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Introducing disagreementJacques Rancière

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2004To cite this Article: Rancière, Jacques (2004) 'Introducing disagreement ', Angelaki,9:3, 3 - 9To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/0969725042000307583URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725042000307583

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jacques ranciere

translated by steven corcoran

INTRODUCINGDISAGREEMENT1

A N G E L A K Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 9 number 3 december 2004

I am not a “political philosopher.” I do notbelieve generally in the “divisions” of philoso-

phy. Nor do I believe in localising philosophywithin some division of knowledges and dis-courses. For me, philosophy consists of singularnodes of thought which are opened by undoingthe established divisions between disciplines. In-deed, against these divisions, I have continued towander into literature, social history, politics,and aesthetics. And I have continued to do sobecause of problems and objects of thoughtthrown up by “non-philosophical” events.So, in the wake of ’68 and the thwarting of the

hoped-for union of students’ and workers’ move-ments, I set out to reconsider the history ofrelations between workers’ movements andutopias or theories of social transformation. Itried to understand the history of workers’emancipation from its beginning, to show itsoriginary complexity, and the complexity of itsrelations with those utopias and theories.Later, in response to developments in the

1990s, I tried to elaborate a theoretical frame-work for a new reflection on politics. The situ-ation in the 1990s was one of surprises, surpriseswhich required a rethinking of the notion ofdemocracy and, indeed, the idea of politics itself.In the first instance, the collapse of the Soviet

system had an effect a double detente. It seemedto spell the death of the old opposition betweenformal and real democracy and, therefore, toherald the triumph of the values of so-calledformal democracy. That is, it seemed to allowthe values of democratic debate to be identifiedwith those of the liberal economy and the stateof right. We then experienced a flourish ofassertions of the return of politics in differentforms: some, following Leo Strauss, celebratedthe return to the original values of politics,

understood as the search for the common good;others rediscovered the Arendtian vision, oppos-ing political action to the empire of social necess-ity; still others put forward the Rawlsian theoryof justice as equity and the Habermasian concep-tion of communicative action as models ofdemocracy.What the collapse of the Soviet system soon

betrayed, however, was an internal weakening ofthe very democracy that was assumed to havetriumphed. For the moment, I am not speakingof problems in the former communist countries.The identification of formal democracy with theliberal economy in fact manifested itself moreand more in the so-called democratic regimes. Itappeared as the internal exhaustion of demo-cratic debate. The end of the socialist alterna-

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/04/030003–07 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725042000307583

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tive, then, did not signify any renewal of demo-cratic debate. Instead, it signified the reductionof democratic life to the management of the localconsequences of global economic necessity. Thelatter, in fact, was posited as a common con-dition which imposed the same solutions on bothleft and right. Consensus around these solutionsbecame the supreme democratic value.What thus accompanied the routing of Marx-

ist regimes was the triumph of a certain Marx-ism, one which turned political forms intoinstruments of economic interests and necessi-ties. At the same time, theories of the “return ofpolitics,” the common good, etc. became idealjustifications of the consensual order. Assertionsof the primacy of the political over the “social”could be heard everywhere. What these asser-tions served to do in reality, however, was tostigmatise the social movements fighting againstthe identification of democracy with the stateadministration of economic necessity.2 The ap-parent return of politics was, in fact, its liqui-dation. That liquidation in turn requirednothing less than a rethinking of the followingquestions. What is the specificity of democracy?What is the specificity of politics as a form ofcommon action? And what does this “common”consist of?This reflection became all the more necessary

as the triumph of consensual democracy broughtwith it some strange counter-effects.“Consensus” was presented as the pacification ofconflicts that arose from ideologies of socialstruggle, and yet it brought about anything butpeace. Not only have a number of states liber-ated from the Soviet system fallen prey to ethnicand religious conflicts – occasionally in radicalforms – but a number of consensual-democraticstates have also witnessed the re-emergence andsuccess of racist and xenophobic movements.At the time, these new forms of violence

disturbing the consensual idyll were seen in twoways. First, they were thought from within thelogic of consensus. That is, they were under-stood as exceptions to the consensus and, asexceptions, they were presented as remnants ofthe past or temporary regressions. The successof the extreme right in France and then in otherEuropean countries was accordingly explained

away as the reaction of social strata threatenedby modernisation.My thinking took the reverse tack: these phe-

nomena had to be thought not as exceptions tobut as consequences of the logic of consensus.They had to be thought as effects not of econ-omic and sociological causes but of the erasureof democracy and politics constitutive of thelogic of consensus. Politics, in other words, hadto be thought as something denied by identitypolitics, because it had already been denied bythe logic of consensus. Politics had also to bethought as something radically heterogeneous tothe tradition of political philosophy. That iswhat determined the re-reading of the political-philosophical tradition I undertook in Disagree-ment.This tradition considers politics to be the

result of an anthropological invariant. The in-variant may be the fear that compels individualsto unite. Or it may be the possession of languagethat permits discussion. In the return to politicalphilosophy much has been made of this linguis-tic power of the human animal, with referenceeither to the Aristotelian definition of man as ananimal endowed with logos or to the pragmaticsof language found in Habermas. In both cases,the definition of political citizenship seems tofollow logically from the definition of the humananimal as an animal endowed with language.Aristotle says in essence: man is a political ani-mal – he can be recognised by his possession oflogos, which is what enables him to discuss thejust and the unjust, while animals have a voiceonly to express pleasure and pain (Politics1253a). Elsewhere he adds that a citizen is onewho participates in the fact of governing andbeing governed. Deducing the second prop-osition from the first is apparently simple, as isfounding the reciprocity that characterises poli-tics and democracy in general on the sharedhuman privilege of language. In the same way,Habermas shows that entering into an interlocu-tory relation in order to defend certain interestsor values requires submitting assertions to objec-tive criteria of validity, on pain of performativecontradiction. It seems that the fact of givingone’s word to be understood implies an imma-

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nent telos of inter-comprehension as the basis ofrational community.There is, of course, no evidence for this kind

of conclusion. Indeed, immediately after posit-ing the essence of the political animal, Aristotlemakes a distinction between those who possesslanguage and those, like slaves, who can onlyunderstand it. This is because the possession oflanguage is not a physical capacity. It is a sym-bolic division, that is, a symbolic determinationof the relation between the order of speech andthat of bodies – which is why the very distinc-tion between human speech and an animal’svoice is problematic. Traditionally, it had beenenough not to hear what came out of the mouthsof the majority of human beings – slaves,women, workers, colonised peoples, etc. – aslanguage, and instead to hear only cries ofhunger, rage, or hysteria, in order to deny themthe quality of being political animals. It was injust such terms around 1830 that the Frenchthinker Ballanche rewrote the apologia of theplebeian secession on the Aventine Hill in an-cient Rome. The conflict was, above all, one overwhat it was to speak. Plebeians, gathered on theAventine Hill, demanded a treaty with the patri-cians. The patricians responded that this wasimpossible, because to make a treaty meantgiving one’s word: since the plebeians did nothave human speech, they could not give whatthey did not have. They possessed only a “sort ofbellowing which was a sign of need and not amanifestation of intelligence.” In order to under-stand what the plebeians said, then, it had firstto be admitted that they spoke. And this re-quired a novel perceptual universe, one where –contrary to all perceptible evidence – those whoworked for a living had affairs in common withfree men and a voice to designate and arguethese common affairs.This is what “disagreement [mesentente]”

means. It cannot be deduced from the anthropo-logical fact of language. Nothing can be deducedfrom some anthropological property common tohumanity in general, because the “common” isalways contested at the most immediate level:the fact of living in the same world, with thesame senses [sens], and the same powers ofholding something in common. Deducing the

existence of a common political world from thecomprehension of language can never be naturalwhen that world presupposes a quarrel over whatis common. Mesentente – a term untranslatableinto English – indicates this node in between twothings. It means both “the fact of not hearing, ofnot understanding” and “quarrel, disagree-ment.” Combining both meanings yields onlythis: the fact of hearing and understanding lan-guage does not in itself produce any of theeffects of an egalitarian community. Egalitarianeffects occur only through a forcing, that is, theinstituting of a quarrel that challenges the incor-porated, perceptible evidence of an inegalitarianlogic. This quarrel is politics.Indeed, that is what is implied by the word

“democracy.” The name needs to retain all itspolemical force. It was invented not bydemocrats as a rallying cry but by their adver-saries as a term of abuse. Democracy meant thepower of the people with nothing, the speech ofthose who should not be speaking, those whowere not really speaking beings. The firstsignificant occurrences of the term “demos” areto be found in Homer and always appear inspeech situations. Greek and Trojan leaders alikedenounced the same scandal: that men of thedemos – men who were part of the indistinctcollection of people “beyond count” – took theliberty of speaking.The word “demos” does not designate the

poor or suffering part of the population. Prop-erly it designates those who are outside thecount, those who can assert no particular titleover common affairs. In The Laws, Plato enu-merates all the titles – age, birth, virtue, knowl-edge, strength, etc. – to exercising power, titleswhich give some the right to govern others –who are, conversely, young, of low birth, igno-rant, etc. Right at the end of the list, though, isa title which is not one: God’s part, as heironically puts it, that is, the lot of fate, chance,or, simply, democracy.Democracy, then, is the specific power of

those who have no common title to exercisepower, except that of not being entitled to itsexercise. Democracy is the disrupting of all log-ics that purport to found domination on someentitlement to dominate. There are many such

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logics, but through various mediations they canbe reduced to two: those of birth and wealth. Bycontrast, the power of those without title is theaccident that interrupts the play of these logics,and with it the dominant movement that leadsfrom the archaic power of birth to the modernpower of wealth. It is this accident which allowspolitics as such to exist. Politics is not thegeneral art of governing human assemblies byvirtue of some principle inherent in thedefinition of a human being. It is the accidentthat interrupts the logic by which those whohave a title to govern dominate – a titleconfirmed only by the fact that they do domi-nate. Human government is not the putting intopractice of some “political virtue” native to thehuman animal. Instead, all that exists are thecontingency of domination founded on itself andthe contingency of equality which suspends it.Between the general human capacity for

speech and the definition of “citizenship” as thecapacity to govern and be governed lies“disagreement,” which opens the sphere of poli-tics as a suspension of all logics that wouldground domination in some specific virtue. Herelies the power of the demos, understood as thecollection of those with no title to dominate orbe dominated. Democracy, in this sense, is notone political regime within a classification ofdifferent forms of government. Nor is it a formof social life, as the Tocquevillean traditionwould have it. Rather, democracy is the insti-tution of politics itself as the aberrant form ofgovernment.The term “demos,” as the very subject of

politics, sums up the aberrant, anarchic natureof politics. The demos is not the real totality orideal totalisation of a human collectivity. Neitheris it the masses as opposed to the elite. Thedemos is, instead, an abstract separation of apopulation from itself. It is a supplementary partover and above the sum of a population’s parts.Political subjects are, thus, not representativesof parts of the population but processes of sub-jectivation which introduce a disagreement, adissensus. And political dissensus is not simply aconflict of interests, opinions, or values. It is aconflict over the common itself. It is not aquarrel over which solutions to apply to a situ-

ation but a dispute over the situation itself, adispute over what is visible as an element of asituation, over which visible elements belong towhat is common, over the capacity of subjects todesignate this common and argue for it. Politicaldissensus is the division of perceptible givensthemselves.This presupposes the introduction of a divid-

ing line in what is generally designated as thepolitical sphere. Politics is not primarily theexercise of power or the deciding of commonaffairs. Every decision on common affairs re-quires the prior existence of the common, thatis, a form of symbolising the common. There aretwo broad forms of this symbolisation of thecommon. The first symbolises the community asan ensemble of well-defined parts, places andfunctions, and of the properties and capabilitieslinked to them, all of which presupposes a fixeddistribution of things into common and private –a distinction which itself depends on an ordereddistribution of the visible and the invisible, noiseand speech, etc. This type of distribution cantake on more or less archaic or modern forms. Itstretches from the patricians’ not hearing theplebeians speak to modern statistics, where opin-ions are distributed as functions of parts of thepopulation, such as socio-economic or agegroups. Archaic or modern, the way of countingparts, places, and functions remains the same.This way of counting simultaneously defines theways of being, doing, and saying appropriate tothese places. I call this form of symbolising thecommon, that is, the principle of distributionand completeness that leaves no space for asupplement, the police [police].And I reserve the name of politics [politique]

for another, second form of symbolising thecommon, one which calls into question the divi-sions of common and private, visible and invis-ible, audible and inaudible. This calling intoquestion presupposes the action of supplemen-tary subjects, subjects that are not reducible tosocial groups or identities but are, rather, collec-tives of enunciation and demonstration surplusto the count of social groups. The young Marx ina famous formula speaks of the proletariat as a“social class which is not a social class but thedissolution of all classes.” I’ve twisted this

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phrase from the meaning Marx gave it to turn itinto a definition of political subjects in general,since, even when they bear the same name associal groups, political subjects are supernumer-ary collectives which call into question thecounting of the community’s parts and the rela-tions of inclusion and exclusion which definethat count. Thus, “workers” or “proletarians”were subjects who instituted a quarrel over thecharacter (private or common?) of the world ofwork. Their actions brought a universe previ-ously thought of as domestic into public visi-bility. It made the inhabitants of that worldvisible as beings belonging to the same (public)world to which others belonged, that is, as be-ings capable of common speech and thought.Such a demonstration could occur only in theform of a dissensus, as was the case at anothermoment with the demonstration of women’s ca-pabilities. On each occasion, what mattered waschallenging the accepted perceptible givens, andtransforming one world into another. What wehave here, though, is not merely the historicalform of the excluded group’s entry into publicview. All political action presupposes the refuta-tion of a situation’s given assumptions, the intro-duction of previously uncounted objects andsubjects.This is why a vicious circle emerges in the

opposition between the political and the social asmaintained by a certain reading (Strauss,Arendt) of ancient philosophy. This traditionseeks to purify politics from the impingementsof the social, but the effect of this purification isto reduce politics to the state, and thereby re-serve politics for those with a “title” to exerciseit. Politics, however, consists of calling the so-cial/political, private/public divide into question.Habermas’s pragmatic logic contains the samekind of vicious circle. “Performative contradic-tion” only functions if a speech situation with itspartners and rules already constituted is as-sumed. Political interlocution, though, is de-ployed precisely in situations where no priorscenario to regulate the objects or partners of thecommon exists. In politics, subjects act to createa stage on which problems can be made visible –a scene with subjects and objects, in full view ofa “partner” who does not “see” them.

This means that politics is not a permanentgiven of human societies. There are always formsof power, but that does not mean that there isalways politics. Politics occurs only when politi-cal subjects initiate a quarrel over the percep-tible givens of common life. This difference isalways precarious, as political subjects are opera-tions [dispositifs] of enunciation supernumeraryto the parts of society or collective identities.They are always on the verge of disappearing,either through simply fading away or, moreoften than not, through their re-incorporation,their identification with social groups or imagi-nary bodies: “workers” and “proletarians” wereonce exemplary subjects, before their incorpora-tion as a part of society or the glorious body ofa new community.The identification of democracy with consen-

sus is the current form of this evanescence.Consensus does not mean simply the erasure ofconflicts for the benefit of common interests.Consensus means erasing the contestatory,conflictual nature of the very givens of commonlife. It reduces political difference to police-likehomogeneity. Consensus knows only: real partsof the community, problems around the redistri-bution of powers and wealth among these parts,expert calculations over the possible forms ofsuch redistribution, and negotiations betweenthe representatives of these various parts. Inother words, the consensual state props itself upon global economic necessity presented as anintangible given, in order to transform conflictsover what is common into the internal problemsof a community. All of which assumes that awhole objectivation of the problems and parts ofthe community is possible. Consensus, then, isactually the modern form of reducing politics tothe police. And the philosophies of the return ofthe political and the return to politics are theideological coronation of this effective depolitici-sation.From here it is possible to understand how

consensus is able to engender new forms ofidentitarian passion. The core of consensus liesin suppressing supernumerary political subjects,the people surplus to the breaking down of thepopulation into parts, the subjectivations of classconflict superimposed onto conflicts of interest

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between parts of the population. At the core ofconsensus is the dream of an administration ofaffairs in which all forms of symbolising thecommon, and thus all conflicts over that symbol-isation, have been liquidated as ideological spec-tres.Of course, there is no such thing as the simple

management of common interests or the zerosymbolisation of the community. Whenever theparadoxical power of those without title van-ishes, there remains the conflict between the twogreat titles, the powers of wealth and birth.Whenever the people en trop of democracy dis-appears, another people appears: namely, thecorps of those with the same blood, ancestors, oridentity. And whenever the worker or proletar-ian disappears as a figure of political alterity, themigrant remains as a naked, unsymbolisablefigure of the other. This other can no longer becounted, even in the name of the uncounted. Itcan only appear as that which is to be excluded,visibly in excess of any relation to the com-munity. On the one hand, identitarian extrem-ism carries the consensual logic of suppressingsurplus subjects to its logical conclusion; and, onthe other, it presents itself as the sole alternativeto consensus, the only force to refuse the law ofeconomic or sociological necessity and thus rein-state alternative and conflict. In effect, identitar-ian extremism restages the archaic power ofbirth as the only alternative exactly when democ-racy is reduced in the name of consensus to thesimple power of wealth.The concepts offered in Disagreement at-

tempt to provide tools for thinking through thesingular historical situation of the eclipse ofpolitics. They seek to draw reflections on oursituation away from those grand narratives andprophecies of the “end” which work to trans-form the eclipse of politics into some final realis-ation of a great historical destiny. Theseteleologies take several forms. First, there is thevision of the “end of utopias,” the celebration ofthe return of reasonable politics. In reality, how-ever, this reasonable politics is nothing but thedisappearance of politics in favour of manage-ment. Second, there is the sociological vision ofthe end of politics which identifies democracy inits terminal state with the self-management or

peaceful interaction of the interests and affectspertaining to the “democratic mass individual.”Democracy, though, is not a state of the social,it is a division of society. And the people ofpolitics never disappears into some simple coex-istence of individuals and social groups withoutremainder, it is always replaced by another peo-ple. Finally, there is the thematic of the “end ofhistory,” understood as the end of the era ofconflicts and the passage into a post-historical,pacified world. All this while in our world dou-ble the number of conflicts and massacres isconducted in the name of God or race. Ours is aworld dominated by a power that can only pacifyconflicts – here and there – through recourse toan armed violence identified with the battlewithout limits of God or of good against infiniteevil. Some find the archaic, ethico-religiousrhetoric used by George W. Bush amusing. Oth-ers see in it the height of cynicism. I don’t thinkit is either. What we have here is simply theextreme limit of the logic of consensus, that is,the dissolution of all political differences andjuridical distinctions into the indistinct and to-talising domain of ethics.I have no pretensions to offering remedies to

the various forms of this eclipse of politics. Itdoes seem at least possible, however, to identifythese forms. And it seems necessary todistinguish such research from prophecies ofcatastrophe. Against thoughts of the end andcatastrophe, I believe it is possible and necessaryto oppose a thought of political precariousness.Politics is not some age of humanity which isto have been realised today. Politics is alocal, precarious, contingentactivity – an activity which isalways on the point of disap-pearing, and thus perhapsalso on the point of reappear-ing.

notes1 This paper was delivered by Jacques Ranciereat the Institut Francais, Berlin, 4 June 2003. Itaddresses the reasons why he was prompted toreconsider the tradition of political philosophyand its thinking of politics in his book La Mesen-

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tente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilee, 1995),translated by Julie Rose as Disagreement: Politicsand Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1999). I would like to thank my reader at Ange-laki, Forbes Morlock, for his extensive sugges-tions and comments on two earlier drafts of thistranslation. I would also like to thank Gene Rayand Jasmin Mersmann for their comments on anearlier draft of this translation. [Translator’snote.]

2 For example, the massive strikes in the winterof 1995 in France against plans by the Juppegovernment to move France’s social security andhealth system closer to an American-style systemwere condemned by the usual figures who con-stitute the service intelligentsia as being out ofstep with the rigours of “economic imperatives.”Many of these “unsentimental” intellectuals, hav-ing willingly shed all their radical positions andbecome cognisant of economic activity, openlysupported this government’s “fundamental re-form” in a letter to Le Monde. The popular massuprisings were denounced as “archaic,”“corporatist,” “classist,” in sum, no more than atide of egalitarian nostalgia holding back theprogress of modern, consensual, democraticFrance. On this point see Kristin Ross’s May ’68and its Afterlives (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002)208–15. [Translator’s note.]

Jacques Rancierec/o Editions Galilee9, rue Linne75005 ParisFranceE-mail: ranciere@club-internet.fr

Steven CorcoranWichertstrasse 5210439 BerlinGermanyE-mail: eyed_awry@yahoo.com.au

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