Theory & Event Volume 5, Issue 3, 2001 Johns Hopkins University Press

Article

Viewed Save View Citation Related Content

Additional Information

Ten Theses on Politics Jacques Rancière

Thesis 1:[1]

Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined on its own terms, as a

mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the

possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet politique],[2] not the other way around.

To identify politics with the exercise of, and struggle to possess, power is to do away with politics. But we also reduce the scope of politics as a mode of thinking if we conceive of it

merely as a theory of power or as an investigation into the grounds of its legitimacy. If there is something specific about politics that makes it something other than a more capacious mode

of grouping or a form of power characterized by its mode of legitimation, it is that it involves a

distinctive kind of subject considered, and it involves this subject in the form of a mode of relation that is its own. This is what Aristotle means when, in Book I of the Politics, he

distinguishes between political rule (as the ruling of equals) from all other kinds of rule; or when, in Book III, he defines the citizen as ʻhe who partakes in the fact of ruling and the fact of

being ruled.̓ Everything about politics is contained in this specific relationship, this ʻpart-

takingʼ [avoir-part],[3] which should be interrogated as to its meaning and as to its conditions of possibility.

Theory & Event

(bio)—

An interrogation into what is ʻproperʼ to politics must be carefully distinguished from

current and widespread propositions regarding “the return of the political.” In the past several years, and in the context of a state-consensus, we have seen the blossoming of a�irmations

proclaiming the end of the illusion of the social and a return to a ʻpureʼ form of politics. Read through either an Arendtian or Straussian lens, these a�irmations focus on the same

Aristotelian texts gestured to above. These readings generally identify the “proper” political

order with that of the eu zen (i.e., a conception of the good) as opposed to a zen (conceived as an order of mere living). On this basis, the frontier between the domestic and the political

becomes the frontier between the social and the political; and to the idea of a city-state defined by its common good is opposed the sad reality of modern democracy as the rule of the

masses and of necessity. In practice, this celebration of pure politics entrusts the virtue of the

ʻpolitical goodʼ to governmental oligarchies enlightened by “experts;” which is to say that the supposed purification of the political, freed from domestic and social necessity, comes down

to nothing more (or less) than the reduction of the political to the state [lʼétatique].

Behind the current bu�ooneries of the ʻreturnsʼ of the political (that include ʻthe return of

political philosophyʼ), it is important to recognize the vicious circle that characterizes political

philosophy; a vicious circle located in the link between the political relationship and the political subject. This vicious circle posits a way of life that is ʻproperʼ to politics. The political

relationship is subsequently deduced from the properties of this specific order of being and is explained in terms of the existence of a character who possesses a good or a specific

universality, as opposed to the private or domestic world of needs or interests. In short, politics is explained as the accomplishment of a way of life that is proper to those who are

destined for it. This partition — which is actually the object of politics — is posited as its basis.

What is proper to politics is thus lost at the outset if politics is thought of as a specific way of living. Politics cannot be defined on the basis of any pre-existing subject. The political

ʻdi�erenceʼ that makes it possible to think its subject must be sought in the form of its relation. If we return to the Aristotelian definition, there is a name given to the subject (politès) that is

defined by a part-taking (metexis) in a form of action (archein — ruling) and in the undergoing

that corresponds to this doing (archesthai — being ruled). If there is something ʻproperʼ to politics, it consists entirely in this relationship which is not a relationship between subjects,

but one between two contradictory terms through which a subject is defined. Politics disappears the moment you undo this knot of a subject and a relation. This is what happens in

all fictions, be they speculative or empiricist, that seek the origin of the political relationship in

the properties of its subjects and in the conditions of their coming together. The traditional question “For what reasons do human beings gather into political communities?” is always

already a response, and one that causes the disappearance of the object it claims to explain or to ground — i.e., the form of a political part-taking that then disappears in the play of elements

or atoms of sociability.

Thesis 2:

That is proper to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in

contrarieties. Politics is a paradoxical form of action.

The formulations according to which politics is the ruling of equals, and the citizen is the one

who part-takes in ruling and being ruled, articulate a paradox that must be thought through rigorously. It is important to set aside banal representations of the doxa of parliamentary

systems that invoke the reciprocity of rights and duties in order to understand what is

extraordinary in the Aristotelian articulation. This formulation speaks to us of a being who is at once the agent of an action and the one upon whom the action is exercised.[4] It contradicts

the conventional ʻcause-and-e�ectʼ model of action that has it that an agent endowed with a specific capacity produces an e�ect upon an object that is, in turn, characterized by its

aptitude for receiving that e�ect.

This problem is in no way resolved by reverting to the classic opposition between two modes of action: poiesis, on the one hand, governed by the model of fabrication that gives

form to matter; and praxis, on the other, which excludes from this relation the ʻinter-beingʼ [lʼinter-être][5] of people devoted to politics. As we know, this opposition — replacing that of

zen and eu zen — sustains a conception of political purity. In Hannah Arendtʼs work, for

instance, the order of praxis is that of equals with the power of archein, conceived of as the power to begin anew: “To act, in its most general sense,” she explains in The Human Condition,

“means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, ʻto begin,̓ ʻto lead,̓ and eventually ʻto ruleʼ indicates);” she concludes this thought by subsequently linking archein to

“the principle of freedom.”[6] Once Arendt defines both a proper mode and sphere of action, a vertiginous short-cut is formed that allows one to posit a series of equations between

ʻbeginning,̓ ʻruling,̓ ʻbeing free,̓ and living in a city-state (ʻTo be free and to live in a polis is the

same thingʼ as the same text puts it).

This series of equations finds its equivalent in the movement that engenders civic equality

from the community of Homeric heroes; equals, that is, in their participation in the power of arche. The first witness against this Homeric idyllic, however, is Homer himself. Against the

garrulous Thersites — the man who is an able public speaker despite the fact that he is not

qualified to speak — Odysseus recalls the fact that the Greek army has one and only one chief: Agamemnon. He reminds us of what archein means: to walk at the head. And, if there is one

who walks at the head, the others must necessarily walk behind. The line between the power of archein (i.e., the power to rule), freedom, and the polis, is not straight but severed. In order

to convince oneself of this, it is enough to see the manner in which Aristotle characterizes the

three possible classes of rule within a polis, each one possessing a particular title: ʻvirtueʼ for

the aristoi, ʻwealthʼ for the oligoi, and ʻfreedomʼ for the demos. In this division, ʻfreedomʼ

appears as the paradoxical part of the demos about whom the Homeric hero tells us (in no uncertain terms) that it had only one thing to do: to keep quiet and bow down.

In short, the opposition between praxis and poiesis in no way resolves the paradoxical definition of the politès. As far as arche is concerned, as with everything else, the conventional

logic has it that there is a particular disposition to act that is exercised upon a particular

disposition to ʻbe acted upon.̓ Thus the logic of arche presupposes a determinate superiority exercised upon an equally determinate inferiority. In order for there to be a political

subject(ivity), and thus for there to be politics, there must be a rupture in this logic.

Thesis 3:

Politics is a specific rupture in the logic of arche. It does not simply presuppose the

rupture of the ʻnormalʼ distribution of positions between the one who exercises power

and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions ʻproperʼ to such classifications.

In Book III of the Laws, Plato devotes himself to a systematic inventory of the qualifications (axiomata) for ruling, along with certain correlative qualifications for being ruled. Out of the

seven he retains, four are traditional qualifications of authority based on a natural di�erence;

that is, the di�erence in birth. Those qualified to rule are those ʻborn beforeʼ or ʻborn otherwise.̓ This grounds the power of parents over children, old over young, masters over

slaves, and nobles over serfs. The fi�h qualification is introduced as the principal principle that summarizes all natural di�erences: It is the power of those with a superior nature, of the

stronger over the weak — a power that has the unfortunate quality, discussed at length in the Gorgias, of being indeterminate. The sixth qualification, then, gives the only di�erence that

counts for Plato; namely, the power of those who know [savoir] over those who do not. There

are thus four couplings of traditional qualifications to be had, along with two theoretical couplings that claim priority over them: namely, ʻnaturalʼ superiority and the rule of ʻscienceʼ

qua knowledge.

The list ought to stop there. But there is a seventh qualification: ʻthe choice of god,̓

otherwise referring to a drawing of lots [le tirage au sort] that designates the one who

exercises arche. Plato does not expand upon this. But clearly, this kind of ʻchoiceʼ points ironically to the designation by god of a regime previously referred to as one only god could

save: namely, democracy. What thus characterizes a democracy is pure chance or the complete absence of qualifications for governing. Democracy is that state of exception where

no oppositions can function, where there is no pre-determined principle of role allocation. ʻTo

partake in ruling and being ruledʼ is quite a di�erent matter from reciprocity. It is, in short, an

absence of reciprocity that constitutes the exceptional essence of this relationship; and this absence of reciprocity rests on the paradox of a qualification that is absence of qualification.

Democracy is the specific situation in which there is an absence of qualifications that, in turn, becomes the qualification for the exercise of a democratic arche. What is destroyed in this

logic is the particular quality of arche, its redoubling, which means that it always precedes

itself within a circle of its own disposition and its own exercise. But this exceptional state is identical with the very condition for the specificity of politics more generally.

Thesis 4:

Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a rupture in the logic of arche — that is, in the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it — democracy is the regime of

politics in the form of a relationship defining a specific subject.

What makes possible the metexis proper to politics is the rupture of all those logics of allocation exercised in the part-taking of arche. The ʻfreedomʼ of a people that constitutes the

axiom of democracy has as its real content the rupture of the axioms of domination: a rupture, that is, in the correlation between a capacity for rule and a capacity for being ruled. The citizen

who partakes ʻin ruling and being ruledʼ is only thinkable on the basis of the demos as a figure

that ruptures the correspondence between a series of correlated capacities. Democracy is thus precisely not a political regime in the sense of a particular constitution that determines

di�erent ways of assembling people under a common authority. Democracy is the institution of politics — the institution of both its subject and its mode of relating.

As we know, democracy is a term invented by its opponents, by all those who were ʻqualifiedʼ to govern because of seniority, birth, wealth, virtue, and knowledge [savoir]. Using it

as a term of derision, they articulated an unprecedented reversal of the order of things: the

ʻpower of the demosʼ means that those who rule are those who have no specificity in common, apart from their having no qualification for governing. Before being the name of a community,

demos is the name of a part of the community: namely, the poor. The ʻpoor,̓ however, does not designate an economically disadvantaged part of the population; it simply designates the

category of peoples who do not count, those who have no qualifications to part-take in arche,

no qualification for being taken into account.

This is exactly what Homer describes in the Thersites episode evoked above. Those who

want to speak, though they belong to the demos, though they belong to the undi�erentiated collection of the ʻunaccounted forʼ [lʼhors-compte] (anarithmoi), get stabbed in the back by

Odysseusʼ scepter. This is not a deduction but a definition: The one who is ʻunaccounted-for,̓

the one who has no speech to be heard, is the one of the demos. A remarkable passage from

Book XII of the Odyssey illustrates this point: Polydamas complains because his opinion has been disregarded by Hector. With you, he says, ʻone never has the right to speak if one belongs

to the demos.̓ Now Polydamas is not a villain like Thersites; he is Hectorʼs brother. Demos thus does not designate a socially inferior category: The one who speaks when s/he is not to speak,

the one who part-takes in what s/he has no part in — that person belongs to the demos.

Thesis 5:

The ʻpeopleʼ that is the subject of democracy — and thus the principal subject of politics — is not the collection of members in a community, or the laboring classes of

the population. It is the supplementary part, in relation to any counting of parts of the population that makes it possible to identify ʻthe part of those who have no-partʼ [le

compte des incomptés][7] with the whole of the community.

The people (demos) exists only as a rupture of the logic of arche, a rupture of the logic of beginning/ruling [commencement/commandement]. It should not be identified either with the

race of those who recognize each other as having the same origin, the same birth, or with a part of a population or even the sum of its parts. ʻPeopleʼ [peuple] refers to the supplement

that disconnects the population from itself, by suspending the various logics of legitimate

domination. This disjunction is illustrated particularly well in the crucial reforms that give Athenian democracy its proper status; namely, those reforms enacted by Cleisthenes when he

rearranged the distribution of the demes [8] over the territory of the city. In constituting each tribe by the addition of three separate boundaries — one from the city, one from the coast, and

one from the countryside — Cleisthenes broke with the ancient principle that kept the tribes under the rule of local aristocratic chie�ainships whose power, legitimated through legendary

birth, had as its real content the economic power of the landowners. In short, the ʻpeopleʼ is an

artifice set at an angle from the logic that gives the principle of wealth as heir to the principle of birth. It is an abstract supplement in relation to any actual (ac)count of the parts of the

population, of their qualifications for part-taking in the community, and of the common shares due to them according to these qualifications. The ʻpeopleʼ is the supplement that inscribes

ʻthe count of the unaccounted-forʼ or ʻthe part of those who have no part.̓

These expressions should not be understood in their more populist sense but rather in a structural sense. It is not the laboring and su�ering populace that comes to occupy the terrain

of political action and to identify its name with that of the community. What is identified by democracy with the role of the community is an empty, supplementary, part that separates

the community from the sum of the parts of the social body. This separation, in turn, grounds

politics in the action of supplementary subjects that are a surplus in relation to any (ac)count

of the parts of society. The whole question of politics thus lies in the interpretation of this void. The criticisms that sought to discredit democracy brought the ʻnothingʼ which constitutes the

political people back to the overflow of the ignorant masses and the greedy populace. The interpretation of democracy posed by Claude Lefort gave the democratic void its structural

meaning.[9] But the theory of the structural void can be interpreted in two distinct ways: First,

the structural void refers to an-archy, to the absence of an entitlement to rule that constitutes the very nature of the political space; Secondly, the void is caused by the ʻdis-incorporationʼ of

the kingʼs two bodies — the human and divine body.[10] Democracy, according to this latter view, begins with the murder of the king; in other words, with a collapse of the symbolic

thereby producing a dis-incorporated social presence. And this originary link is posed as the

equivalent of an original temptation to imaginatively reconstruct the ʻglorious body of the peopleʼ that is heir to the immortal body of the king and the basis of every totalitarianism.

Against these interpretations, let us say that the two-fold body of the people is not a modern consequence of the sacrifice of the sovereign body but rather a given constitutive of politics. It

is initially the people, and not the king, that has a double body and this duality is nothing

other than the supplement through which politics exists: a supplement to all social (ac)counts and an exception to all logics of domination.

The seventh qualification, Plato says, is ʻgodʼs part.̓ We will maintain that this part belonging to god — this qualification of those who have no qualification — contains within it

all that is theological in politics. The contemporary emphasis on the theme of the ʻtheologico- politicalʼ dissolves the question of politics into that of power and of the grounding event that

is its fundament. It re-doubles the liberal fiction of the contract with the representation of an

original sacrifice. But the division of arche that conjoins politics and democracy is not a founding sacrifice: It is, rather, a neutralization of any founding sacrifice. This neutralization

could find its exact fable at the end of Oedipus at Colonus: it is at the price of the disappearance of the sacrificial body, at the price of not seeking Oedipusʼ body, that Athenian

democracy receives the benefit of its burial. To want to disinter the body is not only to

associate the democratic form with a scenario of sin or of original malediction. More radically, it is to return the logic of politics to the question of an originary scene of power; in other

words, to return politics to the state. By interpreting the empty part in terms of psychosis, the dramaturgy of original symbolic catastrophe transforms the political exception into a

sacrificial symptom of democracy: It subsumes the litigiousness proper to politics under any

of the innumerable versions of an originary ʻcrimeʼ or ʻmurder.̓

Thesis 6:

If politics is the outline of a vanishing di�erence, with the distribution of social parts

and shares, then it follows that its existence is in no way necessary, but that it occurs as a provisional accident in the history of the forms of domination. It also follows from

this that political litigiousness has as its essential object the very existence of politics.

Politics cannot be deduced from the necessity of gathering people into communities. It is an

exception to the principles according to which this gathering operates. The ʻnormalʼ order of

things is that human communities gather together under the rule of those qualified to rule — whose qualifications are legitimated by the very fact that they are ruling. These governmental

qualifications may be summed up according to two central principles: The first refers society to the order of filiation, both human and divine. This is the power of birth. The second refers

society to the vital principle of its activities. This is the power of wealth. Thus, the ʻnormalʼ

evolution of society comes to us in the progression from a government of birth to a government of wealth. Politics exists as a deviation from this normal order of things. It is this

anomaly that is expressed in the nature of political subjects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscription of ʻthe (ac)count of the unaccounted-for.̓

There is politics as long as ʻthe peopleʼ is