Opposition to corporate legal rights has become more visible in recent years. Activists seek ways to address the influence of corporations on the state and its ancillary institutions. The most well-known tactics range from Occupy's embrace of anarchic, leaderless horizontalism to the Mayday PAC raising money to elect representatives who support a campaign finance amendment to the US Constitution. The spectrum of political efforts between these two approaches speaks to how the problem of corporate power resonates with many people in (...) the United States. It also, however, demonstrates how "democracy," as the ostensible opposition to corporate politics, can be interpreted as everything from... (shrink)

Despite the increasing attention devoted to the theme of political judgment, the question of how to theorize judgment as specifically democratic remains elusive. This article shows the promise of Spinoza for approaching such a vexing issue. Through a combined reading of his major political and metaphysical texts, I develop a new concept of political judgment that I call ‘citizen jurisprudence’. Citizen jurisprudence is at once a right and a power that is internally related to the ‘power of the people’. Put (...) another way, citizen jurisprudence is the figure and effect of democracy understood in an expansive sense: not solely as a state form but as an activity of equally free individuals determining the sense and the scope of common affairs. An account of this concept simultaneously nuances Spinoza’s current profile as a political thinker and contributes to efforts within contemporary political theory to recuperate the radical potential of judgment as a mode of democratic agency. (shrink)

Despite the increasing attention devoted to the theme of political judgment, the question of how to theorize judgment as specifically democratic remains elusive. This article shows the promise of Spinoza for approaching such a vexing issue. Through a combined reading of his major political and metaphysical texts, I develop a new concept of political judgment that I call ‘citizen jurisprudence’. Citizen jurisprudence is at once a right and a power that is internally related to the ‘power of the people’. Put (...) another way, citizen jurisprudence is the figure and effect of democracy understood in an expansive sense: not solely as a state form but as an activity of equally free individuals determining the sense and the scope of common affairs. An account of this concept simultaneously nuances Spinoza’s current profile as a political thinker and contributes to efforts within contemporary political theory to recuperate the radical potential of judgment as a mode of democratic agency. (shrink)

What, if anything, do the ‘square’ protests and ‘occupy’ movements of 2011 bring to contemporary democratic theory? And how can we, as political theorists, analyse their discourse and do justice to it? We address these questions through an analysis of the Greek and Spanish protest movements of the spring and summer of 2011, the so-called aganaktismenoi and indignados. We trace the centrality of the critique of representation and politics as usual as well as the ideas about horizontality and autonomy in (...) the protesters’ discourse. These ideas are not only important to their critique of the contemporary liberal democratic regimes in the two countries, but also important to the way in which the protesters organise themselves. Nonetheless, as we shall argue, the protesters are caught within a tension between horizontality and verticality, between autonomy and hegemony, or between moving beyond representation and accepting representational structures. Given this tension, we examine how the protesters negotiate it in three key areas: politics, representation and organisation. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, we further argue that the protesters can be seen as making a claim to equal voice. This is what Rancière refers to as politics proper, and the question is then whether such a politics is possible without falling back into traditional forms of politics. (shrink)

This paper examines Honig’s use of Rancière in her book ‘Democracy and the Foreigner’. In seeking to clarify the benefits of ‘foreignness’ for democratic politics it raises the concern that Honig does not acknowledge the ways in which her own democratic cosmopolitanism may be more akin to Rancière’s police than politics. By challenging Honig’s assertion that democracy is usually read as a romance with the suggestion that it is more commonly read as a horror, I unpick the interstices of Honig’s (...) and Rancière’s work to separate foreignness from democratic cosmopolitanism. Instead, although I posit democratic cosmopolitanism’s potential as a police more conducive to politics I also suggest that the particular salience of Honig’s ‘foreigner’ figure is that it supplements Rancièrian politics, demonstrating a praxis of ‘looking anew’ at our ordinary social practices. By making these seem strange to us, we can discover a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert, thereby furthering the potential of Rancièrian democratic politics. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 1187-1197, September 2022.

What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière, we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of (...) police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section, we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the United States constitute whiteness in a racialized police order. (shrink)

My title could be taken to name an object, the politics of translation, but here I emphasize something related yet quite distinct: the practice that the title also identifies—the process of translating politics. This procedure remains bound up with the basic question of how to translate politics, how to put into English what Rancière means when he talks or writes about “politics.” Since the publication of Disagreement in English translation nearly twenty years ago, Rancière’s English-speaking audiences have been much exercised (...) by just this question. Indeed, the dominant response to Rancière’s work, particularly in the field of political theory, has been to read him as suggesting a radical redefinition of... (shrink)

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s work offers (...) crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms. (shrink)

This article theorizes the connection between political distrust and conspiracy theories through a post-political framework. Following Luc Boltanski’s focus on the critical capacities of ordinary actors, it builds on interviews with participants of the Yellow Vest Movement in France who hold conspiratorial views of Covid-19 and the vaccine. The article explores how the interviewees’ critique mirrors that of post-political theorists. In particular, I use Rancière’s notion of subjectification and politics to theorize how conspiracy theories function as a means of dissent (...) in the interviewees’ understanding of their experiences as well as in their own critique of and disillusionment with politics in France. As such, this article explores how political trust affected reactions to the pandemic, how political trust is interconnected with conspiracy theories and finally how such conspiracy theories can be viewed as biproducts of the post-political order. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière’s conception of equality as an axiomatic presupposition of the political is important, because it bypasses the tradition which defines equality in terms of Aristotle’s conception of geometric equality. In this paper, I show that Rancière’s theory both espouses a monism, according to which inequality implies equality, and relies on a concept of the free will, which is incompatible with monism. I highlight this tension by bringing Rancière’s theory into conversation with the great monist of the philosophical tradition, Baruch (...) Spinoza. (shrink)