The Art of Talking Past One Another: The Badiou–Rancière Debate

The opening chapter in this final section explores what is arguably one of the most important contemporary debates between living French philosophers (a controversy that echoes, in interesting ways, the earlier debate between Derrida and Foucault). It begins by highlighting the extent to which the Badiou-Rancière controversy has largely been an exchange in which they talk past one another (un dialogue de sourds), since they each tend to criticize the other from a privileged citadel—politics for Badiou, aesthetics for Rancière—without responding to the criticisms of their adversary. Against this backdrop, the chapter seeks to provide a comprehensive account of their respective positions on aesthetics and explain where their projects overlap as well as where they definitively part ways.

Aesthetic Revolution and Modern Democracy: Rancière’s Historiography

This chapter turns to the work of Jacques Rancière, who has, perhaps more than any other prominent living philosopher, extended the historical and historiographical work of Foucault by proposing an archeology of aesthetics, with a particular concern for its relationship to the history of politics. In doing so, however, he has stalwartly refused to provide a genealogical account of the emergence of aesthetics, which appeared at more or less the same time as modern democracy. This chapter thereby sets as its task a critical reassessment of the genealogical limitations of Rancière’s account of the historical relationship between art and politics. It is in this light that it advances an alternative account of historical causality by examining the variable conjuncture of determinants that contributed to the emergence of what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art.

The Right of Philosophy and the Facts of History: Foucault, Derrida, Descartes

This chapter proposes a counter-history of a seminal debate in the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. It calls into question the widespread assumption that Derrida rejects Foucault’s structuralist stranglehold by demonstrating that the meaning of a text always remains open. Through a meticulous examination of their respective historical paradigms, methodological orientations and hermeneutic parameters, it argues that Derrida’s critique of his former professor is, at the level of theoretical practice, a call to return to order. The ultimate conclusion is that the Foucault-Derrida debate has much less to do with Descartes’ text per se, than with the relationship between the traditional tasks of philosophy and the meta-theoretical reconfiguration of philosophic practice via the methods of the social sciences.

How Do We Think the Present? From Ontology of Contemporary Reality to Ontology without Being1

The opening chapter explores a philosophic question that reflexively sheds light on the orientation of the book as a whole: how can we write the history of the present? Against the backdrop of the more specific question of how to understand the present state of philosophy, it turns to the late work of Michel Foucault and his unique account of the ontology of actuality or of contemporary reality (ontologie de l’actualité). It carefully reconstitutes his concern with providing a historico-philosophical justification of his own project, which he situates in a trajectory that begins with the emergence of the ontology of actuality in the later Kant. It assesses the contemporary relevancy of his critique of historical periodization and his redefinition of modernity in terms of a critical attitude. Given the apparent contradiction between his rejection of periodic history and his identification of a new era of historical thought, the chapter goes on to suggest that an alternative logic of history—founded on the three dimensions of time, space and social practice—would allow us to completely reformulate the way in which we think the present.

The Hermeneutics of Art and Political History in Rancière

This chapter outlines Rancière’s major contribution to contemporary debates on art and politics by situating it in relationship to the work of his predecessors, and more specifically the paradigms of content-based commitment and formal commitment found respectively in Sartre and Barthes. It highlights the refreshing departure that he proposes from established models for thinking art and politics, but it also underscores some of the limitations inherent in his transhistorical conception of politics as well as in the hermeneutic framework he uses to interpret works of art.

Is Difference a Value in Itself? Critique of a Metaphilosophical Axiology

The opening chapter in this section outlines the implicit value system and binary normative logic—the valorization of difference over and against identity—that has dominated the ‘philosophy of difference’ in France and played an important role in the ‘politics of difference’ in the Anglophone world and beyond. By detailing a series of surreptitious conceptual operations aimed, in part, at disguising the rigidity of this metaphilosophical axiology, it calls into question the sacralization of difference, with special attention paid to its operative historiographical paradigms and its ultimate political consequences. It develops, in this regard, a metaphilosophical critique of one of the deep-seated normative commitments that has dominated a very significant portion of contemporary theory. This critical intervention thereby brings together one of the central motifs of the book as a whole, which aims at dismantling the more or less discreet attribution of value to difference in a seemingly unlimited number of domains (including history, politics and aesthetics).

What Is an Intervention? Metaphilosophical Critique and the Reinvention of Contemporary Theory

The introduction distinguishes between two different modalities of theoretical practice: one that plays by the rules of an established discourse (an interpretation) and another that seeks to contest these norms in order to introduce alternative forms of intellectual practice (an intervention). Based on this distinction, it outlines the basic stakes of the book as a whole: to intervene in the discourse of contemporary continental philosophy. It then provides an overview of the methodological orientation of the various essays by detailing three different forms of intervention that are operative—to varying degrees—in all of them. To begin with, the essays contribute to a descriptive intervention that seeks to develop the broad lines of a counter-history of contemporary thought in which the dominant schematizations are called into question. Secondly, the chapters contribute either explicitly or implicitly to a metaphilosophical critique of contemporary theoretical practice by questioning many of the unspoken norms that govern philosophic work in the present. This form of critical or metaphilosophical intervention is closely intertwined with a discursive intervention, which consists in elaborating new discursive strategies for thinking and alternative models for doing philosophy.

The Hatred of Rancière: Democracy in the History of Political Cultures

This chapter critically examines Rancière’s intervention in Hatred of Democracy by calling into question his transhistorical conception of politics as well as his problematic positions on current events (which purport—in rather contradictory fashion—to distinguish between what is ‘properly political’ and what is not). This critical reflection weaves together both historical analysis and the study of the present in order to formulate an argument against the existence of ‘politics proper.’ More specifically, it sketches the broad outlines of an intransitive history of democracy in which there is no fixed, transhistorical object such as Democracy. It also formulates arguments against the purity of the political in order to highlight the extent to which political practice is always bound up with diverse social, cultural, economic and even psychological forces.

Castoriadis and the Tradition of Radical Critique

This chapter turns to the work of one of the major philosophic figures in France to have stalwartly resisted the theoretical constellation of the philosophy of difference, in part through his identification with a tradition of radical critique that calls into question the standard academic role of philosophy and redefines it as ‘the attempt to think the totality of the thinkable.’ Situating his work in relationship to the so-called structuralists and post-structuralists, it presents the fundamental stakes of his broad intellectual project by providing a succinct but comprehensive account of how his historical ontology and his defense of political autonomy form the backdrop for his writings on aesthetics and psychoanalysis.

The Forgotten Political Art Par Excellence? Architecture, Design and the Social Sculpting of the Body Politic

With a few rare but important exceptions, it is arguable that major contemporary debates on the historical relationship between art and politics—from the work of Lukács and Adorno to that of Lyotard and Rancière—have generally favored the visual arts and literature over and against architecture and urban design. However, as a few thinkers like Benjamin and Foucault have recognized, if there is one art that appears to be prototypically political (in the sense that it is almost inevitably the site of collective decisions that directly shape the social body while simultaneously being subject to multifarious communal appropriations), it is surely architecture. This paradox leads to a question of central importance, which serves to guide the analysis in this final chapter: why have many of the foremost philosophic debates on the historical relation between art and politics sidelined what is perhaps the political art par excellence? This leads to a critical re-examination of the metaphilosophical assumptions undergirding many of the standard historical narratives regarding the development of art and its relationship to politics.