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Abstract
This essay focuses on the works of two contemporary democratic thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, who are commonly considered to be "theorists of the event" and frequently cited side by side. In this essay, I challenge this categorization by highlighting significant differences between these two theorists' seemingly similar accounts. My argument is that Rancière and Negri have developed their radically different conceptions of democratic action in response to two political questions, which first confronted them in the aftermath of May 1968: What is the role of intellectuals in emancipatory struggles? And who is the subject of revolutionary politics?
Over the last decade, debates in political theory have largely revolved around concerns about lack of political engagement among citizens, the dampening effect of electronic media on political action,1 and the closure of possibilities for emancipatory struggles by the so-called "'post-ideological' consensus"2 that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Things have changed since 2011, when a series of events, ranging from Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square, and the 15-M movement in Spain to protests in Syntagma Square in Greece and Gezi Park in Turkey, reminded us once again of the continuing relevance of popular action in politics. These largely unexpected instances of popular protest also gave rise to an important theoretical question: How should we understand the democratic significance and potential of events such as these?
To address this question many political theorists have turned to the works of a group of thinkers who are broadly construed as, to use Jason Frank's apt words, "theorists of the event, the revolutionary, the ruptural."3 This essay focuses on the works of two contemporary thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, who are commonly considered to be a part of this group and frequently cited side by side.4 That Negri and Rancière are often cited together is hardly surprising. After all, since the 1990s, Rancière and Negri have developed similar conceptualizations of democratic action, which cast it as a moment of insurgency that disrupts the existing order.5 Both Negri and Rancière argue against the conventional conceptions of democracy as a type of regime or a form of government. Instead, they suggest that democracy refers to the moments of "politics,"6 or "the real political,"7 that shake the...