Jacques Rancire. "Ten Thesis on Politics." in: Theory & Event. Vol. 5, No. 3, 2001. (English). Thesis 1: Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined on its own terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet politique] not the other way around.

To identify politics with the exercise of, and struggle to possess, power is to do away with politics. But we also reduce the scope of politics as a mode of thinking if we conceive of it merely as a theory of power or as an investigation into the grounds of its legitimacy. If there is something specific about politics that makes it something other than a more capacious mode of grouping or a form of power characterized by its mode of legitimation, it is that it involves a distinctive kind of subject considered, and it involves this subject in the form of a mode of relation that is its own. This is what Aristotle means when, in Book I of the Politics, he distinguishes between political rule (as the ruling of equals) from all other kinds of rule; or when, in Book III, he defines the citizen as 'he who partakes in the fact of ruling and the fact of being ruled.' Everything about politics is contained in this specific relationship, this 'part-taking'avoir-part],[3] which should be interrogated as to its meaning and as to its conditions of possibility. An interrogation into what is 'proper' to politics must be carefully distinguished from current and widespread propositions regarding "the return of the political." In the past several years, and in the context of a state-consensus, we have seen the blossoming of affirmations proclaiming the end of the illusion of the social and a return to a 'pure' form of politics. Read through either an Arendtian or Straussian lens, these affirmations focus on the same Aristotelian texts gestured to above. These readings generally identify the "proper" political order with that of the eu zen (i.e., a conception of the good) as opposed to a zen (conceived as an order of mere living). On this basis, the frontier between the domestic and the political becomes the frontier between the social and the political; and to the idea of a city-state defined by its common good is opposed the sad reality of modern democracy as the rule of the masses and of necessity. In practice, this celebration of pure politics entrusts the virtue of the 'political good' to governmental oligarchies enlightened by "experts;" which is to say that the supposed purification of the political, freed from domestic and social necessity, comes down to nothing more (or less) than the reduction of the political to the state [l'tatique].

Behind the current buffooneries of the 'returns' of the political (that include 'the return of political philosophy'), it is important to recognize the vicious circle that characterizes political philosophy; a vicious circle located in the link between the political relationship and the political subject. This vicious circle posits a way of life that is 'proper' to politics. The political relationship is subsequently deduced from the properties of this specific order of being and is explained in terms of the existence of a character who possesses a good or a specific universality, as opposed to the private or domestic world of needs or interests. In short, politics is explained as the accomplishment of a way of life that is proper to those who are destined for it. This partition -- which is actually the object of politics -- is posited as its basis.

What is proper to politics is thus lost at the outset if politics is thought of as a specific way of living. Politics cannot be defined on the basis of any pre-existing subject. The political 'difference' that makes it possible to think its subject must be sought in the form of its relation. If we return to the Aristotelian definition, there is a name given to the subject (polits) that is defined by a part-taking (metexis) in a form of action (archein -- ruling) and in the undergoing that corresponds to this doing (archesthai -- being ruled). If there is something 'proper' to politics, it consists entirely in this relationship which is not a relationship between subjects, but one between two contradictory terms through which a subject is defined. Politics disappears the moment you undo this knot of a subject and a relation. This is what happens in all fictions, be they speculative or empiricist, that seek the origin of the political relationship in the properties of its subjects and in the conditions of their coming together. The traditional question "For what reasons do human beings gather into political communities?" is always already a response, and one that causes the disappearance of the object it claims to explain or to ground -- i.e., the form of a political part-taking that then disappears in the play of elements or atoms of sociability.

Thesis 2: That is proper to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in contrarieties. Politics is a paradoxical form of action.

The formulations according to which politics is the ruling of equals, and the citizen is the one who part-takes in ruling and being ruled, articulate a paradox that must be thought through rigorously. It is important to set aside banal representations of the doxa of parliamentary systems that invoke the reciprocity of rights and duties in order to understand what is extraordinary in the Aristotelian articulation. This formulation speaks to us of a being who is at once the agent of an action and the one upon whom the action is exercised.[4] It contradicts the conventional 'cause-and-effect' model of action that has it that an agent endowed with a specific capacity produces an effect upon an object that is, in turn, characterized by its aptitude for receiving that effect. This problem is in no way resolved by reverting to the classic opposition between two modes of action: poiesis, on the one hand, governed by the model of fabrication that gives form to matter; and praxis, on the other, which excludes from this relation the 'inter-being' [l'inter-tre][5] of people devoted to politics. As we know, this opposition -- replacing that of zen and eu zen -- sustains a conception of political purity. In Hannah Arendt's work, for instance, the order of praxis is that of equals with the power of archein, conceived of as the power to begin anew: "To act, in its most general sense," she explains in The Human Condition, "means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, 'to begin,' 'to lead,' and eventually 'to rule' indicates);" she concludes this thought by subsequently linking archein to "the principle of freedom."[6] Once Arendt defines both a proper mode and sphere of action, a vertiginous short-cut is formed that allows one to posit a series of equations between 'beginning,' 'ruling,' 'being free,' and living in a city-state ('To be free and to live in a polis is the same thing' as the same text puts it).

This series of equations finds its equivalent in the movement that engenders civic equality from the community of Homeric heroes; equals, that is, in their participation in the power of arche. The first witness against this Homeric idyllic, however, is Homer himself. Against the garrulous Thersites -- the man who is an able public speaker despite the fact that he is not qualified to speak -- Odysseus recalls the fact that the Greek army has one and only one chief: Agamemnon. He reminds us of what archein means: to walk at the head. And, if there is one who walks at the head, the others must necessarily walk behind. The line between the power of archein (i.e., the power to rule), freedom, and the polis, is not straight but severed. In order to convince oneself of this, it is enough to see the manner in which Aristotle characterizes the three possible classes of rule within a polis, each one possessing a particular title: 'virtue' for the aristoi, 'wealth' for the oligoi, and 'freedom' for the demos. In this division, 'freedom' appears as the paradoxical part of the demos about whom the Homeric hero tells us (in no uncertain terms) that it had only one thing to do: to keep quiet and bow down. In short, the opposition between praxis and poiesis in no way resolves the paradoxical definition of the polits. As far as arche is concerned, as with everything else, the conventional logic has it that there is a particular disposition to act that is exercised upon a particular disposition to 'be acted upon.' Thus the logic of arche presupposes a determinate superiority exercised upon an equally determinate inferiority. In order for there to be a political subject(ivity), and thus for there to be politics, there must be a rupture in this logic. Thesis 3: Politics is a specific rupture in the logic of arche. It does not simply presuppose the rupture of the 'normal' distribution of positions between the one who exercises power and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions 'proper' to such classifications.

In Book III of the Laws, Plato devotes himself to a systematic inventory of the qualifications (axiomata) for ruling, along with certain correlative qualifications for being ruled. Out of the seven he retains, four are traditional qualifications of authority based on a natural difference; that is, the difference in birth. Those qualified to rule are those 'born before' or 'born otherwise.' This grounds the power of parents over children, old over young, masters over slaves, and nobles over serfs. The fifth qualification is introduced as the principal principle that summarizes all natural differences: It is the power of those with a superior nature, of the stronger over the weak -- a power that has the unfortunate quality, discussed at length in the Gorgias, of being indeterminate. The sixth qualification, then, gives the only difference that counts for Plato; namely, the power of those who know [savoir] over those who do not. There are thus four couplings of traditional qualifications to be had, along with two theoretical couplings that claim priority over them: namely, 'natural' superiority and the rule of 'science' qua knowledge. The list ought to stop there. But there is a seventh qualification: 'the choice of god,' otherwise referring to a drawing of lots [le tirage au sort] that designates the one who exercises arche. Plato does not expand upon this. But clearly, this kind of 'choice' points ironically to the designation by god of a regime previously referred to as one only god could save: namely, democracy. What thus characterizes a democracy is pure chance or the complete absence of qualifications for governing. Democracy is that state of exception where no oppositions can function, where there is no pre-determined principle of role allocation. 'To partake in ruling and being ruled' is quite a different matter from reciprocity. It is, in short, an absence of reciprocity that constitutes the exceptional essence of this relationship; and this absence of reciprocity rests on the paradox of a qualification that is absence of qualification. Democracy is the specific situation in which there is an absence of qualifications that, in turn, becomes the qualification for the exercise of a democratic arche. What is destroyed in this logic is the particular quality of arche, its redoubling, which means that it always precedes itself within a circle of its own disposition and its own exercise. But this exceptional state is identical with the very condition for the specificity of politics more generally.

Thesis 4: Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a rupture in the logic of arche -- that is, in the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it -- democracy is the regime of politics in the form of a relationship defining a specific subject.

What makes possible the metexis proper to politics is the rupture of all those logics of allocation exercised in the part-taking of arche. The 'freedom' of a people that constitutes the axiom of democracy has as its real content the rupture of the axioms of domination: a rupture, that is, in the correlation between a capacity for rule and a capacity for being ruled. The citizen who partakes 'in ruling and being ruled' is only thinkable on the basis of the demos as a figure that ruptures the correspondence between a series of correlated capacities. Democracy is thus precisely not a political regime in the sense of a particular constitution that determines different ways of assembling people under a common authority. Democracy is the institution of politics -- the institution of both its subject and its mode of relating. As we know, democracy is a term invented by its opponents, by all those who were 'qualified' to govern because of seniority, birth, wealth, virtue, and knowledge [savoir]. Using it as a term of derision, they articulated an unprecedented reversal of the order of things: the 'power of the demos' means that those who rule are those who have no specificity in common, apart from their having no qualification for governing. Before being the name of a community, demos is the name of a part of the community: namely, the poor. The 'poor,' however, does not designate an economically disadvantaged part of the population; it simply designates the category of peoples who do not count, those who have no qualifications to part-take in arche, no qualification for being taken into account.

This is exactly what Homer describes in the Thersites episode evoked above. Those who want to speak, though they belong to the demos, though they belong to the undifferentiated collection of the 'unaccounted for' [l'hors-compte] (anarithmoi), get stabbed in the back by Odysseus' scepter. This is not a deduction but a definition: The one who is 'unaccounted-for,' the one who has no speech to be heard, is the one of the demos. A remarkable passage from Book XII of the Odyssey illustrates this point: Polydamas complains because his opinion has been disregarded by Hector. With you, he says, 'one never has the right to speak if one belongs to the demos.' Now Polydamas is not a villain like Thersites; he is Hector's brother. Demos thus does not designate a socially inferior category: The one who speaks when s/he is not to speak, the one who part-takes in what s/he has no part in -- that person belongs to the demos. Thesis 5: The 'people' that is the subject of democracy -- and thus the principal subject of politics -- is not the collection of members in a community, or the laboring classes of the population. It is the supplementary part, in relation to any counting of parts of the population that makes it possible to identify 'the part of those who have no-part' [le compte des incompts][7] with the whole of the community.

The people (demos) exists only as a rupture of the logic of arche, a rupture of the logic of beginning/ruling [commencement/commandement]. It should not be identified either with the race of those who recognize each other as having the same origin, the same birth, or with a part of a population or even the sum of its parts. 'People' [peuple] refers to the supplement that disconnects the population from itself, by suspending the various logics of legitimate domination. This disjunction is illustrated particularly well in the crucial reforms that give Athenian democracy its proper status; namely, those reforms enacted by Cleisthenes when he rearranged the distribution of the demes [8] over the territory of the city. In constituting each tribe by the addition of three separate boundaries -- one from the city, one from the coast, and one from the countryside -- Cleisthenes broke with the ancient principle that kept the tribes under the rule of local aristocratic chieftainships whose power, legitimated through legendary birth, had as its real content the economic power of the landowners. In short, the 'people' is an artifice set at an angle from the logic that gives the principle of wealth as heir to the principle of birth. It is an abstract supplement in relation to any actual (ac)count of the parts of the population, of their qualifications for part-taking in the community, and of the common shares due to them according to these qualifications. The 'people' is the supplement that inscribes 'the count of the unaccounted-for' or 'the part of those who have no part.'

These expressions should not be understood in their more populist sense but rather in a structural sense. It is not the laboring and suffering populace that comes to occupy the terrain of political action and to identify its name with that of the community. What is identified by democracy with the role of the community is an empty, supplementary, part that separates the community from the sum of the parts of the social body. This separation, in turn, grounds politics in the action of supplementary subjects that are a surplus in relation to any (ac)count of the parts of society. The whole question of politics thus lies in the interpretation of this void. The criticisms that sought to discredit democracy brought the 'nothing' which constitutes the political people back to the overflow of the ignorant masses and the greedy populace. The interpretation of democracy posed by Claude Lefort gave the democratic void its structural meaning.[9] But the theory of the structural void can be interpreted in two distinct ways: First, the structural void refers to an-archy, to the absence of an entitlement to rule that constitutes the very nature of the political space; Secondly, the void is caused by the 'dis-incorporation' of the king's two bodies -- the human and divine body.[10] Democracy, according to this latter view, begins with the murder of the king; in other words, with a collapse of the symbolic thereby producing a dis-incorporated social presence. And this originary link is posed as the equivalent of an original temptation to imaginatively reconstruct the 'glorious body of the people' that is heir to the immortal body of the king and the basis of every totalitarianism. Against these interpretations, let us say that the two-fold body of the people is not a modern consequence of the sacrifice of the sovereign body but rather a given constitutive of politics. It is initially the people, and not the king, that has a double body and this duality is nothing other than the supplement through which politics exists: a supplement to all social (ac)counts and an exception to all logics of domination.

The seventh qualification, Plato says, is 'god's part.' We will maintain that this part belonging to god -- this qualification of those who have no qualification -- contains within it all that is theological in politics. The contemporary emphasis on the theme of the 'theologico-political' dissolves the question of politics into that of power and of the grounding event that is its fundament. It re-doubles the liberal fiction of the contract with the representation of an original sacrifice. But the division of arche that conjoins politics and democracy is not a founding sacrifice: It is, rather, a neutralization of any founding sacrifice. This neutralization could find its exact fable at the end of Oedipus at Colonus: it is at the price of the disappearance of the sacrificial body, at the price of not seeking Oedipus' body, that Athenian democracy receives the benefit of its burial. To want to disinter the body is not only to associate the democratic form with a scenario of sin or of original malediction. More radically, it is to return the logic of politics to the question of an originary scene of power; in other words, to return politics to the state. By interpreting the empty part in terms of psychosis, the dramaturgy of original symbolic catastrophe transforms the political exception into a sacrificial symptom of democracy: It subsumes the litigiousness proper to politics under any of the innumerable versions of an originary 'crime' or 'murder.' Thesis 6: If politics is the outline of a vanishing difference, with the distribution of social parts and shares, then it follows that its existence is in no way necessary, but that it occurs as a provisional accident in the history of the forms of domination. It also follows from this that political litigiousness has as its essential object the very existence of politics.

Politics cannot be deduced from the necessity of gathering people into communities. It is an exception to the principles according to which this gathering operates. The 'normal' order of things is that human communities gather together under the rule of those qualified to rule -- whose qualifications are legitimated by the very fact that they are ruling. These governmental qualifications may be summed up according to two central principles: The first refers society to the order of filiation, both human and divine. This is the power of birth. The second refers society to the vital principle of its activities. This is the power of wealth. Thus, the 'normal' evolution of society comes to us in the progression from a government of birth to a government of wealth. Politics exists as a deviation from this normal order of things. It is this anomaly that is expressed in the nature of political subjects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscription of 'the (ac)count of the unaccounted-for.' There is politics as long as 'the people' is not identified with the race or a population, inasmuch as the poor are not equated with a particular disadvantaged sector, and as long as the proletariat is not a group of industrial workers, etc Rather, there is politics inasmuch as 'the people' refers to subjects inscribed as a supplement to the count of the parts of society, a specific figure of 'the part of those who have no-part.' Whether this part exists is the political issue and it is the object of political litigation. Political struggle is not a conflict between well defined interest groups; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the community in different ways. The clash between the 'rich' and the 'poor,' for instance, is the struggle over the very possibility of these words being coupled, of their being able to institute categories for another (ac)counting of the community. There are two ways of counting the parts of the community: The first only counts empirical parts -- actual groups defined by differences in birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute the social body. The second counts 'in addition' a part of the no-part. We will call the first police and the second politics. Thesis 7:

Politics is specifically opposed to the police. The police is a 'partition of the sensible' [le partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement.

The police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. The essence of the police is neither repression nor even control over the living. Its essence is a certain manner of partitioning the sensible. We will call 'partition of the sensible' a general law that defines the forms of part-taking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed. The partition of the sensible is the cutting-up of the world and of 'world;' it is the nemen upon which the nomoi of the community are founded. This partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, that which separates and excludes; on the other, that which allows participation (see Editor's note 2). A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared 'common' [un commun partag] and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined through the sensible. This latter form of distribution, in turn, itself presupposes a partition between what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible. The essence of the police is to be a partition of the sensible characterized by the absence of a void or a supplement: society consists of groups dedicated to specific modes of action, in places where these occupations are exercised, in modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places. In this fittingness of functions, places, and ways of being, there is no place for a void. It is this exclusion of what 'there is not' that is the police-principle at the heart of statist practices. The essence of politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable. Thesis 8:

The principal function of politics is the configuration of its proper space. It is to disclose the world of its subjects and its operations. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one.[11]

Let us begin from an empirical given: police intervention in public spaces does not consist primarily in the interpellation of demonstrators, but in the breaking up of demonstrations. The police is not that law interpellating individuals (as in Althusser's "Hey, you there!") unless one confuses it with religious subjectification.[12] It is, first of all, a reminder of the obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there isn't: "Move along! There is nothing to see here!" The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of 'moving-along' into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein. It is the established litigation of the perceptible, on the nemen that founds any communal nomos. This partition constituting politics is never given in the form of a lot, of a kind of property that obliges or compels politics. These properties are litigious as much in their understanding as in their extension. Exemplary in this regard are those properties that, for Aristotle, define a political ability or are intended for 'the good life.' Apparently nothing could be clearer than the distinction made by Aristotle in Book I of the Politics: the sign of the political nature of humans is constituted by their possession of the logos, the articulate language appropriate for manifesting a community in the aisthesis of the just and the unjust, as opposed to the animal phone, appropriate only for expressing the feelings of pleasure and displeasure. If you are in the presence of an animal possessing the ability of the articulate language and its power of manifestation, you know you are dealing with a human and therefore with a political animal. The only practical difficulty is in knowing which sign is required to recognize the sign; that is, how one can be sure that the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths. And the same goes for the opposition so readily invoked between the obscurity of domestic and private life, and the radiant luminosity of the public life of equals. In order to refuse the title of political subjects to a category -- workers, women, etc -- it has traditionally been sufficient to assert that they belong to a 'domestic' space, to a space separated from public life; one from which only groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger, or anger could emerge, but not actual speeches demonstrating a shared aisthesis. And the politics of these categories has always consisted in re-qualifying these places, in getting them to be seen as the spaces of a community, of getting themselves to be seen or heard as speaking subjects (if only in the form of litigation); in short, participants in a common aisthesis. It has consisted in making what was unseen visible; in getting what was only audible as noise to be heard as speech; in demonstrating to be a feeling of shared 'good' or 'evil' what had appeared merely as an expression of pleasure or pain.

The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not the confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the manifestation of a distance of the sensible from itself. Politics makes visible that which had no reason to be seen, it lodges one world into another (for instance, the world where the factory is a public space within the one where it is considered a private one, the world where workers speak out vis--vis the one where their voices are merely cries expressing pain). This is precisely why politics cannot be identified with the model of communicative action since this model presupposes the partners in communicative exchange to be pre-constituted, and that the discursive forms of exchange imply a speech community whose constraint is always explicable. In contrast, the particular feature of political dissensus is that the partners are no more constituted than is the object or the very scene of discussion. The ones making visible the fact that they belong to a shared world the other does not see -- cannot take advantage of -- the logic implicit to a pragmatics of communication. The worker who argues for the public nature of a 'domestic' matter (such as a salary dispute) must indicate the world in which his argument counts as an argument and must demonstrate it as such for those who do not possess a frame of reference to conceive of it as argument. Political argument is at one and the same time the demonstration of a possible world where the argument could count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that he or she 'normally' has no reason to either see or hear. It is the construction of a paradoxical world that relates two separate worlds. Politics thus has no 'proper' place nor does it possess any 'natural' subjects. A demonstration is political not because it takes place in a specific locale and bears upon a particular object but rather because its form is that of a clash between two partitions of the sensible. A political subject is not a group of interests or ideas: It is the operator of a particular mode of subjectification and litigation through which politics has its existence. Political demonstrations are thus always of the moment and their subjects are always provisional. Political difference is always on the shore of its own disappearance: the people are close to sinking into the sea of the population or of race, the proletariat borders on being confused with workers defending their interests, the space of a people's public demonstration is always at risk of being confused with the merchant's agora, etc. The deduction of politics from a specific world of equals or free people, as opposed to another world lived out of necessity, takes as its ground precisely the object of its litigation. It thus renders compulsory a blindness to those who 'do not see' and have no place from which to be seen. Exemplary, in this regard, is a passage from Arendt's On Revolution discussing the manner in which John Adams identifies the unhappiness of the poor with the fact of 'not being seen.'[13] Such an identification, she comments, could itself only emanate from a man belonging to a privileged community of equals. And, by the same token, it could 'hardly be understood' by the people comprising the relevant categories. We could express amazement at the extraordinary deafness of this affirmation in the face of the multiplicity of discourses and demonstrations of the 'poor' concerning precisely their mode of visibility. But this deafness has nothing accidental about it. It forms a circle with the acceptance of an original partition, a founding politics, with what was in fact the permanent object of litigation constituting politics. It forms a circle with the definition of homo laborans as a partition of the 'ways of life.' This circle is not that of any particular theoretician; it is the circle of 'political philosophy.' Thesis 9: Inasmuch as what is proper to 'political philosophy' is to ground political action in a specific mode of being, so is it the case that 'political philosophy' effaces the litigiousness constitutive of politics. It is in its very description of the world of politics that philosophy effects this effacement. Moreover, its effectiveness is perpetuated through to the non-philosophical or anti-philosophical description of the world.

That the distinguishing feature of politics is the existence of a subject who 'rules' by the very fact of having no qualifications to rule; that the principle of beginnings/ruling is irremediably divided as a result of this, and that the political community is specifically a litigious community -- this is the 'political secret' that philosophy first encounters. If we can speak of the privileged stature of the 'Ancients' over the 'Moderns,' it is a consequence of their having first perceived this 'secret' and not of having been the first to oppose the community of the 'good' to that of the 'useful.' At the head of the anodyne expression 'political philosophy' one finds the violent encounter between philosophy and the exception to the law of arche proper to politics, along with philosophy's effort to resituate politics under the auspices of this law. The Gorgias, the Republic, the Politics, the Laws, all these texts reveal the same effort to efface the paradox or scandal of a 'seventh qualification' -- to make of democracy a simple case of the indeterminable principle of 'the government of the strongest,' against which one can only oppose a government of those who know [les savants]. These texts all reveal a similar strategy of placing the community under a unique law of partition and expelling the empty part of the demos from the communal body. But this expulsion does not simply take place in the form of the opposition between the 'good' regime of the community that is both one and hierarchised according to its principle of unity, and the 'bad' regimes of division and disorder. It takes place within the very presupposition that identifies a political form with a way of life; and this presupposition is already operating in the procedures for describing 'bad' regimes, and democracy in particular. All of politics, as we have said, is played out in the interpretation of democratic 'anarchy.' In identifying it with the dispersal of the desires of democratic man, Plato transforms the form of politics into a mode of existence and, further, transforms the void into an overflow. Before being the theorist of the 'ideal' or 'enclosed' city-state, Plato is the founder of the anthropological conception of the political, the conception that identifies politics with the deployment of the properties of a type of man or a mode of life. This kind of 'man,' this 'way of being,' this form of the city-state: it is there, before any discourse on the laws or the educational methods of the ideal state, before even the partition of the classes of the community, the partition of the perceptible that cancels out political singularity.

The initial gesture of political philosophy thus has a two-fold consequence: On the one hand, Plato founds a community that is the effectuation of a principle of unity, of an undivided principle -- a community strictly defined as a common body with its places and functions and with its forms of interiorisation of the common. He founds an archi-politics[14] based on a law of unity between the 'occupations' of the city-state and its 'ethos,' (in other words its way of inhabiting an abode), as law but also as the specific 'tone' according to which this ethos reveals itself. This etho-logy of the community once again makes politics and police indistinguishable. And political philosophy, inasmuch as it wants to give to the community a single foundation, is condemned to have to re-identify politics and police, to cancel out politics through the gesture that founds it. But Plato also invents a 'concrete' mode for describing the production of political forms. In a word, he invents the very forms of the refusal of the 'ideal state,' the settled forms of opposition between philosophical 'a-prior-ism' and concrete sociological or political-scientific analyses of the forms of politics as expressions of ways of life. This second legacy is more profound and more long-lasting than the first. The sociology of the political is the second resource -- the deuteron plous -- of political philosophy that accomplishes (sometimes against itself) its fundamental project: to found the community on the basis of a univocal partition of the sensible. In particular, de Tocqueville's analysis of democracy, whose innumerable variants and ersatz versions feed the discourses on modern democracy, the age of the masses, the mass individual, etc., fits into the continuity of the theoretical gesture that cancels out the structural singularity of 'the qualification without qualifications' and the 'part of the no-part,' by re-describing democracy as a social phenomenon, of the collective effectuation of the properties of a type of man. Inversely, the claims for the purity of the bios politikos (of the republican constitution and of the community versus the individual or democratic mass, and the opposition between the political and the social) share in the effectiveness of the same knot between the a-prior-ism of the 'republican' re-founding, and the sociological description of democracy. No matter which side one rests on, the opposition between the 'political' and the 'social' is a matter defined entirely within the frame of 'political philosophy;' in other words, it is a matter that lies at the heart of the philosophical repression of politics. The current proclamations of a 'return to politics' and 'political philosophy' are an imitation of the originary gesture of 'political philosophy,' without actually grasping the principles or issues involved in it. In this sense, it is the radical forgetting of politics and of the tense relationship between politics and philosophy. The sociological theme of the 'end of politics' in post-modern society and the 'politico' theme of the 'return of politics' both derive from the initial double gesture of 'political philosophy' and both move towards the same forgetting of politics. Thesis 10: The 'end of politics' and the 'return of politics' are two complementary ways of canceling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the social and a state of statist apparatuses. 'Consensus' is the vulgar name given to this cancellation.

The essence of politics resides in the modes of dissensual subjectification that reveal the difference of a society to itself. The essence of consensus is not peaceful discussion and reasonable agreement as opposed to conflict or violence. Its essence is the annulment of dissensus as the separation of the sensible from itself, the annulment of surplus subjects, the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body, and of the political community to the relationship of interests and aspirations of these different parts. Consensus is the reduction of politics to the police. In other words, it is the 'end of politics' and not the accomplishment of its ends but, simply, the return of the 'normal' state of things which is that of politics' non-existence. The 'end of politics' is the ever-present shore of politics [le bord de la politique] that, in turn, is an activity of the moment and always provisional. 'Return of politics' and 'end of politics' are two symmetrical interpretations producing the same effect: to efface the very concept of politics, and the precariousness that is one of its essential elements. In proclaiming the end of usurpations of the social and the return to 'pure' politics, the 'return of politics' thesis simply occludes the fact that the 'social' is in no way a particular sphere of existence but, rather, a disputed object of politics. Therefore, the subsequently proclaimed end of the social is, simply put, the end of political litigation regarding the partition of worlds. The 'return of politics' is thus the affirmation that there is a specific place for politics. Isolated in this manner, this specific space can be nothing other than the place of the state and, in fact, the theorists of the 'return of politics' ultimately affirm that politics is out-dated. They identify it with the practices of state control which have, as their principal principle, the suppression of politics.

The sociological thesis of the 'end of politics' symmetrically posits the existence of a state of the social such that politics no longer has a necessary raison-d'tre; whether or not it has accomplished its ends by bringing into being precisely this state (i.e., the exoteric American Hegelian-Fukayama-ist version) or whether its forms are no longer adapted to the fluidity and artificiality of present-day economic and social relations (i.e., the esoteric European Heideggerian-Situationist version). The thesis thus amounts to asserting that the logical telos of capitalism makes it so that politics becomes, once again, out dated. And then it concludes with either the mourning of politics before the triumph of an immaterial Leviathan, or its transformation into forms that are broken up, segmented, cybernetic, ludic, etc -- adapted to those forms of the social that correspond to the highest stage of capitalism. It thus fails to recognize that in actual fact, politics has no reason for being in any state of the social and that the contradiction of the two logics is an unchanging given that defines the contingency and precariousness proper to politics. Via a Marxist detour, the 'end of politics' thesis -- along with the consensualist thesis -- grounds politics in a particular mode of life that identifies the political community with the social body, subsequently identifying political practice with state practice. The debate between the philosophers of the 'return of politics' and the sociologists of the 'end of politics' is thus a straightforward debate regarding the order in which it is appropriate to take the presuppositions of 'political philosophy' so as to interpret the consensualist practice of annihilating politics. Notes [1] The original translation of the "Ten Theses" was done by Rachel Bowlby. However, some phrases were modified by Davide Panagia in consultation with Jacques Rancire. Terms in square brackets are Rancire's original French expressions.

[2] Our English 'political subject(ivity)' does not give an adequate sense of Rancire's "le sujet politique," a term that refers both to the idea of a political subjectivity and to the 'proper' subject of politics. [3] Rancire plays on the double meaning of the avoir-part as both a 'partaking' and a 'partition.'

[4] The reference is to Arendt's claim that "the human capacity for freedom, which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle its producer to such an extent that he appears much more the victim and the sufferer than the author and the doer of what he has done" (The Human Condition, p. 233-234; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

[5] The word-play, here, is on the idea of an 'inter-est' referring both to a principle of inter-relating and to the idea of societal 'interest.' Rancire is invoking an Arendtian distinction found in her The Human Condition (see pages 50-58).

[6] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 177.

[7] Though the literal translation of the French is "the count of the unaccounted-for" the formulation found in the English translation of Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, (Julie Rose trans., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) is retained for the sake of consistency.

[8] Demes were townships or divisions of ancient Attica. In modern Greece the term refers to communes.

[9] See Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) especially Part IV: "On the Irreducible Element."

[10] Rancire is invoking Ernst Kantorowicz's work on medieval political theology, also present in Lefort's study.

[11] Rancire's conception of dissensus counts as an instance of the paradox of the 'one and the many' characteristic of democratic politics.

[12] Rancire here refers to Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (see Lenin and Philosophy, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

[13] See Arendt's chapter entitled "The Social Question" from On Revolution; especially pages 68-71 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

[14] See Rancire's Dis-agreement (Chapter 4) for an extended discussion of this concept.

Jacques Rancire. Art Is Going Elsewhere. And Politics Has to Catch It. Jacques Rancire and Sudeep Dasgupta. "Art Is Going Elsewhere. And Politics Has to Catch It." in: Krisis. 2008, Issue 1, (English).

The reflections of the French philosopher Jacques Rancire shift in be- tween literature, film, pedagogy, historiography, proletarian history and philosophy. He came to prominence when he contributed to Althussers Lire le capital (1965) and, shortly after, published a fervent critique of Al- thusser La Leon dAlthusser (1974). He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University of Paris VIII (St. Denis) and continues to teach, as a visiting professor, in a number of universities, including Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley. A recurrent motif in Rancires work is capturing the relation between politics and aesthetics, and their various meanings in different contexts. Much of his work can be characterized as an attempt to rethink and subvert categories, disciplines and discourses. On October 30 2007, a Dutch combined translation of Le partage du sensible and Linconscient esthtique was presented in Amsterdam.1 On this occasion Sudeep Dasgupta interviewed Rancire on sensory experience, the play of art, and politics as a form of disturbance. The first moment in your intellectual career was your engagement with Louis Althusser and marxism, in particular with the notion of philosophy as having a strong function in defining or in distinguishing science from ideology; philosophy was closely linked to a strict definition of science, producing concepts. You made a big impression with your important essay on critique in Marx. After that, you turned away from a particular way of thinking about philosophy and went to the archives, particularly to research on nineteenth century workers in France. What motivated that turn away from philosophy to the archives, which is not a very common turn that philosophers take? What did you hope to find there? Could you connect it to how your work developed subsequently? I am not the first philosopher who decided to go to the archives. There was, of course, the example of Foucault. He did something very surprising for my generation; it was the first time a history of madness appeared. What was it? A book of a philosopher and its all about questions of the poor, of medicine, of asylums. There already was this model and it was not a bad model, I think. Second, it was the leftist movement of 68; it became obvious that something was wrong with the idea that people were exploited and dominated because they didnt know the law of exploitation and domination; so the sciences were there to bring them the knowledge of what they wished to know. There was a sort of vicious circle: the people cannot understand the place where they are in the system because it is precisely a law of the system that it conceals itself. It was a kind of tauto- logy. Science was supposed to free people and to give them the knowledge in order to emancipate them, but what science basically would explain is what people necessarily are to ignore, that is, what science could tell of their position. People were dominated because they were ignorant and they were ignorant because they were dominated. So what I tried to do was get another idea of that vicious circle. First, of course, I had a kind of naive idea: lets go to the archives to see the reality of social movements, of workers movements; lets find a sociology of workers practice, workers movement, workers thinking and workers emancipation. But what appeared to me in this research is that it was impossible to op- pose something like an authentic workers thought to Marxist thought. It was impossible to deduce the workers movement, socialism and revo- lution from a lived experience from popular culture and so on. Why pre- cisely? Because of the vicious circle. Just a little earlier Ruth Sonderegger explained in which way Plato said everything about the workers condi- tion. 2 According to Plato, workers have to do just their own business. They cannot do anything else but their own business for two reasons. The first reason is that they have no time. The second is that they have the aptitude fitting that business, which is the same thing as saying that they have no other aptitude. They have the aptitude to do this, and to be in this place, and to be in this space-time which of course is the reverse of their exclusion. What interested me, and what Ive discovered, is that the possi- bility of workers emancipation is to transform the circle in a kind of spiral by getting out of that workers identity which was not just a condition but a whole sensible world, that is, of domination and exploitation. It was a matter of what could be seen, what could be sensed. What does it mean, the distribution of the sensible? What kind of world is given to you, and how do you make sense of that given sensory world? What Ive tried is to build from their collectivity a new kind of subjectivity. This means that proletarians had a possibility of getting away from that workers identity, that workers culture, that workers body. Emancipation would be about creating for themselves a new body, a new lived world. And so it was clear that the problem was not that they ignored their condition but that for them it was being able to ignore it. To do as if they were not in that position. There is this famous text of Kant, Critique of Judgment, saying that aesthetic judgment asks us only to be sensible of form. When standing in front of a palace, it does not matter that it was built out of the sweat of the poor people; we have to ignore that, says Kant. I think Kant was right. At the same time I came upon a text written by a joiner, a floor-layer,3 and he explains precisely what he sees as he is laying a floor in a rich house. He decides to acquire an aesthetic perception of the room, of the garden, of the whole perspective. So he decides to do as if he had a disinterested gaze, and could get an aesthetic judgment, notwithstanding the fact that he is poorly paid, that he works for a boss, and that he works for the rich. For me this was important. It reminded me of my view of aesthetics aesthetics not being a sociology of art but as being a form of experience. That is, an experience of disconnection. This has been conceptionalized by Kant and Schiller in terms of disconnection: there is something that es- capes the normal conditions of sensory experience. That is what was at stake in emancipation: getting out of the ordinary ways of sensory expe- rience. This thought has been important for my idea of politics, not being about the relations of power but being about the framing of the sensory world itself. Where do you locate your work? This has been a problem for a lot of people over the years: What is Rancire? Is he a philosopher? Is he a literary critic? Your books cover fields from pedagogy, the writing of history, philosophy, cinema and literature. Youve occupied a po- sition in philosophy and in aesthetics. Yet you have very strongly stated that you are neither a philosopher of politics nor are you a historian of art. Would you say that your work, through the decades, has leaned or been closer to a particular discipline, or could you say the point of your work has been precisely to critique them and if so, how? What kind of central themes come up? You are interested in an object and you try to understand it. For instance, you try to understand how people can change the sensible frames of exis- tence as was the case in the process of emancipation. So you go to the archives, to see documents about workers conditions, workers thought, et cetera. At that point you are supposed to be in the field of the historian. Historians ask you: what is your historical method? You have to apply a historical method. My question became: what is historical method? You only try to understand something; therefore you go to materials that may help you to understand. Then you try to make sense of them. What kind of method is this? You use your brains. You try to find something and you use your brains to make sense of it. Historical method does mean some- thing; I am not saying it does not mean anything. It means you have to be located in this place, because this object is social history. Workers thought was part of workers life, workers experience, the expression of that expe- rience. There was a leading social historian of the working class in France who made a bibliography about literature on workers. And it happened that my book was put in the subcategory cultural and religious con- science of work. The right method of the philosophers, sociologists, the literary critics, is just the same as the Platonic commandment: you have to do your own business. But, of course, if I do my own business, it means I have to give up my object. My object is people who dont want to keep to their own business. From my point of view, there is no real field of discipline. The borders of a discipline just mean: you are not supposed to go outside of this. To under- stand the question I just had to go outside. I had to put together things that do not go together. Namely, Platos text about workers lack of time, and a workers text in the nineteenth century thousands of years after Plato dealing precisely with what it meant to have no time. So if I want to understand, I have to cross the borders of disciplines. This kind of de- lineation of borders is the other face of an inner prescription. There are two ways of thinking. There is the thinking of the poor, which is the expression of his condition. And there is the thinking of a thinker, who makes the bibliography and who organizes the category. And this thinker knows he can encompass the totality and understand that in this totality are some manifestations of thought. But thought is just an ex- pression of a condition. So basically when my work doesnt belong to a discipline, it belongs to an attempt to break the borders of the disciplines. Because borders are only there to say you must not cross the border, and to say: there are two kinds of thought, two kinds of thinking beings. What Ive tried to demonstrate is there is only one kind of thinking being and that everybody uses his or her own brains to try to understand something. So a discipline is a fiction. This does not mean it is imaginary. It means it is a kind of construction of a territory with a population, with forms of sensory representation, with ways of making sense of things. It is also a political, or a meta-political, fiction. If you think of sociology, for instance, and the way Bourdieu discovered the habitus and so on, it reminds us of the fact that sociology is not a kind of science that has fallen from the sky at a certain time. Sociology was politics. It emerged in the nineteenth cen- tury, that is, after the revolution, because there was the big concern at the time that people are no longer at their place, that there are no more common representations uniting people, no monarchy, no religion, no feudality. Thus we had to invent a new form of aggregation of society and new forms of collective thinking. And in this case, of course, new forms of anomie and of heresy, a form of modern thinking about emancipation, about being different from oneself, had to be pushed aside. Part of the growing importance of your work and its reception in the art world, has been your very strong critique of a certain kind of teleology, a certain kind of historical narrative, which goes, very quickly put: realism, modernism, postmodernism. You have also been very critical of contemporary art which claims to be political, to the extent that it is very critical of capi- talism, for example, and the fact that we are all caught up in the consumer culture, and you have argued that what art keeps doing in this kind of denunciation of capitalism is to bear witness to its own powerlessness. You reject this narrative of realism/modernism/- postmodernism, and youve brought up three regimes: the ethical, the representative, and the aesthetic regime. The aesthetic regime has been crucial to a lot of your arguments in different fields. If there are problems with the realism/modernism/postmodernism-narrative, could we see the ethical, representative and aesthetic regimes as a kind of parallel historical narrative? To put briefly, is it one narrative rejected by you and replaced by another, or is there some- thing specific about these three regimes that make us rethink how to think about our relation to history? I am thinking in particular of the category of the aesthetic regime. My first problem with the narrative of realism/- modernism/postmodernism is that it doesnt help us to understand what happened in art and in aesthetic experience during the last two centuries. Take for instance the case of realism and in Bram Ievens talk about literature4 what is the signification of the realistic novel in the nineteenth century? It is not at all a kind of peak of representation because it would represent everything in all kinds of ways. It was a break with a re- gime in which only some things could be and had to be represented in a certain way. So what realism means is not a kind of fanatical imitation of reality. What the realistic novel means, on the contrary, is the disruption of the dominant way in which reality was represented. If we think that for realism that every subject is good, this means ultimately that there are no subjects very well sensed by Flaubert that all subjects are equivalent and that ultimately there are no subjects at all. This counts for the realis- tic novelists, as well as for abstract art. There is no subject matter at all. So this opposition between realism, modernism and postmodernism is all a fake imagination. We really have to get rid of it. Take, for instance, the idea of modernism as the autonomy of the arts. Historically modernism was about the contrary: it was the idea that art had to be committed to modern life, the idea that art had to create forms of life no more paint- ings and symphonies and so on. Its not that I want to replace concepts with better concepts. What is bad about those categories for me is that they rely on an idea of historical necessity. In the case of the three regimes I try to define three forms of function. But this does not mean: three historical ages. The aesthetic re- gime is the regime in which all forms can coexist. At the same time, the aesthetic regime is defined by a specific form of aesthetic experience. But basically, this regime is of coexistence. Let us look at the notion of the classics. This notion is a modern invention; an invention of the aesthetic regime. Before, we had the distinction between the ancients and the mod- erns. The very idea of the classics is to re-qualify and to re-inscribe an- cient literature in the present. In the seventeenth or eighteenth century nobody ever played Sophocles, or Aeschylus. They were praised, but not played. And now they are played. The point is that the aesthetic regime allows old forms to coexist with new forms. It is fascinating if you think of cinema. What cinema did in the 1920s and 1930s, and specifically in Hollywood, was to reinvent defini- tions of genres, and old separations disappeared. For instance, look at the directions of the great Hollywood producers: the idea that a plot must be like this. The idea of action and plot was the same as the idea in the eight- eenth century about theatre. This also means that the aesthetic regime is a regime of ambivalence. Aesthetic experience is experience of the ambiva- lent. The aesthetic experience is set up as a kind of disruption. In Kant and Schiller, for instance, there is a kind of experience that is distinguished from the ordinary connections of experience. At the same time, we know, as it is disconnected from the hierarchical organization of the sensible, it became the basis of a new idea of revolution and a new idea of community where people are equal as sensible creatures and not only as citizens. So the aesthetic regime gave a new form to ethical thinking. It is clear that revolutionary art is a kind of wavering between the idea of aesthetic expe- rience and of art that is supposed to create new forms of life and to sup- press itself. So what I tried to do is to substitute teleological concepts and historical necessity, by categories that help us to understand the en- tanglement of different logics. Lets turn to the question of political or politicized art. Are there any criteria or valid founda- tions on the basis of which we can judge whether an artwork is political or not? Or what the politics is of a particular artwork? Your response has been: there are no criteria, only choices. But in your readings in cinema (in Eisensteins The General Line for example) you talk about the narrative that desires to produce a certain meaning but which always gets inter- rupted or in some way thwarted by an element in the artwork which is non-signifying, which cannot as quickly be ascribed to a meaning. So there is this kind of play between meaning and materiality in an artwork. Connecting that argument of yours, which you have shown in lit- erature but also in cinema, could you say if that would be, if not a foundation, a way to judge whether the artwork is political or not? Would that be going some way towards it by high- lighting this aspect of meaning and its interruption? Does that relate to politics and aesthetics? First of all, we cannot enclose the question in the concept of politics of art. What is efficient is not art in and of itself; art is part of a certain distribution of the sensible part of a certain reconfiguration of experience. What was important, in the case of workers emancipation, was the possibility of leisure and the ability to see paintings, much more than specific words or paintings. People were not emancipated by revolutionary painting. But they could acquire a new kind of body, a new gaze out of this availability of any kind of painting. There is something wrong with the idea that poli- tical effects are to be located in the artwork itself or, in particular, in the intention of the artist. What happens in the aesthetic regime of art is that artists create objects that escape their will. Sometimes it denies their will. There are democratic works that are made precisely by artists who were not at all democrats. Secondly, there is a political potential where there is a disruption of a given organization of the relation between the sensible presentation and forms of meanings. We know that this idea was implemented by political artists like Eistenstein. Eisenstein was playing a double play: on the one side, Eisenstein was playing on the rigours of editing and cutting, the or- ganization of the shots as a production of a meaning. And at the same time, he plays on something quite different. There is a kind of lyricism in the sequences of The General Line that is obviously borrowed from the tra- dition of Russian painting. Let us look over and over again at the political artist, who plays on the disturbing element; I am thinking of estrange- ment in Brecht, of course. I would say estrangement is also a kind of dou- ble play, because there is this kind of straight line, you actually choose something that is strange; but as you choose it, it is disturbing in the very scenery of the sensible. This disturbing element must lead to the awareness that there is some- thing wrong with the social order. But obviously there is no reason to believe that civil disturbance, as an effect, will lead to an awareness of the political situation of the world and to mobilization. On the one hand, Brechts view of estrangement relies on the Marxist theory of alienation; on the other hand it relies on the surrealist and Dadaist practice of dis- turbing elements. But in this case the disturbing element leads to no specific form of awareness or mobilization. This politics of the uncanny elements is always ambivalent because of the meaning and the withdrawal of meaning. When you look at this play, you can define a politics of aes- thetics using some forms of disturbance or the uncanny. But whats important: you cannot define the effects of it. The politics of literature, or the politics of art, is not oriented at the constitution of political subjects. It is much more oriented at the reframing of the field of subjectivity as an impersonal field. In a certain way, the political interpretation of the un- canny in terms of effects is always a kind of negotiation. Art is going else- where. And politics has to catch it. The problem is not what artists have to do to become political; the question has to be reversed: what do political subjects have to do with art? Youve talked about the constitution of the subjects as an impersonal field. In your books you have made very clear that one cannot ascribe a certain set of qualities to a certain group of people, which is exactly the police regime. There is no prescribed subject of the revolution as in the old days we used to talk about the working class, et cetera. In a sense, then, your theory about the subject, who would be related to the practice of dissensus, is always in formation and hybrid. The hybridity of the subject becomes very clear in The Nights of Labor.5 These workers are workers, but the problem is they are something else. So you have developed a theory of the subject as hybrid, as changing, and in a way as errant wandering in a place they shouldnt be wandering. How would you relate this theory of the subject to the rise of identity politics, theories of our identity both within and outside the academy? One field is postcolonial studies, where there has been an ongoing critique of the unified subject with a fixed essence. How would the development of your theory of the subject throughout your work relate to some of these ways of thinking? As you probably know, I am French [laughter]. In France there is no iden- tity politics, there are no postcolonial studies. This means I never had to address those kinds of issues that are crucial in other countries. They are systematically ignored in France. So my dealing with the question of the subject never was an attempt to address issues of identity politics or hy- brid, postcolonial identities and so on. Basically I have no interest in cre- ating a theory of the subject. When I was young, in the time of Al- thusserianism, there were these strong statements about the subject who is ensnared or entrapped in the symbolic order and we would know what happens when the subject wants to get out of the trap. My interest was to define subjects in terms of capacity and not in terms of incapacity. Also I did not want to define natures of subjects, but processes of subjectiviza- tion. This was thirty years ago; I wanted to get out of a certain description of social identities like, for instance, the idea of popular culture, workers' thinking, and so on. What Ive tried to define is the way in which every form of subjectivization is a form of dis-identification. Certainly there you can see some relations between my dealing with identity and subjectivity, and the problems in postcolonial studies. Ive only taken a different per- spective. But I dont like so much this notion of hybridity, because it seems to refer much more to the constitution of a subject rather than to processes of subjectivization. You have been extremely critical in many of your books about the turn towards a kind of politics which gets reduced to the state, and in particular, about the ways in which experts, philosophers, sociologists, other intellectuals and administrators withdraw into something like a state apparatus which then claims to function as a democracy. Here in the Netherlands, we have a certain history of the partage du sensible as well, which is the zuilensysteem or so-called pillar system. All kinds of groups had gotten their own institutional spaces and society was neatly divided between all of these communities. Around the late 1990s that started falling apart when certain discussions came up around the immigrant in particular the not well-educated, preferably Muslim immigrant. There was an attack on the way Dutch society was structured; an attack on the so-called elites in The Hague. There was almost a kind of attempt of repartition of what society would mean here. The pillar system is bad, elites are wrong; and there should be a politics in the name of the people. There is this vague, amorphous thing called people without any fixed subject. Could this development in the Netherlands be seen as an example of dissensus? And does dissensus have any political leanings? Can you think of a partage du sensible which is right wing, or not emancipa- tory? I am not arguing for people or against the elites. I argue about two forms of structuration of the community. The logic of police versus the logic of politics does not mean the elites are the bad ones and the people are good. What I try to distinguish are not two categories of populations, but two logics of functioning. The logic of police is the logic of separate compe- tence; that there is a specific competence for governing people. The logic of politics is the logic of equal competence of anybody. It rarely happens that the people agree with this idea because they think that there are parts of the population that obviously are not competent and should be put aside. We are in a situation where there is this kind of oligarchic attempt to erase the political stage. When this stage tends to disappear you can see new forms of strange organization, or restructuration, of the community and of the relation between the same and the other, and so on. This hap- pened in France with Le Pen. What was the basis of the success of Le Pen? Precisely this void of the political stage: the possibility to present a kind of caricature or perversion of politics in the name of the people. But the question is: in the name of what people? Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is editor of Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique (Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi, 2007). Transcription by Dirk Haen