ABSTRACT
The chapter assesses Rancière’s possible intellectual affinity with Carl Schmitt as belonging to the same agonistic tradition. Notable differences notwithstanding, the chapter sees alignment at the metapolitical level: in the case of Schmitt, a methodological stance where the distinction between friends and enemies ceases to be purely formal, but is interwoven with a prior decision about who or what to oppose; in Rancière, as a ‘polemical intervention’ against the tradition of political philosophy that attempts to expunge precisely the phenomenon that it claims to be explaining: politics.
