Rancière and Commitment: The Strange Place of the Politics and Style of Jacques Rancière in the Western-Marxist Tradition

Abstract

A thinker of impurity, Rancière is most often read as proposing an alternative to the ontology of the political. Against the many attempts to restore a pure sense of politics and of its public space, Rancière maintains the place of politics in a common appearance that is identical to reality. Though typically seen as having broken with the Marxist tradition, I argue here that it is possible to find in his fragmentary style something like a negative dialectic. While politics is what his works address, it is also how it is addressed. Politics, and its assertion of an apparently impossible equality, must be lived out by critique and not merely described. In doing just this, Rancière offers a renewed take on the western-Marxist tradition’s politics of aesthetics. Indeed, I maintain that Rancière, far from breaking with Marxism full stop, instead effects a reversal, a reversal of education into politics.