A series of interviews, carried out over thirty years, with the philosopher Jacques Rancière is a great opportunity to (re) browse the challenges of a major thought of our time, entirely worked by the question of political emancipation.
Jacques Rancière wrote about twenty books on apparently diverse subjects such as cinema, literature, image, and political philosophy. In reality, the common thread of the whole is “ More than politics or art, the way in which the borders designate and retraced certain practices as artistic or political ». This last publication strengthens these links as well as the building built over time.
The rancid work readers will also be happy to meet all the theses developed by him in this thick publication. Composed exclusively in the form of a collection of interviews – some of which are more famous than others, but the best of which are not always the most famous – it presents them in a chronological order (from 1976 to 2009) rather than thematic. Without bringing together all the interviews published by the author, it brings together enough to cover the central moments of this philosophy.
The proposed arrangement accentuates two certainties. On the one hand, journals have become the very place of a new mode of exhibition and dissemination of thought deployed in books. On the other hand, the interview is distinguished from the book by a constant effort of conciseness, an acuity of thought absent from learning devices, in that it subjects an author to the obligation to answer more targeted questions than those he gives himself when writing his work. In the same sense, moreover, beyond these questions, an author can be asked about unexpected consequences of his words, on his impact on other fields, on concrete situations which did not exist during the writing of the book. So it goes here for the questions relating to negationism, the posture of Mallarmé in his relations with the Third Republic, the sense of “ contemporary », The notion of criticism, etc.
This arrangement is also governed by the proposed title. What have become of us, we who were obsessed for a long time by the idea of progress and the spirit of discovery, if it seems that we are now “ tired »To think or act ? Curiously, there is a term common to many philosophers (Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Alain Ehrenberg, Jacques Rancière) of our time: they are surprised – and let us know for very different reasons – by the furious inactivity which risks grasping us at every moment. Moreover, they simultaneously force us to look at the meaning of this fatigue, because if for some the fatigue can constitute a sign of weakness, for others, it can correspond to a sign of despair before the inept, even, for others, to the triggering of a story to be accomplished by the dissatisfaction of the present.
Is it to know this fatigue that Rancière introduces us into this last work ? Not quite. He gave up his philosophy there, relearn us to question the categories that structure the diagnoses and debates on our present (modernity, postmodernity, alienation, unconsciousness, incapacity, etc.). He underlines again that the mode of subversion from which his philosophy is deployed coincides with an emancipatory perspective according to which it is important to fight against the sharing which are considered to be able and those who are considered to be unfit to think, those who make science or philosophy and those who are considered only as objects of knowledge.
And, in fact, the emancipation which governs its horizon of thought manifests itself in the forms of action and practices guided by the presupposition of the equality of anyone and by the concern to verify it: conflict of 1995, struggle of undocumented migrants. This name of emancipation – which, moreover, has a story that should be reconstructed – does not refer to a simple awareness of domination on the part of the dominated, in a given society. Rather, it covers the work undertaken in political action against the police, a work that focuses on the consistency of equality. Everyone understands very well, by reading this work, that the “ police “, On the other hand, does not only designate the special forces attached to a government, but all of the forces that each keep in their place and make them believe that they are unable to act, while others exercise the functions of knowledge, power or distribution of social roles.
This philosophy is therefore based on a central concept, that of sharing the sensitive. Any society and form of government defines what is visible, what can be said and the subjects that are able to say it. In this, she is ordering a “ sharing (Bodies, ways of doing and saying), to the organization of borders between beings who share the skills and others who remain without share. And that this sharing is a sharing of the sensitive, a statement of president of the Republic violently expressed it, a few years ago, speaking in public odors of cooking of others on the stairs of buildings. It is the police function to maintain this sharing. The policy, on the other hand, has the role of undoing these divisions, of moving all types of sharing as much as possible, of introducing into them deviations likely to interrupt its effectiveness, we will come back.
In each interview, in a certain way, Rancière chooses to prolong or amplify the travel exercises of borders already proposed in his works which constitute (or constituted) of this fact for each of their readers, and for many militants in the new social movements, a time of thought, a time which has given (have) to think and unpublished objects of thought. The evidence of today, the number of researchers who claim to be of this philosophy, especially in the social sciences.
In this case, each interview focuses rather on a particular object: the current forms of political subjectivation (by difference with the old forms which were based on scenes of large-scale confrontation), the movements of unemployed, undocumented forms, the transversal forms of political action, immigration and racism or xenophobia, the difficulties and dead ends has not resulted in disagreement, the difference between the claim of a doing or the exercise of a right and a political conflict (the singularization of a universal, the ability to judge and decide on common affairs, a question posed to the whole community), the difference between a police conflict and a political conflict, the category of biopolitics, that of people or the living room, that of art regime, or even that of art,
But, let’s repeat, the conclusion remains constant: politics, if today it is difficult to implement, is again thinkable ! Each of these interviews therefore reconstitutes the controversial turn of Rancière’s thought. Not only does this turn, but also the figure of a rancid which thinks emancipation (and that of its reader) in terms of declaration, not transmission or guide, on the model of Joseph Jacotot, this character he has exhumed from the archives during work on pedagogy. The philosopher thus implements, in these interviews, the principle according to which the equality of intelligence is first of all equality of oneself of intelligence in all its operations.
All the texts first cross the disciplines in which Rancière has established his thought: cinema, history, literary criticism, literature, aesthetics, the analysis of particular situations. Each time, the reader sees deploying the properly rancian reading mode of the targeted objects. What is very sensitive, for example, for the literature which is the subject of numerous questions and answers here, supported brilliantly, especially when Rancière condenses his thesis on the opposition between the Belles-Lettres-these practices and doctrines which revolved entirely around the theme of the norm to be respected to be likely-and the literature, this other historical regime of the art of writing, born XIXe century, woven around a writing that does not favor genre or object.
In all these respects, Rancière upsets our ways of thinking, produces distinctions that question dominant analyzes. But, it is to better put into perspective, secondly, the common feature of this research. Common trait of which we can affirm, on a historical level, that it consists in thinking about politics outside of Marxist intelligibility (antagonism of classes and domination), political philosophy apart from liberal conceptuality and political action outside of party activity. And, on a conceptual level, which he contributes to putting before our eyes the sharing that should be put into play, the disputes that it is important to stage, the ways so essential to the philosopher to break the natural belief and the questioning of the separation of genres, boundaries, functions which is decisive for politics to take place.
What about this policy ? And what about our political culture, today ? Rancière constantly returns to the elaboration that has recognized her philosophy as one of the essential philosophies of the moment. Politics should not be confused with the police. Both of them (politics and police) to be understood in a very specific way. If “ police Is the name of a principle of unity and saturation of social organization, a sharing of the sensitive excluding everything remains, it is dispensed in the mode of one: everyone has their place and each place has their thing. The police define what is to be seen, which can see it and decide on them, at some point. Politics, on the other hand, is the formula of what divides instead of uniting. Policy therefore does not coincide at all with the management of society by the State, with so -called political institutions. It corresponds to the construction of the speech scene, or to the demonstration by which the argument of a wrong is established. Police and politics are in conflict, in the sense that politics is the word that breaks into a police system, by manufacturing political subjects. And what will we call “ subject ” policy ? Not a party, not the vanguard of this or that or a representative, but forces which are intended to universalize a conflict, a particular reconfiguration of the sharing of the sensitive which links political quality to a certain contingency and the presupposition of equality.
If some new reader wishes to introduce itself by this work to the philosophy of Rancière, that it begins with the interviews which are more panoramic and more descriptive (for example, p. 255 sq.), Then he will persevere by letting himself go to a more biographical interview (p. 325), finally it seems to us that he can disperse a little in the work according to his centers of interest, before returning to the central concept of gap, of interruption, emancipation (set of practices which give its radicality to equality not as an end but as presupposition to update) and (p. 117, 125, 152) of universal.