A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière

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LAW 328 Green Legal Theory

Notes

Ideas always are material realities, taking over bodies, giving them a map of the visible and orientations for moving.

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his books are always forms of intervention in specific contexts.

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‘Where are we?’ means two things at once: ‘how can we characterize the situation in which we live, think and act to-day?’, but also, by the same token: ‘how does the perception of this situation oblige us to reconsider the framework we use to “see” things and map situations, to move within this framework or get away from it?’; or, in other words, ‘how does it urge us to change our very way of determining the coordinates of the “here and now”?’

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showing that consensus meant in fact the contrary of democracy and, by the same token, the erasure of politics itself.

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Agonism

Democracy was invented as a polemical name, designating the unthinkable power of the multitude of those who have no qualification for governing. It was an insult in the mouth of Athenian aristocrats.

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‘Disagreement’ and ‘dissensus’ do not imply that politics is a struggle between camps; they imply that it is a struggle about what politics is, a struggle that is waged about such original issues as: ‘where are we?’, ‘who are we?’, ‘What makes us a we’, ‘what do we see and what can we say about it that makes us a we, having a world in common?’

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there are the words in which people express a situation as they feel it, and there are the words by which science accounts for a situation

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cf Heidegger's meditative/calculative thinking in Discourse on Thinking: Memorial Address

The main point is not what they explain or express, it is the way in which they stage a scene or they create a commonsense: things that the speaker and those who hear it are invited to share – as a spectacle, a feeling, a phrasing, a mode of intelligibility.

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disturbing conclusion that the essence of politics is the power of the people, and that the essence of the ‘power of the people’ is: the power of those who have no quality to exert power.

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possible to reconstruct not a political theory but a dramaturgy of politics.

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If a political government means anything at all, it means a government based on no specific qualification for power.

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‘dramaturgy’ of politics, a way to make sense of the aporias of political legitimacy by weaving threads between several configurations of sense. A configuration of sense is an effective form of linkage between perceptions, discourses and decisions. This form of linkage creates a specific form of commonsense, defining what can be seen, said and done, and confronting other forms of commonsense, which means other constructions of the possible.

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cf Problematic

there is not, on the one hand, ‘theory’ which explains things and, on the other hand, practice educated by the lessons of theory. There are configurations of sense

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his ‘concepts’ are instable: police and politics, distribution of the sensible, aesthetics, literature, etc. don’t mean the same thing from the beginning of the travel to the end; firstly because the travel is a fight too, a multi-waged fight where the emphasis can be put on different aspects; secondly because the travel – or the fight – continuously discovers new landscapes, paths or obstacles which oblige to reframe the conceptual net used to think where we are.

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slaves too understand language but it is impossible to see them as political animals; so the human ‘aisthesis’ has to be divided: understanding language, Aristotle says, does not mean possessing language. But this is not the whole picture: Aristotle opposes the speech which is the manifestation of the human political capacity to the voice which only expresses the animal sensations of pleasure and pain.

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cf P=NP and the intuitive response: no, P != NP, because that would imply that appreciating Mozart is the same as being able to compose

it is those situations of confusion that make thinking an interesting and possibly useful activity.

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