Staging equality

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 37, 2006, Pages 109-120

  Hallward, Peter ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33644547382     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (86)

1. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, tr. Kristin Ross, Stanford 1991, p. 138. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Pittsburgh, March 2005, and at Cerisy, May 2005.
2. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, tr. Liz Heron, London and New York 1995, pp. 32-3. For the same reason, the egalitarian democracy that Rancière defends against its neo-conservative detractors is neither a decadent form of social disintegration nor an exemplary form of political government but rather that 'ungovernable element upon which every government, in the end, is founded'
3. (Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie, Paris 2005, pp. 57; 105-6).
4. For a more general survey of the anarchic orientation of Rancière's work, see my 'Rancière and the Subversion of Mastery', Paragraph, vol. 28, no. 1 (Summer 2005).
5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes, London 1991, p. 67.
6. Rancière, 'The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics' (Goldsmiths College, 17 September 2003); see homepages.gold.ac.uk/psrpsg/ ranciere.doc; my emphasis.
7. 'Entretien avec Jacques Rancière', Dissonance 1 (2004); I'm grateful to Yves Citton for this reference. Pierre Campion notes the prominence of theatrical analogies in his detailed review of Rancière's Le Partage du sensible in Acta Fabula, September 2000, available at www.fabula.org.
8. Rancière, Les Scènes du peuple, Lyon 2003, p. 10.
9. Rancière, Disagreement, tr. Julie Rose, Minneapolis 1999, p. 88, translation modified.
10. 'Entretien avec Jacques Rancière'.
11. Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Paris 1983, pp. 36, 84.
12. Rancière, 'Thinking of Dissensus'; see also
13. La Haine de la démocratie, pp. 41-7.
14. Plato, Republic, in particular 392d-398b; 595a-608b.
15. Plato, Laws 701a. As Samuel Weber notes, even by comparison with unruly democracy, what Plato finds 'so frightening and fearful about the theatrocracy is that it appears to respect no such confines. And how, after all, can there be a polis, or anything political, without confinement? The previous divisions and organization of music into fixed genres and types is progressively dissolved by a practice that mixes genres and finally leaves no delimitation untouched or unquestioned'. Weber, 'Displacing the Body: The Question of Digital Democracy' (1996), available online at www.hydra.umn.edu/weber/displace.html.
16. Plato, Laws 701b-c.
17. Plato, Republic 605b-c.
18. Rancière, Partage du sensible, Paris 2000, pp. 14; 67-8.
19. Partage du sensible, p. 15.
20. Plato, Republic 604e.
21. See in particular 'The Language of African Theatre', in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London 1986.
22. Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 2.
23. Rancière, 'The Emancipated Spectator' (August 2004); see theater.kein.org.
24. 'Emancipated Spectator'.
25. See in particular Rancière, 'Biopolitique ou politique?', Multitudes 1 (March 2000).
26. Lacoue-Labarthe, L'Imitation des modernes, Paris 1986, pp. 276, 100;
27. cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Stagings of Mimesis', Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2 (2003), p. 59.
28. Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie, p. 56.
29. Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 174-5.
30. Rancière, 'Dix thèses sur la politique', Aux bords du politique, 2nd ed., Paris 1998, p. 241.
31. Rancière, 'Politics and Aesthetics', Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2 (2003), p. 202.
32. Rancière, 'Dix thèses sur la politique', p. 242.
33. Rancière, Nights of Labour. The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, tr. John Drury, Philadelphia 1989, p. 19.
34. Rancière, La Leçon d'Althusser, Paris 1974, pp. 144, 96, 121.
35. Les Scènes du peuple, p. 11;
36. Leçon d'Althusser, p. 154.
37. Les Scènes du peuple, p. 8; cf.
38. Rancière, The Names of History, pp. 65, 73.
39. 'Le bon temps ou la barrière des plaisirs' and 'Le Théâtre du peuple', both reprinted in Les Scènes du peuple.
40. Les Scènes du peuple, p. 12.
41. Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 236-9, 214, 243.
42. 'Dix thèses sur la politique', p. 245.
43. See La Haine de la démocratie, p. 54; and
44. Aux bords du politique, pp. 229-31.
45. 'Dix thèses sur la politique', p. 224.
46. Rancière, 'Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics', in Peter Hallward, ed., Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, London 2004, p. 230.
47. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, tr. Reginald Snell, New York 1965, p. 80; cf.
48. Malaise dans l'esthétique, Paris 2004, pp. 42-5.
49. Rancière, Malaise dans l'esthétique, p. 132; cf.
50. Schiller, Aesthetic Education, letter 15.
51. Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 169, 181-5;
52. Disagreement, pp. 85-7.
53. Jules Michelet, L'Etudiant: cours de 1847-48 [1877], quoted in
54. Les Scènes du peuple, p. 175.
55. Malaise dans l'esthétique, pp. 31-2, 162; see also
56. Rancière, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', NLR 14, March-April 2002, p. 148.
57. Disagreement, pp. 125-6; cf.
58. Malaise dans l'esthétique, 172. According to Ranciére, this is the outcome affirmed, in effect, by Agamben's conception of the 'state of exception', whereby 'the idea of the purity of polities' is turned on its head, so as to 'empty the stage of political invention by sweeping aside its ambiguous actors. As a result, politics comes to be identified with the act of a power that appears as an over-whelming historico-ontological destiny: we are all, from the outset, refugees in the homogeneous and pervasive space of the camp, entrapped in the complementarity of bare life and exception' (Rancière, 'Thinking of Dissensus').
59. See Rancière, 'Politics and Aesthetics', pp. 196-7.
60. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, New York 1977.
61. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, New York 1971, p. 338.
62. Partage du sensible, pp. 23, 68-9; cf.
63. Malaise dans l'esthétique, p. 16.
64. Disagreement, pp. 72-6, As Aristotle candidly explains, the best democracy will be one that, countering its spontaneous tendency, keeps the people at a distance from the political process while ensuring that the privileged or well-born retain the actual reins of power (Aristotle, Politics 1318b).
65. Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy, New York 1975; see
66. Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie, pp. 12-4.
67. See for example Chomsky, 'Deterring Democracy in Italy: A Key Case of Thought Control' (2002), available at www.justresponse.net.
68. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage, New York 1967, p. 16.
69. Disagreement, pp. 137-8; cf.
70. Names of History, pp. 93, 98.
71. Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 44-5;
72. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, pp. 105-6, 133-4.
73. See for instance Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 77.
74. As Alain Badiou notes, Rancière's presumption is that 'every social tie implies a master' (Badiou, Abrégé de métapolitique, Paris 1998, p. 123).
75. Like Jacotot before him, Rancière sometimes seems most comfortable defending a cause whose integrity is guaranteed but whose implications are never likely to 'take on'-proof, perhaps, of a willingness positively to embrace a version of what Hegel called the unhappy consciousness. See Ignorant Schoolmaster, pp. 134, 139.
76. Shores of Politics, p. 41;
77. La Chair des mots: politiques de l'écriture, Paris 1998, p. 11.
78. develop this point in more detail in 'The Politics of Prescription', South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 104, no. 4 (Autumn 2005), pp. 771-91.
79. 'Politics and Aesthetics', p. 202.
80. See 'Le Compromis culturel historique', Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 275, 279-80.
81. Ignorant Schoolmaster, pp. 65; 5-6.
82. 'En allant à l'expo: l'ouvrier, sa femme, les machines', Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 63-84; cf.
83. Les Scènes du peuple, pp. 100-1;
84. Leçon d'Althusser, pp. 162-3.
85. Disagreement, p. 9.
86. Leçon d'Althusser, pp. 207-8.