Disembodied politics: commitment and formal distance in Rancière^*

Abstract

In light of the theme and concerns of the present collection of essays, we may ask whether ‘distance in general’, and ‘critical distance in particular’ (Fredric Jameson), has truly disappeared with postmodernity. Proposing an immediate and interruptive political engagement with local issues, Jacques Rancière’s articulation of political mobilisation does seem to confirm this claim. Upon further inspection, however, his emancipatory politics repeat the same mistake of valuing an abstract universal at the expense of a concrete particular, however paradoxical this may seem at first sight. The present article develops this thesis in three moments. On the first hand, it highlights Rancière’s notion of conflict as being institutive of politics. Secondly, it connects this ‘sensible’, and Rancière’s understanding of politics as being aesthetic, to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’. The French author sees in the leading section of the first Critique the grounding possibility of (I) freeing up time and space within the social realm; (II) the representation of a common political surface that can be reshaped; (III) political equality; (IV) emancipation. The last section shows how this recourse to the transcendental subject in Rancière’s politics follows and embraces a traditional position in the history of philosophy whereby identity is denigrated at the profit of a disembodied universalism.

Keywords:

• Rancière
• Kant
• Lévinas
• politics
• aesthetic
• distance
• emancipation
• identity

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally published in French in the following work: Marc Chevrier, Yves Couture et Stéphane Vibert (eds.) (2015), Démocratie et modernité: la pensée politique française contemporaine, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, collection ‘Res Publica’.

Notes

1. See the English translation: Rancière (1999, p. xii). Precisely because of such philosophical oversights, all translations in this article are mine and page numbers refer to the French text: Rancière (1995).

2. Rancière will define democracy, the very regime that challenges the Republic’s natural order and allows subjectification, as a ‘way of being of politics’. See Rancière (1995, p. 139).

3. The following interpretation of Chaos is deeply inspired by the account of Cornélius Castoriadis, in Castoriadis (2004, pp. 171–175).

4. The poem’s first lines are dedicated to the Muse, as was the tradition. The beginning of its narrative, however, starts on line II.116, with Khaos geneto.

5. This is discussed in Rancière (2000, p. 62). Translated passages of this book are mine.

6. Kant (1781), A21/B35. Henceforth, references to the first Critique will indicate the habitual A/B pagination in the text.