(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
French philosopher Jacques Rancière has agreed to answer questions about the current historical situation, formulated by publisher and author Eric Hazan, who runs the publishing house La fabrique. Hazan thus publishes some of the most relevant books in France in political theory and history, including Comité invisible's publications, but also Rancières. In the preface, Hazan writes that Rancière didn't really want to make the book at first, but then became persuasive. Rancière's reservation or skepticism is not explained in more detail, but it is quite indicative of Rancière's intellectual and theoretical position. He is not a teacher who interprets the text and explains how things are connected. While other philosophers and sociologists in France are still busy taking on the role of a non-party organic intellectual who not only analyzes the historical situation but also offers strategic considerations, Rancière fails to explain very consistently.
While a philosophically oriented economist such as Frédéric Lordon is trying to stage a kind of spokesman for Nuit debout, Rancière refuses to advocate for an identifiable political project, let alone party or movement. Of course, this does not in any way mean that we are dealing with a thinker who is not preoccupied with his time and his political developments, but for Rancière it is crucial not to position himself as the great master of philosophy or an intellectual who explains to the masses something , they do not know. Thinking is not an activity reserved for the philosopher, it is something that everyone can do. Rancière strongly rejects the notion that the masses are shrouded in ideological fog and that the philosopher must shed light on the situation. As he puts it in the book, his thinking is just one voice among many others.
Of course, that's why Rancière is skeptical of Hazan's assignment. Rancière will not interpret the text, he will not explain "in what time we live" (A quel temps vivons-nous?). Or, of course, he will do well, that is, to analyze the historical situation, but he does so as one voice among many others, not as an authority, an intellectual, who issues instructions or formulates a program. Rancière relates to his contemporary and the various political tendencies at stake in it, but without providing a recipe with which we can act politically. Instead, he proposes a theory of the political as moments of surprising political action, where subjects suddenly reject the role they have been assigned, thus opening up another divide of the sensual. But without these moments give rise to any overall theory of what should be done.
Ranciere's rejection of the role of explanatory or educational philosopher is linked to his definition of political as the verification of a prior equality, the fact that everyone can speak and everyone can think, and thus are political subjects in the active sense. The similarity is the starting point. But it is constantly tried to be rejected by the established institutions. For Rancière, what we commonly understand as politics is that of understanding the absence of politics. He defines the political system and the political governance of society as "the police" by which he denotes the naturalized division of seats and maneuvers, ie the structuring according to which one does one thing while others do something else: Some pass laws in the Folketing, while others go to school.
For Rancière, what we usually understand as politics is to understand the absence of politics.
For Rancière, politics is when this functionally divided society is challenged, when someone suddenly finds themselves somewhere else than they are supposed to be, thus demonstrating that they can actually speak and act as political subjects as well. When paperless migrants occupy a church in Paris, when workers in Lyon's 1830s write poems and compose music, or when Parisian students walk the streets in May '68 and sing that they are German Jews. These are examples of political subjectivation in which another world emerges. Where another way of dividing the sensual is revealed through displacement. Where bodies reject the identity they have been assigned and suddenly are somewhere else, are between identities or are a "wrong" place. There is a fundamental conflict between the anarchy of existence and the attempt of power to inscribe it into the ruling order.
Politics has its own dynamic and cannot be explained by reference to sociological or socio-economic conditions. Not that these are irrelevant, they are not, but for Rancière, the political event contains an overshoot of these matters. The political event is autonomous in that a rupture or slippage occurs in which the established hierarchies are challenged and appear random. In this way, Rancière's thinking can be described as an anti-sociological philosophy of events, where it is important to be affirmative of the de-identification and the actual attempts to share the senses in other ways.
A big part of the new book is about the difficulties of analyzing contemporary and its various political expressions such as the Nuit debout and the space occupation movements in southern Europe. One of the problems has to do with the delivered paradigms of interpretation, first and foremost Marxism, which Rancière continues to be skeptical of. According to Rancière, Marxism operates with an idea of economic determination, which he rejects in favor of the idea of an aesthetic revolution in which the creative, revolutionary gesture does not point beyond, but opens a space here and now. There is no legal link between the social conditions and emancipation, there are no development laws, no final settlement. Marxism sees connections where there is none, sees the revolution in exploitation and submission, but the revolutionary break is not the other side of the socio-economic conditions according to Rancière, it is a process in which something new occurs in which the people emerge as a political subject. One cannot, as Marxism does, presume the people or the working class, they exist only afterwards as results of the process. For Rancière, both domination and liberation are thus far more complex processes, and they cannot be read off each other. There is no direct connection between the factory and the proletariat (or revolution).
Rancières problematization of the notion of a direct link between domination and revolution, between capitalism and socialism is highly relevant, but it tends to become ahistorical when he writes that there is no difference between 2016, 2005 or 1850. Of course, we cannot go directly from, for example, the tendency of the rate of profit to the revolutionary lifting of the monetary economy, but that does not mean that we can completely exclude certain major structural transformations within capital in the analysis of the historical situation. The relationship between revolution and society is extremely difficult to analyze, and it is good that Rancière rejects easy connections, but when he categorically rejects any link between political event and socio-economic development, he is dangerously close to understanding political subjectivation as a abstract formula without any historical consistency, in which the contradiction between institution and rupture becomes a kind of transhistoric principle that constantly re-emerges and disappears.
