ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 it was claimed that if we wish to use Rancière to inspire a democratic strategy of appropriation, dis-identification and subjectification we need to think about how we can conceptualise and reduce the level of conformity that maintains police order, fixing any given conception of the social in place. In attending to this task, this chapter opens with a discussion of the brief mention of conformity by Rancière in his work. It will note that despite the centrality of emancipation in his writing and the insistence that we cannot be emancipated but must emancipate ourselves, he does little to tell us more precisely how we can do this. Consequently, the remainder of the book will proceed by engaging his work in conversation with other thinkers (Cavell, Derrida and Butler) in order first to effect a contrast through which we can bring his meaning into sharper focus, and second to develop his work via the formulation of three more dissensual practices. It will be guided in this task by Rancière’s aforementioned insistence that politics is about challenging existing ways of being, saying and doing through doubling, by which he means the imposition of difference on top of that which already exists. In this chapter it will be suggested that Stanley Cavell’s theory of the double self can help us to loosen our attachments to ways of being through aversivity. Chapter 4 will focus on how reading Rancière alongside Derrida on literarity and democracy helps us to identify poeticity as a practice of dis-orienting our ways of saying. In Chapter 5 it will be argued that by juxtaposing Rancière with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity we can identify absurdity as a practice of unsettling our ways of doing.
