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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
In this short book, Jacques Rancière takes stock of the state of contemporary politics and examines current developments in the light of his writings. Rancière takes issue with what he sees as the consolidation in recent years of an increasingly oligarchic class of professional politicians within the system of representative democracy, while simultaneously objecting to leftist animosity towards electoral politics. He discusses a wide range of contemporary political movements and figures, from Nuit debout and Marine le Pen to Occupy, Trump, Syriza and Podemos, and he offers a trenchant critique of a variety of ideas and thinkers associated with radical politics, such as the ideas of immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism and the concept of insurrection put forward by the Invisible Committee. But above all he talks about the time in which it makes sense to talk about all this, a time for which history has made no promises and the past has left no lessons, only moments to be extended as far as possible. In politics, there are only presents. It is at every moment that the bonds of unequal servitude are renewed or that the paths of emancipation are invented.
Presented in the form of a dialogue between Jacques Rancière and Eric Hazan, this timely reflection by one of the most influential radical thinkers writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
What Times Are We Living In?
What Times Are We Living In?
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
About the book
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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What Times Are We Living In?
A Conversation with Eric Hazan
Jacques Rancière
Translated by Steven Corcoran
polity
Originally published in French as En quel temps vivons-nous ? Conversation avec Eric Hazan © La Fabrique Éditions, 2017
This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3700-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
About the book
This book took the form of a ‘conversation’ after a compromise was reached. At La Fabrique we wanted Rancière to express his thoughts on the times we are living in, but he himself didn’t feel the need to do so. Then, perhaps worn down by my asking, he told me one day that, if I presented him with some questions, he would reply to them. The task seemed to me a difficult one, although the aim was clear: to get Rancière to elaborate on things he had recently put forward in articles and interviews – on novelty in ‘our times’ and on what in them is continuous with the past, on the link between representation and democracy, on the end of work as the form of a common world to come, on hopes for a community of struggle that is also a community of life, on the new caution that we must adopt when speaking about such apparently simple notions as ‘people’, ‘insurrection’ or ‘history’ … But what questions should be asked and where to start?
I took some months to decide, then ended up by setting down one piece of the puzzle and, Rancière playing the game, the rest fell nicely into place. The conversation unfolded in written form, at a lively pace, between August 2016 and February 2017. The reader will be the judge of whether the result lives up to the question posed in the title of this short book.
E.H.
What Times Are We Living In?
ERIC HAZAN In Hatred of Democracy, published in France in 2005, you put forward some rules designed to permit a representative system to declare itself democratic: short and non-renewable electoral mandates, a monopoly of the people’s representatives over the drafting of laws, control against the interference of economic powers in electoral processes … In other texts from the same period, you suggest that a large role be given to drawing lots in the selection of a ‘government staff’, to prevent its being composed of those who ‘like power’ and are adept at taking it.
It is now more than twelve years since Hatred was written. Do you think that democracy is the central notion around which political questions continue to revolve? That the choice of those who represent us remains determinant? Have we not seen the growing decay of the representative system of government in recent years? Is the question today not to find a way to get rid of it – and at last to live without government?
JACQUES RANCIÈREHatred of Democracy laid out a reflection on the idea of democracy, not a political agenda. The reflection set out from a contradiction that saw, in states that defined themselves as democracies, fierce campaigns develop denouncing democracy as the reign of mass individualism and the destruction of the social link. The book’s central thesis was that democracy is not a political regime, that it is the egalitarian condition, the anarchic condition of the very existence of a specifically political power – but also, by the same token, the condition that the exercise of power strives incessantly to repress. I showed that what we commonly call politics is actually the contradiction in act that brings the exercise of power to rest on the democratic principle that contradicts it and of which it is the contradiction. This is the framework within which I studied the opposition of principle between democratic logic and representative logic and the forms of crossover between them. I recalled in particular a certain number of principles and rules that can be deduced from the democratic principle and that are liable to inject more democracy into institutions, for example drawing lots and short, non-renewable and noncumulative mandates. I recalled these rules and principles not as recipes to apply for ‘revitalizing democracy’, as they say today, but as demands suited to creating a break with the prevailing view, which assimilates democracy and representation, and to showing that our representative regimes are in fact increasingly oligarchic and that, in France, republican campaigns against the horrors of equality are the theoretical crowning of the process of growing inequality in our societies and our institutions.1
I admit to finding comical the idea that we have moved beyond all that. The republican campaign that I denounced back then has intensified ever since, becoming the main national cause – which, for example, makes the wearing of this or that swimming costume ‘the question’ on which the future of our civilization depends. As for the decay of the representative system, this is an outdated notion that has sustained the hopes and illusions of a ‘radical’ left since the 1880s, a left always given to seeing in the low participation rates in this election or that the proof that there has been massive disinvestment from the electoral system. But there is no decay of the representative system. Institutions are not living beings: they do not die from their illnesses. This system is staying the course and finds ways to accommodate the anomalies and monsters that it secretes. Through its very mechanisms, it creates a place for those who claim to represent the unrepresented, and it turns its own mediocrity into a principle of resignation to its necessity. Facing this, recent extra- or anti-parliamentary movements have not created any real alternative political space. The squares movements, which have produced the most vigorous affirmations of democracy in recent years, have been unable to lead to the creation of political movements autonomous of state agendas. Their heritage has sometimes dissipated, sometimes extended into alternative forms, but it has also been captured by ‘left of the left’ parties such as Podemos or Syriza, which play the game of electoral programmes and of alliances and negotiations between governmental parties. The energy of Occupy Wall Street gave impetus to the Bernie Sanders campaign, which in the end was left no choice but to support Hillary Clinton. And, in France, the electoral circumstances risk being marked by the usual stampede of leftist souls who subscribe to a logic of the ‘least worst’. Those who once asked us to vote for Hollande because he wasn’t as bad as Sarkozy will urge us this time to vote for Macron because he isn’t as bad as Fillon, or for Fillon because he isn’t as bad as Marine Le Pen, and in five years’ time to support Marine Le Pen because she isn’t as bad as her niece. The brains of Nuit debout [Up All Night] called upon us to say: we will never vote socialist again. I think that he should rather have said: we want no more presidents or presidential elections. I think that a head-on campaign challenging the ‘democratic’ primaries and the very procedure of the presidential election was a wholly logical outcome of the movement and precisely the occasion to mark the fact that democracy is something other than the choosing of the few by the many.
Living without government is certainly a great aim to have. But this was similarly the case in 2005, and indeed in 1850, when the defeated
