes, and not
according to a form correlated with that of the State. However, we must accept the
consequences of this position and recognise that, on these questions, where no a
priori deduction is possible and where history cannot help us, it is politics in its
interior mode that enables us to identify what the idea of a politics without party
involves.

Essentially, Rancire tends to identify politics in the realm of its absence, and from
the effects of its absence. On this basis it becomes difficult for him truly to
distinguish himself from political philosophy, against which he constantly rages. He
is a bit like a magician who conjures up shadows. However, there is a shadow only
because next to it, small as it is, there is a tree, or a shrub. It is a shame that
Rancire knows of the existence of this political tree, and of its real pressure, but
that in order not to disturb the dreary plain which surrounds it unduly, he stubbornly
refuses to climb onto it.
No doubt he draws consolation by telling himself that, through this difficult exercise,
and without paying the highest price, he managed to avoid being, like so many
others, a renegade rallying to consensus, a Thermidorean.

Notes
1 Jacques Rancire, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. [La Msentente. Politique et
philosophie, Paris: Galile, 1995.]
2 Jacques Rancire, La Leon dAlthusser, Paris: Gallimard, 1974.
3 Jacques Rancire, Disagreement, p. 61.
4 Jacques Rancire, Eleven Theses on Politics, lecture given on 4
December 1996 in Ljubljana (source: http://www.zrc-sazu.si/
www/fi/aktual96/ranciere.htm).