At the Borders of the Sensible Order

The Performativity of the Political Subject in Jacques Rancière’s Thought

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the specificity of the political in its main outlines by reinterpreting Jacques Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible through the lens of the debate on borders, and to bring to the fore the displacing move that transforms the principle of dissensus –which disrupts the identification mechanisms of the existing visibility regime –into a practice of individual and collective intervention. From a Rancièrean perspective, this intervention practice, framed by the assertion that political subjectivization is possible through the rejection of existing social categories, defeats the historical destiny of those who have been whispered where to position themselves, what they can express, and whose speech can be accepted as articulate voice; it ensures that the boundaries of a hierarchical social order afflicted by inequality are eroded through the abolition of given identities. While analyzing idea of subjectivization, the study will also seek an answer to the question of whether the Rancière’s theses trap the subject in a domain where material and social conditions are pushed into the background or in a new border. Another fundamental question related to this one is whether the theses put forward by the thinker reduce politics solely to the problem of the political subject. Without ignoring these questions, the primary concern of this study is to investigate the possibility of a political tendency that neither traps politics or the political in the bottleneck of the identity problem nor overlooks the social reality from which the subject emerges.