Edited issue of Parallax

Editorial:
Jacques Rancière: in disagreement


Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp


There are many ways of being in disagreement. Over the past forty years, Jacques Rancière’s work has defined itself through disagreement. There have been significant disagreements: with Althusser, Bourdieu, Habermas, Lyotard, Derrida, Agamben, Badiou…; with the influence of Heideggerian categories for thinking politics and the political; with neoliberalism and thinkers of ‘consensus’; and indeed with the possibility of the concept of ‘political philosophy’ per se.

More recently, Rancière has explicitly elevated ‘disagreement’ to the status of the primary political category. His sense of the political character of disagreement has several dimensions. For firstly, there is the problem of recognition and of mutual intelligibility. This is not only the problem of ‘speaking the same language’, but the reciprocal problem of one group acknowledging that another group might be equals, equally able to command logos, sense and reason, and hence worthy of being listened to and perhaps responded to. At the same time, Rancière’s work insists on the importance of the always difficult task of establishing a shared, or common, ethos and topos for disagreement: ‘Those who say on gen¬eral grounds that the other cannot understand them, that there is no common language, lose any basis for rights of their own to be recognized’, he proposes, while ‘those who act as though the other can always understand their arguments increase their own strength ¬and not merely at the level of argument’. Hence, Rancière is communitarian precisely insofar as he is not a ‘Communitarian’: for what we share is disagreement, not consensus: it is dissensus between us that needs to be verified.

So this issue of parallax, Jacques Rancière: in Disagreement, seeks to establish a space for the verification of the disagreements within which Rancière intervenes, in a ‘sphere of shared meaning’. The issue was conceived as a way to clarify the nature of Rancière’s interventions into putatively distinct disciplinary and indeed geographical realms – politics, philosophy, history, film, aesthetics, literature, pedagogy, in francophone and – increasingly – anglophone realms; to illuminate the contours and the significance of his disagreements with others and, reciprocally, the nature of the disagreements that others have with him; and thereby to simultaneously demonstrate and verify the importance of Rancière.

The aim of this issue was to make explicit these lines of engagement and dissensus by inviting provocative thinkers and theorists to respond to the challenge of Rancière’s interventions – and to invite Rancière to respond directly to these contributions.

For responding so generously, even though up against so many other pressing commitments, we sincerely thank Professor Rancière. We thank all of our contributors, and we thank the editorial team of parallax, in particular Martin McQuillan, for affording us this opportunity to present some important disagreements.