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Title: Ten Theses on Politics* 
Author: Jacques Ranciere* 
Date: 2001* 
Language: en*
Topics: dissensus, democracy, politics* 
Source: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques-ranciere/articles/ten-thesis-on-politics/*

Jacques Ranciere*

Ten Theses on Politics*

* ** * * ** Thesis 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] 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 ‘he

who partakes in the fact of ruling and the fact of being ruled.’

Everything about politics is contained in this specific relationship,

this ‘part-taking’avoir-part],[3] which should be interrogated as to its

meaning and as to its conditions of possibility. ** An interrogation

into what is ‘proper’ 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 affirmations proclaiming

the end of the illusion of the social and a return to a ‘pure’ form of

politics. Read through either an Arendtian or Straussian lens, these

affirmations 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 ‘political good’ 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 [l’étatique]. ** Behind the current buffooneries of the

‘returns’ of the political (that include ‘the return of political

philosophy’), 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 ‘proper’ 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 ‘difference’ 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 ‘proper’ 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 ‘cause-and-effect’ model of action that

has it that an agent endowed with a specific capacity produces an effect

upon an object that is, in turn, characterized by its aptitude for

receiving that effect. ** 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 ‘inter-being’ [l’inter-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 Arendt’s 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, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’

and eventually ‘to rule’ 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 ‘beginning,’ ‘ruling,’ ‘being free,’ and living in a city-state

(‘To be free and to live in a polis is the same thing’ 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: ‘virtue’ for the aristoi,

‘wealth’ for the oligoi, and ‘freedom’ for the demos. In this division,

‘freedom’ 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 ‘be 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

‘normal’ 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 ‘proper’ 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 difference;

that is, the difference in birth. Those qualified to rule are those

‘born before’ or ‘born otherwise.’ This grounds the power of parents

over children, old over young, masters over slaves, and nobles over

serfs. The fifth qualification is introduced as the principal principle

that summarizes all natural differences: 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 difference

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, ‘natural’ superiority and the rule of

‘science’ qua knowledge. ** The list ought to stop there. But there is a

seventh qualification: ‘the 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 ‘choice’ 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. ‘To partake in ruling and

being ruled’ is quite a different 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 ‘freedom’ 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 ‘in

ruling and being ruled’ 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 different 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 ‘qualified’ 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

‘power of the demos’ 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 ‘poor,’ 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 undifferentiated

collection of the ‘unaccounted for’ [l’hors-compte] (anarithmoi), get

stabbed in the back by Odysseus’ scepter. This is not a deduction but a

definition: The one who is ‘unaccounted-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, ‘one never

has the right to speak if one belongs to the demos.’ Now Polydamas is

not a villain like Thersites; he is Hector’s 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 ‘people’ 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

‘the part of those who have no-part’ [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. ‘People’ [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 chieftainships whose power,

legitimated through legendary birth, had as its real content the

economic power of the landowners. In short, the ‘people’ 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 ‘people’ is

the supplement that inscribes ‘the count of the unaccounted-for’ or ‘the

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 suffering 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 ‘nothing’

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

‘dis-incorporation’ of the king’s 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 ‘glorious body of the people’ 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 ‘god’s 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

‘theologico-political’ 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

Oedipus’ 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 ‘crime’ or ‘murder.’ ** Thesis 6: ** If politics is the

outline of a vanishing difference, 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 ‘normal’ 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 ‘normal’ 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 ‘the (ac)count

of the unaccounted-for.’ ** There is politics as long as ‘the people’ is

not identified with the race or a population, inasmuch as the poor are

not equated with a particular disadvantaged sector, and as long as the

proletariat is not a group of industrial workers, etc… Rather, there is

politics inasmuch as ‘the people’ refers to subjects inscribed as a

supplement to the count of the parts of society, a specific figure of

‘the part of those who have no-part.’ Whether this part exists is the

political issue and it is the object of political litigation. Political

struggle is not a conflict between well defined interest groups; it is

an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the

community in different ways. The clash between the ‘rich’ and the

‘poor,’ for instance, is the struggle over the very possibility of these

words being coupled, of their being able to institute categories for

another (ac)counting of the community. There are two ways of counting

the parts of the community: The first only counts empirical parts —

actual groups defined by differences in birth, by different functions,

locations, and interests that constitute the social body. The second

counts ‘in addition’ a part of the no-part. We will call the first

police and the second politics. ** Thesis 7: ** Politics is specifically

opposed to the police. The police is a ‘partition of the sensible’ [le

partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and of a

supplement. ** The police is not a social function but a symbolic

constitution of the social. The essence of the police is neither

repression nor even control over the living. Its essence is a certain

manner of partitioning the sensible. We will call ‘partition of the

sensible’ a general law that defines the forms of part-taking by first

defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed. The

partition of the sensible is the cutting-up of the world and of ‘world;’

it is the nemeïn upon which the nomoi of the community are founded. This

partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the

one hand, that which separates and excludes; on the other, that which

allows participation (see Editor’s note 2). A partition of the sensible

refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared ‘common’ [un

commun partagé] and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined

through the sensible. This latter form of distribution, in turn, itself

presupposes a partition between what is visible and what is not, of what

can be heard from the inaudible. ** The essence of the police is to be a

partition of the sensible characterized by the absence of a void or a

supplement: society consists of groups dedicated to specific modes of

action, in places where these occupations are exercised, in modes of

being corresponding to these occupations and these places. In this

fittingness of functions, places, and ways of being, there is no place

for a void. It is this exclusion of what ‘there is not’ that is the

police-principle at the heart of statist practices. The essence of

politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with

a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole.

Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into

being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always

attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by

subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an

intervention upon the visible and the sayable. ** Thesis 8: ** The

principal function of politics is the configuration of its proper space.

It is to disclose the world of its subjects and its operations. The

essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence

of two worlds in one.[11] ** Let us begin from an empirical given:

police intervention in public spaces does not consist primarily in the

interpellation of demonstrators, but in the breaking up of

demonstrations. The police is not that law interpellating individuals

(as in Althusser’s “Hey, you there!”) unless one confuses it with

religious subjectification.[12] It is, first of all, a reminder of the

obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there isn’t: “Move

along! There is nothing to see here!” The police says that there is

nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It

asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of

circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space

of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e.,

the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the

space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named

therein. It is the established litigation of the perceptible, on the

nemeïn that founds any communal nomos. ** This partition constituting

politics is never given in the form of a lot, of a kind of property that

obliges or compels politics. These properties are litigious as much in

their understanding as in their extension. Exemplary in this regard are

those properties that, for Aristotle, define a political ability or are

intended for ‘the good life.’ Apparently nothing could be clearer than

the distinction made by Aristotle in Book I of the Politics: the sign of

the political nature of humans is constituted by their possession of the

logos, the articulate language appropriate for manifesting a community

in the aisthesis of the just and the unjust, as opposed to the animal

phone, appropriate only for expressing the feelings of pleasure and

displeasure. If you are in the presence of an animal possessing the

ability of the articulate language and its power of manifestation, you

know you are dealing with a human and therefore with a political animal.

The only practical difficulty is in knowing which sign is required to

recognize the sign; that is, how one can be sure that the human animal

mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance rather

than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not

wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as

the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not

hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths. And the same

goes for the opposition so readily invoked between the obscurity of

domestic and private life, and the radiant luminosity of the public life

of equals. In order to refuse the title of political subjects to a

category — workers, women, etc… — it has traditionally been sufficient

to assert that they belong to a ‘domestic’ space, to a space separated

from public life; one from which only groans or cries expressing

suffering, hunger, or anger could emerge, but not actual speeches

demonstrating a shared aisthesis. And the politics of these categories

has always consisted in re-qualifying these places, in getting them to

be seen as the spaces of a community, of getting themselves to be seen

or heard as speaking subjects (if only in the form of litigation); in

short, participants in a common aisthesis. It has consisted in making

what was unseen visible; in getting what was only audible as noise to be

heard as speech; in demonstrating to be a feeling of shared ‘good’ or

‘evil’ what had appeared merely as an expression of pleasure or pain. **

The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not the confrontation

between interests or opinions. It is the manifestation of a distance of

the sensible from itself. Politics makes visible that which had no

reason to be seen, it lodges one world into another (for instance, the

world where the factory is a public space within the one where it is

considered a private one, the world where workers speak out vis-à-vis

the one where their voices are merely cries expressing pain). This is

precisely why politics cannot be identified with the model of

communicative action since this model presupposes the partners in

communicative exchange to be pre-constituted, and that the discursive

forms of exchange imply a speech community whose constraint is always

explicable. In contrast, the particular feature of political dissensus

is that the partners are no more constituted than is the object or the

very scene of discussion. The ones making visible the fact that they

belong to a shared world the other does not see — cannot take advantage

of — the logic implicit to a pragmatics of communication. The worker who

argues for the public nature of a ‘domestic’ matter (such as a salary

dispute) must indicate the world in which his argument counts as an

argument and must demonstrate it as such for those who do not possess a

frame of reference to conceive of it as argument. Political argument is

at one and the same time the demonstration of a possible world where the

argument could count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified to

argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see

the object and to hear the argument that he or she ‘normally’ has no

reason to either see or hear. It is the construction of a paradoxical

world that relates two separate worlds. ** Politics thus has no ‘proper’

place nor does it possess any ‘natural’ subjects. A demonstration is

political not because it takes place in a specific locale and bears upon

a particular object but rather because its form is that of a clash

between two partitions of the sensible. A political subject is not a

group of interests or ideas: It is the operator of a particular mode of

subjectification and litigation through which politics has its

existence. Political demonstrations are thus always of the moment and

their subjects are always provisional. Political difference is always on

the shore of its own disappearance: the people are close to sinking into

the sea of the population or of race, the proletariat borders on being

confused with workers defending their interests, the space of a people’s

public demonstration is always at risk of being confused with the

merchant’s agora, etc. ** The deduction of politics from a specific

world of equals or free people, as opposed to another world lived out of

necessity, takes as its ground precisely the object of its litigation.

It thus renders compulsory a blindness to those who ‘do not see’ and

have no place from which to be seen. Exemplary, in this regard, is a

passage from Arendt’s On Revolution discussing the manner in which John

Adams identifies the unhappiness of the poor with the fact of ‘not being

seen.’[13] Such an identification, she comments, could itself only

emanate from a man belonging to a privileged community of equals. And,

by the same token, it could ‘hardly be understood’ by the people

comprising the relevant categories. We could express amazement at the

extraordinary deafness of this affirmation in the face of the

multiplicity of discourses and demonstrations of the ‘poor’ concerning

precisely their mode of visibility. But this deafness has nothing

accidental about it. It forms a circle with the acceptance of an

original partition, a founding politics, with what was in fact the

permanent object of litigation constituting politics. It forms a circle

with the definition of homo laborans as a partition of the ‘ways of

life.’ This circle is not that of any particular theoretician; it is the

circle of ‘political philosophy.’ ** Thesis 9: ** Inasmuch as what is

proper to ‘political philosophy’ is to ground political action in a

specific mode of being, so is it the case that ‘political philosophy’

effaces the litigiousness constitutive of politics. It is in its very

description of the world of politics that philosophy effects this

effacement. Moreover, its effectiveness is perpetuated through to the

non-philosophical or anti-philosophical description of the world. **

That the distinguishing feature of politics is the existence of a

subject who ‘rules’ by the very fact of having no qualifications to

rule; that the principle of beginnings/ruling is irremediably divided as

a result of this, and that the political community is specifically a

litigious community — this is the ‘political secret’ that philosophy

first encounters. If we can speak of the privileged stature of the

‘Ancients’ over the ‘Moderns,’ it is a consequence of their having first

perceived this ‘secret’ and not of having been the first to oppose the

community of the ‘good’ to that of the ‘useful.’ At the head of the

anodyne expression ‘political philosophy’ one finds the violent

encounter between philosophy and the exception to the law of arche

proper to politics, along with philosophy’s effort to resituate politics

under the auspices of this law. The Gorgias, the Republic, the Politics,

the Laws, all these texts reveal the same effort to efface the paradox

or scandal of a ‘seventh qualification’ — to make of democracy a simple

case of the indeterminable principle of ‘the government of the

strongest,’ against which one can only oppose a government of those who

know [les savants]. These texts all reveal a similar strategy of placing

the community under a unique law of partition and expelling the empty

part of the demos from the communal body. ** But this expulsion does not

simply take place in the form of the opposition between the ‘good’

regime of the community that is both one and hierarchised according to

its principle of unity, and the ‘bad’ regimes of division and disorder.

It takes place within the very presupposition that identifies a

political form with a way of life; and this presupposition is already

operating in the procedures for describing ‘bad’ regimes, and democracy

in particular. All of politics, as we have said, is played out in the

interpretation of democratic ‘anarchy.’ In identifying it with the

dispersal of the desires of democratic man, Plato transforms the form of

politics into a mode of existence and, further, transforms the void into

an overflow. Before being the theorist of the ‘ideal’ or ‘enclosed’

city-state, Plato is the founder of the anthropological conception of

the political, the conception that identifies politics with the

deployment of the properties of a type of man or a mode of life. This

kind of ‘man,’ this ‘way of being,’ this form of the city-state: it is

there, before any discourse on the laws or the educational methods of

the ideal state, before even the partition of the classes of the

community, the partition of the perceptible that cancels out political

singularity. ** The initial gesture of political philosophy thus has a

two-fold consequence: On the one hand, Plato founds a community that is

the effectuation of a principle of unity, of an undivided principle — a

community strictly defined as a common body with its places and

functions and with its forms of interiorisation of the common. He founds

an archi-politics[14] based on a law of unity between the ‘occupations’

of the city-state and its ‘ethos,’ (in other words its way of inhabiting

an abode), as law but also as the specific ‘tone’ according to which

this ethos reveals itself. This etho-logy of the community once again

makes politics and police indistinguishable. And political philosophy,

inasmuch as it wants to give to the community a single foundation, is

condemned to have to re-identify politics and police, to cancel out

politics through the gesture that founds it. ** But Plato also invents a

‘concrete’ mode for describing the production of political forms. In a

word, he invents the very forms of the refusal of the ‘ideal state,’ the

settled forms of opposition between philosophical ‘a-prior-ism’ and

concrete sociological or political-scientific analyses of the forms of

politics as expressions of ways of life. This second legacy is more

profound and more long-lasting than the first. The sociology of the

political is the second resource — the deuteron plous — of political

philosophy that accomplishes (sometimes against itself) its fundamental

project: to found the community on the basis of a univocal partition of

the sensible. In particular, de Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy,

whose innumerable variants and ersatz versions feed the discourses on

modern democracy, the age of the masses, the mass individual, etc., fits

into the continuity of the theoretical gesture that cancels out the

structural singularity of ‘the qualification without qualifications’ and

the ‘part of the no-part,’ by re-describing democracy as a social

phenomenon, of the collective effectuation of the properties of a type

of man. ** Inversely, the claims for the purity of the bios politikos

(of the republican constitution and of the community versus the

individual or democratic mass, and the opposition between the political

and the social) share in the effectiveness of the same knot between the

a-prior-ism of the ‘republican’ re-founding, and the sociological

description of democracy. No matter which side one rests on, the

opposition between the ‘political’ and the ‘social’ is a matter defined

entirely within the frame of ‘political philosophy;’ in other words, it

is a matter that lies at the heart of the philosophical repression of

politics. The current proclamations of a ‘return to politics’ and

‘political philosophy’ are an imitation of the originary gesture of

‘political philosophy,’ without actually grasping the principles or

issues involved in it. In this sense, it is the radical forgetting of

politics and of the tense relationship between politics and philosophy.

The sociological theme of the ‘end of politics’ in post-modern society

and the ‘politico’ theme of the ‘return of politics’ both derive from

the initial double gesture of ‘political philosophy’ and both move

towards the same forgetting of politics. ** Thesis 10: ** The ‘end of

politics’ and the ‘return of politics’ are two complementary ways of

canceling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the

social and a state of statist apparatuses. ‘Consensus’ is the vulgar

name given to this cancellation. ** The essence of politics resides in

the modes of dissensual subjectification that reveal the difference of a

society to itself. The essence of consensus is not peaceful discussion

and reasonable agreement as opposed to conflict or violence. Its essence

is the annulment of dissensus as the separation of the sensible from

itself, the annulment of surplus subjects, the reduction of the people

to the sum of the parts of the social body, and of the political

community to the relationship of interests and aspirations of these

different parts. Consensus is the reduction of politics to the police.

In other words, it is the ‘end of politics’ and not the accomplishment

of its ends but, simply, the return of the ‘normal’ state of things

which is that of politics’ non-existence. The ‘end of politics’ is the

ever-present shore of politics [le bord de la politique] that, in turn,

is an activity of the moment and always provisional. ‘Return of

politics’ and ‘end of politics’ are two symmetrical interpretations

producing the same effect: to efface the very concept of politics, and

the precariousness that is one of its essential elements. In proclaiming

the end of usurpations of the social and the return to ‘pure’ politics,

the ‘return of politics’ thesis simply occludes the fact that the

‘social’ is in no way a particular sphere of existence but, rather, a

disputed object of politics. Therefore, the subsequently proclaimed end

of the social is, simply put, the end of political litigation regarding

the partition of worlds. The ‘return of politics’ is thus the

affirmation that there is a specific place for politics. Isolated in

this manner, this specific space can be nothing other than the place of

the state and, in fact, the theorists of the ‘return of politics’

ultimately affirm that politics is out-dated. They identify it with the

practices of state control which have, as their principal principle, the

suppression of politics. ** The sociological thesis of the ‘end of

politics’ symmetrically posits the existence of a state of the social

such that politics no longer has a necessary raison-d’être; whether or

not it has accomplished its ends by bringing into being precisely this

state (i.e., the exoteric American Hegelian-Fukayama-ist version) or

whether its forms are no longer adapted to the fluidity and

artificiality of present-day economic and social relations (i.e., the

esoteric European Heideggerian-Situationist version). The thesis thus

amounts to asserting that the logical telos of capitalism makes it so

that politics becomes, once again, out dated. And then it concludes with

either the mourning of politics before the triumph of an immaterial

Leviathan, or its transformation into forms that are broken up,

segmented, cybernetic, ludic, etc… — adapted to those forms of the

social that correspond to the highest stage of capitalism. It thus fails

to recognize that in actual fact, politics has no reason for being in

any state of the social and that the contradiction of the two logics is

an unchanging given that defines the contingency and precariousness

proper to politics. Via a Marxist detour, the ‘end of politics’ thesis —

along with the consensualist thesis — grounds politics in a particular

mode of life that identifies the political community with the social

body, subsequently identifying political practice with state practice.

The debate between the philosophers of the ‘return of politics’ and the

sociologists of the ‘end of politics’ is thus a straightforward debate

regarding the order in which it is appropriate to take the

presuppositions of ‘political philosophy’ so as to interpret the

consensualist practice of annihilating politics. ** ** Notes* ** [1] The

original translation of the “Ten Theses” was done by Rachel Bowlby.

However, some phrases were modified by Davide Panagia in consultation

with Jacques Rancière. Terms in square brackets are Rancière’s original

French expressions.* ** * [2] Our English ‘political subject(ivity)’

does not give an adequate sense of Rancière’s “le sujet politique,” a

term that refers both to the idea of a political subjectivity and to the

‘proper’ subject of politics. [3] Rancière plays on the double meaning

of the avoir-part as both a ‘partaking’ and a ‘partition.’* ** * [4] The

reference is to Arendt’s claim that “the human capacity for freedom,

which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle

its producer to such an extent that he appears much more the victim and

the sufferer than the author and the doer of what he has done” (The

Human Condition, p. 233–234; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

1989).* ** * [5] The word-play, here, is on the idea of an ‘inter-est’

referring both to a principle of inter-relating and to the idea of

societal ‘interest.’ Rancière is invoking an Arendtian distinction found

in her The Human Condition (see pages 50–58).* ** * [6] Hannah Arendt,

The Human Condition, p. 177.* ** * [7] Though the literal translation of

the French is “the count of the unaccounted-for” the formulation found

in the English translation of Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy,

(Julie Rose trans., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) is

retained for the sake of consistency.* ** * [8] Demes were townships or

divisions of ancient Attica. In modern Greece the term refers to

communes.* ** * [9] See Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1988) especially Part IV: “On the

Irreducible Element.”* ** * [10] Rancière is invoking Ernst

Kantorowicz’s work on medieval political theology, also present in

Lefort’s study.* ** * [11] Rancière’s conception of dissensus counts as

an instance of the paradox of the ‘one and the many’ characteristic of

democratic politics.* ** * [12] Rancière here refers to Althusser’s

“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (see Lenin and Philosophy,

New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).* ** * [13] See Arendt’s chapter

entitled “The Social Question” from On Revolution; especially pages

68–71 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).* ** * [14] See Rancière’s

Dis-agreement (Chapter 4) for an extended discussion of this concept. **

* **