Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ENUNCIATION AND POLITICS
Logos and existence, theater and performance
For Rancière, politics exists only through the constitution of a “theater,” a
stage on which the actors perform the artifice of political interlocution by
means of a double logic of discursivity and argumentation that is at once
reasonable (since it postulates equality) and unreasonable (since this
equality exists nowhere).
For there to be politics, a stage of “speech and reason” must be
constructed by the interpretation and theatrical dramatization of the gap
between the logic of police and of equality. This is a normative conception
of politics. No action that understands public space other than as interlocution
by way of speech and reason is political. Rancière, therefore, does
not consider the actions of the suburbans in 2005, who did not respect this
model of mobilization, as political.
The issue is not to integrate people who, for the most part, are French,
but to make them be treated as equals. […] It is to know if they are
counted as political subjects, endowed with a speech in common. […]
This movement of revolt has apparently not yet found a political form,
as I understand this, i.e. the form of a scene of interlocution that
recognizes the enemy as part of the same community as itself. 23
In reality, contemporary movements do not neglect to actualize the political
logic described by Rancière, i.e. to construct a scene of speech and reason so
as to lay claim to equality by way of demonstration, argumentation, and
interlocution. But even though they fight for recognition as new political
subjects, they do not make this form of acting into the only one that could
be defined as political. And even more importantly, these struggles take
place in a framework, which is no longer that of the dialectics and the
totalization of the demos that is at once part and totality, both “nothing”
and “everything.”
On the contrary, in order to impose themselves as political subjects, they
are obliged to break away from the politics of the “people” and the “working
class,” such as it is incarnated in the political and social democratic regimes
of our societies.
These political movements play and juggle with these different modes of
political action, but according to a logic that is not limited to the staging of
23 Jacques Rancière, “La haine de la démocratie – Chroniques des temps consensuels,”
Libération, Dec 15, 2005.
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