'Command that does not command': Reconsidering Rancière's opposition of politics and policing

Since the publication of his last book-length political polemic, 'Hatred of Democracy' (2005), the work of Jacques Rancière has generally focused on developing the conceptual and historical features of his account of aesthetics. With the recent publication of his 2009 debate with Axel Honneth, 'Recognition or Disagreement?' (2016), we have good reason to return to his political thought as it is outlined in 'Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy' (1995) and related texts such as his “Ten The ses on Politics” (1998). Programmatically speaking, Rancière conceives of politics as a practice of dissensus enacted in the name of equality. But in examining the debate between Rancière and Honneth, Jean-Philippe Deranty and Katia Genel have recently sought to reframe Rancière’s account of dissensus in the terms of Honneth’s theory of recognition. Drawing on the subtitle of Disagreement, it is necessary to critique Deranty and Genel both at the level of politics and how this politics implicates philosophy. Elsewhere, I have already indicated how reframing dissensus as a form of the politics of recognition blunts the radicality of Rancière’s methodological commitments. I will not revisit these claims here. Instead, I would like to dispel the assumption that makes this “recognition” reading—as one variant of a generally liberal reading of Rancière—possible. On this assump tion, Rancière holds that dissensual speech is political action. As Deranty writes, “politics in Disagreement is a battle of justifications, mainly a battle about what counts as justification and who is entitled to proffer and expect justifications.” But Rancière’s work isn’t about how to distribute social goods and allocate duties and entitlements to such a degree that we will willingly accept inequalities in our societies. So I will argue, by contrast, that for Rancière speech functions as a me tonymy for a broader praxis of egalitarian, dissensual politics. More specifically, I will contend that Rancière’s egalitarian politics entails two forms of praxis: the symbolization of equality through dissensus and the subversion or elimination of relationships of command, coercion, or force implemented by regimes of policing.