Summary
Jacques Ranciere: On the Edges of the Political
The texts collected in the book On the Edges of the Political were published by Jacques Ranciere in the eighties and nineties of the last century. Today, almost thirty years after the publication of the oldest text, we see how Rancière's basic ideas are still fresh. Therefore, this collection of texts is not only of an introductory nature, but in it we find maturely thought-out ideas about the relationship between politics and philosophy. At the time when Ranciere was writing, huge breaks were taking place both in the political space (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and in the philosophical scene (Habermas' paradigm of political consensus was losing its strength). Philosophy and politics require new approaches and ideas. The question posed by Ranciere is: how to think the political and how to educate the political subject, without reducing the political to the idea of Carl Schmitt, according to which the identification of the enemy is a condition for the possibility of constituting political subjectivity. For Rancière, political subjectivation occurs only in the act of dismantling given identities and in the construction of an identity that presupposes something hardly conceivable: impossible identification. Political space, in Rancier's approach, is not reduced to police logic that seeks to maintain order by conserving identities, but precisely in identifications that call the established order into question. (F13)
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.