JACQUES RANCIÈRE - FOR LOVE OF DEMOCRACY

Abstract

Following the form and substance content of any encyclopedic endeavor (a first formulation already anticipating the item dedicated to Jacques Rancière in The Encyclopedia of the Fundamental Political Philosophy Works - a fundamental project of the Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations "Ion I. Brätianu", Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania - a project which will be finished in 2017 - the present study follows the method of Rancierian dissension in order to point out, in close proximity to the La haine de la démocratie text, the state of democracy. Within the influx of works, studies and commentaries regarding the fate of democracy, any focusing upon Rancière's perspective would consist in a way of avoiding the categorization or theorization of democratic crises, considering that political metaphors still have politically adequate instruments for denominating "the actual state of democracy".

Headnote

Abstract: Following the form and substance content of any encyclopedic endeavor (a first formulation already anticipating the item dedicated to Jacques Rancière in The Encyclopedia of the Fundamental Political Philosophy Works - a fundamental project of the Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations "Ion I. Brätianu", Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania - a project which will be finished in 2017 - the present study follows the method of Rancierian dissension in order to point out, in close proximity to the La haine de la démocratie text, the state of democracy. Within the influx of works, studies and commentaries regarding the fate of democracy, any focusing upon Rancière's perspective would consist in a way of avoiding the categorization or theorization of democratic crises, considering that political metaphors still have politically adequate instruments for denominating "the actual state of democracy".

Keywords: Jacques Rancière, La haine de la démocratie, critique of democracy, democracy scandal, democracy - democracies.

Jacques Rancière: essential data

An important figure within the group picture of French philosophers of Algerian descent, Jacques Rancière is the architect of a philosophical and political system based upon a correlation of aesthetics, literature, cinematography and an epistemology of emancipation.

An adept of that initiative targeting a definitive separation from dichotomical traditions, and an artisan of emancipation philosophy, involved in eroding those hierarchies with which political philosophy operates, seen in his double instance as theoretician but also a critic1, Jacques Rancière is constantly concerned with dismantling arbitrarily created borders between research disciples and activity domains.

Jacques Rancière is essentially guided, at the beginning of his activity, by Louis Althusser; and consequently advocates the need for suppressing philosophy, with the avowed purpose of actualizing it, as can be inferred from the works of a young Marx (carefully studied by Jacques Rancière). He is also manifestly concerned with the intention of imprinting a permissive process of elasticizing philosophical frontiers - with landmarks in works such as La Pensée sauvage (Claude Lévi-Strauss), Histoire de la folie (Michel Foucault) or Jacques Lacan's work about psychoanalysis. "The Althusser lesson" represents an important step towards tracing Rancière's philosophical profile, announcing a fracture between it and any humanist and Sartrian Marxist scores, and marks the start of structuralist research endeavors within the domain of active thinking (in movement, we note) inside social forms.

The separation from Althusser's thinking is obvious in the process of creating a work which avoids both the deployment of new theories and the destruction of old ones, and which deliberately banks upon structuring a plus- value project and promoting a radical pedagogy extracted from denying the existence of categories such as "pure proletarians", with expected effects in understanding history but also in theorizing the political.

In a Rancière-ian acceptation, politics acknowledges "the existence of contentious data" expressing a conviction that "the whole community shows excesses inside any group or social interest, and none of these groups has the necessary qualifications for governing". Politics is identified with "the part without a part" as "an equal, universally accessible aptitude"2.

What Rancière offers is in fact a tensional method of focalizing upon dissensions which fragment and redistribute senses, without ignoring objects and spaces seen as formulations of political ontology and found in the symbolism of the worker; and also within an aesthetics of the sublime which underlines a central idea of his work - what qualifies as worthy of being thought about. Insistently debated and commented upon, accepted or criticized, Rancière's working method is either subsumed to opinions formed by critical readings of Badiou's and Zizek's works, or influenced by a firmly delimited attitude towards the constellation of thinkers integrating his ideas - Agamben, Derrida, Lyotard or Negri3.

One should beware of criticizing democracy

Hesitating (upon a Romanian translation of the title) between a selection of grammatical instruments offered by the Romanian language - "of", "regarding" and "against" - and trying to find the adequate contextual instruments, Bogdan Ghiu 4 clairvoyantly noted that the paper La haine de la démocratie impressed and surprised everyone by becoming a "reference title" in the North American world; focusing upon "the state of democracy" and "its new theories"5

Certainly, the book was imbued with privileged attention, role and motivation; but it also confirmed the quotient of difficult lectures (the few representations it had within Romanian space sanction its elitist and pompous style), and its status as a manifest program "genealogically debating concepts, frames and strategic categories of discussions about democracy"6. In this sense, Bogdan Ghiu repeats the Rancierian exhortation - beware of criticizing democracy - and advises caution when dealing with critical approaches.

In Rancière's acceptation, democratic scandal (even on a theoretical plan) is nothing new; a first critique of democratic systems (coming from Plato) was fueled by concepts stating that hazardous governing and denial of legitimacy would surprisingly ensure the exercise of governance. If the end of Sovietism is seen as a decisive event, able to deepen the discrepancies between exigencies of an oligarchic world power network and the idea of easily accessible power for everyone, Marxist critique, in disguise, will dress itself up as a critique of democracy itself.

Starting from the cutting- edge observation that "hate directed against democracy" is "as old as democracy itself", being equivalated, in ancient Greece, with an "invented insult", with "lawlessness" and, closer to our times, with "actualized violence"7, Rancière offers, in the introductory part of his work, the object, method and purpose of his book, while at the same time confessing "I have nothing in common with those who proliferate the violence of this hatred - we note - thus, nothing to talk about with them". La haine de la démocratie projects and analyzes, as a nodal point of the debate, "the new hatred directed against democracy", resumed in the idea that "there exists just one good democracy, that which does not allow the disintegration of democratic civilization"8.

From victorious democracy to criminal democracy remarks from the start - in the perspective of victorious democracy emphasized by titles announcing, in March 2005, the success of both Iraqi elections and anti- Syrian manifestations in Beirut - that the triumph of democracy does not entail just a set of inherent advantages, but also the acceptance of a quantum of disorder 9.

In order to avoid being blocked in a syntagm such as "crisis of democracy" (which elicited interest in the 1975 report signed by M. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and J. Watanaki) one can pinpoint the factor which determines and maintains "a crisis of democratic governance which is nothing more than intense democratic life". Rancière offers, as a remedy for democracy's excessive vitality, a return to Pisistratus, via Aristotle, by "aiming for higher purposes" and orienting towards other goals those energies "which are feverishly active upon the public stage"; a solution which has its obverse in citizen indifference towards (even ignorance of) the public good, and in sublimated actions of some governments "called to act upon the demands of society"10.

The refutation and attenuation of democratic vitality would target an easily identifiable double bind placed within that evil which already defines the fundamental character of democratic life; an extended participation of the masses in debates concerning public matters. On the other hand, it is accepted that the good democracy coincides with a capacity to rule and a concept of social life able to correctly assess any excessive collective activity or individual retreat. Hence, we can deduct the signs of a democratic paradox seen as the rule of excess11.

Realizing a parallel between the American perspective upon the crisis of democracy and its French- extraction variation, Rancière notes that, if the first enlists (under the sign of a clash of civilizations) Western- Christian democracy in the ranks of an Oriental- despotic system, the French intelligentsia banks upon a radical reformulation, able to reinstate the formal opposition between a strict democracy- Christianity- Islam relationship, and that of excepted Jewish- type governments.

Impartial and objective, advocating an equidistant position, neither American nor French, Rancière extracts and formulates the principles of antidemocratic discourse from within the rest of "disfigured totalitarianisms" whose attributes already trace a profile of recomposed democracy. The established correspondence between democracy = non- limitedness = society is consolidated through a triple imperative conjunction: 1. democracy has to become a form of society; 2. this form of society is mistaken for the tyranny of egalitarian individuals; 3. mass individual society, identified with democracy, is forced to guarantee the unlimited increase of revenue, a desired objective of any law of logical capitalist economics12.

Written in a Foucaultian manner (with an interest in concepts such as pastoralism, power or police - the last term is reloaded and clarified by Rancière as a defining order of bodies involved in the being's "sequencing" - seen as a way of existence and obedience, representing not just a "disciplinarization" but also a rule, a configuration of occupied spaces, with their inherent properties of distributed force networks). Politics or the lost shepherd investigates the political, defining it as independent from the model of a shepherd feeding his flock. One banks upon a theoretically inverted highway of senses, a reassessment of significances demanding a return to the "lost shepherd" model, seen as the ultimate expression of democratic analysis, a society of consumerist individuals. The nostalgic introduction of Plato's shepherd - from The political Man - into the equation can serve as an argument explaining the opposition good governance - democratic governance13.

Plato openly accuses democracy of applying the status of law dominance (opposed to the demands of medics or shepherds) and is clearly against any situations where their virtues would be manifested only in the benefit of those they care for, adapting to the particular and the sample.

Rancière's opinion is that Plato can be imbued with the quality of inventor of sociological types of reading which define the modern world, a clarification which targets the reality of that state of society in which the egoistical man is the one who rules. Any dissertation upon this theme would state that democracy is, in the vision of logical analysis, a "bad form of governance and of political life", "a false political regime", "a bazaar of constitutions, a harlequin"14.

A diminution (a loss, even) of faith involves the cessation of any mission able to appreciate the authority of filiation as a principle of government, and converts any democratic regime into an anarchistic one. Any government, in order to function, has to acknowledge its own ungovernable character; democratic politics expresses the capacity of governance extended to those lacking any title which would recommend them for this function - a situation attesting to the anarchical institutions of a politics not founded upon natural order.

"Democracy is a political form belonging to another age, unable to suite our age except at the expense of serious rearrangements" states Rancière in his reconfiguration of the profile of democratic man, whom he considers to be "the product of an inaugurating operation". One has to note here that democracy's inherent disorder and lavishness must not be seen as unsettling or dangerous symptoms; on the contrary, they prove that politics can effectively come into being when the principle of governance is separated from that of filiation, but continues to be based upon an inherently identical nature15.

Here is the scandal of democracy!

Under the slogan: Here is the scandal of democracy! Rancière interprets echoing signals noted in the politics of those who do accept neither the hazard gods nor destiny's roulette, noting that, in the acceptation of the police term, both models of governance and authoritarian practices can be based upon a division of places and competencies16.

Democracy, republic, representation relates democracy (a fight for equal rights, targeted against any logical dictate of the electoral system), the republic (an identification of state laws with the values of society, an equivocal term, marked by that tension which includes an excess of politics inside the forms of the political, an educational endeavor harmonizing laws and customs, institutional forms and the social body), and representation (a common, neutral will directed towards particular interests).

Starting from the simplified blueprint of direct democracy - representative democracy (both a pleonasm and an oxymoron) Rancière clarifies the fictional status of democracy and democratic societies, confessing his conviction that there are no democratic governances in existence. In its instance as a non- invented system, representation (the exact opposite of democracy) is, at its origins, a state, an order, a possession, an expression of that willingness demanded by a superior power and which "is not authentic unless it is unanimous"17.

Revealing and enouncing "exactly" the significance and potentialities of democracy, Rancière subsumes to this concept "the juridical and political forms of constitutions and state laws which re not based upon a single logic". In Raymond Aron's vision, a pluralistic constitutional regime represents a mixed form of government which can be assimilated to parliamentary democracy or parliamentary systems. The democratic process deploys the action of subjects who, in the economy of those spaces placed between identities, reconfigures the antagonistic doublings private- public, universal - particular18.

So which would be the reasons and motivation for all this hatred?

The reasons of any hatred, although identifying and denominating a single evil by the problematical terms of the plural democracies, renounces any generalizing sense in order to target and concentrate upon a single hatred; a recent order, structured as a form of confusion affecting the generic understanding of concepts impacting upon the deep significance of an ideological operator which "depoliticizes any problems which belong to public life and transforms them into society events". Thus one can recommend that any nonlegitimate use of the senses of democracy should be regulated, without being minimized or omitted, in a Foucaultian note - a clear equivalent stating that "any battle of words is a battle of things".

We live in democracies (acknowledging a minimal degree of permissiveness for any representative system declaring itself as a democratic one - through short electoral mandates, a monopoly of the state's representatives upon the elaboration of laws, an interdiction for state functionaries to be representatives of the people, a reduction of electoral campaigns and all attached expenses to a minimum, and by controlling any mixing of economic powers into electoral processes). But Rancière's verdict (firmly expressed at the end of his analysis) denies such an affirmation: "We live in oligarchic states" in which "the power of oligarchy is limited by a double recognition of popular sovereignty and individual liberties"19.

As a conclusion, in Rancière's opinion, democracy is not sufficiently mature, so not yet ready to confront the anxieties of a comfort delivered by "the intolerable egalitarian condition of inequality itself", confirming that the period of scholarly- judicial constructs including the power of the people within oligarchic constitutions has been superseded, and that politics and science have thus become both retrograde and obsolete.

Formulating opinions similar to David Estlund's when theorizing epistemic proceduralism and attributing expert responsibilities to any due parties, and amending the intelligentsia's statute as "specializing in symptoms", Rancière offers a convincing and well- integrated model addressing a thematic registry which cannot elude studies by B. Manin, A. Barnett, Peter Carty, O. Dowlen or Y. Sintomer. This relaunches an original political philosophy, countering a direction which would offer a simple diagnosis of democracy's deficiencies. Rancière pleads for exploration, investigation and a crossing of closed fields20, with the obvious purpose of offering both a solution and a model (and less of a treatment) for democracy's reason of being.

Footnote

1Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.

2 Truong, Nicolas, Jacques Rancière, "Il n'y a jamais eu besoin d'expliquer à un travailleur ce qu'est l'exploitation", in Philosophie magazine, http://www.philomag.com/les-idees/entretiens/ jacques-ranciere-il-ny-a-jamais-eu-besoin-dexpliquer-a-un-travailleur-ce-quest (visited 31.05.2007).

3 Jacques Rancière, La haine de la démocratie, La Fabrique éditions, 2005.

4 Ura împotriva democrafiei (La haine de la démocratie), translation into Romanian and foreword by Bogdan Ghiu, Cluj, Idea Print & Design publishing house, 2012.

5 Ibidem, p. 5.

6 Ibidem, p. 9.

7 Ibidem, p. 8.

8 Ibidem, p. 10.

9 Ibidem, p. 11.

10 Ibidem, p. 14.

11 Ibidem, p. 15.

12 Ibidem, pp. 26-27.

13 Ibidem, p. 42.

14 Ibidem, p. 42-43.

15 Ibidem, p. 44.

16 Ibidem, p. 54.

17 Ibidem, p. 60.

18 Ibidem, p. 70.

19 Ibidem, pp. 80-81.

20 Olivier Pascal Mousselard, «Le philosophe Jacques Rancière: "La parole n'est pas plus morale que les images"», in Télérama, nr. 3074, December 15th, 2008.

References

REFERENCES

Campion, Pierre, Jacques Rancière et la démocratie. Un livre d'intervention, http://pierre.campion2.free.fr/cranciere_democratie.htm.

Chambers, Samuel A., (2013), The Lessons of Rancière, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Davis, Olivier (ed.), (2013), Rancière Now, Current Perspectives on Jacques Rancière, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Deranty, Jean-Philippe, Alison Ross (eds.), (2012), Jacques Ranciere and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, Continuum.

Duvoux, Nicolas, (2006), «La haine de la démocratie de Jacques Rancière», in Le Philosophoire, 1/2006 (nr. 26), pp. 129-134.

Ebguy, Jacques-David, (2006), «Le travail de la vérité, la vérité au travail: usages de la littérature chez Alain Badiou et Jacques Rancière», in Fabula LHT (littérature, histoire, théorie), nr. 1, februarie.

Ghiu, Bogdan, (2012), Forward. Democracy Scandal: drawing lots, open political expertise, procedural purism (Cuvânt-înainte. Scandalul democraÇiei: tragere la sorti, expertiza politico, deschisa, purism procedural), in Jacques Rancière, Hatred against Democracy (Ura împotriva democratiei), Cluj, Idea Print & Design Publishing House.

Mousselard, Olivier Pascal, (2008), «Le philosophe Jacques Rancière: "La parole n'est pas plus morale que les images"», in Télérama, no. 3074, 15 decembrie 2008.

Rancière, Jacques, (2009), ''A few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière", in Parallax 52, 15 (3), July-September 2009.

Rancière, Jacques, (2005), La haine de la démocratie, La Fabrique éditions.

Rancière, Jacques, (2012), Ura împotriva democratiei (Hatred against Democracy), Cluj, Idea Print & Design Publishing House.

Todd, May, (2008), The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality, Pennsylvania State University Press.

Truong, Nicolas, Jacques Rancière, (2007), «Il n'y a jamais eu besoin d'expliquer à un travailleur ce qu'est l'exploitation», in Philosophie magazine, 31.05.2007, http://www.philomag.com/les-idees/entretiens/ jacques-ranciere-ilny-a-jamais-eu-besoin-dexpliquer-a-un-travailleur-ce-quest.