On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.
20.04.2013
The practise of doing nothing
Unemployed positivity
04.11.2012
Miguel Abensour as reader of Spinoza
Spinoza, Marx, Moses Hess
05.10.2012
Agamben and Nancy as readers of Spinoza
Leaving Immanence?
06.06.2012
Feminist readings of Spinoza
Becoming woman?
03.05.2012
Deleuze on Spinoza's theory of affects
From the ontological to the affective
04.04.2012
Spinoza with Deleuze
The underground current of the philosophy of immanence
07.03.2012
Macherey's Spinoza
Ontology of multiplicity or materialist dialectic?
08.02.2012
Althusser's concept of immanent causality
- Seminar
Marx with Spinoza
08.12.2011
Exhausting politics
Being out of class (Deleuze)
01.11.2011
What is an inoperativity that consists in contemplating one's own potentiality to act?
The messianic class
29.06.2011
Sharing the inappropriatable
The retreating class
26.05.2011
The political capacity of the proletariat
The subtractive class II
07.04.2011
The political capacity of the proletariat
The subtractive class
03.03.2011
Disrupting the logic of division
The supplementary class
04.02.2011
The antinomies of proletarian politics
The paradoxical class
02.12.2010
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe on political difference
Retreating the political
08.11.2010
Lars T. Lih as Reader of Lenin
What Is to be Done? and Bolshevism
03.10.2010
The concept of capitalism in "Anti-Oedipus"
Capitalism deterritorialized
30.06.2010
Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan
An impossible encounter I
28.05.2010
An impossible encounter: Deleuze, Guattari and Lacan
Preparatory Meeting
27.05.2010
Micropolitics in "A thousand plateaus"
Molecular Politics I
07.04.2010
On affectivity and potentiality
Spinoza with Deleuze
04.03.2010
Nietzsche with Deleuze
The negative in the positive
04.02.2010
The notion of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari
Becoming
04.11.2009
On Esposito's concept of bio/politics
Biopotentiality
08.10.2009
Reading Althusser
07.10.2009
Rancière's farewell to Althusserian Marxism
La leçon d'Althusser
06.10.2009
Debating Althusser's philosophy of the encounter
What is aleatory materialism?
03.09.2009
Negri on materialism
Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo
02.09.2009
Tronti and Cacciari's concept of the political
The autonomy of the political
17.06.2009
"From Capital-Labor to Capital-Life" by M. Lazzarato
Invention
20.05.2009
Reading Simondon
Individuation
09.04.2009
Nancy on the singularity of death
Excess
11.03.2009
Agamben and Deleuze on pure immanence
Immanence
11.03.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory meeting
11.03.2009
Workshop: becoming-major, becoming-minor
Preparatory meeting
07.02.2009
Foucault with Deleuze
The force of the outside II
06.02.2009
Superimposing diagrams: discipline and governmentality
The force of the outside
06.02.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory Meeting
05.12.2008
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
Marx's Metapolitics
04.11.2008
Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process
05.10.2008
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
Deconstructing Value Theory
11.09.2008
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
Value and Capitalist Capacities
01.07.2008
Debating "The mirror of production" by Jean Baudrillard
Marx with Bataille
06.06.2008
The coming communities of commons
05.06.2008
Feminist comments on the relation between politics and labor
The arcane of reproduction
09.05.2008
Rancière on the inactuality of communism and the intelligence of the unqualified
07.05.2008
Virno on Marx's "Fragments on machines"
Notes on the general intellect
04.04.2008
Virno on the concept of bio-politics in Postoperaism
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy? II
03.04.2008
Jason Read on abstract and living labor
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy?
07.03.2008
Reading Negri's "Twenty Theses on Marx"
The autonomy of living labor
08.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker II
07.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker
07.12.2007
On Badiou's concept of truth procedure
Assigning a measure to the excessive power of the state
09.11.2007
Reading Jacques Ranciere's "Ten theses on politics"
The supplementary part that disconnects the people from itself
04.10.2007
Deleuze and Guattari on the concept of minoritarian struggle
Micropolitics
07.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class II
06.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class
02.07.2007
From class to minority
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism III
01.07.2007
On the concept of the concrete universal
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism II
30.06.2007
On Marx and Foucault
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism
30.05.2007
Dictatorship of the proletariat and council movement
The Soviet experience II
29.05.2007
Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Revolution
The Soviet experience
06.04.2007
Negri on Lenin
Democracy beyond law II
05.04.2007
Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of protetariat
Democracy beyond law
09.03.2007
Benjamin's concept of mysthic and divine violence
To bring about the real state of exception II
08.03.2007
Agamben's reading of Benjamin
To bring about the real state of exception
09.02.2007
Agamben's sovereign theoretical turn in thinking potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality II
08.02.2007
Agamben's theory of autonomous potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality
Jacques Rancière
— (1983) The Philosopher and his Poor, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 3-21; 70-89
— (1995) Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pr, 1999, pp. 82-93
From one disagreement to another
Jacques Rancière on Marx’s notion of the declassifying class
In this seminar session, we reflect on the distance between the two modes of disagreement with Marx’s notion of the declassifying class that Rancière articulates in the course of more than ten years, first in The Philosopher and his Poor in 1983, and then in Disagreement in 1995. The question raised today is what happens in the distance between these two symptomal readings of Marx with Plato, in which Rancière considers the ruse that connects Plato’s philosophy in The Republic to Marx’s anti-philosophy in On the Jewish Question, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction, and the series of works written between 1845 and 1848, The Holy Family, The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto.
For Rancière, the idea suturing Marx to Plato is that of the evacuation of the people from the scene of politics, the cancelling out of the worker-artisan, his stillstand in moderation in Plato and in self-negation or self-subtraction in Marx. This evacuation of the people from the stage of politics is organised, according to Rancière, through the notion of the division of labor. All modes of domination are thought by him through this notion of which he says in Althusser’s lesson that “through May”, gauche prolétarienne “inherited [it] from the Cultural Revolution” and was called “to abolish the division of labor that separated intellectual from manual labor”. In the course of his writings, Rancière supplements the notion of the division of labor by the notion of the police, the count and the division of the sensible.
For our discussion, I would like to put forward two hypotheses.
(1) In the passage from The Philosopher and his Poor to Disagreement Rancière displaces the paradox through which he reads Marx with Plato: from the paradox of communism he switches to the paradox of democracy.
(2) Simultaneously, Rancière shifts from a primarily positive to a primarily negative theoretisation of the political. From the affirmation of the excess immanent to polytechnology in The Philosopher and his Poor, he passes on to the affirmation of an incision introduced to the order in Disagreement. That is to say, from the idea that the people are capable of doing whatsoever, he passes to the idea that the people are capable of subtracting from itself. From class singularisation, Rancière turns to a reinvention of the declassifying class that he so severely has attacked in the 1980s: the third people or the part with no part possesses nothing but the instance of conflict and litigation that it adds to the situation.
At our session we will reflect on the theoretico-political implications of these shifts in Rancière's thought from one disagreement to another and, correspondingly, on two antinomies immanent to his thought of politics:
Firstly, by announcing the transhistorical truth of the act that unbinds the people from its place, Rancière—in striking contradiction to his critique of political philosophy—establishes, in Disagreement, a philosophical principle of the political. Consequently, philosophy is put in the place of politics providing a single philosophem as its prince and principle.
Secondly, modes of domination are predominantly analysed in the form of the distribution and allocation of parts and rights, in other words, in the logic of division to which a sort of political metadivision is opposed. The question of politics has thus been unbound from the question of the complex composition of modern power conceived as mutual displacement of modes of valorisation, discipline, governmentality and law. This complex topology is replaced by the opposition of rich and poor, police and politics, count and uncounted.
Simultaneously, a certain torsion takes place in Rancière’s writings in the course of which he brings back to his thinking of politics what he attempted to refute in the 1980s—the definition of politics as labor of the negative conceived in Disagreement as the effectivity of a non-dialectical negativity without synthesis, a cut that has to be staged.