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10/26/2005 10:42 AMavide Panagia | Ceci n'est pas un argument: An Introduction to the Ten Theses | Theory & Event 5:3

Page 1tp://cat1.lib.trentu.ca:2093/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3panagia.html

Ceci n'est pas un argument : An Introduction to theTen Theses

5:3 | 2001 Davide Panagia

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The Ten Theses on Politics [1] is not an argument about politicsif, by argument, one intends a philosophical justification of thenature of the political. It is, rather, a series of considerations onpolitical thinking that parallel Rancire's inquiry, in Dis-agreement , into "the set of reflective operations whereby'political philosophy' tries to rid itself of politics, to suppress a

scandal in thinking proper to the exercise of politics." [2] TheTen Theses is thus a critical intervention into the manner inwhich a philosophical orientation to political life attempts topurify politics by "effac(ing) the litigiousness constitutive of politics." (Thesis 9) Rancire's site of critical attack is recentattempts to restore and protect the political against theencroachments of the social. This includes the rise of "NewFrench Thought," exemplified in the prose of Alain Renaut andLuc Ferry, along with neo-Kantian versions of consensusdemocracy. In these instances the political is identified with thestate, "placing the tradition of political philosophy in the

service of the platitudes of a politics of consensus." [3]Rancire's appreciation of politics differs substantially fromsuch statist models. Politics, he posits, is a term of artsynonymous with democracy; it refers to an evanescent momentwhen tensions arising from a human being-in-common produceinstances of disruption, generating sources of political action.

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The reader of the Ten Theses will notice Rancire's repeated useof essentialist language. Expressions like 'proper to politics' and'everything about' or 'essence of politics' pepper the Ten Theses ,emphatically asserting Rancire's position. And this is preciselythe point: Politics is the practice of asserting one's position thatruptures the logic of arche ; that is, politics is an event initiatedby individuals or groups who insist that the orderedconfiguration of a political arrangement (what he calls 'thepolice') is wrong . Such proclamations, however, do not soundlike anything because they are unrecognizable as speech; theyare a version of the Aristotelian blaberon .[4] What The Names

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of History calls 'the excess of words' -- coincident with thedemocratic revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies - is the voicing of a wrong ( tort )[5] that falls on thedeaf ears of the police. These ears are deaf, however, notbecause they cannot hear but because there are no recognizableprotocols by which the dissonant humming of the blaberon maybe acknowledged. Contrasted to 'polite' deliberation, the

political blaberon looks and sounds like a kind of billingsgatethat is at once crude and disruptive. "For political philosophy toexist," Rancire explains, "the order of political idealities mustbe linked to some construction of city 'parts,' to a count whosecomplexities may mask a fundamental miscount, a miscountthat may well be the blaberon , the very wrong that is the stuff of politics." [6]

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This is why appeals to procedures of deliberation are aninsufficient account of democratic politics. The assertion of anutterance is crucial to political life but speech act theory is illequipped to consider the blaberon . Political interlocution "hasalways mixed up language games and rules of expression, and ithas always particularized the universal in demonstrativesequences comprised of the meeting of heterogeneouselements." [7] The difficulty of democratic politics, then, is notin determining the causes, effects, and correctives forcommunicative failure. Rather, "the problem is knowingwhether the subjects who count in the interlocution 'are' or 'arenot,' whether they are speaking or just making noise." [8] In

other words, consensus theories fail because they presume thata communicative scenario is already in place when contestinggroups come together; these theories assume further thatcommunicative participants know what they are talking about.In contrast, Rancire characterizes political speech as excessiveand noisy because there is no pre-established agreementregarding either the status of the speakers or the objectives theywish to pursue. This noisy populace is the 'no-part' of 'the partof those who have no part:' not only a miscounted elementwithin the larger ordering of a polity, but also the ones whohave no part in politics -- namely, the unrepresentable.

Paradoxically, it is the police's miscount that allows for thepolitically relevant no-part to persist.

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For Rancire, 'democracy' is irreducible to the institutions inwhich it is set: Democracy does not simply refer to theorganization of an edifice that a citizenry must legitimate; it is apractice, a divisive operation, where the unrepresented element

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voices a wrong. In this vein, Rancire's unit of political analysisis the mistake, the miscounted ones whose speech utterances aremisunderstood [ms-entendu]. Since misunderstanding isconstitutive of political interlocution, dissensus comprises thenature of political argument. Political argument, therefore,cannot escape the trappings of what he will periodically refer toas literarity (or the excess of words). We are political animals,

Rancire believes, because we put words into circulation; weinvent useless and unnecessary words that exceed the functionof rigid designation and confound those who claim to "speakcorrectly." [9] Such cacophony produces effects and hisprincipal interest, as historian, literary critic, and politicaltheorist, is to investigate into the effectivity of speech acts.Hence the value of his historical examples: Clisthene's re-organization of the ancient tribes of Athens into demes ,seventeenth century preachers referring to monarchs as tyrants ,and nineteenth century workers referring to themselves as

proletariat .[10] The transference of these terms from onepolitical situation to another by a class of people whoseauthoritative status is, at best, illegitimate because it is notrecognized is, for Rancire, the political moment parexcellence.

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In this respect, troping is the political activity par excellence.The ability to make and shape words, to create a novel turn of phrase and have it circulate, implies that politics permits asubstantive aesthetic and, more specifically, 'poetic' dimension.

"To affirm the 'poetic' nature in politics," Rancire has recentlystated, "means first and foremost that politics is an activity of reconfiguration of that which is given to the sensible." [11] Thispractice of reconfiguration, of speaking out of turn in acacophonous manner, is a part-taking in politics that is alwaysat risk. It is because individuals are not permitted to participatethat politics occurs: individuals part-take because they do nothave a part and it is in the multiple attempts at part-taking thatthe democratic moment emerges.

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In highlighting 'disordering' and 'reordering' as two key featuresof democratic political action, Rancire endorses a poetics of politics whose image is of the order of the sublime. Democracyis not an institution; it is a force that dislocates. It does notpermit stasis, nor does it allow for the kind of contemplativeharmony characteristic of a consensus imaginary. Instead,democratic life tends towards the partisan: accountability isdivisive because it exposes a constitutive inequality at the heart

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of institutional arrangements. Equality and tort , then, areprinciples of political illegitimacy that allow for democracy tooccur rather than merely persist. The 'return of the political'thesis, present in much contemporary political thought, cannotaccount for this scandal of thinking; Rancire's Ten Thesesaddresses this fundamental miscount.

Further Reading

Rancire, Jacques & Panagia, Davide. "Dissenting Words: AConversation with Jacques Rancire." Diacritics . 50:3 (2001):113-126.

Rancire, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy .Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: The University of MinnesotaPress, 1998.

Rancire, Jacques. On the Shores of Politics . Trans. Liz Heron.Phronesis. Ed. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. New York:Verso, 1995.

Rancire, Jacques. The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge . Trans. Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis: TheUniversity of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Rancire, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster . Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1991.

Rancire, Jacques. "On the Theory of Ideology - Althusser'sPolitics." Ideology . Ed. Terry Eagleton. London: LongmanGroup UK Ltd., 1994. 141-161.

Notes

[1] The Ten Theses on Politics , originally delivered in Bologna,Italy, was written between 1994 and 1996 and subsequently

published in the second French edition of Rancire's Aux bordsdu politique (1998). It appears in English here, for the first time.

[2] Rancire, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy , p. xii.

[3] Rancire/Panagia, "Dissenting Words: A Conversation withJacques Rancire," in Diacritics (Fall, 2001), p. 6.

[4] Rancire, Dis-agreement , p. 4. Although Rancire does not

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cite it, the reference is to Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics .

[5] I refer to the English translation of wrong (in Dis-agreement ) from the French tort ( La Msentente: Politique et Philosophie , Galile, 1995). Though 'wrong' is not incorrect, itoverlooks the juridical tradition of tort law that coincides withthe emergence of social contract theories of government. Thus

'wrong' not only refers to the logical correctness of aproposition but also to the historical emergence of ' tort ' (i.e., tobe wronged) as a relevant political category coincident with therise of democratic revolutions in the eighteenth century. I wouldlike to thank Frances Ferguson for helping me formulate thispoint.

[6] Rancire, Dis-agreement , p. 6.

[7] Rancire, Dis-agreement , p. 50.

[8] Rancire, Dis-agreement , p. 50.[9] Rancire/Panagia, "Dissenting Words," p. 3.

[10] Demes were townships or divisions of ancient Attica while proletariat , according to the Oxford English Dictionary (2ndEd. CD-ROM), refers to "the lowest class of the community inancient Rome, regarded as contributing nothing to the state butoffspring."

[11] Rancire/Panagia, p. 3.

Davide Panagia recently completed his Ph.D., Images of Political Thought: Judgment, Opinion, and the Science of Politics , at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recentpublication is entitled The Predicative Function in Ideology (in

Journal of Political Ideologies , 2001). He can be reached [email protected]

Copyright 2001, Davide Panagia and The Johns Hopkins University Press

all rights reserved. NOTE: members of a subscribed campus may use thiswork for any internal noncommercial purpose , but, other than one copysent by email, print, or fax to one person at another location for thatindividual's personal use, distribution of this article outside of thesubscribed campus, in whole or in part, without express writtenpermission from the JHU Press is expressly forbidden.

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