THE HATRED OF RANCIÈRE

Jacques Rancière is not known for lacking polemical verve. When he is not engaged in controversies with his contemporaries – whether explicit or implicit – he describes, with a thinly veiled contempt, their scorn for his own manner of thinking. One of his recent works, Hatred of Democracy, has the apparent advantage of being situated at the intersection of these two tendencies, as it is at once a description of the hatred of others and a polemical intervention against them. Published in 2005 as a circumstantial piece, the book is an acerbic critique of what Rancière perceives as the present hostility toward democracy. It is true that he affirms on the book's first page that the hatred of democracy ‘is as old as democracy itself for a simple reason: the word itself is an expression of hatred’. However, his own object of analysis in this little book is the new form taken by this perennial hatred in the contemporary world. It is in this light that he examines the modes of questioning democracy recently formulated by citizens of democratic countries. For these authors, democracy is understood not as a series of institutional mechanisms, but as a set of customs: ‘For them democracy is not a corrupt form of government; it is a crisis of civilisation afflicting society and through it the State.’ Rancière thus relies on an implicit distinction between political democracy, or the state institution of democracy, and cultural democracy, or the civilisational practice of democracy. The principal thesis of the detractors of cultural democracy in our time is summarised in the following way: ‘there is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilisation.’

In order to pay homage to Rancière's polemical verve, I would like to engage in a polemic myself. So that it might truly be an homage, it is indeed necessary to follow him on this perilous path that leads beyond intellectual appropriateness and to the heart of matters, the path that led him to break radically with Althusser, to call into question Deleuze's entire aesthetic project, to lash out violently against Lyotard's reflection on the sublime, to criticise Badiou's aesthetic incompetence, and so forth.