Jacques Ranciere - On the Shores of Politics

Jacques Rancire

Translated by Liz Heron

First published as Aux bords du politique

First published by Verso 1995

This edition published by Verso 2021

Editions Osiris 1992

Verso 1995, 2021

Translation Liz Heron 1995, 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

USA: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-966-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-78960-283-8 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78960-282-1 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

The End of Polities is based on a paper presented to the Franco-Brazilian symposium on Power held on 9,10 and 11 May 1988 at the Collge International de Philosophie, on the invitation of Pierre-Jean Labarrire. The text was subsequently reworked to be given as a paper to the philosophy departments of Edinburgh University and Essex University in February 1989.

The Uses of Democracy was the topic of a paper for the symposium Democracia, democracia social y participacin organized in Santiago de Chile by the Centro de Estudios de la realidad contempornea in December 1986. An early version was published in Spanish in Democracia y participacin, edited by Rodrigo Alvayay and Carlos Ruiz (CERC, Santiago, 1988).

The Community of Equals is based on a lecture given at the invitation of Miguel Abensour in a discussion forum with Alain Badiou at the Collge International de Philosophie, on 11 May 1987.

Democracy Corrected was originally published in Le genre humain, no. 22, Autumn 1990.

I wish to thank Donald Nicholson-Smith for his generous and invaluable help with this translation.

To speak of the boundaries of the political realm would seem to evoke no precise or current reality. Yet legend invariably has the political begin at one boundary, be it the Tiber or the Neva, and end up at another, be it Syracuse or the Kolyma: riverbanks of foundation, island shores of refoundation, abysses of horror or ruin. There must surely be something of the essence in this landscape for politics to be so stubbornly represented within it. And we know that philosophy has played a signal part in this stubbornness. Its claims in respect of politics can be readily summed up as an imperative: to shield politics from the perils that are immanent to it, it has to be hauled on to dry land, set down on terra firma.

The whole political project of Platonism can be conceived as an anti-maritime polemic. The Gorgias insists on this: Athens has a disease that comes from its port, from the predominance of maritime enterprise governed entirely by profit and survival. Empirical politics, that is to say the fact of democracy, is identified with the maritime sovereignty of the lust for possession, which sails the seas doubly threatened by the buffeting of the waves and the brutality of the sailors. The great beast of the populace, the democratic assembly of the imperialist city, can be represented as a trireme of drunken sailors. In order to save politics it must be pulled aground among the shepherds.

From the discussion which opens Book IV of the Laws, we know that the distance of eighty stadia which separates the city of Clinias from its port is, in the Athenians eyes, barely enough. Only the few encircling mountains prevent this proximity from making the whole project of foundation a hopeless one. The almuron, the tang of brine, is always too close. The sea smells bad. This is not because of the mud, however. The sea smells of sailors, it smells of democracy. The task of philosophy is to found a different politics, a politics of conversion which turns its back on the sea.

In the first place, it is a matter of mise-en-scne, of shifting images around: cave and mountain instead of sea and land. Before taking us down into the famous cave, Socrates tells us a lot about triremes, incorrigible sailors and helpless pilots. Entering the cave we bid farewell to this fatal and seductive seascape. The cave is the sea transposed beneath the earth, bereft of its sparkling glamour: enclosure instead of open sea, men in chains instead of rows of oarsmen, the dullness of shadows on the wall instead of light reflected on waves. The procedure whereby the prisoner is released and offered conversion is preceded by another, by that first metaphoric act which consists in burying the sea, drying it up, stripping it of its reflections and changing their very nature. In response to these assaults we know, however, that the sea will take its revenge. For the paradox of the undertaking is that hauling politics onto the solid ground of knowledge and courage entails a return to the isles of refoundation; it means crossing the sea once more and surrendering the shepherds resurrected city to the whims of tides and mariners.

The primary aim of this noncommittal declaration this declaration without promises might therefore be to indicate a few places or pathways conducive to reflection upon the figure of the boundary which has always accompanied thinking about the political; and also upon the age-old, and still current, position of philosophy at the margin of politics, always somehow linked to the idea of a retreat from that fatal brink, the idea of a change of course, of a conversion which, from Greek metanoia to German Kehre, whether voluble or mute (or even mutely voluble), has always attended philosophys thinking, or thoughtlessness, or even distractedness, vis--vis the political realm.

But it has also become clear that current events can give fresh meaning to this line of inquiry. Nowadays we hear countless proclamations, both scholarly and otherwise, of the end of the era in which politics wandered from littoral to littoral. Ended too, it is said, is the time when philosopher-legislators took it upon themselves to reground politics at the risk of leading it to some new abyss. Politics is apparently now at last quitting that territory, bounded by the shores of origin or blocked by the looming abyss, to which the custodianship of philosophy has hitherto confined it. Free at last, it is supposedly about to spread out through the boundless space which is that of its own suppression. The end of a subservient politics will thus also be the end of politics itself. We are said to be living through the end of political divisions, of social antagonisms and Utopian projects; entering into an age of common productive effort and free circulation, of national consensus and international competition. Instead of Utopian islands and millenarian dreams, the belated wisdom of our times offers more accessible earthly paradises and more imminent deadlines: Europe or the Centre, 1993 or the year 2000.

Yet, viewed from closer range, this configuration holds some surprises. Thus the same conspicuous American who noisily proclaims the end of history with our decade also tells us, more quietly, that this is the very same end proclaimed by Hegel in 1807, even if this means leaving us in doubt: Has it taken history this particularly overburdened two-centuries-long interval to get its death over with because getting rid of the last vestiges is always slow, or because of the fateful error of the interpreter, Marx, who saw in the Hegelian promise not the end of history at all, but merely the end of prehistory?