On Ranciere's Dualism

• In Event: Aesthetics, Storytelling, and Reason, and Justice in Contemporary Political Thought

Abstract

I argue that Rancière’s entire theoretical vision is structured by a poorly conceived dualism of material necessity and spiritual freedom wherein the reigning logic of inequality cannot, in principle, ever be displaced by a democratic logic. The best that can be hoped for is that the necessarily inegalitarian institutions of society be subjected to the continual pestering of the part that has no part. Rancière's account of politics is empirically rooted in an idiosyncratic reading of workers from 19th-century France, whose experiences he works up into two principles: (1) the necessity of material inequality as the animating impulse of the dominant institutions of every social order; and (2), the necessity of a necessarily immaterial equality of intelligence between all human beings. These hypostatized categories are then imposed on the singularity of every possible (or imaginable) political situation that Rancière examines (or fails to examine). I contend that this style of universalism positively constricts the scope of our political vision.

Author

• Tyler Olsen, CUNY Graduate Center