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From “The Idea(s) of Politics”, undergraduate thesis by Patrick Harrison, Brown University
CHAPTER 2
UNIVERSALITY: THE POLITICS OF SAMENESS
Totality does not equal universality. If late capitalism has produced a global commonality
of social and power relations, it has produced nothing universal: no equality other than equality
in exploitation; no freedom other than freedom to consume and to be consumed; no truth other
than the empty decree of the end of history. If capital has created a mass situation or community,
then there is no Sameness to this community, no universal belonging, but only the privileged
belonging of the virtuous bourgeoisie, and the non-belonging of the wretched of the earth. We
should carefully distinguish, then, between universality and totality to show that questions of
universality are equally at play in local struggles as in global ones.
Implicit in our preceding discussions of totality were two distinct assumptions about the
relation of politics, universality, and totality. First, in Fredric Jameson’s Marxism, there is the
assumption that radical politics must address itself to some narrative of totality in order to be
truly universal. This attitude is implicit in Jameson’s argument “local struggles and issues are
not merely indispensable, they are unavoidable; but as I have tried to say elsewhere, they are
effective only so long as they also remain figures or allegories for some larger systemic
transformation”.i For Jameson, totality and universality are two sides of the same coin: because
we exist in a socio-economic totality, local political action only has universal import when it is
an allegory of the main narrative of this totality—class struggle. Furthermore, this conceptual
schema implies that local struggles that do not function as allegories for the single narrative of
class struggle are not properly political struggles, but are rather instances of “false” or
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“paranoid” consciousness that must be read as indexing the truth of class struggle precisely in
their failure to properly express it. Ultimately for Jameson, in order for a political struggle to
have universal import, it muse function as an expression of a contradiction in a pre-given totality.
Second, in the later Foucault’s concept of totality as that which is produced by
massifying power relations, such as biopolitical power, that operate by producing humans as
mass species-subjects or “populations” (rather than just as individual subjects), it becomes
possible to think of universality and a universal politics as struggles that divide this artificially
produced (rather than pre-given) totality in half. Foucault calls such a situation “race war”, a
term that has nothing to do with bio-medical and cultural discourses of “race” but applies to any
situation in which a social totality is divided in half against itself: class struggle, colonial
occupation, etc. In race war, “a binary structure runs through society”, splitting society into a
superrace and a subrace, and inaugurating a permanent war of society against itself for racial
purification.ii It is in such a war that, for Foucault, a truly universal truth and right—truth and
right that speak to the whole of the totality—can arise:
The truth is, in other words, a truth that can be deployed only from its combat position, from the
perspective of the sought-for victory and ultimately, so to speak, of the survival of the speaking subject
himself. […] The more I decenter myself, the better I can see the truth” […] Truth is an additional force,
and it can be deployed only on the basis of a relationship of force. The fact that the truth is essentially part
of a relationship of force, of dissymmetry, decentering, combat, and war, is inscribed in this type of
discourse.iii
We should reject the model of the race war as the only possibility for reconceptualizing
universality, truth, and right. Race war does not produce truly universal universals. The right of
the race war is the right of the superrace to dominate or destroy the subrace, and its truths are
statements predicated on the superiority of one race over another. Racial truths are not really
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addressed to the opposite race, but only to one’s own race; they are not truths of equality and
belonging, but of destruction of the racial Other. In short, racial truths are truths that seek to
complete and close off the totality by the genocidal elimination of internal impurity or
foreignness.
What is common to both different conceptual pairings of universality and totality is the
predication of universality on a relation of antagonism: class antagonism in Jameson, and the
antagonism of race war in late Foucault. In all but instances, the universal is a disputed
universal, rather than simply that which is most common; truth is a disputed truth, a weapon in
struggle. In other words, universality is that which is brought forth and embodied by the
antagonism of engaged subjects. Let us recall our assertion in the previous chapter that politics is
the confrontation of engaged subjects, and nothing else; that the space in which political
confrontation takes place is always (pre)constructed for every engaged subject; and that there
exists no non-subjective, non-political position from which one could opt-out of, transcend, or
claim to objectively represent the space in which this confrontation of engaged subjects takes
place. With this definition in mind, then let’s connect the dots and hazard the following
hypothesis: that there is politics only where the stakes are universal, that there is only politics
proper where there is struggle of universal import. The critical question is this: can we think
universality without totality? Or, must the “universal” be defined as that which addresses a
totality?
Certainly for both Jameson and Foucaul, any concept of universality is predicated on a
prior concept of totality. For Jameson, there is universality because there is a pre-given universal.
i Jameson, Fredric “Marxism and Postmodernism”. New Left Review vol. I/176, July-August 1989: p. 33-45. p. 44.ii Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended. trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, and
Francois Ewald. New York: Picador, 2003. p. 51.iii Foucault. Society Must Be Defended. trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, and Francois
Ewald. New York: Picador, 2003, p. 53.
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For the late Foucault, universality is made possible through a produced totality. We should do
them better, then, and begin our discourse on universality the thought of universality to be
independent of and not identical to totality. We need a thought of universality against totality.
Only through such a thought of universality can we think of both singular, local struggles and
struggles against totalizing forms of power—such as global capitalism or State biopolitics— as
equally universal in their import and, thus, as equally political struggles. And we must
furthermore stipulate that, insofar as the universal is brought forth in a produced-totality, the
universal does not close off and complete this totality by purging the Other, but rather adds to the
totality, expands it, and brings forth Sameness from that which was excluded. Only under these
suppositions will we create a thought of the truly universal, of a universality that consists in the
equality of all, or rather, of a non-totalizable non-all in freedom and belonging.
In the preceding chapter, our discourse set the stage of contemporary politics by
investigating whether there existed a political totality. Having cautiously affirmed through an
extensive historico-theoretical discussion that international biopolitical capitalism increasingly
brings about a global social, economic, and biopolitical commons that can be thought of as a
political totality, we must now proceed forward through a more formally philosophical
discussion of principles of politics, universality, equality, and truth. Further analysis of present
history will only lead us to contemplate possibilities for action that remain within the facticity of
what-there-is. In a political moment as urgent as this, after the historical failure of the worlds
most ambitious radical political projects of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism, we must wager
that our current situation requires a rigorous process of thought concerning basic philosophical
and ontological questions—thought about thought—to conceive of the possibility of new
possibilities. That is, by thinking about how we think about politics, universality, truth, etc., we
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can hopefully open up new possibilities for radical forms of political action by understanding
what is meant by these terms in a fundamentally different way. By this I do not at all propose a
return to the notion of the autonomy of thought; thought remains eminently conditioned by
history, and historical practice is constitutive of thought. Rather, what I am proposing is that
through thinking about how we think about politics, we may be able to produce concepts of
equality, truth, and freedom that are fundamentally heterogeneous to those found in hegemonic
capitalist, liberal-democratic ideology, and that are not mere reiterations of the concepts handed
down to us from the orthodox Marxist tradition, either.
We proceed forward, therefore, in two parts. First, in Chapter 2, we will proceed through
a close reading of Jacques Rancière’s theory of politics-as-disagreement and Etienne Balibar’s
concept of equaliberty to articulate new concepts of universality, freedom, and equality and
contrast them with contemporary approaches to politics in the current intellectual Left, especially
those influenced by Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau. We will define the engaged subject of
politics as the part-of-no-part whose appearance inscribes the principle of equaliberty and creates
a community divided in itself. Finally, we will briefly discuss the movement of shackdwellers
called the Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa as an instance of radical, egalitarian
democracy. In Chapter 3, our discussion will proceed to an even more formal exploration of the
ontology of Alain Badiou to rearticulate Rancière’s concept of the appearance of the part-of-no-
part as a meta-ontological Event. Badiou will enable us to clarify the meaning of some of
Rancière’s terms and even improve on Rancière’s theory of politics by allowing us to think of
how to extend the liberatory effects of the Event beyond the moment of initial rupture through
what Badiou calls a truth-procedure. More substantively, however, Badiou will allow us to
conceive of politics as an ontological activity that fundamentally restructures collective being
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and Symbolically mediated reality by “touching” the Real and bringing forth a radical equality-
in-belonging or generic humanity.
RADICAL EQUALITY: RANCIÈRE & BALIBAR
Rancière summarizes his theory of politics in Disagreement thus: “politics exists
wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those
who have no part”.iv To understand what Rancière means by the “part of those who have no
part”, it is worth rehearsing his reading of Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle divides the polis into
three “parts” each with a different entitlement to the “good” of the community—meaning not
only property, but also a “proper” social place in the community as a speaking subject: the oligoi,
whose entitlement to political power and wealth is self-legitimated by their inherited wealth; the
aristoi, whose entitlement to representation and wealth is founded on their virtue or excellence of
character; and the demos or “people”, whose proper lot in the community is only their freedom.
Whereas the oligoi’s wealth is self-legitimating, and the virtue of the aristoi legitimates their
superior share of property and power, the demos has no proper lot of anything but their freedom,
which, Rancière points out, is not even proper to them, but which they rather share with the other
two non-slave parts of society. Whereas the oligoi and aristoi are defined by positive attributes
—wealth and virtue, respectively—the freedom of the demos is a purely empty attribute: it is
nothing but the freedom not to be enslaved thanks to the sheer contingency of their having been
born to “free” citizens in Athens after the abolition of debt slavery. It is in precisely this sense
that the demos constitutes a “part-of-no-part”, a part of society which not only has “no part in
anything”—no guaranteed political role or property—but is also not really a proper part at all,
has no positive identity in the social order. This non-role of the part-of-no-part originated by the
iv Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. p. 123.
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ancient Athenian demos can be remapped throughout history up to the present to include women,
the colonized “the wretched of the earth”, the postcolonial poor of the global South, immigrants
in the contemporary developed world, and, most importantly for Rancière, the proletariat, not in
the sense of the word as the 19th century industrial working class, but as
a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the
dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and
which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in
general.v
Politics proper, from ancient Greece through industrial England to the globalized contemporary,
consists in the tension between the official hierarchy of society and the structural vacuum of the
part-of-no-part whose very existence threatens the naturalness and coherence of the existing
order. At stake in politics proper, as Marx immediately allows us to see, is universality itself.
Rancière argues that the political act proper is the polemical identification of the
particular of the part-of-no-part with the universal of the community on the basis of their equality
in freedom with all other parts of the society. Rancière describes this movement by which the
“nothing” of the part-of-no-part polemically identifies itself with the “everything” of the
community itself:
Not only does freedom as what is “proper” to the demos not allow itself to be determined by any positive
property; it is not proper to the demos at all. The people are nothing more than the undifferentiated mass of
those who have no positive qualification—no wealth, no virtue—but who are nonetheless acknowledged to
enjoy the same freedom as those who do. The people who make up the people are in fact simply free like
the rest. Now it is this simple identity with those who are otherwise superior to them in all things that gives
them a specific qualification. The demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all
citizens. In doing so, this party is not that one identifies its improper property with the exclusive principle
v Marx, Karl. Early Writings. trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. New York: Penguin, 1992. p. 256.
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of community and identifies its name—the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position—with the
name of the community itself.vi
By recognizing that the demos is equal to the oligoi and aristoi in freedom, if only “in principle”,
Aristotle lets the cat out of the bag, allowing the demos to directly identify itself with the
freedom shared by the community as a whole. The part-of-no-part thus constitutes a “singular
universal”: a singular historical entity that embodies a universal principle of equality in freedom
and inscribes this principle into community through the disruption of the existing order.vii This
freedom in equality is nothing less than the radical equality of all in “the sheer contingency of
any social order”,viii and its disruptive inscription reveals that “there is no natural principle of
domination by one person over another”.ix Rancière’s subversive reading of Aristotle recalls
Marx’s own ambivalent appreciation for capitalism: capitalism’s declaration of the equality of
men, women, and children in the freedom to sell their labour (i.e. to be exploited), cruel as it may
be, nonetheless breaks feudal bonds and opens up the space in thought for the development of
much more radical conceptions of equality and freedom to be realized in communism.x But
whereas Marx’s concepts of equality and freedom are arguably bound up in a substantive notion
of human nature that is fettered and alienated by capitalism and could be actualized under
communism, Rancière’s notion of equality in freedom rejects any substantive, positive definition
of the human and is non-founded only on the empty potential for the social order to be different
than it is. Equality in freedom is nothing less than the lack of any natural reason for domination
—that the order of things should not be different than they are.
vi Rancière, Disagreement, p. 8.vii Ibid. p. 23.viii Ibid. p. 15.ix Ibid. p. 79.x Marx. Capital Vol. I. trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1990. About capital’s creation of “free
workers,” see p. 874. About equality, Marx writes “… since capital is by its nature a leveler, since it insists upon equality in the conditions of exploitation of labour in every sphere of production as its own innate right, the limitation by law of children’s labour in one branch of industry results in its limitation in others.” p. 520.
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Etienne Balibar has helpfully theorized this radical equality in freedom as the proposition
of the direct identity of freedom and equality as a “self-evident truth” or, rather, a “truth [that]
cannot be put in doubt”.xi Balibar calls this equality-in-freedom “equaliberty.” At stake in
Balibar’s discourse is the creation of a principle with all the prescriptive force for political action
of a universal truth without any of the mystificatory, Enlightenment baggage usually associated
with the term “truth”. Thus, it is important for Balibar not simply to posit that equaliberty is
universally true, but to articulate how it is universally true—that is, to ask in what precise sense
is it a “true” proposition, and what is the form of the universality of this truth. Balibar insists
that freedom and equality are not ideal essences, but consist in material historical practices and
discourses: not “Freedom” and “Equality” in themselves, but the practical, historical “freedom
to” and “equality in”. Therefore, the proposition of equaliberty must be proved through the
rigorous historical demonstration that “the (de facto) historical conditions of freedom are exactly
the same as the (de facto) historical conditions of equality”.xii Such a demonstration can only be
the negative demonstration that there is no historical evidence to contradict the identity of
freedom in equality, since where and whenever freedom has been impinged so also has been
equality, and vice versa. In this sense, equaliberty is a properly “experimental” proposition, the
“truth” of which is thinkable only retroactively as the historical “truth-effects” of concrete,
historical events that enunciate it. Furthermore, Balibar argues, if the proposition of equaliberty
can only be negatively proven, then the substantive “content” of the proposition of equaliberty is
fundamentally indeterminate. That is to say, the proposition of equaliberty contains no
substantive prescription for the realization of maximal equality-in-freedom in practice, but is
supplied with substance only by concrete historical enunciations with finite demands, the
xi Etienne Balibar. Masses, Classes, Ideas. trans. James Swenson. New York: Routledge, 1994. p.47.xii Ibid. p. 48.
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performative effectivity of which is derived precisely from the indeterminacy of the “content” of
equaliberty:
All the force of the statement [of equaliberty] comes form its indeterminacy, but this is also the source of
the practical weakness of the act of enunciation, or rather, of the fact that the consequences of the statement
are themselves indeterminate: they are entirely dependent on ‘power relations’ and the evolution of a
conjuncture in which it will always be necessary in practice to construct individual and collective referents
for equaliberty.”xiii
The indeterminacy of equaliberty—the “emptiness” of freedom in Rancière—should be
distinguished from pure negativity. Historical inscriptions of equaliberty do not function only to
disrupt the social order, but also to create a new order. The historical enunciations that inscribe
equaliberty into the community may be either negative—“Why should women not vote? Why
should conditions at the workplace not be of public political concern?”xiv—or positive—“All
men are created equal”. Strictly speaking, nothing either negative or positive is prescribed by
the proposition of equaliberty. The indeterminacy of equaliberty means that it is a purely formal
principle, empty in itself of any concrete prescriptions for political action, but one that is
nonetheless indispensable for political action to refer.
We can illustrate the consequences of this highly philosophical “formal turn” for political
thought with the example of rights. The proposition of equaliberty sweeps aside traditional
distinctions between “real” rights—defined as the “rights of man”, “universal, inalienable,
subsisting independently of any social institution”,—and “(merely) formal” rights—defined as
the “rights of citizen”, positive and effective legal institutions that are ultimately restrictive and
inadequate to the former.xv The discourses of both the political Right and the vulgar Left adopt
xiii Ibid. p. 49.xiv Žižek, Slavoj. The Universal Exception. ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. New York: Continuum, 2007. p.
190.xv Balibar, Masses, p. 44.
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this model: the vulgar Left will say that real rights can only be adequately expressed through the
revolutionary transformation of society; the Right insists that any social orders is adequate to
defend our real rights, and then defends any oppression in the existing as a kind of necessary
evil, or as an inevitable “reality” that cannot be eliminated but only reduced to acceptable levels.
The weakness of both positions is that they rely on a substantive conception of “human nature”
which “real” rights express and “formal” rights defend.xvi
Against this, Balibar argues that there is no human nature prior to any (contingent,
constructed) social order, displacing the binaries of “real” and “(merely) formal” rights, and
“man” and “citizen”, entirely.xvii In the place of this discourse, he posits the principle of
equaliberty, which we might think of as a double-edged blade: one edge is the purely formal
proposition of the identity of freedom and equality, empty of any substantive program for its
historical realization; the other edge is enunciation of this principle in practical, historical
political struggles that performatively gives this empty principle substantive content through
demands for institutional political rights; and the two edges meeting at the point of the singular
universal that subjectively embodies this demand for equaliberty. This martial metaphor is quite
appropriate, for equaliberty is above all a polemical principle, a weapon of struggle, the “sword
of justice”. Equaliberty “is not so much the definition of a political right”, nor even so much a
“right to have rights”,xviii “as it is the affirmation of a universal right to politics”.xix That is, the
principle of equaliberty is a “right” to identify one’s particularity with the universal of the
community and polemically demand institutional protection of one’s principled equality-in-
freedom, a “right” that has no substantive guarantee, but is non-founded only on the contingency
xvi Ibid. p. 40.xvii Ibid. p. 44.xviii Balibar. “Universalism”, lecture at University of California Irvine, 2 Februay 2007. Text online at
http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=171, 9 April 2008.xix Balibar, Masses, p. 49.
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of any social order.
In contrast to the traditional discourses on rights, we should assert that we have not “real”
rights first and “formal” rights second, but the formal “right” of equaliberty and real-life rights
which inscribe this empty principle with positive historical content simultaneously. Or, better
yet, we should say that equaliberty is not so much a “real” right as it is a “Real right” or a “right
of the Real” to shatter any given social-Symbolic order by re-inscribing the “sheer contingency”
on which the given order is non-founded. To be sure, this hypothesis is tricky, since neither
Rancière nor Balibar uses the term “Real” in the texts we are discussing. And yet, is not the
indeterminate and purely formal relationship of equaliberty to its historical, polemical
enunciations precisely the same as that of the Real to language? And, when Rancière posits that
the “equality of anyone with anyone” is founded on the “sheer contingency of the social order”,
what can be the absent-cause of this “sheer contingency” but the Real itself? It is in precisely this
sense that, as Badiou puts it, “equality is not at all realized, but real”: equality is not the goal of a
political struggle, but a condition that is axiomatically affirmed as the inaugural gesture of
struggle.xx Equaliberty can be thought of as the right of the Real to rupture the existing Symbolic
order. Or, more exactly, equaliberty is the right of the part-of-no-part to embody the minimal gap
between the Real and the Symbolic, and thus inscribe its name as a “torsion” or “warp” in the
existing order.xxi
We will elaborate on this thesis much more fully in Chapter 3. For now, though, we should
conclude this preliminary transcoding of Balibar and Rancière into Lacanian terms by observing
that, just as the Real is never adequately “captured” by the Symbolic, so institutional rights can
never exhaust the principle of equaliberty: “there will be a permanent tension between the
xx Badiou, Alain. Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker. New York: Verso, 2006. p. 112.xxi Rancière, Disagreement, p. R14.
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conditions that historically determine the construction of institutions that are in conformity with
the proposition of equaliberty, and the hyperbolic universality of the statement”.xxii Furthermore,
there is no reason that only institutional/State “rights” should be the only concrete forms of
equaliberty. Equaliberty cannot be exhausted by any one institutional form, but can inscribed
into any kind of political, social, and economic practice, whether as the creation new rights in
existing institutions, or the revolutionary formation of new institutions and new methods of
political self-organization. The work of politics is never done, even as it strives towards the
unchanging horizon of the maximal equaliberty. While Rancière’s theory of politics essentially
defines politics as a rupture of the existing order, Balibar’s principle of equaliberty enables us to
think a thread of temporal continuity running through the histories of these ruptures. If politics
proceeds in fits and starts, then these concrete historical ruptures are also so many performative
inscriptions of a single universal truth—the identity of equality and freedom—that is at least as
old as the Greeks and the durability of which has no end in sight.
***
Now that we have glossed Rancière’s general theory of politics proper as the rupture of
the existing order through the polemical identification of the part-of-no-part with the whole of
the community, we should take a step back and determine how the social order is structured in
the first place, and from there proceed to discuss in detail the precise form of universality
operating in the notion of this “singular universal”. The naturalness and security of the existing
order is maintained by what Rancière calls the police: “the procedures whereby the aggregation
and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of power and the distribution of places
and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution”.xxiii In more concrete, practical
terms, the police is
xxii Balibar, Masses, p. 50.
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an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees
that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the
sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as
discourse and another as noise.xxiv
Rancière’s concept of policing is essentially the same as Foucault’s concept of the governmental
management of power relations; Foucault himself used the term “police” to describe the
instruments of governmentality.xxv
We might think of policing as having two semi-distinct moments: counting—the
procedure that determines that each “part” of society exists and has positive, singular attributes—
and assigning—the procedure by which each part is assigned that which is “proper” to it.
Doubtless, the two moments of policing are only partially distinct and are very often practically
exercised simultaneously in what we might call general ac/counting; counting subjects is always
instrumentalized towards a process of assigning them a proper place, and the assigning of bodies
to social places retroactively effects the counting of the subjects. Nonetheless, it is worth
provisionally separating the two moments, first, to give more precise, historical specificity to the
meaning of each moment and to track the difference between Rancière and Foucault’s approach
to politics. The first half of the cited sentence describes the function of the police in actively
creating for each party in society a “proper” role and place and assigning them to it. Especially
important to assigning are power relations of domination and exploitation, as well as forms of
subjection that produce subjects in ordered physical and conceptual spaces, such as the
disciplining of the body in medicine, social behavior, sexuality, and architectural/urban space;
and discourses of identity; etc. The second half of the cited sentence describes the function of
xxiii Rancière, Disagreement, p. 28.xxiv Ibid. p. 29.xxv Foucault. “Governmentality” in The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil
Gupta. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. p.131-143. cit. p. 143.
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the count of parts. Rancière’s use of the word “count” plays on the two meanings of the term,
signifying both the arithmetic counting of elements in society as so many parts of a harmonious
geometric whole, and the deciding of “who counts” in society. In more Foucaultian terms,
counting consists in the production and circulation of knowledge about humans that produces
them as subjects and inserts them into matrices of normalcy that determine what account is made
of their speech: whether they are experts or laymen, sane or mad, etc. The police is the very
fabric of social existence, the structures of knowledge/power that order social being-together.
The moment of departure between Ranciere and Foucault lies in Ranciere’s insistence the
maneuverings of power relations should be thought of as politics.xxvi While Rancière does not
assign any pejorative connotation to the term “police” and concedes that “one kind of police may
be infinitely preferable to another”, he insists that Foucaultian counter-power represents only
counter-policing, a re-inscription of the police logic of accounting, rather than a break from it.xxvii
For Rancière, the thesis that “everything is political” must be rejected, for “if everything is
political, then nothing is”. xxviii Rather, we should assert that anything can become political if it
gives rise to a radically egalitarian logic of being-together heterogeneous to the managerial logic
of the police. The logic of politics proper must be defined not by the continuous struggle of
management and micro-resistance, but by definite rupture; not by the macroscopic agonism of
intersecting power relations, but by a binary antagonism that divides a single community into
two through the polemical appearance of the part-of-no-part.
The police opens up a space for politics to emerge through the “wrong” count of the parts
of society: “there is politics—and not just domination [that is, policing]—because there is a
wrong count of the parts of the whole”.xxix Clearly inherited from Marx’s “general wrong”,
xxvi Rancière, Disagreement, p. 27.xxvii Ibid. p. 31.xxviii Ibid. p. 32.
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Rancière’s concept of the wrong designates the fundamental injustice by which the police
miscounts the elements of society and denies the existence of the part-of-no-part. Rancière uses
three highly formal tropes to develop his concept of the wrong: one linguistic, one optical, one
topological. The task of politics is to “process” the wrong by contesting the existence of the
wrong against those who deny its existence, by making the wrong visible, and by inscribing the
wrong in the community as its difference from itself.
The primary trope Rancière uses to elaborate his theory of politics is the linguistic trope
of disagreement. According to Rancière, “Disagreement occurs wherever contention over what
speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation”.xxx Disagreement is
disagreement, and not just miscommunication, because each party both understands and does not
understand what the other party means by the same signifiers because of their homonymic
ambiguity. Disagreement is always a meta-disagreement, a dispute about whether there is or is
not a disagreement taking place at all by disputing three conditions of its own speech situation:
The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution “are” or “are not”, whether
they are speaking or just making a noise. It is knowing whether there is a case for seeing the object they
designate as the visible object of the conflict. It is knowing whether the common language in which they
are exposing a wrong is indeed a common language.xxxi
In a political disagreement, the part-of-no-part testifies to their existence, in spite of the wrong of
their not being counted, in a language common to all. Against this, the police declares that the
part-of-no-part is not a real party; that there is no wrong; and that there is no common stage of
disagreement, even going so far as to claim that there cannot be any communication because the
language of command can be understood by the dominated, but not spoken by them.
xxix Ibid. p. 10.xxx Ibid. p. xi.xxxi Ibid. p. 50.
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Disagreement presumes the fundamental performativity of speech: “parties do not exist prior to
the declaration of wrong… [b]efore the wrong that its name exposes, the proletariat has no
existence as a real part of society”.xxxii The speaking subjects, the object of disagreement, and the
communal speech situation are all constituted all at once in the moment of the enunciation of a
disagreement. Utterances in situations of disagreement therefore have no objective referents
“out there,” but directly concern the intersubjective constitution of each speaking party and the
possibility of mutual recognition. Now we understand that when we have said that politics
begins with a miscount of a part-of-no-part. This miscount is not a mere “error”, an accounting
mistake which simply “overlooked” some part (of no part) that was always “out there”, and
which can be settled in an amicable fashion by developing a better system of accounting. The
wrong is in no way objective; its existence cannot be neutrally verified within a framework of
transparent communicative rationality. Rather, it must be perceived/ performatively articulated
(it is the same thing) only from the engaged subject position of the part-of-no-part that affirms
and embodies the existence of the wrong. Disagreement thus performatively constitutes as a
community divided in itself, what Rancière calls “dissensus”: “the presence of two worlds in a
single one”.xxxiii
Rancière’s linguistic model of politics as disagreement should be contrasted the with the
model of politics drawn from deconstruction(ism) as the recognition of others qua absolute
Other. From this latter point of view, politics is about the struggle between two relations to
Otherness: one a murderous, totalitarian relation which seeks to destroy the absolutely Other; and
one, a relation of hospitality and openness to the Other. Laclau is right to point out that it is the
vulgar disciples of Derrida who derive from deconstruction a completely unconditional ethical
xxxii Ibid. p. 39.xxxiii Rancière. “Ten Theses on Politics”. Theory and Event vol. 5:3, 2001.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html, 9 April 2008.
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injunction of openness to the Other, and that Derrida himself knows that things are more
complicated—that even as one desires an encounter with the Other, such an encounter is
impossible because one’s relation to the absolutely Other can only be a radical non-relation. xxxiv
This leads Derrida to formulate a politics of fidelity to the unfulfillable “emancipatory promise”
of the arrival of the absolutely Other in what Derrida terms a “messianism without a messiah”.xxxv
If this messianic promise is impossible to fulfill, it must nonetheless be experienced as a
“promise to be kept, that is, not to remain ‘spiritual’ or abstract,’ but to produce events, new
effective forms of action, practice, organization, and so forth” through lived “fidelity” to this
promise.xxxvi For Derrida, the condition of possibility of politics—of negotiating relations with
finite others—is also the condition of its impossibility—of encountering, in the otherness of
others, a glimmer of the infinite Other to which we can never relate as such. Derrida calls the
temporality of such a politics a “future present,” that is, a present that is always opened up to a
“future to come”, awaiting the arrival of an impossible Event that cannot be awaited as such.xxxvii
In contrast, for Rancière, politics is about the performative retroactive declaration of Sameness:
“We are Same in equaliberty, and we always have been!”. For Rancière, politics consists of two
competing concepts of the Same: the oppressive, hierarchical Sameness of the police order, on
the one hand, and the egalitarian Sameness of equality in freedom, on the other. Indeed, the
labeling of others as Other, as Foreign and not-Same, is a protocol of the police, against which
the part-of-no-part demands the reciprocal recognition of Sameness between all and all.
Rancière should be further contrasted with the still-more vulgar politics of multicultural
pluralism so popular among the American liberal-left. The truly progressive position is not the
xxxiv Laclau, Ernesto. Emancipation(s). New York: Verso, 2007. p. 77. xxxv Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 2006. p. 82.xxxvi Ibid. p. 112-3.xxxvii Ibid. p. 81
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multiculturalist respect for differences, but the universalist argument that those who are wronged
on the basis of difference are in fact fundamentally the Same, that they are equal-in-liberty.
Which is not to say that there is no place for the respect for differences, but, rather, that
respecting differences is a task for the police rather than politics. The linguistic tropes often
associated with the left-liberal politics of recognition are that of the “right to narrate” one’s own
history of oppression, or the competition of heterogeneous language games (feminine non-
metaphysics versus phallogocentrism, etc.). The latter account of speech, however, is only a
softer form of the police mis-accounting of the speech of the oppressed as unintelligible noise.
As for the former, Rancière insists that politics exists only where there is a universal address: the
“right to narrate” is only political when it is the right to narrate in a common language, heard and
understood by all. For Rancière, politics does not consist in counter-narratives “gnaw[ing] away
the great institutionalized narrative apparatuses” through “skirmishes that take place on the
sidelines”, but in peripheral narratives claiming center stage and universal import.xxxviii Against
the pluralistic agonism of the politics of recognition, Rancière posits the internal antagonism of
the One divided in itself. Against the competition multiplicity of sub-narratives in fragmented
space, Ranciere posits a community marked by a binary division between those who see no
division and those who do, and this internal division is the very condition that makes possible the
inscription of equaliberty.
The critical point to be derived from this for radical political practice (at least in the
American academy) is not to shy away from antagonism in the name of co-existence, but
precisely to embrace it in the name of the universal. The Left must accept that the universal is
always divided in itself, existing only where it is in dispute, that antagonism is the condition of
xxxviii Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Lyotard Reader. ed. Andre Benjamin. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1989. p.132
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universality, and not an obstacle to it. As the later Foucault said, “we have to rediscover war”
and to “reactivate it”, to accept a genuine binary antagonism as the possibility of true
universality.xxxix Instead of thinking politics as the essentially liberal process of recognition and
created spaces of agonistic coexistence within a framework of consensus, we must embrace the
fact that one can only make universal claims from an engaged, partisan subject position in an
antagonistic situation of disagreement.xl Instead of the endless task of deconstructing binaries,
we must think the possibility if a genuine antagonism, and have the courage to take sides.
The second trope or figure that Ranciere uses to discuss politics is the optical figure by
which the pure appearance of the part-of-no-part retroactively makes visible the wrong count of
society’s parts. Policing requires every part of society to be visible, knowable, and accounted for
within a hierarchical regime of propriety. The “wrong” by which this governance of appearance
disguises the part-of-no-part is necessarily invisible from the point of view of the existing order,
or rather, is the very invisibility of power itself. Thus, the appearance of the part-of-no-part
makes visible the invisible wrong, “revealing a mode of existence of sense experience that has
eluded the allocation of parties and lots”.xli We can think of the appearance of the part-of-no-part
as a pure appearance because it is an appearance that has no referent from the point of view of
the existing order, but which nonetheless possesses an effectivity of its own. That is to say, a
pure appearance is simultaneously the materialization of that which it is “only an appearance”. It xxxix Foucault, Society, p. 268.xl Žižek writes about this point in Rancière, reading him through Badiou:
To be proletarian involves assuming a certain subjective stance (of class struggle destined to achieve redemption through revolution) that, in principle, can occur to any individual; to put it in religious terms, irrespective of his (good) works, any individual can be touched by grace and interpellated as a proletarian subject. The limit that separates the two opposed sides is the class struggle is thus not objective, not the limit separating two positive social groups, but ultimately radically subjective; it involves the position individuals assume towards the Event of universal Truth. Again, the crucial point here is that subjectivity and universalism are not only not exclusive but are, rather, two sides of the same coin. It is precisely because class struggle interpellates individuals to adopt the subjective stance of a proletarian that its appeal is universal, aiming at everyone with no exceptions”. (Žižek, Universal p.199.)
In Chapter 3 we will discuss precisely what Žižek means by “Event”.xli Rancière, Disagreement, p. 58.
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“does not conceal reality but in fact splinters it, introduces contentious objects into it, objects
whose mode of presentation is not homogeneous with the ordinary mode of existence of the
objects thereby identified.”xlii Hence, pure appearance creates a disagreement over the existence
of a “surplus subject” which cannot be ac/counted for by the police.xliii
The pure appearance of the part-of-no-part can thus be recoded as the performative self-
(re)presentation of a new speaking subject through what Rancière calls subjectification: “the
production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously
identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the
reconfiguration of the field of experience”.xliv Subjectification is neither the process of a pre-
existing subject “‘becoming aware’ of itself or finding its voice”,xlv nor is it the emergence of a
new subject “ex nihilo”—to be sure, the bodies that make up the part-of-no-part do exist.xlvi
Subjectification is rather a matter of the pure appearance of a new speaking subject at the
discursive level through the “transforming [of] identities defined in the natural order of the
allocation of functions and places into instances of experience of a dispute”.xlvii
Rancière calls this process of transformation the “disidentification” of subjects with the
subject position created for people by the police. Disidentification is the inaugural moment of
politics: as Badiou elegantly put it, if “all resistance is a rupture with what is, [then] every
rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself”.xlviii The critical
significance of the concept of politics as disidentification is that anyone and everyone can
disidentify themselves with their place in the police order and inscribe themselves under the
xlii Ibid.104xliii Ibid. p. 87.xliv Rancière, Disagreement, p. 35.xlv Ibid. p. 40.xlvi Ibid. p. 36.xlvii Ibid. p. 36.xlviii Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 7.
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subject name of the part-of-no-part, be it “people”, “proletariat”, or “woman”, as the case may
be. Subjectification-through-disidentification is “the opening up of a subject space where
anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted, where a
connection is made between having a part and having no part”.xlix This means that neither can
any one objective social group monopolize the (non)place of the part-of-no-part, nor can any one
group become a “final” part-of-no-part that would exhaust the infinite demand of equaliberty for
all time; anyone can speak in solidarity with “women” when that is the name of the part-of-no-
part in a particular political sequence, and the subject name “women” never exhausts the strictly
relational (non)space of the part-of-no-part.l The appearance of the part-of-no-part is ultimately
a formal matter: the term designates the formal enunciator of the principle of equaliberty, whose
particular subject name will be decided by the contingencies of history.
The third and final trope of the wrong is its topological figuration as the difference of the
community with itself. We have already discussed that the political community is one defined
by disagreement, and therefore divided in itself. We have also seen that the appearance of the
part-of-no-part is also a pure appearance that embodies this wrong: the part-of-no-part is the
subject “whose very existence is the mode of manifestation of the wrong”.li The topology of the
wrong, involves a dialectic between the void in knowledge that the wrong is, and the supplement
of the part-of-no-part that embodies this void.lii It is worth very briefly summarizing Rancière’s
description of the four, historical simulacrums of politics in order to better understand the exact
way in which this dialectical tension between void and supplement plays out in politics proper,
and further clarify how the universal can be divided in itself. The first simulacrum is
xlix Rancière, Disagreement, p. 36.l Ibid., p. 50.li Ibid., p. 39.lii Rancière. “Ten Theses on Politics”. Theory and Event Issue 5.3. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3Rancière.html, 9 April 2008.
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archipolitics, associated with Plato, which claims that the community is a closed unified whole in
which everything is accounted for. Archipolitics is the model of the perfect police state, where
wrong does not exist and the community is fully identical to itself.liii Symmetrical to archipolitics
is metapolitics, which declares that political conflict is always false, and that the truth of politics
“is located beneath or behind [politics proper], in what it conceals and exists only to conceal”,
namely, objective socio-economic conflict.liv For metapolitics, the wrong is the gap between the
illusory sphere of political conflict and the objective conflicts of socio-economic groups;
disagreement is reduced to tension between “false consciousness” and science. This theory,
however, cancels out politics itself, since what it declares to be “real” politics—the conflict of
objectively knowable socio-economic groups and forces—involves only the policing of the
distribution of goods and things, and not real political contestation. Metapolitics’ two
incarnations, according to Rancière, are capitalist democracy, which reduces politics to
managing the economy and ameliorating of social conflicts, and Marxism, which reduces politics
to the objective contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production.
In short, metapolitics depoliticizes politics, reducing the irreducibly subjective antagonism of
politics proper to a matter of objective knowledge in which, as in archipolitics, every party is
accounted for.
The objectifying of social conflict in metapolitics leads to ultrapolitics, which declares
that there is no common ground whatsoever between two opposed subject positions in an
objective socio-economic conflict, and that one party must destroy the other.lv Michel Foucault’s
theory of race war belongs properly to this model of false-politics, as does the Manicheanism of
liii Rancière, Disagreement, p. 65-70.liv Ibid. p. 82.lv Rancière, Disagreement, p. 85. Though Rancière only mentions ultrapolitics in passing, Žižek is quite correct to
point out that ultrapolitics can be considered a fourth archetype of false-politics, filling a structural relation with the other three archetypes in a classical Greimasian: Žižek, Universal, p. 187.
74
many anti-colonial struggles, described by Fanon, that precedes a second, more humanist,
universal, and Rancierian moment in which all who struggle for liberation are considered part of
the nation. For ultrapolitics, the wrong designates an absolute, objective, Manichean division of
the community, and each party confronts one another as an absolute Other that must be
annihilated. For politics proper, however, the wrong is an internal division of the community,
and each party confronts the other in an argument about whether or not they are the Same in
equaliberty. We could distinguish the dualism of ultrapolitics from politics proper numerically
by saying that ultrapolitics consists in the antagonism of the absolute Two, but politics proper in
the antagonism within a One that is always in itself Two. Whereas ultrapolitics speaks of the
enemy, of “us and them,” politics speaks of a single “sphere of appearance of a subject, the
people, whose particular attribute is to be different from itself, internally divided”.lvi
Fourth, and finally, there is parapolitics—associated with Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau,
and Habermas—which presents the self-difference of the community as a pluralistic agonism of
individual persons or social groups in a “war of all against all”. lvii Parapolitics proposes to create
order through establishment of clear procedures of legitimating rule through processes of
representation, such as the delegation of authority to the Leviathan or through contract-based
parliamentary democracy. The essential move of parapolitics is to suture shut the open wound of
the wrong through the constant interchange of power between representatives of the people in a
process legitimated democratic consensus. The most sophisticated Leftist version of parapolitics
today is Laclau’s theory of hegemony. It will be useful to contrast at length Rancière’s theory of
politics to Laclau’s, not only to further clarify Rancière’s concept of universality, but also to
develop a new idea of democracy as radical egalitarian rupture in contrast to the democratic
lvi Rancière, p. 87.lvii Rancière, p. 70-81.
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socialism promoted by Laclau and which dominates left-liberal political movements today.
Finally, we will look briefly at the political self-organization of shackdwellers in Durban as a
possible example of such radical democracy.
***
Both Rancière’s theory of politics and Laclau’s theory of hegemony can be read as
rethinkings of class struggle as developed in Marx’s Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, but the two reinterpretations of Marx are essentially different on two points:
the form of the “general wrong”, and the form of universality embodied by the proletariat.
Universality
Laclau models society in duly post-structuralist fashion as a system of differentially
defined elements. Laclau, like Jameson, assumes that universality is predicated on the existence
of a totality. In properly deconstructive fashion, however, Laclau assumes that society is not a
pre-given totality, but an infinite expanse of differences. A totality can only be formed out of
this expanse of difference if all elements can be equivalently differentiated from some absolute,
antagonistic Other. Laclau’s absolute Other is not the ontological limit-exteriority or infinite
alterity of Derrida, but an other “inside” the field of differences that is produced as absolutely
outside through ideological and political processes of exclusion. This absolute other may be
ideologically figured as an absolute outside (Nature or the Foreigner), or it may be an element
within society that is depicted as the tyrannical, common enemy of all other parts of society (e.g.
the bourgeoisie as the “notorious crime of the whole of society”).lviii Politics would then consists
in the agonistic struggle of elements “within” society to represent, with their own signifiers, this
shared difference between all the elements of society and society’s other. In this way, a
particular part of society can occupy the position of the singular universal. This is, however, an
lviii Marx, Early Writings, p. 254
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impossible task, since this shared difference, qua difference, is nothing but a pure negativity.
The position of the universal is necessarily an empty one, then, the particular content of which is
determined through the struggle between the various elements in society to hegemonize the role
of representing “the impossible fullness of society”.lix
We can make three essential distinctions between how Laclau’s and Rancière’s
conceptions of universality. First, as we said, Laclau predicates universality on the existence of
an ontologically prior totality. The fact that both universality and totality are both (im)possible
for Laclau does not change the basic onto-temporal relation between the two concepts. For
Rancière, however, the universal only comes into play in the resistance of totalization: only
when the part-of-no-part rises up and refuses its place in the totalizing system of police
knowledge does it become a singular universal. The universal, for Rancière, is precisely what
creates a fracture in any police totality, and divides totality into twain between those who see
only the totality of objective knowledge with nothing unaccounted for, and those who see a void
that must be made Same in equaliberty with all. The “one world divided into two” that politics
creates is not so much a “renewed” totality, as it is a totality that is always incomplete, a non-all,
always marked by an internal void, or supplemented with an illegal, internal surplus subject.
Second, Lalcau and Ranciere have slightly different conceptions of the form of political
antagonism. Laclau is very insightful to argue, against the left-liberal politics of recognition, that
universality comes into play only when the banal difference of everything with everything is
turned into a binary antagonism. However, for Laclau, the struggle to embody this universality
is characterized by pluralistic, agonism. For Rancière, however, the embodiment of the universal
by the part-of-no-part is immediately antagonistic. Against the universality of compromise—
each element finds its interests more or less represented in those of the hegemon—Rancière
lix Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 55.
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posits a universality that is always a disputed universality, one that cannot be compromised but
must be wholly either affirmed or denied. Either the part-of-no-part belongs to the community or
it does not; either there is a community of equals, “a world of reciprocal recognitions” of mutual
Sameness in equaliberty, or there is not.lx
This leads directly to a third, crucial difference between Laclau and Rancière: whereas
Laclau’s universality is not truly universal—it always excludes a manufactured Other, the
“notorious crime of socity”—Rancière’s is a truly universal universality precisely because it is
predicted on internal difference rather than exclusion. Precisely because the part-of-no-part is an
internal void, its declaration of belonging, of equality in freedom, is addressed to every one. The
part-of-no-part represents the whole of the community because it embodies the zero-degree of
membership in the community. It expresses the one attribute that is universal in the community
—pure belonging, shorn of any other positive feature or qualification. Rancière’s model of
universality is the inverse of Laclau’s: it is the universality initiated when the internal void or
Other declares itself to be Same, that there is no outside-the-community. Therefore, as Rancière
says, “The ‘world’ can get bigger”—we can include ever more people into the fold of the
community—but “the universal of politics does not get any bigger”. lxi
The Wrong
On the question of the form of the “general wrong,” the key difference between Laclau
and Rancière is that whereas according to Laclau posits the “general wrong” as an injustice
(imaginary or real) committed symmetrically against all parts of society by their common enemy,
Rancière posits that the wrong is committed asymmetrically against the part-of-no-part. For
Laclau, the general wrong cuts across all parts of society. For Rancière, the part-of-no-part is the
lx Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. p. 218.lxi Rancière, Disagreement, p.139.
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locus of the wrong. This difference has to do with the question of counting. Earlier we said that
Rancière’s theory of politics was the inverse of Laclau’s, but this is not exactly precise. The
part-of-no-part is not really an Other because in order to be an Other, one must be counted as
excluded, but the part-of-no-part is precisely not counted at all. The part-of-no-part is more
properly a void in the count, and the thought of such a void is precisely what escapes Laclau’s
model of society. Thus, Laclau’s model of society is really only a police model, in which all the
elements of society are always-already present and accounted for. Rancière shows that what is at
stake in politics is the presentation of a void in the model of society as a differential system, and
of making this void belong to society as an internal supplement. What else is this void that the
order of signifiers misses but the Real itself? In the following chapter, we will devote extended
discussion to the idea that the part-of-no-part inscribes the Real into the social-Symbolic order of
a political community.
For now, however, it is pressing that we conclude with some observations on how
Rancière’s theory of politics should make us re-conceptualize democracy and political practice.
Laclau’s theory of hegemony leads him to define democratic politics as the agonistic
succession of finite and particular identities which attempt to assume universal tasks surpassing them; but
that, as a result [of this impossibility of fully representing the universal] are never able to entirely conceal
the distance between task and identity, and can always be substituted by alternative groups”.lxii
For Laclau,
a radically democratic society is one in which a plurality of public spaces, constituted around specific
issues and demands, and strictly autonomous of each other, instills in its members a civic sense which is a
central ingredient of their identity as individuals. Despite the plurality of these spaces, or rather, as a
consequence of it, a diffuse democratic culture is created, which gives the community its specific
identity.lxiii
lxii Laclau, p. 15-16.
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It is quite clear that this model of society as an order of spaces is not a model of politics but of
police, and that Laclau’s concept of democracy is not one of democratic politics but of
parapolitical policing. The “democratic culture” or “civic sense” ostensibly created in this space
is nothing more than the deconstructist’s utopia, in which “all sides fully accept the radically
contingent character of their endeavors.” lxiv Such an order may indeed be an acceptable police
order, but it is not democratic politics proper.
Against this, Rancière argues that there can be no “democratic society” as such, but rather
that democracy is what upends the order of every society:
Democracy is not a regime or a social way of life. It is the institution of politics itself, the system of forms
of subjectification through which any order of distribution of bodies into functions corresponding to their
‘nature’ and places corresponding to their functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency.lxv
Democracy, for Rancière, is not a term for any order of society, but the very name of the
procedure by which the part-of-no-part declares its equality in freedom with all. A properly
political, democratic struggle consists not in the agonistic competition of pre-deconstructed
groups within a multi-institutional framework, but in a binary, antagonistic struggle of the One
against itself that explodes all frameworks. The binary inscribed by politics cannot be
deconstructed, but only “eclipsed”, through the victory of one side or another.lxvi So called
“liberal democracy” has no intrinsic relation to democracy at all, but constitutes a form of
policing Rancicere calls “postdemocracy”:
… a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby
reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests.
Postdemocracy is not a democracy that has found the truth of institutional forms in the interplay of social
lxiii Ibid., 121.lxiv Žižek “Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri”,
http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm, 9 April 2008.lxv Rancière, Disagreement, p.101.lxvi Rancière, Disagreement, p. 139.
80
energies. It is an identifying mode, among institutional mechanisms and the allocation of the society’s
appropriate parts and shares, for making the subject and democracy’s own specific action disappear. It is
the practice and theory of what is appropriate with nothing left over for forms of the state and the state of
social relations.lxvii
In a word, postdemocracy is not politics at all, but metapolitical policing; it is not the
preservation of politics, but its ossification. We should maintain, however, that State institutions
are always anti-political. It has sometimes been the case that States have been a central
battleground of political struggles. Throughout the 20th century, voting rights were critical points
of contention for genuine political struggles, most dramatically in the struggle against apartheid
in South Africa. However, the infinite demands of equaliberty cannot be satisfied by any single
right, and politics can never become frozen in any form of State. Furthermore, if democratic
State institutions once proved key for political struggle, they cannot be confused with politics
itself, and today they very often prove to be the enemy of genuine politics, as liberal
postdemocracy establishes an ideological monopoly on the signifiers “democracy” and
“politics”, turning every discussion of democracy into a banal question of elections, of State
affairs, and of the governmental management of power relations.
The continuation of genuine politics in South Africa since the end of apartheid in the
movements of shackdwellers offers a possible example of what radical, egalitarian democracy
might look like. Michael Neocosmos has diagnosed the failure of the anti-apartheid struggle to
bring about a substantive economic and political change for the most excluded and impoverished
in South African as a consequence of a confusion between democracy as “people’s power” and
democracy as State:
The binding of the mass movement around the idea of the coming to power of the exiled leaders of the
lxvii Ibid. 102
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ANC was its undoing. The sites of embryonic people’s power never fully matured and were rather still
born, as the democratic politics of the mass movement more or less rapidly collapsed into authoritarianism
as a result of internal contradictions and external pressures.lxviii
The “people’s power” to which Neocosmos refers is the autonomous, self-organization of
people’s courts, schools, and “street committees” during the period of 1984-86 when the ANC
famously called upon South Africans to make the country ungovernable. Neocosmos sees to the
ongoing self-organization of residents of shantytown—particularly, to the alliance of settlements
near Durban called the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM)—as the continuation of people’s power
today. Those still excluded from economic security and legal rights even after the end of
apartheid surely constitutes, for South Africa, its part-of-no-part. Since 2001, the municipal
government of Durban has pursued a program of slum clearance by withdrawing basic services
and utilities such as electricity and toilets in settlement areas, and evicting shackdwellers to sell
land to private development projects.lxix In 2005, the AbM coalesced around a 750 person
demonstration that barricaded Kennedy Road, a major highway near a large shack settlement of
the same name, to protest efforts at their eviction. Since this originary event, the movement has
expanded into an alliance of settlements from across the Kwa-Zulu Natal province and also in
Capetown.lxx
With few employment possibilities, no healthcare, no financial safety net, no basic
utilities, and even no policing (except when the police arrive to forcibly evict the poor and
bulldoze settlements), the urban poor of the global South exist in a vacuum in which the State
lxviii Neocosmos, Michael. “Civil society, citizenship and the politics of the (im)possible: rethinking militancy in Africa today”. http://abahlali.org/node/1429, 9 April 2008. p. 45.
lxix Pithouse, Richard. “‘Our Struggle is Though, on the Ground, Running’ The University Of Abahlali baseMjondolo”. www.abahlali.org/files/RREPORT_VOL106_PITHOUSE.pdf, 9 April 2008. p. 15-19lxx Ibid. p. 23
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has withdrawn control (only, of course, to brutally reassert it through evictions, etc.). The AbM
have managed to carve out a space of communal solidarity in the absence of any support by the
State, organizing schools, community gardens and kitchens, and community councils that operate
through collective decision making. lxxi Though the AbM has some elected leadership, they are
held to strict procedures of accountability through reports to collective decision making bodies
and mostly function as organizational officials with little independent decision-making
authority.lxxii The AbM has organized mass election boycotts and demonstrations that have
successfully prevented evictions, but have gained few positive concessions from the city
government in the way of basic utilities. Perhaps most crucially, the AbM is an entirely non-
professional and non-party movement that has refused both financial aid from international
NGOs and refused to present candidates for local municipal office in order to preserve the
autonomy of their self-organization.lxxiii In their actions, the AbM has renounced the pursuit of
State or representational power and focused on a politics of “the transformation of the lived
experience of power”.lxxiv
It is worth inquiring if today the urban poor constitutes a part-of-no-part of global
capitalism—deprived of a place in the national legal, supranational legal, and economic orders.
Today over half of the Earth’s population—3.2 billion—live in urban areas, and urban areas are
expected to account for virtually all of global population growth “which is expected to peak at
about 10 billion in 2050”.lxxv The very existence of the urban poor is due to both the massive
expansion of cities as centers of commerce and manufacture as “undeveloped” nations are
integrated into the global market, and to the decimation of agricultural economies in the
lxxi Ibid. p. 47.lxxii Neocosmos, p. 51-55.lxxiii Ibid. 28.lxxiv Neocosomos, p. 1.lxxv Davis, Mike. “Planet of Slums” New Left Review vol. 25, March-April 2004, p. 5-34. cit. p. 5.
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undeveloped world caused by subsidized over production in the developed nations. The urban
poor furthermore contribute to the global economy indirectly by acting as the base of unskilled,
informal labour in urban areas. Žižek has mused on the political potential of shantytown
residents:
One should resist the easy temptation to elevate and idealize slum-dwellers into a new
revolutionary class. It is nonetheless surprising how far they conform to the old Marxist definition of the
proletarian revolutionary subject: they are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the
classical proletariat (‘free’ from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the
state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode of
being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life.
The slum-dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called ‘symbolic
class’ (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists etc) which is also uprooted and perceives
itself as universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with blacks
in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the new axis of class struggle, or is the ‘symbolic class’
inherently split, so that one can make a wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the
‘progressive’ part of the symbolic class? The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum
collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘free world’ […]lxxvi
If Žižek’s comparison of the modern globetrotting immaterial labourer to the slum dweller seems
a bit vain, it is worth nothing that many of the shack-dwelling leaders of the AbM are
intellectuals who have published rich theoretical papers on their websites, and that intellectuals
from around the South African academy have allied themselves with the AbM’s cause (including
the two South African scholars, Richard Pithouse at University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Michael
Neocosmos at University of Praetoria, cited in this chapter). It is also encouraging for the
possibility of international solidarity that the AbM has held demonstrations against the deposing
lxxvi Žižek, Slavoj. “Knee Deep”. London Review of Books. 2 September 2004. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n17/zize01_.html, 9 April 2008.
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of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, successfully courted the sympathetic attention of international news
media, produced a documentary film about their struggle,lxxvii and a website rich with
documentation of their activities as well as journalistic and theoretical papers produced by their
intellectual leadership.lxxviii These tentative international identifications and exploitations of new
media have both enabled the world at large to take notice of the struggle of the AbM, and created
for its members a degree of ideological solidarity with disenfranchised poor in other parts of the
world. Given the limited means and the immediacy of the concerns of AbM, it remains to be
seen what a shared sense of struggle with the people of Haiti, or with the youth in the Parisian
banilieus could mean for the poor of South Africa. However, communication with similar
struggles in other countries, and with those who are willing to engage with the AbM on their own
terms, has already had a profoundly encouraging ideological effect for the struggle. What
practical effect such cognitive mapping has, beyond bolstering the confidence of organized
struggles that manage to make contact with one another, remains to be seen.
The struggles of the AbM are predicated on the immediate conditions of both their local
situation and their existence in the margins of the global economic order. The AbM has no
means of production to seize except their very bodies, and no weapons of struggle except their
capacity for disciplined, mass, coordinated action. Their politics is radical egalitarianism at
work. And yet, the direct democracy advanced by the AbM is by no means an alternative to the
State, which continues to lie at the horizon of all their activity: their primary project is still to
prevent eviction and gain basic services to their settlements from the city government. If the
AbM provides us with at least one example of radical egalitarian political ruptre, then the crucial
question is what kind of police order should result if the demands of the AbM were met. Is the
lxxvii Kennedy Road and the Councillor. dir. Aoibheann O'Sullivan, 2005. http://www.archive.org/details/AoibheannOSullivan_0, 9April 2008.
lxxviii “Abahlali baseMjondolo”. http://abahlali.org, 9 April 2008.
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extremely localist, direct democracy of the street committees of 1984-86 and the self-
organization of the shantytowns usable model for a more egalitarian order, a kind of soviet for
the age of immaterial production? Probably not; they are transitional, ruptural forms of
organization that by necessity leave untouched the much larger questions of what is to be done
once a new order is established. What remains to be thought is how the liberatory effects of the
politics proper can be extended beyond the initial rupture. If politics and genuine democracy is
precisely not a permanent order of being-together, but the instance where police orders are
disrupted, then how can we ensure that politics will bring about a more just and egalitarian order
once its sequence of confrontation has been eclipsed and victory achieved? It is here—what
comes after the rupture of politics—that Rancière’s thought on politics comes to a stop.