Rancière, human rights, and the limits of a politics of process

The chapter identifies an ethical lacuna at the heart of Rancière’s politics-as-process, which disables the discernment of the relative merits of political acts. Frost takes up the cases of someone prosecuted for inciting racial hatred against Muslims (Norwood v. UK) and of a French scholar who had denied the existence of gas chambers (Faurisson v. France). Frost concludes that Rancière’s politics opens up the social order to new forms of subjectivation, but the recognition of a political subject is an ethical act, which Rancière does not properly acknowledge.