The Actuality of Communism by Bruno Bosteels

Author:Bruno Bosteels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

Of course, Disagreement, like almost all of Rancière’s books according to the author himself, is also a conjunctural intervention, tied in this particular case to the dominant model of consensus from which he seeks to free himself without for this reason lapsing into the other extreme, which would posit the absolute anteriority of the unrepresentable, or of the sublime. To maintain himself “equally far removed from the consensual discussion and from the absolute wrong,” such is the task of the logic of disagreement according to the blurb on the back cover of Rancière’s Disagreement. Or, to put some name tags on this: the task is to maintain himself at an equal remove from Jürgen Habermas and from Jean-François Lyotard. Only to note that this operation is another constant in Rancière’s work, namely, his tendency to occupy the space or nonplace in between two positions according to the well-known formula neither/nor, which at the same time entails a categorical refusal of the either/or as a false dilemma. “Struggle on two fronts,” people used to say not so long ago: neither left-wing nor right-wing opportunism; neither anarchic adventurism nor orthodox dogmatism; or again, a few years later: neither apocalyptic nor integrated. It is within the structure of such a struggle on two fronts that I would situate the peculiar antinominalist use of the category of politics in Disagreement.

In criticizing this use of politics or the political, my aim is not to chasten the philosopher in the name of some knee-jerk form of anti-essentialism. Nor am I taking issue with the axiomatic allure of the formalization per se. I merely wish to interrogate some of the consequences, for politics as a thought-practice, of the style “there is politics when …” or “politics begins there where …” Besides, this last formula recalls another of Rancière’s favorites, the one that precisely opens the first chapter of Disagreement under the title “The Beginning of Politics”: “Let’s begin at the beginning.”29 My sole question concerns the exact status of this “there is” or of this “beginning”: Is it a theoretical principle or a historical fact? A logical presupposition or a chronological start? A transcendental condition of possibility or a haphazard empirical event? Or, and this would be a tempting last possibility, can we hold on to all these interpretations at once in a singular mixture—another banquet, this time methodological—that could very well be constitutive of the style of thinking of all of Rancière’s work?

Politics and the Police

I want to tackle this larger question by interrogating just one of the possible effects of Rancière’s restricted nominalism, namely the risk of falling into what the author himself, in Althusser’s Lesson—that is to say, almost twenty years before the reemergence of the same expression in Badiou’s meditation “The Intervention” from Being and Event—calls “speculative leftism.”30 Indeed, I fear that the definition of politics in Disagreement, most notably when formulated from within the opposition of politics and the police, is all too easily assimilated to the leftist scheme that in earlier times used to oppose, for example, the plebes and the State.

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