HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 285

Interview

Max Blechman, Anita Chari, Rafeeq Hasan

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics
of Class Struggle:
An Exchange with Jacques Rancière*

Introduction
In an effort to compensate for the liberal complacency
still dominant in the graduate departments of
philosophy and political science at the University of
Chicago, three doctoral students decided to examine
some political heterodoxy coming their way from
France via the work of Jacques Rancière. Weekly
discussions on his recent political writings (chiefly,
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 1999; On the
Shores of Politics, 1995; Le partage du sensible. Esthétique
et politique, 2000) unpacked dense, meticulous
arguments, matched by a staccato, machine-gun-like
prose – an architectonic structure and polemical style
worthy of Logical Revolts [Les Révoltes logiques], the
title of Rancière’s 1970s journal which tracked the
struggles and speech of the poor. A historian no less

* Interview conducted in English at Northwestern University on 10 April 2003. The

interviewers would like to thank Miguel Vatter and Jacques Rancière for inviting us
to their seminar on aesthetics and politics.

Historical Materialism, volume 13:4 (285–301)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005
Also available online – www.brill.nl
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 286

286 • Interview with Jacques Rancière

than a philosopher, Jacques Rancière’s intellectual itinerary – from his precocious

collaboration with Althusser (his essay on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in the
1965 Lire le Capital) to his break with the latter and his work on the poetics
of historical knowledge and the heresy of democracy – bespeaks an ongoing
and unforgiving refusal of consensual thought, an intelligence too restless
not to verify what is covered under a name, a concept, a classification.
Jacques Rancière here responds to questions on his theory of class struggle.
The intention is to draw attention to a cornerstone of his thinking on democracy
and to reveal thereby a line that marks him off from those – whether theorists
of ‘radical democracy’ or otherwise – who dismiss the universal supposition
of class struggle as a figure of the past. In what sense is Rancière’s theory of
class struggle responsive to contemporary struggles for emancipation? How
is this theory expressive of democratic agency, of the irreducible opposition
between politics and police,1 or of the conflict between democracy proper
and the rising ‘identification of politics with the management of capital’?2
How does this reworking of class struggle draw on Marx, the litigious demand
for rights, the aesthetic reorganisation of social space and the utopian impulse?
One of the most stimulating aspects of Rancière’s work is the way in which
these questions of democracy, universality, and class struggle are insistently
bound to the very form of his writing. Rancière has an idea of method –
performed rather than stated – according to which the thinking of democracy
is organised and composed. Gilles Deleuze famously proclaimed that ‘doing
philosophy is trying to invent or create concepts’.3 If the Rancièrian method
of political thinking exemplifies a similar concept-creating device, we may
note, as Rancière suggests toward the end of this interview, that the ‘declassing’
reconfiguration of concepts is itself a ‘backfire’ of politics – another instance
of its universal struggle and import.

Question: You have relocated the site of politics from forms of political
régime to the operation of class struggle. For you, the present decline of
politics is directly related to the eclipse of the Marxian signifier of class

1 In Disagreement, Rancière uses the term ‘police’ to refer to ‘the set of procedures
whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of
powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this
distribution’ (Rancière 1999, p. 28). Politics, by contrast, is ‘an extremely determined
activity antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration
whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by
definition, has no place in that configuration’ (Rancière 1999, pp. 29–30).
2 Rancière 1999, p. 113.
3 Deleuze 1995, p. 25.
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 287

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle • 287

struggle. Yet you rethink class struggle in terms of political subjectification

and take your distances from any ideal politeia, or from what Marx called
‘true democracy’ and communism. We would like to know the reason for
this shift from Marx, how it modifies the Marxist signifier of class struggle,
and in what respect the struggle for rights plays a central role in this
modification.
Rancière: Rights as such, you think so?

We thought this implicit, for instance, in your critique of Marx’s account

of human rights in On the Jewish Question.
This is not actually the way in which I did put the issue. My critique of
the young Marx was not so much concerned with rights as with political
subjectification.4 In the young Marx, there is a kind of debasement of politics,
politics for him being only superstructural appearance, and the real thing
being the subterranean process of class war. I tried to overturn the position
by appropriating for myself the enigmatic sentence of the Introduction to the
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right where he writes that the proletariat is a
class of society that is not a class of society, and is actually a ‘class’ that entails
the dissolution of all classes. The question is: what does this mean, how do
you think of this class which is not a class? In the same text, Marx makes the
proletariat akin to a kind of chemical or biological idea of dissolution. The
proletariat is thought as the process of the decomposition of old classes. From
this point on, Marxism oscillated between a negative idea of class as dissolution
and a positive idea of class as identity. And, ultimately, this second sense, the
proletariat as a positive class of labour, obviously became the mainstream
sense of class in Marxism.
I tried to put differently this process of ‘dissolution’. It is not a matter of
the historical and quasi-biological decomposition of old classes. I rather think
this dissolution as a symbolic function of declassing. The class that is not a
class thus becomes an operator of declassification. The proletariat is no longer
a part of society but is, rather, the symbolic inscription of ‘the part of those
who have no part’, a supplement which separates the political community
from any count of the parts of a society.5 The idea of the dissolving class can
thus give the concept of what constitutes a political subject.

4 See Rancière 1999, p. 35: ‘By subjectification I mean 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 field of
experience.’
5 See Rancière 1999, p. 38: ‘Proletarian subjectification defines a subject of wrong –

by superimposition in relation the multitude of workers. What is subjectified is neither

HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 288

288 • Interview with Jacques Rancière

This is, then, precisely what makes it possible to get out of the trap of
‘either formal democracy or true democracy’: thinking the proletariat as a
form of the demos, as a political subject? What is important for me is not
restoring the formal democracy, the rights of man as such, against Marx.
Instead, the issue is to relate democracy – and the rights of man, possibly –
to this idea of the political subject as a class that is not a class but an operation
of declassification. What matters to me is to understand the demos as precisely
an operator of class struggle – but class struggle in a very specific sense.
Ancient philosophy explicitly acknowledged that the war between the rich
and the poor is at the centre of politics. But these names did not refer to
economic classes. The poor were those who were ‘nothing’, who were not
entitled to govern. Democracy was the power of those who were ‘nothing’.
It is in this sense that politics is class struggle, and that the struggle defines
itself as the re-symbolisation of the community.

It seems to us, however, that your political thinking underscores rights in

class struggle in the excess of egalitarian logic over police logic, especially
if we understand rights with Claude Lefort as a symbolic dimension that
is irreducible to the objective legal forms of liberal and formal democracy.
Isn’t this irreducibility of community to its own body, this excess of the
symbolic where Lefort situates the struggle for rights, also where class
struggle as you understand this term is located?
Well, I think you can put matters that way. But, at the same time, my view
of the ‘excess of the symbolic’ is different from Lefort’s. Lefort thinks this
excess in terms of sacrifice. Modern democracy would be born from an
originary sacrifice, from the disincorporation of the ‘double body’ of the king.6
My view of democracy does not link the excess to any kind of political
theology. Rights are not a kind of absolute for me. They are inscriptions of
the demos, an inscription of the part of those who have no part. As such, they
are always litigious, oriented toward staging conflict in the process of
verification. There is a basic uncertainty about what and whom rights include.

work nor distribution, but the simple counting of the uncounted, the difference between
an inegalitarian distribution of social bodies and the equality of speaking beings’. For
class struggle, see, for instance, Rancière 1995, p. 33: ‘In the democratic age, declassifying
division has taken on a privileged form whose name has fallen totally out of favour,
yet if we are to know where we are we must look at the form face-on. The name given
to this privileged form was class struggle.’
6 See Lefort 1986, pp. 25, 302. For Rancière’s critique, see Rancière 1999, p. 100.
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 289

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle • 289

The act of the political subjects is to build such or such case for the verification
of their extension and their comprehension. From the beginning, the duality
of the ‘rights of man and the citizen’ has been denounced as a neat trick.
Marx interpreted the difference as a mark of illusion. He contrasted the concrete
privileges of ‘men’ – i.e. the bourgeois – to the celestial rights of citizens.
Conversely, Burke – and Arendt after him – opposed the national rights of
citizens to the abstract rights of abstract man. But, as I view it, the gap between
‘man’ and ‘citizen’ is not the mark of illusion. It is an interval where political
subjects can act and put rights to the test. Political subjects are not definite
collectivities, they are surplus names, names that can stage dissensus concerning
who is included in their count. Correspondingly, political predicates – such
as freedom or equality – are not properties belonging to individuals or groups.
They are open predicates, I mean predicates susceptible to a litigious challenge
concerning whom they exactly refer to and the cases in which they are
considered actual. What is important is thus the capacity of subjectification
induced by the very indeterminacy of the names ‘man’ and ‘citizen’. The
‘rights of man’ are first of all operators of subjectification. They are abstract
as long as you make nothing of them.

For you, ‘the proletariat’ is significant precisely as a polemical, empty name

for re-symbolisation, as a pure operator for class struggle. Given this sort
of formalisation of class, your position seems different from many
contemporary theories of radical democracy. Why politics based on class
struggle and not politics based on something like fractured plural identities?
Why frame politics as class struggle in this way?
I don’t so much frame politics in terms of class struggle as reinterpret class
struggle from a political point of view: class struggle as the power of
declassification. This is why I resist the replacement of the proletariat by a
multiplicity of minorities. This is not a choice between a ‘big’ subject and a
multiplicity of little subjects. It is much more the choice between an additive
and a subtractive way of counting the political subjects, between the
pluralisation of identities and the universality of disidentification. What is
important in politics as class struggle is political subjectification, that is, not
only the fact of the action of minorities, the action of groups, but the creation
of what I call empty names of subjects. What was the proletariat? The proletariat
was an empty name for a subject – for anyone, for counting anyone. I think
there is a difference between thinking the necessity of this kind of universal
subjectiviser, and thinking politics as a matter of minorities in the way certain
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 290

290 • Interview with Jacques Rancière

theories of ‘radical democracy’ do. At the same time, I get out of the
socioeconomic identification of the political class.

Is the logic of declassification and dissolution, as expressed in the operator

of class struggle, a way of distinguishing universalistic political movements
from more sectarian or identitarian movements, such that universalistic
movements, ones you would call properly political, would be movements
that work toward their own dissolution, while a movement that does
not work toward its own dissolution would be particularistic and anti-
political?
I am not so much emphasising class as a process of self-dissolution. I am
interpreting what dissolution means. Basically, I think the important distinction
is between what I call a universal subjectiviser and representations of identity,
minority, community, and so on. What I put under the name of dissolution
or self-dissolution is the action of subjects that play precisely on the difference
between a natural status and a political function. This is the importance of
the idea of the proletariat for me. It can at one and the same time be the
name of a class and the open name of the uncounted. What I call positive
subjectification is this process of disidentification. What is important is
the disidentifying moment that shifts from an identity or an entity as a
worker, as a woman, as a black, to a space of subjectification of the uncounted
that is open to anyone. This means making the same words mean different
things, so that it can refer to closed groups or to open subjects. This open
process of disidentification is also a process of universalisation. Take the
declaration ‘We are all German Jews’ in Paris, May ’68, or the present ‘We
are all children of immigrants’ slogan in France. These names of subjects don’t
designate groups, they disrupt the system of designations that frame the
community in terms of definite standards of inclusion. A ‘movement’ invents
for this operation specific names, provisory names bound up with a specific
speech situation.

There is a disidentification that takes place, and another identification that

takes place, let’s say the bourgeois citizen who claims he is an immigrant,
or indeed, ‘We are all immigrants’. But precisely that disidentification and
that identification are made possible by a primary or implicit identification
with the empty name of the proletariat as such. Is the decline of politics,
to return to our first question, linked to the decline of the universal signifier
that allows for these kinds of playing off on identities?
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 291

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle • 291

Yes, I think that certainly the most effective political subjects were those
subjects that involved a strong identity, and therefore, a strong process of
disidentification, and the possibility of transferring the power of identity to
the power of disidentification and the power of universal subjectification.
So, when those class subjects disappear, what in fact we have generally is
either the kinds of identities that cannot lend themselves to processes of
disidentification, or, I would say, some kind of residuals of the universal
subjects. Today we have the ‘we-are-on-this-side’ identities, we are this minority
asking for its own rights, and, on the other hand, we have these kinds of
volatile universal subjects – subjects that operate under a banner like ‘We are
all children of immigrants’. And, in this case, a disidentification is declared –
precisely, the absence of difference – that is not given the name and the
consistency of a dissensual subject. I think that the state of politics today is
played out in the relation between volatile subjects of disidentification and
identity groups.

Does framing politics as disidentification and interruption in the police

order reject or presuppose a reference to some sort of utopian political
community? What does a community based around this model of political
interruption look like? In On the Shores of Politics, you appear to want
to bypass Agamben, Nancy and Derrida – with their locutions like ‘the
community to come’, ‘the community in-difference’, etc. – in favour of
thinking about the way in which political communities determine who
counts. But how does this understanding of politics include or exclude
something like an ideal of political community. In other words, what status
does the utopian have in your work?
If you think that politics in general is the gathering of human beings in
some sort of community, you raise the problem: what is the best kind of
community that we can imagine? But, in my view, politics always comes as
a kind of exception to the way in which, generally, communities are gathered,
it comes as an interruption. There are factual communities, grounded in the
power of birth or money, and there is politics as the process of challenging
the meaning of these factual communities through the operation of
declassification. The process of politics creates dissensual collectivities. These
collectivities give birth to new capacities and they bear ideas of future
communities. But it is impossible to think of the future community as a
projection of those kinds of communities that are involved in political conflict.
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 292

292 • Interview with Jacques Rancière

One cannot think of a future dissensual community. This is meaningless. So

when you think of utopia, you think of a form of community that would not
lend itself to dissensus. This means, in fact, a community where everybody
has the same ‘meaning’. This is a metapolitical project, a project that, through
aesthetics, jumps from politics to ethics.7
So, either ‘utopia’ goes back to some new form of the old Platonic project
of the ‘living’ consensual community, or it plays the part of the supplément
d’âme giving us the energy for political action. But political action, in my view,
is not about ideal future community. I’m not fond of the lingering idea that
we need utopia for the future. Much more important to me is the empowerment
of the actual capacities of anyone through dissensual practice.
As regards your reference to Nancy, Agamben and Derrida, I don’t think
that any of them projects a future of the community even if Agamben wrote
a book called The Coming Community.8 What they try to do, rather, is to relate
the thinking of the political community to some prior form of anthropological
or ontological ‘being-together ’ that would be tied to an ontological or
anthropological structure, such as the Heideggerian Dasein. The ‘difference’
of utopia is, in some way, traced back to an originary difference that would
give the political community its full meaning. I’m really very suspicious about
this pre-political requirement of community. In my view, the exceptionality
of politics does not need to be grounded in some ontological configuration
of ‘being-together’. In Agamben’s case, this requirement ultimately results in
a dismissal of politics: we are trapped within a ‘state of exception’ from which
only an ontological revolution can save us. It was already the Heideggerian
idea. I believe that we should first be saved from this kind of salvation.

But what does emancipation within your theoretical framework look like?
What are the emancipatory possibilities and ends of this anarchic politics
of dissensus?
Emancipation is a process rather than a goal, a break in the present rather
than an ideal put in the future. It means first breaking with the law of the
police, where everybody is in his own place, with his own job and his own
culture, her own body and her own forms of expression. Social emancipation
was first made of individual breaks with the kind of ‘identity’ that pinned

7 See Rancière 1999, pp. 81–2: ‘. . . modern metapolitics presents itself as a

symptomology that detects a sign of untruth within every political distinction – that
between man and citizen, for instance’.
8 Agamben 1993.
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 293

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle • 293

workers down to ‘their’ place and ‘habitus’. It was an ‘aesthetic’ revolution

as I understand the term, an overturning of the partition of the sensuous
which assigned to workers their place in (or outside of) the symbolic space
of the community, in the ‘private’ realm of production and reproduction. It
is what I studied in The Nights of Labor, which is about the beginnings of
social emancipation among French workers in the nineteenth century.9 I called
it La nuit des prolétaires, precisely because the argument is about day and
night. For these workers, emancipation meant breaking the partition of the
sensuous that determined the day as the time workers work, and night as
the time they rest. The beginning of emancipation was the decision to make
something more of their night: to write, read, think and discuss instead of
sleeping. Emancipation first meant reframing their own existence, breaking
with their workers’ identity, their workers’ culture, their worker’s time and
space.
It is in this sense that the Schillerian idea of an ‘aesthetic’ revolution was
relevant to my understanding of social emancipation. Schiller’s idea of a new
revolution grounded in the aesthetic suspension of the conditions of domination
was close to the kind of aesthetic neutralisation that shaped proletarian
subjectification as a break with proletarian identity. Emancipation, for them,
first meant constituting themselves as aesthetic subjects, capable of this kind
of ‘disinterested’ gaze that Kant analyses in the Critique of Judgement.

It is interesting that you give the example of Schiller, since, for him, that
suspension is fundamentally a utopian moment. Doesn’t Schiller think the
aesthetic state as a human need akin to the Kantian pure republic? And
isn’t the aesthetic restructuring of space and time in proletarian experience
also necessarily tied to an imaginary signifier of ideal community that
allows for that very restructuring, that creates a gap between the extant
structuring of space and time and an alternative that is merely possible?
We wonder whether the aesthetic staging of alterity in class struggle points
logically to the utopian.
It depends on what you call the utopian. Social emancipation was not about
showing the way to an ideal society to come, it was not about implementing
a utopian programme for a new society. It was, first of all, people constituting
themselves into new kinds of human beings, with a new sense of space and
time in the present. Sure, utopian programmes could help constitute the gap

9 Rancière 1989.
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 294

294 • Interview with Jacques Rancière

with the extant order. But the awareness that you can begin hic et nunc a new
life of equality, use a new language, have ‘new senses’ is a more powerful
way to stage this gap than the dream of a future community. This is why,
nowadays, the name of utopia is very often more or less explicitly transferred
to this very impulse. This means that it cannot create the impulse by itself.
Equality has to be practised before being dreamed. It is not the same thing
to have a utopian goal to fulfill and to have the new, and concrete, intent to
reframe here and now your space, your time, your relation to speech, to
visibility, and all of these aspects of everyday life. There are so many things
that are lumped together in the idea of utopia that I prefer to dismiss the
term. And this is why I speak in terms of aesthetic revolution, in terms of
the reconfiguration of one’s body, of one’s lived world, of one’s space and
time.

In Le Partage du sensible, you distinguish between two types of avant-

gardes in modernity.10 There is the ‘strategic avant-garde’, the authoritarian
or military model that determines the meaning, orientation, and historical
possibilities of a movement. But there is also the avant-garde that underscores
a more aesthetic anticipation of the future, following the Schillerian model
of free play. Now, the aesthetic model distinguishes itself from the strategic
one by decentring emancipation and by inventive forms of subjectification.
And it seems that your idea of emancipation is on the side of this aesthetic
model – that this is the context for what you put forward as ‘aesthetic
revolution’, only without the slide towards metapolitical anticipation. Would
it be fair to say that the aesthetic qualifier changes what is understood by
‘revolution’ in the same way the aesthetic qualifier distinguishes for you
a specific modality of the avant-garde?
I made this distinction when answering questions about the avant-garde
in modernity; it is not a concept with which I am comfortable. That said, it
is true that the idea of the ‘aesthetic state’ and the ‘aesthetic education’ framed
a new vision of what revolution means. Schiller explicitly opposed the aesthetic
suspension of the power of ‘understanding’ over ‘sensibility’ or ‘form’ over
‘matter’ to the ‘power of the law’ as it had been implemented by the French
Revolution. The aesthetic revolution appeared as a revolution in the partition
of the sensuous, in the forms of the lived world itself, instead of a revolution
in the forms of government. It fostered an idea of avant-garde as a power of

10 Rancière 2000. Translated in Rancière 2004.

HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 295

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle • 295

anticipation rather than a power of commandment. But you cannot equate it

with an opposition between ‘artistic avant-garde’ and ‘political avant-garde’.
The opposition is an opposition between two ideas of the revolution, between
two ‘aesthetics’ of revolution: there is, I would say, the ‘representational’ idea
of the avant-garde as the power of those who know the ends and are able to
choose the better means for those ends and the aesthetic idea of a global
change in the ways of living, thinking and feeling. In Marxism, the idea of
the ‘human revolution’ challenges the idea of the revolution led by the expert
avant-garde. The revolutionary artists played on this tension and tried to
identify the social revolution with the invention of a new life. But the
revolutionary powers imposed the scheme of art as illustration of the new
order.

We’re interested in some moments of your work where something like the
Hegelian problematic of recognition surfaces. In On the Shores of Politics,
for example, you point out how the superiority of the superiors collapses
in the act of explaining to inferiors why they are inferior. One finds the
same sort of argument made in the introductory chapters of Disagreement.
We wonder what role something like recognition plays in your work. More
specifically, does this push your use of class struggle closer to something
like the unfolding of the pre-political actualisation of the human expectation
to be recognised in some way? Are you comfortable with pushing the quasi-
Hegelian overtones of this position?
First of all, the question is not whether it is Hegelian or not. There is an
ethical reading of Hegel as a thinker of recognition, and I myself am supposed
to be a thinker of recognition. Recently I stumbled upon an essay, ‘Jacques
Rancière’s Contribution to the Ethics of Recognition’.11 I understand why: I
strongly emphasised the issues of politics as the ‘count of the uncounted’ and
as a way of making visible demands and agents of demand that were invisible.
But I don’t think that Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave is concerned
with such issues. And I think that the ‘count of the uncounted’, as a structural
configuration of the political community is something different from individual
problems of recognition. I fear that, by setting the issue in terms of recognition,
we make it into a matter of individual suffering – ‘I’m not recognised, I want
to be recognised’. This has, for me, a rather patronising overtone. It is not
the same thing as the idea of framing a sensory visibility of equality. In On

11 Deranty 2003.
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 296

296 • Interview with Jacques Rancière

the Shores of Politics, I mention a strike in the 1830s where the workers demanded
‘relations of equality between the bosses and the employees’. In fact, they
demanded that the bosses take off their hat when they stepped into the
workshop. You can interpret it as an ethical claim for recognition. But I think
it is more relevant to see how this demand underscores a specific connection
between politeness and politicity. This demand was about the visibility of
equality, about the ‘public’ status of the workshop and the workers rather
than about their dignity (they also asked for the right to read the newspapers
in the workshop). The idea of redistributing the relation between the spaces,
the uses and the rules appropriated for them is more than a claim for
recognition. Politics is first of all a sphere of appearance.

Perhaps the reason one might take your work to point to an ethics of
recognition is that so many of the examples you use are historical examples
in which people are in some sense not yet counted as human. What you’re
emphasising now is very helpful, because you’re saying that the count of
the uncounted is much broader than who gets counted as a human. The
uncounted is a much more diffuse terrain of struggle, interrogating not
only personhood but also all the rules, the whole structure of appearance
that determines everyday life. Is that correct?
Yes. It is not a question of a humanity that allegedly would be resolved in
our societies where everyone is counted as a human being. On the one hand,
it is a kind of structural law: the count of the uncounted is the difference
which opens the field of politics as such. On the other hand, it is the operator
which redistributes the relations between the modes of being, the modes of
doing, the forms of visibility and so on. And this process operates on such
or such form of the uncertain border separating the private and the common,
the visible and the invisible. You may be considered in general as human
beings, called as electors to choose your president, etc. and become entirely
inaudible when you set out, for instance, to express your own idea on the
law that regulates your work, your future or the education of your children
or students. The relation between inclusion and exclusion is at play everywhere
and has to be made explicit everywhere.

You have stated that a political act ceases to be political when the wrong
it addresses is a ‘mere matter of redistribution’.12 But when is a matter of
12 Rancière used this precise phrase during the question and answer session of his

seminar on aesthetics and politics held at Northwestern University on 10 April 2003.

The basic argument, however, may be found in Disagreement and other works.
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 297

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle • 297

distribution ‘a mere matter of distribution’, a matter that does not reconfigure

the political space or lead to a new division of the sensuous, but rather
appeals to the extant police order? What fundamentally draws the line
between distribution as an instance of reconfiguration of the political space
as opposed to mere shifts within the police order?
On a general level, the distinction is whether it is a question of distribution
of parts or whether it is a question about the distribution of the common. I
think that a question is political as long as it is a question about who in fact
takes part in the common, or about what is related to the distribution of the
common itself, meaning precisely the universality of the capacities of the
common. Of course, very often, the two things are tied together and it’s
difficult to say, ‘at this moment we are out of politics and we are in questions
of social repartition’. I think that trying to identify politics is trying to identify
what concerns the common in the issue of, for example, strikes, pensions,
and so on. What concerns the fact that some workers want to keep their
historical advantages? What concerns the relationship of matters of pensions
with the configuration of the common itself? The question may also be raised
in view of health and the organisation of hospitals, for instance. There are
problems of who pays for what, of course. And then there is also the issue
of whether equality involves the possibility for anybody to be treated by
the best doctors, in the best hospitals, etc. These kinds of conflicts raise
the issue of equality before life and death. There is very often a connection
between what is purely a matter of interests between particular groups or
the interests of individuals, and the consideration of community, of the effects
of equality.

It seemed to us that there is a tragic dimension of politics in your work,

insofar as the dynamic element of politics is always working towards
disillusion in form, towards incorporation within the police order and social
sedimentation.
I try not to think politics in such a tragic mood. I don’t represent politics
as this kind of dynamic, but always collapsing, process that inevitably becomes
mere social sedimentation. First, I think that the fact that the dynamic is
always temporary and provisional is not such a tragedy. It does not come
down to the eternal attempt of human beings to achieve a good that always
escapes from their grasp. Also, what you call sedimentation cannot be thought
only in terms of reincorporation. It is also a living memory of politics, a set
of inscriptions that can be re-enacted. Political movements lead to forms of
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 298

298 • Interview with Jacques Rancière

sedimentation such as laws, social institutions, and so on. But it doesn’t mean
that it is only a kind of retombée of the great dynamic; it means that there are
new inscriptions of equality.
Equality is not only inscribed in the law, but inscribed in social institutions –
I mentioned the hospital, but this is also true of schools and so on. So there
are a lot of places where the dynamic is sedimented, but ‘sedimented’ also
means that it is there and ready for a kind of revival. For instance, take the
question of education. Sometimes a little reform is a Pandora’s box that gives
way to a new dissensus because, in its bluntness, it raises the issue of whether
it is equality or whether it is inequality that gives its law to the whole system.
In On the Shores of Politics, I mention the great strike that challenged French
schools and universities in 1986, and which was less concerned with the
content of a right-wing plan of reform of education as with the keyword of
this plan, which was selection.13 For many years, sociologists had denounced
the ‘illusion’ of equality in the schools as veiling the reality of social
reproduction. But the reality of social selection under the egalitarian appearances
is one thing, the political reality of those appearances is another matter. So
the official dismissal of the egalitarian appearance in favour of selection did
not amount to a mere ‘return to reality’. It meant a reconfiguration of the
community under the signifier of inequality. That attempted dismissal restored
to the egalitarian signifier all its power.
So, the places of sedimentation are also places of inscription of the democratic
signifiers that can open, and do open, new spaces of dissensus. You can say
that it is tragic because it doesn’t open straightaway into a stable egalitarian
achievement. It is always a partial achievement, some reduction of the political
dynamic to legal or social acquisitions. But, at the same time, there is this
dialectic that makes the sedimentation of politics also something of a
springboard. So I don’t consider my conception tragic.

A final remark. We are intrigued by the very way in which you philosophise,
by what doing philosophy means for you. Schematically speaking, we find
in your work something like a combination of two different techniques.
One would be the Deleuzean idea that what philosophy ought to do is to
create concepts. So you give us a series of concepts – archipolitics, parapolitics,
metapolitics, politics verses the police. And what we also find interesting,
and we are actually very thankful for it, is that you offer these concepts

13 See Rancière 1995, pp. 52–8.

HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 299

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle • 299

without all the usual deconstructionist pieties about how one concept
inevitably slides in the other, and so on. But, at the same time, we find in
your work a quasi-Heideggerian tendency to use familiar terms in order
to destabilise them. So politics and police come to mean something very
different than they usually do, and democracy correctly understood in your
terminology becomes synonymous with politics and class struggle itself.
Is there a strategy to this technique? Does the strategy itself have political
import?
Creating concepts and changing the meaning of the words is one and the
same process. I neither try to come back to some originary secret hidden in
the etymology of the words, nor to destabilise meanings for the pleasure of
destabilising them. I ask myself questions such as: what do ‘proletariat’,
‘politics’, ‘democracy’, or ‘aesthetics’ mean specifically? I need not destabilise
these words because they have no stability at all in the first place. Democracy,
for instance, means, according to the case at hand, a virtue, a form of
government, a state of society, and so on. Many social scientists or philosophers
exploit this indetermination and the supposition of a ‘common sense’ that
would ultimately make clear what these terms are about. I began my work
by throwing this ‘common sense’ into question, by showing for instance that
‘worker’ – as a political concept – designates a form of disidentification of
‘worker’ as a socio-cultural identity. When breaking with the referential system
of this ‘common sense’, I would hear complaints of incomprehension. So I
then tried to ‘reconstruct’, to propose new concepts by giving to the old
monsters (democracy, politics, etc.) restrictive determinations. And I used the
Greek signifiers (such as demos or polites) as illustrations of this reconfiguration
rather than as tools for a ‘de-construction’. Anyway, it is not clear to me how
I could reconstruct without doing some deconstructing.
In my work, I never asked myself what kind of philosophy I was doing or
whether I was doing philosophy or something else. Creating concepts also
means destabilising the borders between the disciplines (philosophy, political
science, history, sociology, literature, and so on). The point is less to destabilise
words and meanings than to destabilise the order of the disciplines that say
that each thing must be in its place. For me, of course, this is a political
question. There is a return or a kind of backfire of the political question on
the theoretical question. All my research came up against the issue of the
border: how do you draw a line separating public life and domestic life,
the political and the social, the common and the private, the visible and the
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 300

300 • Interview with Jacques Rancière

invisible, the audible and the inaudible? Ultimately, this comes down to
knowing how to draw the line separating in general those who ‘can’ from
those who ‘cannot’ and how, conversely, you can cross the border, deny
it, play upon it, and so on. You cannot understand anything of this if you
enclose yourself in the field of one discipline. A discipline is always the
anticipated implementation of a decision about the relation of thought and
life, about the way thought is shared. What is at stake in a social movement
is unintelligible if you view it through the separate lens of political science,
sociology, philosophy, and so on. And what is at stake in a literary text is
unintelligible if you try to understand it only in terms of literary theory. I
don’t cross the borders because I want to destabilise things – I’m really a very
quiet person! What interests me is trying to find the point of intelligibility.
Creating concepts means trying to find the point of intelligibility, and you
have to blur the borders and reshape the territory to find this point.
Social scientists are inclined to think that this is mere empiricism and that
this creativity is an attempt to get rid of any protocol of science. For me, it
is a higher form of rationality. You have to be anarchical if you want to be a
good rationalist in these matters.
As a consequence, I cannot really situate myself in the field of philosophy
in the sense that I would be doing what philosophy has to do. I don’t know
exactly what philosophy has to do. What I can say is what philosophy has
been about in its historical existence. I can say philosophy was or was not
about such and such knot in so-called political, scientific or artistic issues.
And I try to displace the way we understand these knots. One of my books,
The Names of History, has ‘A Poetics of Knowledge’ as its subtitle.14 The point
here is to frame the question of how things become philosophical or become
political or become literary in a kind of metapoetics or general poetics. This
is to say that this kind of general poetics for me takes the place that is usually
occupied by ontology. I have no interest in relating what I do to a kind of
general ontology, as, for instance, the ontology of being and event in Badiou
or the ontology of potentia and act in Agamben. An ontology can be a
supplementary tool for bringing such and such knot of ‘politics and philosophy’
or ‘aesthetics and politics’ to light. But an ontology remains a kind of poem
and you still have to understand how it constructs poetically its own relation
to what it is supposed to ground.

14 Rancière 1994.
HIMA 13,4_333_f12_285-301I 11/5/05 1:33 PM Page 301

Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle • 301

References
Agamben, Giorgio 1993, The Coming Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles 1995, ‘On a Thousand Plateaus’, in Negotiations, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Deranty, Jean-Philippe 2003, ‘Jacques Rancière’s Contribution to the Ethics of
Recognition’, Political Theory, 31, 1: 136–56.
Lefort, Claude 1986, The Political Forms of Modern Society, edited by John B. Johnson,
Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Rancière, Jacques 1989, The Nights of Labor: The Worker’s Dream in Nineteenth Century
France, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Rancière, Jacques 1994, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, Jacques 1995, On the Shores of Politics, London: Verso.
Rancière, Jacques 1999, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, Jacques 2000, Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, Paris: La Fabrique.
Rancière, Jacques 2004, The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum.