ABSTRACT
Jacques Rancière’s “Politics, Identification and Subjectivization” provides a cogent summary of his political philosophy. His discussion is guided by the activity of thinking as a human capacity to translate the political as the difference between policy (police) and emancipation (politics). Rancière defines emancipation as the concern with the principle of equality and its polemical verification. Equality is not a matter of establishing social order, and so politics does not refer to various identities, whether the people, the community or the self. Minority rights therefore do not define a politics since politics is not a matter of identity but of subjectivization. Politics is nevertheless a polemical commonplace for the handling of wrongs and the demonstration of equality. Rancière rejects the opposition of universal to particular and proposes instead the logic of identification, as for example, with Palestinians or political prisoners like Julian Assange. His philosophy addresses these issues without recourse to political economy.
