ABSTRACT

Turning now to consider practices that could disrupt ways of saying we can begin with the discussion of political slogans in which Rancière demonstrates the doubling of language involved in ‘politics’. These include the appropriation of the term ‘hooligan’ by Eastern Bloc dissidents;3 the 1968 Paris student slogan ‘we are all German Jews’;4 Blanqui’s appropriation of the term ‘proletarian’;5 and the Australian left’s reworking of the term ‘un-Australian’ to challenge the use of the term to exclude immigrants and others who are not considered to fit into the image of Australia built by the centre right.6

Rancière tells us that these are instances of what he refers to as ‘literarity’ in which certain stigmatised names are appropriated and given a positive affirmation to scramble their use and problematise the distribution of order in which they are being applied. In his little-cited essay on the term ‘un-Australian’ Rancière further devel-

ops his work on the poetics of ‘politics’. Here he suggests that poetic speech creates dissensus, which is not a disagreement between two already defined parties, but a ‘poetic invention’.7 This is dissensus as opposed to redistribution; it is not a reordering but a break with order (see Chapter 1) for