Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic

Disagreement
Author(s): Solange Guénoun, James H. Kavanagh and Roxanne Lapidus
Source: SubStance , 2000, Vol. 29, No. 2, Issue 92 (2000), pp. 3-24
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/3685772

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Jacques Rancikre:
Literature, Politics, Aesthetics:
Approaches to Democratic Disagreement
interviewed by
Solange Guinoun and James H. Kavanagh

"Pour que l'invitation produise quelque effet de pensee, il faut que

la rencontre trouve son point de m6sentente."-La misentente (12)
[In order for the invitation to produce some effect of thought, the
encounter must find its point of disagreement.]

The Principles of Equality, Education and Democracy

SG In reading your work, one has the impression that you have had a
kind of revelation or "nuit de Pascal" in encountering that extraordinary
nineteenth-century pedagogue, Joseph Jacotot, to whom you have devoted
a book, Le maftre ignorant (1987).

JR It was not a "nuit de Pascal," but certainly an essential encounter for

re-asking the question of politics and equality. In fact, Joseph Jacotot
proposed, in an incredibly provocative way, two radical principles that placed
the pedagogical paradigm alongside the progressivist logic generally
identified with democracy. First of all, equality is not a goal to be attained.
The progressivists who proclaim equality as the end result of a process of
reducing inequalities, of educating the masses, etc., reproduce the logic of
the teacher who assures his power by being in charge of the gap he claims to
bridge between ignorance and knowledge. Equality must be seen as a point
of departure, and not as a destination. We must assume that all intelligences
are equal, and work under this assumption. But also, Jacotot raised a radical
provocation to democratic politics. For him, equality could only be
intellectual equality among individuals. It could never have a social
consistency. Any attempt to realize it socially led to its loss. It seemed to me
that every form of egalitarian politics was confronted by this challenge: to
affirm equality as an axiom, as an assumption, and not as a goal. But also to
refuse a partition between intellectual equality and social inequality; to
believe that even if egalitarian assumptions are alien to social logic and

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4 Jacques Rancibre

aggregation, they can be

consists of this very conf

SG What strikes me is t
politico-socialist conjuncti
education and teaching in
vis-a-vis the two then-cur

JR The French debate o

still is-monopolized by
tendency, inspired by
transmitting knowledge a
to reduce scholastic ineq
needs and styles of und
saw the development of
Jean-Claude Milner's De
and its mode of diffusion
teachers and sociologists a
about intellectual emanc
which based equality eit
teacher's role, or on a "sci
knowledge.

SG One of the striking

series of shifts from one d
object that will cut across
"the poetics of knowled
interpretation of Mallarm
and now you are concern
and with cinema. While al
an object that relates to p
mesentente. Philosophie et
(1996), La chair des mots.
Aux bords du politique, pu
edition appearing in 1998

JR The question of poli

linked to each other. For m
of divisions and boundarie

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Interview 5

book on the em
at the heart of
time that dict
have no time l
through work
sleep, to give t
enter into a w
into account,
genres-histor
workers belon
as documents
decided to read
Where others
in the languag
the barrier be
language and t
which sought
workers who
attempt to app
of a "poetics
expresses a ver
proletaires w
"scientific" an
take into accou
for themselve
and to affirm

SG All of wh

JR In traditi
thought, feeli
a spokesperson
the one who p
their assigned
should speak i
in "popular cu
believe they "r
and "their" wa
in his/her pla

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6 Jacques Ranciere

JHK Obviously the basis

concept of equality, and
notion of equality. But
already structured and d
Or are you posing a non-

JR If equality is axioma
undetermined in its pr
determined political field
This being said, the ega
expression and manifest
particular state of inequa

JHK Isn't that an Enlig

prior to politics. Aren't y
notion of equality?

JR No. First of all beca

imply an assumption of e
the Rights of Man exce
equality of rights by "
egalitarian axiom is not b
philosophy. "Nature" i
intervenes as an addition
of social bodies. Finally
egalitarian practices carr
individuals and population
of the distance between r

The Concept of Literatu

The Disagreements of L

SG Let's talk about the

from "Belles Lettres" t
understand the latter. Wh
les contradictions de la lit
you describe Belles Lett
system of "the art of w
Boileau, Huet, Voltaire,
contemporary literature
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Interview 7

your personal
Whereas elsew
post-Revolution
difference in
ensembles-Bel
and a change in
or able to take
system, to put

JR First of al
the art of writ
have shown ho
order they de
treatment" is ju
of specific thou
Belles Lettres
in the systema
a culmination
two systems fo
in two differen
gap between th
do not obey th
of art" or boun
themselves. Cl
outside or on
Romanticism e
excluded by Be
or else it reinv
interpretation
able to do so w

JHK You prop

art of writing
affirm themse
already approp

JR I call "lite
without a legi
emitter and r
"living" word
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8 Jacques Ranciere

written, "mute" word, w

it should or should not sp
takes this to mean "owne
"literary" quality (the fam
is no direct relationship b
words and literature as
contrary, there is a stron
novels is the woe of the p

SG I can imagine how y

of the inventive literary
with the identical but un
heyday of literary theor
have been debating these
note that in Le Monde t
Compagnon's Le demon
assessment of literary the
sur les contradictions de l
existential horizon, witho
soliciting it constantly
dated, like "literarity," "

JR I haven't been mu
"literarity" is linked to a
and larger, and concerns
[le partage du sensible]:' t
there was not literary the
within both language and
des proletaires, especiall
their discovery of the wo
paper.

SG You are proposing tw

was the basis of the Bel
that belongs to the system
you put it, quoting Malla
another mode of fiction (
For example, Vincent Des
the Ancients as a new pri

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Interview 9

of truth and f
modern than le
classical writers
recently you w
constructs 'fic
relations betwee
and what one ca
that of post-18

JR It's art's rep

There's no op
representative
organization of
liberates art fr
simulacra. On th
the idea of "fict
Fiction become
factual account
tells a story. Bu
fiction becomes
the rule of trut
not ring true, i

SG Although I
definition of "l
double-bind. On
interest of liter
activities, outs
literature as a s
that our field
realizes that no
your message is
audience for yo
an object conce

JR For me, th
philosophers a
separate domai
investigations

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 10 Jacques Ranciere

necessarily brings togethe

procedures that enable us
art of writing, and those
me, Hegel's theorization
sentences spring from an
time reading writers than

SG I'm certainly not quest

readings of post-1789 text
same thing can be done wi

JR I think so. But it's not

of this or that era. "Literat
longer acknowledges the r
in the detail of the texts.
"should do." He allows us t
of Corneille's departure fr
out and justifies these dep
and "departure" are inte
replaced critical adjudica
continuation of this self
according to modes of atte
an art historian of the sch
that is informed by the Im

SG It is nonetheless rem
agreement with the most
politically more to the R
impossible dream, shared b
last 40 years. Even though
impasse are different, the
problematic?

JR I am certainly aware of the wish, here and elsewhere, to make a tabula

rasa of the theoretical and practical upheavals of the 1960s, and, for example,
to restore a "humanism" in tune with the old art of rhetoric, just as one
wants to restore the criteria of taste, and of pleasure, the wisdom of
enlightened sovereigns and counselors, etc. But for me, separating the
historical systems of writing does not mean putting each person in his place

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 Interview 11

and time. In a
reappropriatio
legitimate met
pulled the lit
indefinitely os
based on undet
that operates
the political--b
notions like "c
problems (from
of psychoana
representation

The Politics, A

SG Let's move on to the question of individual and collective

subjectification that you analyze in several texts, in an attempt to understand
the relations you establish between literature, aesthetics and politics, all of
which you have redefined. In La misentente (1995) you proposed splitting
the current notion of the political into "police" and "politics" ["la politique/
police" and "la politique/politique"] and you define "police" as a partition of
the sensible/perceptible, while "political" would be a means for disrupting
this partition, since, according to you, the essence of politics is disagreement.
From which you derive an "aesthetic of the political," or a politics that would
be aesthetic in the sense of allowing to be heard or seen what was previously
invisible and inaudible, by inscribing a perceptive world into another one,
as you described it in your "Postface" to the American edition of Le Philosophe
et ses pauvres (1998). So my question is this: Does literature belong to this
general historical mode of visibility that you call aesthetic, or is it different
from it, and how? One has the impression of a kind of conflation of these
three terms-politics, aesthetics, literature-- to designate the same operation:
an antagonistic partition of the sensible.

JR I use "aesthetic" in two senses-one broad, one more restrained. In

the broad sense, I speak of an "aesthetic of the political," to indicate that
politics is first of all a battle about perceptible/sensible material. Politics
and police are two different modes of visibility concerning the things that a
community considers as "to be looked into," and the appropriate subjects to

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 12 Jacques Ranciere

look into them, to judge

that I gave in La Misentent
from the mouths of the pl
things, and not growls of h
designates for me a specif
system. The representative
(different in the sense of
imitation-and from there i
of appreciation, etc. The ae
based on how artistic pro
system transforms this int
a thought that has becom
uprooted from the ordinar
system proposes the produ
non-intentional, of the com
and the unconscious (Kan
artistic production as the c
process, etc.) It exempts th
also from the kind of auton
It makes them into both au
of life. Literature, as a ne
aesthetic system of the art

SG In what sense do you u

of your Chair des mots. P
distinguish it from "literat
theories of language-phil
these words?

JR The idea of writing is not based on a theory of language, but on what

I call the partition of the sensible. For Plato, writing defined a certain common
space-a circulation of language and thought with neither a legitimate
emitter, a specific receptor, nor a regulated mode of transmission. For him,
this space of mute language is, by the same token, the space of democracy,
and democracy is also the system of written laws and the system where
there is no specific title for exercising power. This is a philosophical and
political concept, rather than a linguistic one. "Writing" is a modality of the
rapport between logos and aisthesis, which, since Plato and Aristotle, has
served to conceptualize the political animal. The concepts of writing and of

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Interview 13

literarity allow
animal in the gr
from all quarte

SG If one had
with whom yo
the partition of
language-in eit
What exactly w

JR The idea of
translating and
of Foucault-his
and capable of
that I have attem
of art, could be
But at the same
or not for a p
crossings-over,
the historicists
to me to cover u
So that where
think in terms
about locking u
reason. In La n
appropriated a t
we are in a pol
the question of
that makes the

SG What is c
linguistic, or o
of letters, tha
And has this co

JR The idea of
more philosoph
is the political r
of La nuit des p

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14 Jacques Ranciere

assigned a group identity. O

It's a matter of saying th
sociologists and politician
language.

JHK To put the question

interested in part in liter
and carried out, etc., and
equality of literary compet

JR On the one hand, I'm i

of experience-individual a
in literature as the specific
of art. Obviously these two
competence has no direct c
Rather, there is a rapport o
of literarity, which condit
I believeit's fruitful to wo
a paradigm of literature,
larger, more indeterminate
We must not be in a hurry
these axes to produce its ow
we fall into the useless cate
of representation, and so o

JHK Why do Woolf and Jo

period" any more than Z
questions the "Platonic" no
to the worker status." It
conceptualizes the meaning
a place appropriate to his
being a 'good' scientific ob
way of being and a way of
("Histoire des mots, mots
You also say that "the
conceived on the organic
on deeds and words-and so
people, on the contingenc
"Clearly there is a geneal

SubStance

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Interview 15

community. Fo
corresponds to a
writing corresp
"the true novels
of the leisure cl
account of grea
Doesn't this ver
of literature (p
correspondence
based on hetero
it corresponds t
speaking subject
that there are,
to specific comm
of the ones we t
Perhaps this re
two "types" of c
"paradigms" a
community-ind
must rigorously
organic" and "si
one type of fic
one for democ
discourse to the
Hugo-Zola disco
way; neither d
discourse open u
the democratic

JR The text to
historic discour
the discourse of
large paradigm,
and was based on
speaking. For th
the "meaning of
of the revolution
of nature, or, on
mythological po

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 16 Jacques Rancibre

the discourse of social histo

paradigm. From it, social h
of method (recourse to grea
interrogation of "silent wit
this reduction of literarity
generally oriented to the L
this order an aestheticism th
I have said that in order for historians to renew their access to democratic

speaking, they would do well to renew their literary paradigms, and for
myself, I wrote La Nuit des proletaires along structural lines that are closer to
The Waves than to Les Misdrables. For me, it was an heuristic principle. From
the historians' point of view, it was a provocation. But it's not a matter of
saying that there would be a truly democratic literature and then another,
falsely democratic literature. There is no correspondence, term by term,
between novelistic forms and forms of political action. And finally, it is
literarity-as a mode of circulation of writing-that belongs to the democratic
partition of the sensible, and not some kind of intrigue.

SG You propose "disagreement" [la misentente] as a way of thinking about

political subjectification, distinguishing it from "misrecognition" [la
meconnaissance] or "misunderstanding" [le malentendu]. Disagreement as the
democratic logic of dissensus, as opposed to consensus. You propose the notion
of "warring writings"in order to think about literature and its contradictions.
What would constitute "heterogeneous" literary production, similar to what's
produced by disagreement in the political arena? Is there a style of
subjectification particular to literature, which, of course, would not be a
theory of the subject?

JR Literature, like politics, operates processes of subjectification by

proposing new ways of isolating and articulating the world. This being so,
its subjective inventions are made via a singular mechanism. Literature finds
itself between democratic literarity and a metapolitical goal: the goal of a
discourse and a knowledge about the community that would speak the truth,
underlying or running counter to democratic literarity. The subjects of a
perceptible experience invented by literature bear witness to this duality.
Thus Flaubert's characters bear witness to both the democratic circulation
of letters and a bodily and passive mode of perception that challenges this,
moving from the human scale to a sub-atomic one.

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Interview 17

SG Did I unde
Connecticut, wh
partition of th
aesthetic-origin

JR At that po
general. I was ta
historical system
political in liter
of the sensible
the politics-o
reconfiguration
the Age of Rom
debates with
messages-from
published a lan
style of Rimbau

Aesthetics, Pol

SG You write t
nor a kind of so
mode of symbo
therefore ever
aesthetic appro
every aesthetic

JR I think tha
relationships be
in-common is in
component of p
there is a recon
believing that
important to no
all in the way
community. Boo
modes for fram
number of artis

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18 Jacques Ranciere

are first of all formed on t

autonomous art, the redefin
of the relationships betwe

SG The idea of literary "

the 1990s, in the various li
title La chair des mots. Ho
justify using it to consider

JR I believe this came to

curd du village. This novel
of the perversity of writi
pure, popular souls into cr
into the very ground of r
in order to redeem her sin
This fable is close to Saint-
as true means of human co
For me, this revived the q
at the heart of the worker
of the great theme of St.
point, I was led to rethink
fiction and the paradigm o
reading of the episode of P
analysis of the gospels' acc
disembodiment struck me a
the "dangers of novel-read
of the imagination. I then
the nineteenth century w
literature and its opposit
incarnate language. Consi
a language of mute of thin
page, Rimbaud's language a
within us, and so on.

SG To the extent that for

collective is not an organ
"literary disembodiment."
democratic invention by

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 Interview 19

JR Lefort con
schemata of
disembodiment
"the people" to
from a kind of
from an imagin
by totalitarian
original sacrif
Freudian theme
on the Ten Com
definitively im
centuries of his
murder. I want
from this dram
no ghosts of sac
at Colonus: th
elimination of t
body that is hei
It's the abstrac
title to govern.
ideas of legitim
special catego
government o
community. So
a political subje

JHK All right,

the abstract ide

JR There is no
pronouncement
occurences of p
by the activiti
affirming a pow
who have no b
taking part, tak
people, citizen
reconfiguratio
beginning with
ground.
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 20 Jacques Ranciere

SG For example, there

demonstrations of November-December 1995 in Paris?

JR The question of demos was certainly at play, very emblematically, in

that transformation of subway workers into demonstrators occupying the
pedestrians' space. The economic question of retirement benefits immediately
became, in an exemplary manner, "Who is qualified to oversee the interests
of the community, to connect its present to its future?" According to a purely
Jacotot-style logic, the movement was only strengthened when Prime
Minister Jupp6 played the school master, lecturing these "backward" people
grasping at old "rigid ideas of salary" and "short-term, personal interests,"
enlightening them on the laws of the global economy and on wise
government, as the "responsible" director of their common future. A good
part of the intelligentsia-including the Marxist-trained intelligentsia-
supported the "courageous" move of the Prime Minister, in the name of the
struggle against "populism." But the strikers replied, "Don't waste your
breath, we understand perfectly well. And because we understand, we want
nothing to do with your reform." What they had understood, first of all,
was the logic of the explanation whose function was to divide the world
into those who understand and those who don't. It was the question of
equality underlying the "economic" question. This said, there are degrees
of subjectification. Movements like those 1995 strikes put elements of
subjectification into play, without, however, arousing political subjects in
the full sense-subjects capable of tracing a connection between all instances
of subjectification and attaching them to the great signifiers of collective
life.

JHK This implies a constant reformulation and reconfiguration of the demos

according to context. Thus it's by analyzing these instances that one locates
the political. So why attach so much value to the demos? What does it
contribute, politically? Anyone can call themselves the demos.

JR I seem to detect, behind your question, the shadow of oppositions

between spontaneity and organization, between populism and scientific
theory. For me, it is not a matter of valorizing the demos as the good face of
the collective. It's a matter of reflecting, first of all, on the question, "What
makes the political exist?" It's a matter of problematizing the deceptively
simple idea of a subject who, as Aristotle put it, "participates both in
governing and in being governed." It's a matter of reflecting on the

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 Interview 21

singularity of t
agent of an acti
the natural enti
be commanded
gods"-that is, th
for the symme
beneath banal p
citizens' rights
of the political
the demos" does
rather, it me
incompetents"
"the analysis of
the instances
"populism" seal

The Aesthetic Idea and Artistic Forms

SG I'm interested by the opposition that you develop-based o

Foucault's reprise of Kant-between "aesthetic" and artistic form.According
to you, aesthetic form can only be seen as a form if it is a "form" of nothin
and if it does not realize any concept or imitate any object. Thus it cannot
"produced" by artistic labor. So that only genius, as a subjective faculty, can
produce an aesthetic idea-itself an equivocal concept. What exactly is an
"aesthetic idea," your current research theme at the Collkge de Philosophie?

JR This opposition between two ideas of form is the opposition betwee

two systems of art. Representative logic was linked to the opposition between
form and matter and to the idea of art as the imposition of form to matte
Kant's Critique ofJudgment juxtaposes this traditional logic of art as tekhne
a completely new logic: that of the "free form," which is not the form of
anything, which is not the effectuation of any concept, but rather is the pur
correlative of a gaze that suspends all relations of knowledge or interest in
an object. For Kant, the aesthetic idea is the supplement to the concept, tha
aura of associated and indistinct representations that allows the consciously
elaborated artistic form to transform itself into a widely appreciated aesthet
form. For him, the aesthetic idea belongs in the direct line of the famous "
ne sais quoi" that haunted the Age of Classicism and that makes genius the
standard attribute of the supplement. But the concept of genius also translate

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 22 Jacques Ranciere

that poetical upheaval ina

genius not as a capacity for
master the language, the
aesthetic age, the aesthetic
an identity between an arti
will, and a mode of existen
of will. This global idea
equivalence between fact
within us and the book in
demonstration (Proust), bet
combinatory power of mon

SG Which brings us to
transformation of artistic
term "enthusiasm" should
where "genius is ignoranc
through one." Which bring
of form and the individual
describe in Mallarme. La po
artist from every period
form without the spirit of

JR It's not a question of e

and its spirit belongs to the
idea of the representative s
pure appearance relying o
as the form of a process, th
The "spirit of form" is the
autonomy and heteronomy
opposed to "formalist" disc
pure form, freed of represe
art. From this point of vie
presented as pure auto-af
them the movement of a fa
makes them more than ae
artifices participating i
experience.

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 Interview 23

SG For you, the

but the area fo
problematic
'aesthetization'
aesthetic idea
what sense?

JR The key idea of the aesthetic as an historical system specific to

contemplating art is the identity between the voluntary and the involuntary--
Vico's poetic revolution in declaring Homer a poet not by virtue of his
inventiveness but by the evidence he gives of a state of infancy vis-a-vis
language; Kant's aimless finality; Schiller's "aesthetic state" that suspends
the usual subordination of passive sensation to active understanding;
Flaubert's or Proust's project of a completely calculated book that would be
identical to a book that would write itself; the impressive gripping of
sensation itself, the unconscious revelations of music in Schopenhauer,
Wagner, Nietzsche, and so on. Hegel'sAesthetics was the great systematization
of art as thought outside of itself. And from there literature assigned itself a
double task--the linguistic and geological one of isolating layers of writing,
while reading hieroglyphics or fossils expressing the layers of history (a la
Balzac), and the task of linking thoughts, sentiments and "typical" characters
to primal elements, in themselves insignificant, of their constitution (a la
Flaubert). This is not the Freudian unconscious, but it prepares the way for
it to become thinkable.
Universite de Paris-VIII

University of Connecticut
interview conducted April 18, 1999
translated by Roxanne Lapidus

Note

1. Elsewhere, Rancibre has defined the "partition of the sensible" as "that system of sensible
evidences that reveals both the existence of a communality and the divisions that define
in it respectively assigned places and parts" ("Interview," in Le partage du sensible; cited
in "Cinematographic Image, Democracy, and the 'Splendor of the Insignificant,' an
Interview with Jacques Ranciere" by Solange Guenoun, translated by Alyson Waters
(Sites, Fall 2000).

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 24 Jacques Ranciere

Selected Bibliograp

Ranciere, Jacques. Aux bords de la

of Politics, trans. Liz Heron. Lon
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Soudiere." Communications 58, 1
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version: The Ignorant Schoolmaste
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* La misentente: Politique et philosophie. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1995. English version:
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Press, 1999.
. Les noms de l'histoire. Essai de poetique du savoir. Paris: Seuil, 1992. English version: The
Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy, intro by Hayden
White. Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 1994.
. La nuit des prolitaires. Paris: Fayard, 1981. English version: The Nights of Labor: The
Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. Jon Drury. Philadelphia, Temple
UP:1989.
La parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littirature. Paris: Hachette, 1998.
-. Le partage du sensible: Esthetique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique, 2000.

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