Ranciére and contemporary political problems

8/8/2019 Rancire and contemporary political problems

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Ranciere and Contemporary PoliticalProblemsThe Political: Relational or Founda tional?Through a critical interrogation of the relation between politicalphilosophy and politics Ranciere elaborates a notion of the politicalcharacterized in terms of division, conflict and polemic. For Rancierethe received view which sees relations between systems of speculativethought and the real world of pohtics as necessarily divergent ismisleading. Despite claims to the contrary each side of the relationshares a common understanding of politics as epiphenomena of anoriginary unity which each seeks to maintain against the persistenceof conflict and division. In effect, philosophy 'puts an end to thepolitical, by employing metaphorical resources which at once distanceit utterly from empirical politics and allow it to coincide exactly withit'.^ For Ranciere the solidarity of philosophy and politics is subsumedwithin the notion of the pohce which designates an activity throughwhich each individual is maintained in an allotted place within theorder of society. Thus: 'The basis of the pohtics of the philosophers isthe identity of the principle of pohtics as an activity with that of thepohce as a way of determining the partition of the perceptible thatdefmes the lot of individuals and parties'.^ In short, the sohdarity ofphilosophy and pohtics is the coincidence of an order of being and anorder of ruling derived from and reducible to a unity prior to both.One might say that for Ranciere the relation between philosophyand politics is a response to the problem of the pohtical in whichphilosophy comes off worst. At best philosophy enjoys a distinctlyunder-laboured relation with politics.

Against the identity of philosophy and politics Ranciere affirms anotion of the pohtical as the primacy of irreducible conflict between


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Contemporary Political Problems 4 7the pohce, or from the inevitability of the fact that there is alwaysone more to be counted and placed in some way within the symbolicorder. Here Ranciere relies on a mathematical principle of equality inwhich each is one and only one and which is opposed to a geometricalprinciple of hierarchy which distributes some ones as more importantand powerful than other ones, and w^hich is represented through thesymbolic order in which each one finds its place within the unity ofthe One. Hence the political is a conflict between two heterogeneousprocesses in which mathematics dislocates geometry. Ranciere refersto the location of the encounter between these two processes byreference to a further paradox of 'the nonplace as place' (PIS: 66),and which is not a matter of counting or proportion. Furthermore,to indicate the dimension of agency Ranciere links the problemsemantically and pragmatically to a term from an even older language,the Greek ochlos as the turbulent, disruptive and indeterminate massor mob which serves to verify that the existence of the demos is neverunified and homogeneous {OSP, 319). The demos is always moreor less than itself as it does not require the guarantee of a ground towhich it could be reduced or a transcendental place from which itcould be derived. Hence the ochlos demonstrates that the demos is notone or One.

If the above massively condensed and partial summary of Ranc iere'sposition is reasonably accurate with respect to at least some ofits decisive elements then an issue arises which stems from theimportance given to the relation between philosophy, politics, policeand 'symbolic order' on the one hand and proletarii, ochlos, 'non-placeas place' on the other. The issue is that Ranciere's position seemsto imply that the political arises from the existence of that whichcannot be symbolized by the police, or which can only be symbolizedthrough terms that succeed in designating its anonymity. One mightgo even further and suggest that for Ranciere the political is thatwhich cannot be symbolized by the coincidence of being and rule.If this is the case then it is open to the accusation that disagreementis little more than an objection to the indignity of being overlookedor misnamed, motivated by the sense that some undesirable politically


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48 Paragraphsensitively and in detail that Ranciere's pohtical thought makes apositive contribution to the 'ethics of recognition' but concludes thata certain ambivalence remains. Referring to the subjectivization ofthe pohtical Deranty points out:Obviously, the disruptive subjects could not achieve the reconfiguration of thefield of communal experience in the same ontological, organized, hierarchicalma nne r that social configuration is achieved. They must retain their disruptive staThey appear as subjects only in the pragmatic reconfiguration of the field ofexperience, through the disruption of the ontology of the social order. Theyappear here and now as subject of word and action, but they are not ontologicalentities QRC, 151, emphasis added).Or, we might add, not entities as such. Not one, and not the other.Deranty's point uncovers a problem which is not pursued. Forrecognition to matter the non-ontological and non-symbolic status ofthe political must be denied. How then is the pohtical to be thoughtof in a way which maintains its non-ontological and non-symbolic oraleatory status? The question is posed in order to deny the possibilitythat disagreement is merely a claim to the enjoyment of the advantagesof the symbolic order through subordination to the police. That is tosay, to maintain the paradoxical dimension of the political. The stakesof the problem are laid out in Zizek's recent sympathetic criticism ofRanc iere's work . Along with B adiou, Balibar, and Laclau and Mouffe,who are lumped together on the basis of a common Althusserianinheritance, Ranciere's notion of the political seems 'to fall intothe trap of "marginahst" pohtics, accepting the logic of momentaryoutbursts of an impossible radical pohticization that contains the seedsof its ow n failure and has to recede in the face of the existing O rder '. For Zizek the function of Ranciere's notion of the political is self-limiting in that it must maintain a residual marginal character as thedemonstration of its own authenticity which entails 'an ambiguousattitude towards its politico-ontological opposite, the police Order ofBeing: it has to refer to it, needs it as the big enemy ('Power') whichmust be there in order for us to engage in our marginal/subversiveactivity', adding immediately that 'the very idea of a total subversionof this Order ('global revolution') is dismissed as proto-totalitarian'


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Contemporary Political Problems 49Ultimately Z izek rejects a relational version of the pohtical as merelya 'game of hysterical provocation' {TS, 238) which is inferior to the

heroic revolutionary task of establishing a new positive symbolic o rder.This can be done on the basis of the knowledge that the apparentahistorical status of the existing symbolic order is itself an illusionbecause the truth of the order of Being which it establishes rests ona prior political moment, a foundation in which a positive order ofbeing is instituted. Hence for Zizek the pohtical is the inventionof the One and politics is about which one is the better One. Thejustification for Zizek's critique and the foundational notion of thepolitical which it affirms is the presumption of the coincidence of theauthority of the symbolic, the capacity of the police to order as abasis of rule, and the philosophical elaborations which support it. Inother words, the issue concerns the presumption of a miracle which,for Ranciere, is perhaps more properly understood as a historicallyspecific response to the political. This paper will begin by looking atthe elaboration of the political in Ranciere's thought to see if sucha miracle has a place, a task which will help us to assess the validityof Zizek's criticisms. The paper will then go on to discuss somecontemporary accounts of the components of this miracle in order toassess whether Ranciere's relational notion of the pohtical and Zizek'sfoundational criticisms have a place.The political is not symbolicZizek's foundational account of the pohtical is animated by theconviction that a symbolic order of being is necessary in order toguarantee both social reproduction and its pathological consequences,and a lot more besides. For Zizek the capacity of the symbohc to orderderives from an ability to mediate metaphysics and politics or, in moreformal terms, that which is general and that which is particular. Thisseems to be the assumption underlying Zizek's notion of the pohtical,wh erein H egel's subordination of the symbol of German Romanticismto the conventional nature of the sign purged of any naturalism,intuition or sensuousness is combined with the transformation of


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50 Paragraphpohtics of producing illusions through which subjects are reconciledwith their epistemological poverty.

Immediately it should be noted that it is unlikely that Ranciere'thought can be entirely assimilated to the assumptions with whichZizek's critique makes sense. After all, one of Ranciere's deepest criticisms of the A lthusserian project was that it attempted to estabhsh 'thecoexistence of two heterogeneous conceptual systems: that of historimaterialism and that of a bourgeois sociology of the Durkheimiantype'.^ These two systems were opposed politically and ideologicallythrough the insistence that a properly M arxist theory of ideology wade r ive d f r om The Preface to the Con tribution to a Critique of PoliticaEconomy and was concerned with the forms in which a struggle fought out, and had nothin g to do w ith an eternal structure in which a'metaphysical theory of the subject (in the form of a theory of illusionis linked with a sociology of systems of representations'. A Marxistheory of ideology 'is no more a theory of the subject, than a theoryof science or a theory of "society"' (OTI, 9). Although it would becrude to try and derive Ranciere's recent political thought from anearlier position it would be fair to say that the thematics of struggleis continuous with a relational notion of the political as divisionand polemic. Nevertheless, given this distance it is important to tryand specify what it is about Ranciere's recent pohtical thought thaprovides a basis for Zizek's criticisms. Attempting to do so requires amore direct analysis of the way in which the notion of the symbolicis used.

We can begin by pausing and rewinding to take a closer look aRanciere's explanation of the political. The ambiguity of Ranciere'snotion of the political is condensed in the following statement whichoffers three reasons why there is pohtics:First, because there are names which deploy the sphere of appearance o f the p eop leeven if in the process such names are apt to become separated from 'things'second, because the people are always too numerous or too few compared withthe form of their manifestation; and third, because the name of the people is aone and the same time the name of the com mu nity and the name of a part of orather a split in the com mu nity. Th e gap betw een people as com mu nity and


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Contemporary Political Problems 51thus empirically destined to fail. But is the conflictual aspect of thisfailure automatic, a necessary component of the dialectic of recog-nition and obligation? That is to say, where is the non-ontologicalpohtical dimension? Ranciere provides it with the third reason whichintroduces the notion of division and which does not follow from thefirst two reasons but interrupts them. There is no logical link betweenthe notion of the symbolic, including that which is not symbolized,and the not ion of division. By itself there is no reason why a grievanceshould arise in the gap between the name of the community and itsdivided referent. Either the connection is made through a metaphys-ical equivalence be tween the possibility of non-sym bolization and theexistence of division, which would entail a common reference to afoundation, albeit negatively, or the connection arises from the forceof the evidence of an empirical example. In which case, symbol issubordinated to allegory and the ontological status of the symbolic inboth Romanticism and Durkheimianism is relegated. In fact, this isexactly what happens in Ranciere's argument with the introductionof the notion of a 'double embodiment' to qualify the third reason forpolitics, and which is borrowed from Lefort's use of Kantorowicz'sthesis of 'The King's Two Bodies' in order to explain the emergenceof the modern form of the political from a pre-modern structure oforder centred on the institution of monarchy.

It is worth looking at Lefort's argument in a little more detail inorder to uncover how it produces a specific relation between thesymbolic and the political. The circularity of divine right establishesthe fact that the King is simultaneously spiritual and temporal byway of analogy: 'You are to me, as I am to God'. The body of theKing grounds a proportional geometrical rule of order. It is bothmathematical one and geometrical One in which each other one findsits place. Yet Lefort's analysis of the political does not locate its originwithin the double embodiment of the King. Rather, the pohtical issomething which happens to this structure which has the effect ofdemonstrating both a distinction between the spiritual and temporalproperties of the body of the King and the arbitrariness of their link.This is the revolutionary act in which the physical body of the King is


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52 Paragraphdistinction between the symbohc and the real, empty markers withoupositive properties. For Lefort, this literal dislocation gives rise to thfollowing decisive features of pohtical modernity:Power appears as an empty place and those who exercise it as mere mortals whooccupy it only temporarily or who could install themselves in it only by force ocunning. There is no law that can be fixed, whose articles cannot be contestedwhose foundations are not susceptible of being called into question. Lastly, theris no representation of a centre and of the contours of society: unity cannot nowefface social division.^The place of power is empty, a gap which separates the symbohcand the real. Emptiness cannot be symbolized precisely because it is literal event which symbohzes nothing, but it can be depicted, represented, allegorized. Hence strictly speaking power is not symbolicConsequently, modernity dislocates the relation between power andauthority. There is no longer a generality of power. Henceforththe political becomes the polemicization of the symbohzation opower. Indeed, Lefort p rom otes this activity as one of the democraticvirtues of modernity although recognizes that it can easily fall intoits opposite, the totahtarian menace in which the substantial body oauthority is reinvented and power is symbolized. Democracy is alabout preserving the gap between the symbolic and the real.^

Ranciere does no t follow the logic of Lefort's argum ent completelyinstead transposing it as an attribute of the people itself prior to theinstitution of the King. In so doing it is hard to see how a politicadimension goes with it. By themselves, irrespective of how they arenamed, and irrespective of the referential failure of their names, thenotions of community and people do not entail any dimension opower and authority and thus the possibility of a grievance predicatedon division. It is only wh en one reahzes that the division between thename of the people and the name of a part of the people is a divisionwhich is not named because both people and its part possess the samename that a pohtical dimension becom es thinkable and the doublenessof the people makes sense. The pohtical becomes thinkable insofar as'the part which has no part', the ochlos, demonstrates the sameness


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Contemporary Political Problems 53people or the King. All that matters is that the pohtical estabhshesa polemical relation which reveals the difference within either ofthese names.Yet Ranciere does not follow Lefort's argum ent to the letter simplybecause of a wish to affirm the priority of the people over theKing. According to Zizek, the reason for Ranciere's reluctance toemphasize the modern form of the pohtical is an opposition to theidea and practice of a 'para-politics' which emerges as a consequence.In modernity pohtics is depoliticized as a competition to occupy thesymbohc place of power (TS, 192). This point seems otiose, giventhat in light of the distinction between the pohtical and pohtics thelatter is 'depoHticized' by definition. Indeed, both foundational andrelational notions of the political seem to agree on this point. In fact,Ranciere's opposition is to an even deeper consequence of pohticalmodernity which is that society cannot be estabhshed by referenceto a positive determination and entails, in Lefort's memorable phrase,'the dissolution of the markers of certainty' {DPT, 17). Even thoughLefort affirms the priority of division Ranciere is reluctant to endorsethe consequences of the 'catastrophe in the symbohc linked to thedisembodiment of the "double body" of the king' which takes placein a 'theater of sacrifice' (D, 100). The opposition is not that this issomething that cannot be done, but that to do so, which means tohave done so, displaces a polemic between a social body and 'a bodythat now displaces any social identification' (D, 100). In other words ,the notion of the political as a conflict between the pohce and a 'partwh ich has no part' becomes untenab le. Yet w ithou t the interruption ofochlos no such polemic ever took place and it wou ld not be possible tothink of the people as the division between that which can be namedand that which cannot. So the ambiguity in Ranciere's argumentstems from locating the distinction between the people as One andpeople as division as prior to the interruption of the ochlos, when infact it is this event which produces the distinction. The catastrophedoes not occur within the symbohc. Ra the r, the catastrophe is that thesymbohc occurs in order to produce the coincidence of philosophyand politics.


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5 4 P a r a g r a p hendless series of questions' which have become the agency of thpohtical { D P T , 228). At which point Lefort reaches a conclusionposed in the form of a question which Ranciere takes as a point odeparture. Thus: 'We have to ask how the philosophical idea of thOne colludes with the image of a united society' { D P T , 229). FoLefort this is a matter of the persistence of the 'theological-politica l', term commensurate with the coincidence of philosophy and politicor a foundational notion of the pohtical. Lefort provides no answeto the question but instead suggests an answer to be avoided becausit would liquidate the political itself Such an answer wo uld be onwhich relegates the political form of modern society to illusion anreplaces 'the fiction of unity-in-itself with that of diversity-in-itself{ D P T , 232). So the reluctance to follow Lefort is a strategic decisiowhich prevents the consequences which for Ranciere inevitably arisfrom political modernity. Yet this is at the price of turning thresponse of philosophy and politics into a cause, and which providethe opportunity for Zizek's criticism.^^ Yet as the regicide has takenplace perhaps we should have a look at how these consequences havplayed out in order to try and determine if they have any pohticadimension of value. To do so we shall conclude by examining thcontemporary status of each element of the miraculous trinity of thpolice, the symbolic and philosophy in turn.

Th e end of the p olice

Here we can turn to consider some orthodox accounts of the decisivfeatures of contemporary empirical politics. For example, in a reviewof texts by some then 'nouveaux philosophes' pubhshed in 1978, onyear after punk, and translated into English in 1979, Donzelot essayesome themes grounded in Foucault's notion of 'governmentalitywhich proposed a diagnosis of't he dom inant problem of the m om entthe loss of credibility of pohtical culture'.^ ^ The force of this situatiowas characterized in terms of the 'dedraniatization of social conflicts behding the question of assigning responsibility for the origin of "soevils" and shifting the issue to the different technical options regardin


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Contemporary Political Problems 55has more to do with an approach based on expertise rather thanwith an abihty to rouse audiences' (PPC, 83). Pohtics becomes amatter of maintaining a minimum level of cybernetic equilibriumwithin circumstances which it does not authorize and disagreement isreduced to the status of a practical problem in search of a solution.This does not entail the elimination of 'ruptural practices' (PPC, 84)although their consequences are unintended. The persistence of the'sullen resistance of the silent masses or the spectacular resurgenceof the crowd in demonstrations is an opposition to the cultural andpohtical management of society' which reinforces the default positionof the State as 'the guarantor of processes of social regulation' (PPC,85). Of course, the pohticization of blame plays a huge part inthis scenario.

Recently this analysis has been reinforced by an advocate of theinvention of 'mediation mechanisms' managed by the State, such asthe institution of individual mobility restrained by the commitmentto personal financial investment with which to regulate the conflictbetween capital and labour.^^ For Aglietta, although authority 'can nolonger be legitimized by a symbohc figurehead or by the invocationof a transcendent m oral value or religious belief (C T C , 57) socialinclusion 'must become' the 'categorical imperative of the state' inthe context of the randomization of the causality of wealth and statusrespectively (87). On reflection it is apparent that Aghetta's moraloptimism is unwarranted as the notion of inclusion entails that thestate must somehow create the conditions for its own legitimacy, yetit must do so legitimately. In presupposing what has to be established,the project of 'inclusion' rephcates one of the core paradoxes ofpolitical modernity, for example the figure of the social contractwhich presupposes agreement to subjection in order to demonstratethe legitimacy of the subjection which it formulates. Yet Aghetta'sscenario adds a further disabling twist in that without the symbohcdimension there is no order to be included within. At best inclusionwould be a temporary contingent relation subordinate to the effectsof the actions of finance capital, and this would also hold for its logicalcorrelate, exclusion. In these circumstances it is hardly surprisingthat relations between political systems and their environments are


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56 Paragraphof moral indebtedness, and thus, for Aghetta, of the financial economon which its success is supposed to rest, and the games with sticks ancarrots through which the 'regulative' imperative is embedded.The end of the symbolicWhat these examples show is that pohtics proceeds as the attempto manage the absence of the One as a place of rule, and thus thabsence of a predetermined distribution of places. Not surprisingly thconsequences of this condition are legible within the symbolic itseinsofar as its function is understood as establishing the identity of thidea of the One with its referent. These developments serve to reveathe hmits of Zizek's positive affirmation of a foundational notion othe pohtical. The standard objection to this position is that it cynicallreplaces one form of terror with another. Zizek is indifferent to succom plaints. Rath er , Zizek's anxiety is that the 'sym bohc efficiencof the Order of Being has dissolved in the reduc tion of pohtics to thgeneralized management of the 'smooth service des biens'. AlthouZizek's evidence is drawn from the hterature associated with thsociology of'risk society', the argum ent is pretty much com mensuratwith the diagnoses of Donzelo t and Aghetta. ^

The broader imphcations of Zizek's explanation of the situatioshifts the stakes away from the hackneyed sixty-eightist problem oincorporation, commodification and 'repressive desublimation', iwhich self-authenticating vanguard forces compete with each otheto demonstrate their authenticity, towards a grumpy and curmudgeonly lament over the passing of the conditions in which thpost-Althusserian notion of the political as foundational 'act of insttution' could make sense. Zizek regrets that the conditions for thconstruction of a new symbolic order of Being and thus of thnecessary mediation of ideology have dissolved because the mechanisms of subjectivization through mis-identification which support have collapsed. As a psycho-Marxist Zizek points to the witherinof the Oedipus complex as evidence that 'the paradigmatic modof subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the paterna


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Contemp orary Political Problems 57'any symbolic poin t of reference that would serve as a safe and u np rob-lematic moral anchor' {TS, 332). The knowledge that the symbolicis contingent is no longer the exclusive possession of revolutionarycadres but is embedded reflexively within the post-punk culture ofeveryday life. Subjectivity lacks nothing, as an index of plenitude hasbecome immeasurable. Desire is replaced by drive, crash, and burn.The end of philosophyLastly we should consider the third term in the trinity of the miracle ofcoincidence. Although philosophy's regret over its own impotence orlack of practical significance is for R ancie re httle m ore than a deceptiveruse which defines the genre from its classical Greek origins, on thebasis of evidence consistent with the empirical political examplesgiven above some influential contemporary versions of the topic arecharacterized by the acceptance of the absence of any expectationthat the situation could be overcome. For example, as recently as1958, at least two years after the invention of Rock and Roll, Arendtdeveloped the Heideggerian complaint that 'authority has vanishedfrom the modern world ' because there is no universally agreed m etho dthat would fill the causal and logical gap between speech and action,or wh at Arendt called 'metaphysics'. In this example, the prob lemwas posed in order to renew political philosophy through a returnto its heritage in order to confront the 'elementary problems ofhuman living-together' (WA, 141), and which elsewhere Arendtfamously argued should be solved by the subordination of speechand action to a shared common account of an 'inaugural moment'precisely because metaphysics is lacking.^^ Thus according to a logicwhich Zizek replicated, albeit unknowingly, the order of the One isinvented in a historical moment in order to compensate for an absentmetaphysical foundation, but to which is attributed a causaUty andauthority which metaphysics would possess if it was available. In thiscase empirical pohtics is subordinated to a description of an examplewhich is authoritative because it most approximates a philosophicalideal of pohtics.


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58 Paragraphfunctions as a Umit at which the political begins. This direction endup with a notion of the political as the point in which being andauthority are w ithout foundation and the solidarity of philosophy andpolitics dissolves. Yet it wou ld no t be sufficient to confine this positionto the outcome of a critical interrogation of the relation betweenpohtical philosophy and politics as it is interrupted by a temporadimension which neither can master. Derrida illustrates the point ina recent interview about the dominance of the media construction o'artifactuality', by reference to the technologically-driven productionof a 'practical deconstruction of the traditional and dominant conceof the state and citizen (and thus of "the political") as they arelinked to the actuality of a territory' which is currently taking place.U nd er these circumstances a no tion of the political grasped as afoundation which institutes the solidarity of being and authority nolonger makes sense, even if such a thing had actually happenedImportantly, neither does the police understood as the distributionof places within the symboUc order, which is why Derrida refers tothe political stakes of 'practical deconstruction' in terms of 'multipleconfigurations of mastery without mastery' which are conditionedby a logic of 'exapp ropriation' {ET, 37). That is to say, without theauthority of propriety to keep things in place the vocation of thepolice is redundant. Typically, for Derrida this is neither a good nobad thing in itself. It simply serves to emphasize the contingency oany 'part which has no part' and the impossibility of its reduction to ameasure of political probability.

ConclusionUnder these circumstances a foundational notion of the political iQuixotic. Is Ranciere's relational notion of the pohtical as division avictim of the same fate? Of course, what has been deconstructed is apolitical ontology or order of being, the coincidence of philosophythe symbolic and politics. This does not mean that deconstructionis ochlos, but it does mean that it is something to add, although nsomething that can necessarily be counted as one. Perhaps recognition


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Contemporary Political Problems 59same thing differently, open to relations which do not pre-supposeany miraculous coincidence. After all, it is only with respect to theabsence of such an event that one can really talk about the political.

JEREMY VALENTINEQueen Margaret University College, Edinburgh

NOTES1 Jacques Ranciere, On Tlie Shores ofPolitics, translated by Liz Heron (London,

Verso, 1995), 15. Hereafter OSP.2 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie R os e

(Minneapolis, University ofMinnesota Press, 1998), 63. Hereafter D.3 Jacques Ra ncie re, 'Politics, Identification and Subjectivization', in The Identity

in Question, edited by Joh n Rajchman (London and New York, Routledge,1995), 63-72 (67). Hereafter PIS.

4 Jean-Phillipe Deranty, 'Jacques Ranciere's Contribution to the Ethics ofRecognit ion' , Political Theory 3\:1 (2003), 136-56 (137). Hereafter JRC.

5 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontolog y (London,Verso, 2000), 232. Hereafter TS.6 Jacques Ranciere, 'On the theory of ideology (the politics of Althusser)',

Radical Philosophy 1 (1974), 2-10 (3). Hereafter OTI.7 Ernst Kan torowicz, Tl\e King's Two Bodies (Princeton, Princeton University

Press, 1957).8 Claude Lefort, 77je Political Forms o f Modern Socie ty , edited and translated by

John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986), 304.9 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory , edited and translated by JohnB. Thompson (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988), 233. Hereafter DPT.

10 If there was time and space one could sho w the same problematic in a slightlyearlier work of Ranciere's which addresses the relation between revolutionand mod ernity m ore directly, and wh ere H obbe s is show n to be the name fora specific invention of the solidarity of philosophy, politics and the symbolic.See Jacques Rancie re , Tlw Names of History: On The Poetics of Knowledge,translated by Hassan Melehy, foreword by Hayden White (Minneapolis,University ofMinnesota Press, 1994)11 Jacques Donzelot, 'The Poverty of Political Culture', translated by Couze


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60 Paragraph14 Ha nnah A rendt, 'W hat is Au thority?' [1958], in Between Past and Futur

Eight Exercises in Political Tlwught (New York, The Viking Press, 1961),Hereafter WA.

15 Hann ah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, The Viking Press, 1965).16 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, transl

by Jennifer Bajorek (Cam bridge, Polity Press, 2002), 36, original em phasiHereafter ET.


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