Talk at MUN: Rancière and Clastres

Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at Memorial University in St. John’s, titled "The State and the Police: Considerations on Jacques Rancière and Pierre Clastres." In the talk, I examine the problem of command and coercion through the work of Clastres and Rancière. The argument of this talk has three parts. First, I show that command is a problem conceptualized by Rancière, and then, how the command-obedience relation functions to both reinforce and, when it is politicized, undermine the inequalities of a given police order. Then, I examine Clastres’s critique of the Eurocentric biases of anthropology and ethnography that reduce societies against the state to societies that lack a state. To show how societies refuse coercion and state power, I contend that Clastres proposes debt as both the origin of state power and the reason for the discontinuity and heterogeneity between societies against the state and societies with a state. I conclude with a series of critical remarks aimed toward evaluating Clastres’s identification of coercion with state power and Rancière’s categorization of command as policing. 

The talk is at Science 2101, 4:30 to 5:45.

On Rancière and Clastres (and Todd May)

In Society against the State, Pierre Clastres writes,

from its beginnings our culture has conceived of political power in terms of hierarchized and authoritarian relations of command and obedience. Every real or possible form of power is consequently reducible to this privileged relation which a priori expresses the essence of power. (16)

I've been working on a paper that compares Rancière and Clastres to understand their respective projects. I've completed a rough draft of the section on Rancière, which responds to what I consider to be an undertheorized point in the literature: Rancière's account of command and obedience. I argue that Rancière's politics, at least as he outlines it in Disagreement, has two features (two features also relevant to his concept of the police): politics involves both the symbolization of equality (the aesthetics of politics) and the enactment of equality, which more specifically means the disruption and subversion of relations of command.

By emphasizing the latter point, how equality disrupts relations of command, I think we not only gain a greater appreciation of Rancière's work, but we also gain an analytic distinction that contributes to understanding debates in Rancière scholarship. At the moment, we're only going to look at an example of the latter point.

As some of you know, I recently reviewed Martin Breaugh et al.'s Thinking Radical Democracy. In that review, I discuss Rachel Magnusson's chapter on Rancière. I think it's a great and incisive essay, and I follow her discussion through a critique of the work of Todd May, who, she claims, interprets Rancière's work in terms too close to liberalism. There certainly are passages in May's work where it seems that he does verge to close to liberal accounts of equality, despite, of course, his distinction between passive and active equality. Magnusson's judgment, however, has continued to bother me. After working out the analytical distinction between symbolization and command, I now know why. Todd May is cast as both too liberal (by Magnusson) and too anarcho-purist (by Samuel Chambers) because May and his critics emphasize different features of Rancière’s politics: May focuses on the enactment—in his words, the “activation”—of equality against command, while Magnusson and Chambers interpret May as giving an account of political symbolization. Indeed, one of the virtues of May's work, in distinction to much of the literature, is to think Rancière's politics against relations of command.

Next up is to deal with Clastres, who attempts to outline a genealogy of political power, and his hypothesis is that the social division, which is the State, between command and obedience precedes all other hierarchical distinctions. Then I will argue that Rancière's concept of the police, is a critique of this vertical model of political power.

Book Exchange: McLennan and Shaw

These days, the time I used to spend blogging has been expended on being managing book review editor for Symposium and the CSCP. That does not mean that Matt and I have ended our philosophical back-and-forth. Over at Symposium, we have reviewed each other's books:

Symposium inaugurates a new series, Book Exchanges, with Matthew R. McLennan’s review of Devin Zane Shaw’s Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Rancière (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Shaw’s review of McLennan’s Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy: Badiou’s Dispute with Lyotard (Bloomsbury, 2015). Book exchanges put contemporary scholars into dialogue through mutual review and critique of their recent publications with the aim of establishing intersections and points of reinforcement between works that speak from different standpoints or different disciplines; in the case of McLennan and Shaw, both authors aim to outline a radical and militant philosophical approach informed by Badiou, Lyotard, and Rancière. Such an exchange is apposite, given that McLennan and Shaw are currently co-authoring a book on the political thought of Miguel Abensour.    –Eds.

Review of Thinking Radical Democracy

Symposium has published my review of Martin Breaugh, Christopher Holman, Rachel Magnusson, Paul Mazzocchi, and Devin Penner (eds.), Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-war France. A well-edited volume has to avoid numerous pitfalls: issues of consistency, varying quality of contributions, and overall coherence. Breaugh et al. have done an excellent job in avoiding those potential problems. My overview:

The essays collected in Thinking Radical Democracy aim to situate the political thought of Rancière, Abensour, and Balibar within a tradition of radical democratic thought in postwar France that conceptualizes democracy as divisive and emancipatory. The book includes chapters on the “forbearers” of the return to radical democracy (the “French” Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Clastres), the critics of totalitarianism (Lefort, Castoriadis, and Debord), and concludes with essays concerning Rancière, Balibar, and Abensour. Despite the many differences between these figures, the authors and editors of the present volume argue that the radical democratic tradition is defined by its threefold exploration of  “politics, division, and democracy.”

It's longer than most reviews for Symposium but there's a reason. One of my goals in reviewing the book was to bring to the forefront how there is an important distinction between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique). I think that, in general, the attempt to foreground the possibilities of politics through first defining the political also opens the possibility that definitions of the political could come to police politics. I outline this problem in the review, so read all the way to the end.

Books Received: Egalitarian Moments

Last time we were on the phone, I discovered that even my own mother didn't know the book would be available soon, so I must have been remiss in mentioning it: Egalitarian Moments is available on November 5th, 2015. I've received, in three separate shipments, my author's copies. One of those I'll be exchanging for Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy. The others, with the exception of my copy, I'm open to exchanging for other recently published, prohibitively expensive titles.

Ranciere, the History of Philosophy, and Contemporary Continental Philosophy,

Something I've been working on. Comments welcome before it goes to press in two weeks.

I consider equality, in its political and aesthetic forms, as a significant problem within the history of philosophy from Descartes to Rancière. The purpose of Egalitarian Moments is to outline an egalitarian frame of reference for rethinking modern philosophy after Descartes. The analyses of a number of egalitarian moments in philosophy are meant to engage Rancière’s terse and sometimes polemical historical shorthand. For example, he insists that political subjectivation is modeled on Descartes’s ‘ego sum, ego existo,’ and in Chapter 1, I aim to make historical and conceptual sense of this claim. But what follows is not an exegesis of Rancière’s—or anybody else’s—work. Instead, I place Rancière’s work in a historical context of considering equality as a political, philosophical, and aesthetic problem, while reading the history of modern philosophy from an egalitarian standpoint. Using Rancière’s concepts and arguments to reconsider the history of philosophy while using this counter-history of egalitarian moments to situate Rancière’s work amounts, perhaps, to a hermeneutic circle or, as he would say, a historical fiction. But it is no more of a historical fiction than the way that the predominant frameworks of continental philosophy—such as post-Heideggerian phenomenology and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and post-Marxism—formulate historical or genealogical accounts of thinking their present problematics. What counts is whether or not Rancière’s work and this history of egalitarian moments offer new and compelling ways to think our present engagements with politics and art. 

The Egalitarian Moments is motivated by the fact that evaluating Rancière’s work using the assumptions and methods of these established frameworks in some way occludes important aspects of his thought. If one supposes that politics—or the political (which is something other than politics)—must be grounded in political ontology or the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, Rancière’s work might seem disappointing or even incoherent. Likewise if one expects his politics to decipher in the surfaces of political discontent the true demands of radical struggle. However, I do not attempt to adjudicate the differences between Rancière’s egalitarian method and these established theoretical frameworks and problematics. Instead, by tracing a provisional—and let me stress that it is provisional and non-exhaustive—account of a history of egalitarian moments in philosophy, I hope to show, first, how Rancière, in ways unforeseen by other approaches in contemporary continental philosophy, asks compelling questions and makes compelling claims about equality. More importantly, though, I hope to draw attention to previously overlooked concepts and claims that could still be taken up by new forms of dissensus.

The Final Countdown

I know that very little has appeared on the blog during 2014. That's largely due--at least in my case--to the fact that I've been writing Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Rancière (here). At this point, the book is almost done. I'm currently writing up the conclusion, which summarizes the contents and then proceeds to compare my reading of Rancière to the politics of aesthetics elaborated in his book Aisthesis. These concluding remarks will in part respond to Peter Gratton's review of the book for Society and Space. He notes a vitalist undercurrent in this work. More specifically, Peter shows that the politics of the aesthetic regime of art, as it is framed in Aisthesis, aims to uncover the singular moments of life unburdened by reified representative structures:

In these pages, Rancière privileges the clown, the prisoner awaiting execution, the de-gendered dancer, and so on, all in the name of an inactivity that is but another name for the pure vital force of living, while calling for an indifference to differences that for the author would only be hierarchical and power driven. Indeed they are and have been, but isolating non-hierarchical moments in some sort of eidos of pure inactivity in these descriptions becomes a phenomenological epoché that has to bracket so much away from given contexts, and thus only reinforces what a pretense the “ignorance” and invisibility of the writer were in the first place.

Unlike Peter, however, I don't think this is the culmination of Rancière's work (I also have some qualms with Peter's characterization of Ranicière's account of mimetic norms in the representative regime of the arts, but that discussion has to wait for Chapter 3 of my book). While the book is doubtlessly important, I don't think its vitalist resonances are foregrounded by his other major works on aesthetics (Aesthetics and Its Discontents, The Emancipated Spectator, etc.), which focus on how new forms of social practices become visible and intelligible. I argue that there isn't one politics of aesthetics, but that it takes multiple forms. Thus Rancière's Aisthesis elaborates one possible account of the politics of aesthetics. In my book, I defend a different theoretical approach, emphasizing Rancière's account as a micropolitics of aesthetics that works in the interstices of egalitarian politics and policing. It's also an account of art that is non-teleological (à la Benjamin) and non-monumental (as in Badiou and Schelling).

Ranciere, Greenberg, Whitman

I’m currently working on the third chapter of my book on Rancière and philosophy, part of which was recently delivered at the Aesthetic Experience conference here in Ottawa. As often happens, the final paper didn’t sound too much like the abstract. While I promised a reconsideration of Schiller, I ended up spending much more time on a reconsideration of Greenberg’s modernism—contrasted, at different points, with Baudelaire, Benjamin, Rancière, and Schiller (I also spend more time on Greenberg because, as it turns out, I'll be developing a reading of Schiller that responds to Kant, Fichte, and finally Schelling's concerns as I've outlined them in F&NSPA). The space I’ve dedicated to Greenberg in the third chapter (it’s about 2000 words or so) is warranted because Rancière claims, in a recent interview in Ranciere Now, that ‘the dominant modernist paradigm (the Greenbergian theorization of the avant-garde) is in fact a liquidation of the dominant tendency of the aesthetic regime, which is to abolish the boundaries between “mediums,” between high art and popular art, and ultimately between art and life.’

Untitled, 1957

In developing an interpretation of Greenberg, I found a passage that lends support to Rancière’s opposition between Whitman and Greenberg. (Not to mention that Greenberg is criticizing Clyfford Still, who was one of the first abstract artists I really appreciated--for reasons that might be entirely contingent, because several of Still's works are exhibited in the SFMOMA). In Aisthesis, Rancière argues that Greenberg’s modernism repudiates the ‘cultural democracy [of art] stemming from Whitman,’ and while the case is strong, he does not cite an explicit case where Greenberg castigates Whitman for being, at least in part, kitsch (though note that in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ Greenberg singles out John Steinbeck’s work as a hybrid of modern art and kitsch). However, later, in ‘“American-Type” Painting,’ Greenberg praises Still’s work, with the caveat that

Still’s uncompromising art has its own affinity with popular or bad taste. It is the first body of painting I know of that asks to be called Whitmanesque in the worst as well as the best sense, indulging as it does in loose and sweeping gestures, and defying certain conventions…in the same gauche way that Whitman defied meter. And just as Whitman’s verse assimilated to itself qualities of stale journalistic and oratorical prose, Still’s painting assimilates to itself some of the stalest and most prosaic painting of our time…the kind of open-air painting in autumnal colors…which has spread among half-trained painters only since Impressionism became popular.

Aesthetic Experience Conference

UPDATED 10 February, schedule changes in italics, including the time of my presentation

I will be participating in the Aesthetic Experience Conference at the University of Ottawa this month. My talk will be a rough draft of the first half of Chapter 3 of my book on Rancière. The abstract:

The modernist concept of art, as explicitly formulated by Clement Greenberg, is modeled on an analogy with Kantian critique: just as critical philosophy engages in the self-interrogation of the capacities and limits of reason, modern art engages in the interrogation of the particular medium of each art. I will argue that Rancière’s claim that we can better understand the history of the last two centuries of art by reference to what he calls the “aesthetic regime of art” entails an important reconsideration of Schiller, whose work is often seen as derivatively Kantian. Schiller, Rancière argues, is the first major figure to articulate what is at stake in the aesthetic regime of art: a persistent tension between free play and free appearance, between art becoming life and life becoming art.

The full conference schedule (Location is Simard Room 129): 

February 19 février: The Status of Aesthetic Experience/ Le status de l’expérience esthétique

9h00-9h30: Breakfast/déjeuner
9h30-9h45: Introduction

9h45-11h15: Allen Carlson – The Dilemma of Everyday Aesthetic Experience

11h15-11h30: Coffee break/pause café

11h30-12h15: Veronika Huta and Keith Pearce – Findings From Psychology Research on Aesthetic Experience

12h15-13h45: Lunch/diner

13h45-14h30: Susan Douglas -– AestheSis and/as Aesthetics

14h30-15h15: Bertrand Labasse – L’art ou le mouchoir ? Sur l’interaction des facteurs cognitifs et sociaux dans l’appréciation esthétique

15h15-16h00 Jason Saunders – An integral theory of aesthetics

16h00-16h15 Coffee break/pause café

16h15-17h00 Devin Zane Shaw – Aesthetics and Emancipation: Rancière’s Reconsideration of Schiller

17h00-17h45 Christopher McGrath - Aesthetic Experience as the Meansfor Becoming Human: Romantic Aesthetics in Schleiermacher and Dilthey

18h00-20h00 : Reception/Réception

February 20 février Art and Aeshetic Experience/Art et expérience esthétique
9h00-9h30 : Breakfast/déjeuner
9h30-9h45: Introduction

9h45-11h15: Daniel Dumouchel – L’esthétique introuvable. Considérations historiques sur la genèse de l’expérience ‘esthétique’ de l’art

11h15-11h30: Coffee break/pause café

11h30-12h15: Mélissa Thériault – Ces expériences que nous ne « vivons pas »: l'expérience de la fiction

12h15-13h45: Lunch/diner

13h45-15h15 Noel Carroll - Defending the Content Theory of Aesthetic Experience

15h15-15h30 Coffee break/pause café

15h30-16h15 Louise Boisclair – Particularités de l’expérience perceptuelle interactive

16h15-17h00 Jakub Zdebik – The Line as Aesthetic Experience: Orientation in Thinking in Kant, Deleuze and Kuitca

17h00-17h45 Dave Kemp - An Uncertain Experience: the Production and Viewing of Photographic Documentation from Performance Art Events

"Impossible Identifications" at the EPTC

If you want to know where I've been during 2013, I've been working on a book on Jacques Rancière and philosophy. In Part I, I focus on Rancière's account of political subjectification, and I argue that we could get a better sense of his account if we consider his work in relation to Descartes, Beauvoir, and Sartre (and vice versa). In terms of the overall architecture of the book, my paper on Cartesian egalitarianism should be Chapter 1, and this paper on Sartre and Being and Nothingness is half of Chapter 2. I will be presenting a rough draft of the second half of Chapter 2 at the upcoming meeting of the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) in the first week of June. Here's a link to the program, and I am looking forward to the fact that Jason Wirth, who reviewed my Schelling book, will be giving the commentary on my more recent work.

Here's the abstract:

"Impossible Identifications: Rancière as Reader and Critic of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason"

In this presentation, I examine the influence of Sartre, especially the Critique of Dialectical Reason and several contemporaneous essays on anti-colonialism, on the political thought of Jacques Rancière. A reconsideration of Sartre is in order for two interrelated reasons: first, both Sartre and Rancière propose accounts of emancipatory political subjectification in which subjective praxis emerges as a radical break with a given set of oppressive and exploitative social relations; and second, both Sartre and Rancière conceptualize identity as a function or operation of oppressive or exploitative social relations, and thus political praxis involves a disidentification with one’s previous identifications and interests.

But I'd like to note that Rancière critiques how Sartre hyper-instrumentalizes political praxis. The following is an excerpt from the introduction to the paper:

An important difference between Sartre and Rancière turns on how they conceptualize this dynamic of disidentification. I will argue that Rancière, in his landmark Disagreement (1995), thinks politics as a paradoxical and non-instrumental praxis, an activity with neither end nor interest other than the disruptive and transformative effects of the supposition of equality, meaning “the open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality” (Disagreement, 30). In this sense, Rancière is consistent with his earlier criticisms of Sartre found in The Philosopher and His Poor (1983), where he argues that Sartre’s account of activity results in the hyper-instrumentalization of praxis: “if the world’s matter is to bear the history of liberation, it must be traversed entirely by technique” (Philosopher and His Poor, 155). Freedom becomes a “super technique,” always turned to an ultimate end which forecloses on “the elastic intervals of autodidact freedom…in the disoriented space of pathways and dead ends where people searched not long ago for what rebellious workers and dreamers called ‘emancipation’” (156, 147). This hyper-instrumentalized praxis never escapes from either internal or external exigencies—whether Sartre is discussing the exigencies of the practico-inert, the pledged group, the organization, or ultimately, the party (140, 154).

I will argue that Rancière’s claim that politics involves an “impossible identification” is proposed as an alternative to Sartre’s account of praxis. In short, Rancière’s paradoxical politics involves a political subjectification that undermines previous identities by momentarily identifying with a part of society that has no part, with this dynamic introducing new and more egalitarian ways of speaking, being, and doing into a given set of social relations (or what he calls a “distribution of the sensible”).

The Nothingness of Equality

I noticed that I hadn't yet posted a link to the "The Nothingness of Equality: The 'Sartrean Existentialism' of Jacques Rancière," which was recently published in Sartre Studies International (it's behind a subscription wall). In case you are interested, here's the abstract:

In this essay, I propose a mutually constructive reading of the work of Jacques Rancière and Jean-Paul Sartre. On the one hand, I argue that Rancière's egalitarian political thought owes several important conceptual debts to Sartre's Being and Nothingness, especially in his use of the concepts of freedom, contingency and facticity. These concepts play a dual role in Rancière's thought. First, he appropriates them to show how the formation of subjectivity through freedom is a dynamic that introduces new ways of speaking, being and doing, instead of being a mode of assuming an established identity. Second, Rancière uses these concepts to demonstrate the contingency of any situation or social order, a contingency that is the possibility of egalitarian praxis. On the other hand, I also argue that reading Sartre with Rancière makes possible the reconstruction of Sartre's project within the horizon of freedom and equality rather than that of authenticity. 

This essay is part of what is shaping up to be Part I of my eventual book on Rancière. At the moment, I have it planned that the themes in this paper will follow those addressed in my paper on Cartesian egalitarianism (here), and will be followed by a discussion and critique of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason.

A Short Note on Rancière and Class

I've argued previously that class is an important category in the work of Jacques Rancière. Rarely, however, do we find such a direct reference to class as in this short piece in the Guardian, discussing the revival of Marxism:

[The author is talking about class with Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class...] "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous." [...]

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

Things even get a bit stranger when he discusses the "gravediggers" of capitalism, a figure that Rancière often criticizes (he treats it as a synecdoche for "historical necessity," which he dismisses below):

After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."

Cartesian Egalitarianism Essay Published

As a reader of this blog, you've probably heard that I am working on a book about Jacques Rancière. In the first two chapters, I seek to trace the egalitarian precedents to his work. In doing so, I place Rancière in the Cartesian and existentialist lineages in French philosophy. 

In "Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière," which is now available in Phaenex 7.1:

I present an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’s supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition [restricting the import to the evaluation of epistemological and metaphysical claims], I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects.

For previous discussions on this blog, see here and here.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Rights?

As part of my research on Jacques Rancière, I have been reading up on liberal discussions of human rights. What I've read confirms Todd May's characterization, in The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière, of these discussions as problematics of passive equality, as "the creation, preservation, or protection of equality by governmental institutions" (3). The philosophical discourse on passive equality, then, focuses how these institutional guarantees ought to be distributed. 

This discourse of passive equality, of course, is not Rancière's approach, though it should be noted that movements premised on active equality (the equality of intelligences and abilities) can turn the problem of rights into a space of dissensus, when, for instance, Olympe de Gouges publishes her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen as a searing critique the Declaration of The Rights of Man. Rather than dismiss rights as an illusion, de Gouges makes them a point of contention by asserting "the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not" (Hatred of Democracy, 61). Rancière also mentions the civil rights struggle in the US in the 1960s. So rights are not excluded as intrinsically liberal, but rather Rancière is careful show--in May's terms--that the politics of equality cannot be reduced to the contours of liberalism, and that where "politics becomes passive is not in the recognition or embrace of rights; it is when rights come to structure the field of politics" (May, 34).

For as much as I might appreciate large parts Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights--especially her claims concerning the extra-juridical/literary origins of a sense of sympathy and empathy--she concludes on just such a note of passive equality: "The human rights framework, with its international bodies, international courts, and international conventions, might be exasperating in slowness to respond or repeated inability to achieve its ultimate goals, but there is no better structure available for confronting these issues" (213). She makes no mention of the possibility of transforming 'available structures' through a radical or revolutionary politics of equality.

In this post, I am going to focus on two rhetorical figures found in Micheline R. Ishay's The History of Human Rights. Overall, the book is textbooky in the sense that the text is often descriptive and written from a so-called objective viewpoint, a voice from nowhere, which gave me a greater appreciation of Patrik Ourednik's Europeana. To Ishay's credit, she dedicates a chapter to showing that workers' and socialists' struggle significantly influenced how we think of human rights. However, along the way she co-opts several important "dialectical images"--as Walter Benjamin would say--of revolutionary struggle.

The first is Benjamin's discussion of Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. "A human rights document," Ishay writes, "may be marred by barbarism, yet, according to Benjamin's observation, it is also a barometer of human rights progress" (2-3). This claim is derived from Benjamin's statement that the storm propelling the angel with his back to the future is called progress--as if this "progress" is the moment of redemption in his On the Concept of History. She does not address the fact that Benjamin's claim is part of a critique of progress. The idea of progress, according to Benjamin, is an assumption of the inevitable improvement of humankind (often thought to take place through technological improvements) which is used to organize the mass of data that fills a "universal history," an empty, homogeneous time (Thesis XVII). To this concept of history, Benjamin opposes a materialist historiography and praxis that seeks to blast events out of the continuum of history. By identifying Benjamin's messianism with the distribution of rights through institutional frameworks, Ishay limits radical politics to what we have already called passive equality.

The same movement of co-optation happens when Ishay makes rights the mantle of anti-colonialist struggle, when she claims to side with "the wretched of the earth." In Chapter Five, Ishay discusses what she takes to be the key problems of "globalization and its impact," one of these being the relation of humanitarian intervention and US imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. While much of her book is descriptive, in this chapter she moves to an argumentative mode. She claims that a "new realism of human rights" should criticize the human rights abuses of imperialism but should nevertheless "seize opportunities to advance its cause whenever Western powers confront repressive governments" (290), or be prepared "to a substantive agenda linking human rights and international security" (289). Through this model, she argues, globalization can be made to advance the cause of "the wretched of the earth" (293).

She never addresses the incongruity of yoking the cause of the wretched of the earth to imperialism. One of the central planks of Frantz Fanon's philosophy was that the self-determination of the oppressed could not be advanced by imperialist intervention. To intervene and implement rights from above repeats the civilizing gesture of the old imperialism. Any reference to rights must take place through local conflict and struggle, from the organization of the masses from below. In addition, when Ishay appeals to presenting a "substantive agenda" of human rights, she does not discuss to whom this agenda addresses: Western powers. The framework of rights-security is already today Western and imperialist, and does not have any accountability to those (the oppressed)  to whom Ishay or NGOs appeal for their moral legitimacy. Not to mention that intervention itself can/does destroy those networks and organizations that would be accountable to  local peoples (q.v. Haiti). Like the aforementioned examples, this argument again reduces politics to passive equality.

Cartesian Egalitarianism

I am currently putting the finishing touches on an essay entitled "Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière," which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Phaenex (their site). 

We do not typically consider Descartes an egalitarian. He is more often interpreted, in the post-Heideggerian tradition of philosophy, as an epochal figure of the modern destiny of metaphysics. On this account, Descartes introduces the metaphysical ground of technicity by dividing all beings between thinking subjects and objects of a calculable objective world. Or, following Antonio Negri, he is considered an architect of a “reasonable ideology” that expresses the class compromise constitutive of the formation of bourgeois class power after the 1620s: whereas Descartes formulates his philosophy as the production of human significance (and practical utility) in its separation from the world, the bourgeoisie affirms its position in civil society at the same time it accepts a temporary class compromise with absolutism (Negri, Political Descartes, 295-296).

I argue that Descartes's legacy cannot be reduced to either of these interpretations, that there is something more to his philosophy.

As of late, both Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have laid claim to the legacy of the Cartesian subject, but their appropriation is largely programmatic (Zizek, in fact, is more interested in the Kantian/Hegelian subject; and Badiou the use of mathematics to reconceptualize ontology).

With Rancière (just as, I would argue, François Poullain de la Barre and Simone de Beauvoir), the discussion of the Cartesian subject has a specific content: equality. Cartesian egalitarianism pursues the consequences of Descartes's supposition, found in the Discourse on Method, that reason is equally distributed to all human beings (looking, of course, past the ironic posturing of the first sentence):

Good sense (bon sens) is the best distributed (partagée) thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things. (AT, VI: 1-2)

This claim, that good sense or reason is equal in all human beings, is fundamental to later Cartesian egalitarians, beginning with Poullain de la Barre. Here's Rancière's gloss of the way that Poullain and Jacotot take up this passage: “there are not several manners of being intelligent, no distribution between two forms of intelligence, and then between two forms of humanity. The equality of intelligences is first the equality of intelligence itself in all of its operations” ("L’actualité du Maître ignorant,” 412-413).

As I said, I'm still putting the finishing touches on the essay, so I can't get into all the details here (or else why would you read the article when it is finally published?). I can provide what I take to be the conditions necessary to count a thinker as a Cartesian egalitarian, as I've given them in the abstract (slightly edited here): 

 

I present an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’s supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition [restricting the import to the evaluation of epistemological and metaphysical claims], I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition or tendency. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects.

Rancière's Latest: "Aisthesis"

Many different factors play into how a person chooses his or her dissertation topic. When I began my PhD studies, I figured that I would be writing something on recent French philosophy. I had, in the previous few years, been reading lots of Badiou, Agamben, Lacan, and others. And then, in early 2005, I decided to write a dissertation on Schelling's philosophy of art. Not much had been written on the topic, nor, for that matter, on Schelling in general. I don't even know if I had thought about it in those terms--at most, I must have still been in that phase where reading Schelling was one of  the more unique (and sometimes more bizarre) experiences I had had in studying French and German philosophy (not to say that this experience no longer happens...). The project would also give me a chance to read up on Kant, Spinoza (and then, to my chagrin, Jacobi), Fichte, and Hegel, and work on my German.

Over the years, explaining my decision would remain a complex task (this ended, incidentally, when I published the book), especially if the person asking knew that I went in thinking about French philosophy. Eventually, I started telling these people that the best reason to work on a historical figure is that he or she would never publish anything new while you were trying to finish your dissertation: so if Schelling leapt out of his grave and presented a new system, we'd have bigger problems than my dissertation.

Since I've been working on Rancière, this joke was the first thing I thought of, when I discovered that he's recently published a new book on the aesthetic regime of art, entitled Aisthesis (Galilée, 2011).

The Nothingness of Equality

I've been putting the finishing touches on an essay that ought to see the light of day sometime in 2012 (it has already been accepted for publication). If you were in Montréal last April at the Sartre Society conference, you've already heard parts of it. If everything works like I want it to, it will eventually form part of a chapter in my book on Jacques Rancière. Here's an abstract of what you have to look forward to:

The Nothingness of Equality: The ‘Sartrean Existentialism’ of Jacques Rancière 

I propose a mutually constructive reading of the work of Jacques Rancière and Jean-Paul Sartre. On the one hand, I argue that Rancière’s egalitarian political thought owes several important conceptual debts to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, especially in his use of the concepts of freedom, contingency, and facticity. These concepts play a dual role in Rancière’s thought. First, he appropriates them to show how the formation of subjectivity through freedom is a dynamic that introduces new ways of speaking, being, and doing, instead of being a mode of assuming an established identity. Second, Rancière uses these concepts to demonstrate the contingency of any situation or social order, a contingency that is the possibility of egalitarian praxis. On the other hand, I also argue that reading Sartre with Rancière makes possible the reconstruction of Sartre’s project within the horizon of freedom and equality rather than that of authenticity.

Politics of Literature Review

My review of Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Literature, which I wrote during our sojourn in Paris, is now available at the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books here.

Going to Texas to Read Marx

I'll be heading to the Society for Social and Political Philosophy's roundtable on Marx's Capital, Volume 1, tomorrow. The schedule is up here, and it looks like a strong selection of presentations. I'll be giving a paper entitled "Equality and Differentiating Totality: Reading Marx after Rancière," in which I argue two things:

1. That Rancière's principle (as he sometimes calls it) of equality must be thought as a contribution to a praxis that seeks to produce forms of social relations that both break the governmentality of elitist expertise and overturn the logic of capital.
2. That his critique of the intersection of state functions of expropriation and the logics of capital under neoliberalism should be complimented by David Harvey's work on the uneven geography of capitalism, including his analyses of capital accumulation and accumulation by dispossession.

Before going, with the news of people fighting the attack against unions in Wisconsin and Indiana (among other states), I would like to mention that my travel is funded by our part-time professors union's (the APTPUO) travel grant fund. Yet another benefit of union membership.

Rancière on Racism

Wrong Arithmetic has posted a rough translation of Jacques Rancière's recent talk "Racisme, une passion d'en haut" (delivered at a forum on the expulsion of the Roma from France. The title translates as "Racism, a passion from above"). Rancière, like Badiou, is a long time critic of both state racism in France and the so-called left wing intellectuals that support it. Rather than view the expulsion of the Roma as a ploy to exploit racist passions for electoral gain, Rancière notes (I'm using Wrong Arithmetic's translation below) that:

The last racist campaign wasn’t at all organised by the so-called ‘populist’ extreme-right. It was directed by an intelligentsia that claims to be a Leftist, republican and secular intelligentsia. Discrimination is no longer based on arguments about superior and inferior races. They argue in the name of the struggle against ‘communitarianism’, universality of the law and the equality of all citizens before the law and the equality of the sexes. There again, they are not embarrassed by so many contradictions; these arguments are made by people who otherwise make very little of equality and Feminism. In fact, the argument mostly creates an essential relation [l’amalgame requis] for identifying the undesirable: thus the relation between migrant, immigrant, backward, Islamist, chauvanist and terrorist. The recourse to universality in fact benefits its contrary: the establishment of a discretionary state power that decides who belongs and who doesn’t belong to the class of those who have the right to be here; the power, in short, to confer and remove identities.

He concludes that:

a lot of energy has been spent against a certain figure of racism—embodied in the Front National—and a certain idea that this racism is the expression of ‘white trash’ (‘petite blancs‘) and represents the backward layers of society. A substantial part of that energy has been recuperated to build the legitimacy a new form of racism: state racism and ‘Leftist’ intellectual racism. It is perhaps time to reorient our thinking and the struggle against a theory and a practice of stigmatisation, precariatisation and exclusion which today constitutes a racism from above: a logic of the state and a passion of the intelligentsia.