Below is the rationale, abstracts and brief biographies for a special issue of Boderlands: New Spaces in the Humanities (http://www.borderlands.net.au/) which will appear in Winter 2009. The issue is edited by Sam Chambers and Michael O'Rourke and also includes contributions from fellow Rancibloggers Richard Stamp and Paul Bowman.
Jacques Rancière on the Shores of Queer Theory
A special journal issue edited by Samuel A. Chambers and Michael O’Rourke
Introduction and Overview: Queer Theory and Political Theory
Queer theorists rarely, if ever, invoke Jacques Rancière’s name. But this seems somewhat surprising given Queer Theory’s genealogical “roots” in what is called (at least outside of Rancière’s France) French Theory, in queer activist and anarchic politics, and in a post-Althusserian landscape dominated by sophisticated challenges to identitarian regimes and normative police logics and apparatuses – i.e. heteronormativities. While as Todd May has recently argued, Rancière is hardly a “household name” in the Anglo-American academy, Queer Theory has recently become more and more “at home” in the academy as a homonormative swerve has taken hold. The institutionalization, domestication and one might even say banalization of Queer Theory has taken many forms both within and outside the academy, but most obvious have been preoccupations with same/sex marriage, neoconservative agendas, and a return to an essentialist identitarianism, to a solidifiable subject. The inherent danger in this conservatizing impulse within the field is that Queer Theory will become nothing more than a synonym for Lesbian and Gay Studies and that, as a direct consequence, sex and sexuality will be demarcated as the only proper objects of scrutiny and inquiry for queer theorists. We think Political Theory may provide the best terrain upon which to begin to agitate, shake up, polemicize or revolutionize (in Jeremy Valentine and Benjamin Arditi’s terms) Queer Theory and its all-too-apparent complacencies. The field of political theory also provides a potentially productive space in which to stage an open conversation between Rancière and Queer Theory. This is especially the case since, despite queer theory’s initial emergence in activist politics, Political Theory and Political Science have largely remained immune to the incursions of queer thinking. Sometimes they have even inoculated themselves. The tangentiality of Queer Theory to the discipline of politics and the general silence or lack of engagement on the part of queer theorists with Rancière makes a dialogue between these nearly-proximate fields and figures all the more pressing. As Paul Bowman has pointed out in a discussion of Laclau, Derrida and Rancière the disagreement between the three over politics may not actually be one. With Bowman we would argue that the seeming disagreement or differend is actually an “addition” and that each, Queer Theory and Rancièrean politics, “adds a lot to the understanding of the other” (Bowman, “This Disagreement is not One: The Populisms of Laclau, Rancière and Arditi”, Culture Machine, 2007). So, we contend that Rancière’s thinking of the political offers a potential and profoundly important new turn or twist in Queer Studies. This special journal issue will provide a forum to begin the conversation between queer theory and Ranciere’s work; it will map the contours of a possible alliance between political theory and queer theory; and it will provide signposts for potential “wrong turns” that such an alliance might take.
Contributors
Abstracts, and Brief Biographies
Sudeep Dasgupta
A Partage of the Sexual? The Ex-centric Place of Rancière for thinking Queerness
Abstract:
Rancière’s critique of ethical thought (Lyotard, Agamben, Arendt) is based on his reading of politics, which disturbs the apportioning of Self/Other distinctions and overlaps that much post-Levinasian ethics relies on (Derrida). This ethical turn avoids the political by first denuding the subject of any potentialities, to then introduce the ethical question as the problem of a relation with an excluded subject produced either by contempt (Arendt) or by bare life (Agamben). Rancière reroutes the politics to ethics turn by thinking ethics as ethnos at the very beginning, as that whose an-arche (absence of foundation) disturbs Self/Other distinctions which the “ethical turn” relies on.. His notion of politics partitions ethnos and suggests counter-discursive commonalities rather than the ineffability of the Absolute Other (Derrida) or the alterity of the Inhuman (Lyotard). His early critiques in Nights of Labour and Le Philosophe Plebien improperly yoke terms (night and labour, plebian and philosopher) which divide ethnos, through an improper subject and its labour. The transgressions of the improper subject, are caught in the double – bind that Foucault calls asujetissement, which became crucial in thinking queer theory, first through discourse and then the body. Reading Foucault’s Bataille in relation to History of Sexuality: Volume 2 (Uses of Pleasure), this essay will track the politics-ethics relation as transgression moves from representation and language (Bataille’s L’Oeil for example) to the body, which can be mapped from the epistemological and figural turns in deconstruction and psychoanalysis’ foci on rhetoricality and figurality, to an ethics of the self, as self-relation and bodily praxis.
Both deconstruction and psychoanalysis have a particular place in Rancière’s theory: the former as an implicit absence, the other through a rewriting. Rancière’s relevance for Queer theory bears an oblique, reworked or implicit rejection of these paradigms. His ethics like queer theory, though focussing on the body, must be read through the politics-aesthetic nexus. Unlike Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s “aesthetic-subjecthood” (Forms of Being) Rancière’s aesthetics comes to both sociability and ethics through bodily potential, discursive disagreement and political dissensus, rather than through a post-Heideggerian and Derridean figuration of the being of the subject as lack and effect of the glissement of the signifier. By juxtaposing Rancière’s politics/ethics relationship to the deconstructive/psychoanalytic reading of ethics, I suggest that queer theory’s triple perspective on ethics through a Foucauldian/Derridean/Lacanian lens can be productively skewed. I trace how Rancière’s reading of politics through its attenuated link to ethics as ethnos, offers another way of thinking queerness. Rancière’s deployment of the partage as both schismatic and conjunctive could suggestively redirect sexuality’s destabilizing function by redrawing the politics-ethics relation. If sexuality splits the self-certainty of representation (Edelman in Homographesis) and destabilizes the self’s identity, a partage of the sexual reconstellates the self-community relation and offers a disorder of discourse through the potentialities of the improper proper. Offering an anti-paradigmatic yet politically productive political reading of ethics, a partage of the sexual would be a necessary, and novel, queering of the queer.
Biography:
Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is the editor of Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2007), and published essays in the fields of media studies, film and philosophy, aesthetics, visual culture, postcolonial theory and queer theory. His publications include “Visual Culture and the Place of Modernity” in Ackbar Abbas and John Erni (eds.) Internationalizing Cultural Studies: A Reader, London: Blackwell, 2004, and “The Image between Thought and Sensibility: Jacques Rancière, Cinema and the Aesthetic Revolution”, in Felicity Colman (ed.), Ciné- Philosophy, New York: Acumen, 2008 forthcoming.
Roger Cook
Aesthetic Revolution, the Staging of Homosexual Equality and Contemporary Art
Abstract:
In this paper I present some salient examples of both explicit strategies, and more elusive ruses, which, contemporary queer artists have adopted to deal with inequities and exigencies of pleasure and desire, ethnicity and class, in order to disrupt consensus, destabilize the status quo, and create “new modes of sense perception and […] novel forms of political subjectivity.”
Jacques Rancière draws attention to the way political agency is embodied in the ‘flesh’ of artworks as well as in the rhetoric surrounding them. Some artists make visible minoritarian desires and same sex-practices; however, sometimes the art of homosexuals points elusively in the direction of same-sex desire without necessarily making it explicitly visible or speaking its name: sometimes, particularly pre-Stonewall, in ways that artists themselves might not consciously recognise. “Elusion or evasion of meaning” as Jean-Luc Nancy says “is the meaning most proper to what we call art.”
Rancière expresses the hope that his work be of use as “a tool” for reframing “the categories through which we grasp the state of politics and the state of art.” Artistic production is vital to the staging of (homosexual) equality. Peter Hallward has described Rancière’s work as a “coherent project that pits a theory of disruptive equality against various kinds of orderly domination and hierarchy.” However, he also probes the limitations of its ‘theatrocratic conception of equality,’ wondering whether its improvisatory nature disenables the sustaining of the ‘knowledge, skill or mastery’ needed for political action. This echoes perceptions of the limitations of Butler’s performative queer theory: its failure to take sufficient account of social inequalities, which, as Marx said, “weigh on the brain of the living.”
Revolution is for all. It is not only homosexual artists who are responsible for ‘aesthetic revolution’; but such artists, as part of the ‘part that has’ had little or ‘no part,’ are in a provocative position to give specific thrust to its perpetuation. However, as the problems with identity politics and the assimilation of gay liberation demonstrate, the political aesthetic of queer strategies loses ground: ruses have to be reinvented, stratagems sustained, the pitch queered again and again.
Biography:
Roger Cook teaches of gay and lesbian studies and is a lecturer in fine art at the University of Reading.
Hector Kollias
How Queer is the Dēmos? Politics, Psychoanalysis, and the Impossibility of Emancipation
Abstract:
In this article I attempt to stage an encounter between the thought of Jacques Rancière and one of the most polemical examples of queer thinking of recent times, that encapsulated by Lee Edelman’s coinage of the ‘sinthomosexual’, thus effectively also staging an encounter between Rancière’s political writings and the a-political or even anti-political impulses of queer Lacanianism. Whilst it would be possible to configure a fruitful confluence between Rancière’s notion of the ‘dēmos’ as those who have no share in the distribution of the sensible, and the figure of the queer ‘outsider’ who challenges the political order, so that one can even talk of the possibility of queer ‘emancipation’ in Rancièrian terms, Edelman’s radical figure of the ‘sinthomosexual’ can best be seen as figuring a limit for the possibility of emancipation. Reading Rancière from Edelman’s Lacanian perspective, I argue that the real and salutary possibility of emancipation, the ascension of the queer into political subjectivation must always be checked by the recognition that the communal division represented by the ‘dēmos’ is always capable of re-unification; the incorporating logic of the Symbolic order always heals the rifts it suffers. Is the queer therefore the latest in a number of political entities bestowed with the transformational power of the ‘dēmos’? Should we be celebrating our emancipation and thus fall prone to the dangers of assimiliationism, or what Rancière calls ‘homonymy’? Or is the queer, seen as the ‘sinthomosexual’, destined to figure the rift in the political/Symbolic fabric itself, a rift which, Lacan would suggest, is not itself political and therefore not susceptible to emancipation? Is there a place for those who do not have, and do not ask for, a share?
Biography:
Hector Kollias is a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford where he studied English and French, and Warwick University, where he completed his PhD in Philosophy and Literature. He has temporarily lectured at King’s as well as at Morley College before being appointed to a lectureship in the French department at KCL. His main research interests lie in three general fields. First: the enlightenment and its legacy, in particular the rise of the novel as a new literary genre; the conjunction between the discourse on human rationality and that on excessive anti-rational ‘instinct’, especially in relation to sexuality; and the continuity between the enlightenment and romanticism. Second: the theory of literature in the 20th century, its emergence in the transition between the enlightenment and romantic periods, and its significance as a mode of discourse separate from philosophical reasoning. And third: Queer theory, its relation to psychoanalytic theory, and its reception in contemporary France, especially in conjunction with the broad sweep of contemporary French queer autobiography.
He is currently working on two projects: on the relation between queer theory and queer writing in contemporary France; and on the inception and development of the notion of literature from the 18th century to the present. He has co-supervised research in 20th-century French literature and thought, and would welcome prospective research students in any area related to his interests.
Oliver Davis
Rancière / Queer Theory: from disagreement to irritable attachment
Abstract:
Who could fail to be struck by the remarkable likeness between Rancière’s vision of true politics and certain theorizations of the queer circulating in the English-speaking world? Yet arresting though the similarity certainly is, Andrew Parker is right to say that it is ‘ironic’. If encounter there is to be between Rancière and queer theory, it would be reckless not to spell out the meaning of this irony, the risks both conceptual and strategic:
Conceptual:
1. Rancière is a formalist about politics who has said – emphatically – that his work is not concerned with the content of particular disagreements, with ‘specificity’ of any kind.
2. He is a Cartesian rationalist, albeit a radical one, both in his construction of the mind/body relation in Le Maître ignorant and in the force of his disagreement with Bourdieu in, and around, that work and in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres. So his theory of intellectual emancipation draws on ideas which are assumed to be inimical to feminist, queer and crip theory.
3. He has form for discounting as individualistic sexual liberation struggles and while this does not distinguish him from a large number of French thinkers writing from both the Left and the Right in the mid-1980s, it is hardly an auspicious overture to a relationship.
4. His writing, remarkable for its restrained approach not only to notes but to specific reference to other works, is the mark of a style of thinking which could hardly be further removed from the mutually referencing interconnectedness characteristic of ‘queer theory’ today.
Strategic:
1. Rancière’s relationship to political science is as tangential as political science’s relationship to queer theory. He is therefore not the way for queer theory to gain its entrée to political science.
2. Consonant with his radical anti-authoritarianism, Rancière’s most vital work has taken place at the boundaries between disciplines and has played at them to the point of dissolution: if the discipline, ‘History’, is not one, as he suggested in Les Noms de l’histoire, how much more vulnerable is ‘Queer Theory’ to a thought which systematically exploits the intrinsic porosity of disciplinary boundaries?
The contribution will work through these precautionary points, each of which also hints at the specific benefits, for both Rancière’s work and queer theory, which this encounter is capable of yielding. These reciprocal gains will be duly outlined. There can be no pretending, however, that the encounter could be without friction, without irritation, just as Rancière typically prefers to begin in disagreement. It will be suggested that a politics, ethics and aesthetics of irritable attachment is the overarching productive outcome, and not just a regrettable but inevitable feature, of the meeting of Rancière’s work and queer theory as the latter tries to think its relationship to the lesbian and gay mainstream, as it reconsiders questions of historical transmission, concepts of family and filiation, and as it frames its increasingly numerous and diverse ethical commitments in the wider world.
Biography:
After a BA in French and Philosophy at Oxford University, I stayed on to work under the supervision of the late Malcolm Bowie and completed an M.St. by research on A la recherche du temps perdu. My doctoral work on narratives of ageing and old age in twentieth-century French fiction, philosophy and psychoanalysis, recently published as Age Rage and Going Gently, brings into focus a neglected aspect of life-writing, bare senescence. I am currently writing a book-length study of the work of Jacques Rancière and its relevance to innovative contemporary cultural practices. The aim is to provide an accessible critical overview of Rancière’s work which engages it in constructive dialogue with new modes of cultural production and consumption, in particular new writing and reading technologies in the broadest sense. I have spoken and written on questions of literary-critical methodology (specifically la critique génétique and recent trends in ‘post-Jungian’ criticism) and French queer literary politics, particularly in relation to the work of Guillaume Dustan. I have taught at Wadham College, Oxford and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris and now work in the Department of French Studies at Warwick University.
Michael O’Rourke
Ten Theses on Crip Politics
Abstract:
Even if, or perhaps especially because, disability does not figure very often (or at least not explicitly) in the work of Jacques Rancière, this article will attempt to stage an open-ended conversation between Rancière’s political philosophy and anti-identitarian Crip Theory (as opposed to identitarian disability studies) which is most clearly outlined in Robert McRuer’s book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. Derrida, Butler, Barthes, Foucault and others are the key theoretical presences in McRuer’s book, while Rancière is not invoked or claimed as a crip theorist avant la lettre. If this special issue attempts to bring out, as it were, the queerness of Rancière’s work and/or the potential it offers for reinvigorating queer theory and politics this article is a further extension or twisting of that project in that I will tentatively explore the possibilities Rancière’s oeuvre, drawing on texts from The Nights of Labour right up to the recent writing on the politics of literature, offers for developing a crip theory, politics, poetics, and aesthetics. While Rancière’s short polemical essay “Ten Theses on Politics” will provide the model for my mini-manifesto, I will draw on the whole range of his work and will not seek to develop a teleological argument where each point builds upon the previous one. Rather, the ten theses I set down should be seen as an excursion into crip and queer theory which does not advance a political program or a clearly articulated set of goals. Following Rancière’s own style, as described by Sudeep Dasgupta, my errant theses will carefully unfold an argument while also formulating fluid concepts, adhering to the “spiralling logic of Rancière’s own aesthetics of writing” (Dasgupta). Each section should be read as links in a chain which displace each other, fold and unfold alongside and across each other, athwart and thwarting one another as they thwart the disciplining (and normalizing) of queer and crip theory while intervening into both.
Biography:
Michael O’Rourke lives in Dublin and is the author of many essays on the intersections between queer theory and continental philosophy (especially Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Nancy, Irigaray, Foucault, Butler, Badiou, Agamben, Caputo) and his recent work has been around the question of messianicity and futurity. He is the series editor (with Noreen Giffney) of the Queer Interventions book series and the Cultural Connections: Key Thinkers and Queer Theory book series. Biographical details can be found at www.theeories.com
Charles Phillips
Difference and Disagreement: Actualizing Queerness
Abstract:
Because queer theory has consistently resisted the development of a thicker, more philosophically-grounded foundation, it remains vulnerable to co-optation and dilution. However, over-specifying the content of such an unorthodox ‘field’ runs its own set of risks—namely usurping queerness’ ability to innovate, travel, and politicize various themes in new and interesting ways (i.e. to queer). Finding a theoretical basis for queerness that creates an identifiably queer space without jeopardizing its tendency to innovate is critical to maximizing queer theory’s political potential.
Gilles Deleuze, in his analysis of the concept of difference, does much to sketch out a line of development from which to follow. For Deleuze, difference does not emerge amongst different parties (e.g. the way gays are often described as different from ‘straights’); rather, it appears immanently from the party itself. Difference from is reducible to a model of recognition, in which the number of ‘sexualities’, for instance, are contained within definable range of distinct identities. Difference in itself favors viewing sexuality in terms of a pure continuity, in which newness can emerge unexpectedly from unanticipated places in unforeseen ways. This political operation is not be restricted to ‘new sexualities’; it is also valuable for understanding the way in which new political groups emerge without merely making an appeal to the universal or fitting into a traditional description of the liberal distribution of groups.
Operationalizing this move requires the work of Jacques Rancière, in particular his analysis of disagreement. According to Rancière, a group that does not exist as a political entity comes to be through the declaration of a wrong. As this group emerges or (to use Deleuze’s term of art) actualizes, it fundamentally changes the overall constitution of the police order. Each existing group, because it is defined in relation with the other groups, is modified as a result of another group surging into being. The political moment, for Rancière, is a moment of disagreement between, on the one hand, an order that allegedly includes everyone and every group, and on the other hand, a group that does not count in this order. This group makes itself of account, and thus joins the count.
Reading Deleuze’s concept of difference in itself with and through Rancière’s notion of disagreement reorients the theoretical foundations of queer theory, and allows queerness to re-emerge with a more robust, but still substantially flexible content.
Biography:
Charles Phillips is a PhD candidate at the Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Political Science. His dissertation focuses on queer theory as a political operation, and his broader research interests include pluralism, materialism, subjectivity/agency, and media studies.
Richard Stamp
The torsion of politics and friendship in Derrida, Foucault and Rancière
Abstract:
This paper maps out some of the peculiar twists and torsions between the ‘politics of friendship’, philosophy and queer theory in a reading of Jacques Rancière’s thinking of democracy, which (it is argued) both extends and interrupts the figurations of friendship in the works of both Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. It is guided by Rancière’s conception of ‘the wrong’ as the ‘improper property’ of the ‘part that has no part’, which provides the non-foundational figure that constitutes politics as ‘an interrupted current, the original twist that short-circuits the natural logic of “properties”’ (1999: 13-14). Such equality is anarchic. As Oliver Marchart (2007) has recently argued, such a ‘post-foundational’ figure of the originary torsion of ‘the proper’ and ‘the natural’ is a shared thread in recent thinking of the political in continental philosophy (and, we should add, queer theory): it is also one that has increasingly found expression, albeit in very different modes and contexts, in the figure of the friend (cf. Blanchot 1988, 1997; Nancy 1991; Deleuze & Guattari 1994; Rancière 1995; Foucault 1997; Derrida 1997; Butler 2003; Agamben 1993, 2004). So how might we further twist this originary torsion of politics to consider the queer relationality of friendship?
The first part of this paper, then, considers the peculiarly poisoned gift to queer theory offered by Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the philosophical canon of writings on friendship: on the one hand, Derrida persistently seeks to question the hegemonic schema of ‘a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics’ (1997: viii), thus opening up paths by which queer theory might analyse the political ramifications of friendship qua heteronormative filiation (family, community, civil society, state, race and species); but on the other, this insistent putting-into-question of the ‘fraternization’ of democracy (1997: viii) works to close down any question of the social and historical relation(s) of homosexuality and friendship. By framing his enquiry in terms of the ‘double exclusion of the feminine’ – that is, friendship between women, and friendship between men and women – Derrida identifies such exclusive ‘fraternization’ with the ‘essential and essentially sublime figure of virile homosexuality’ (1997: 279). So, when he calls for a thinking of a democracy-to-come, it is defined negatively as a thinking that would no longer be ‘an insult to the friendship we have striven to think beyond the homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema’ (1997: 306). What is the rhetorical-political force of this ‘insult’ figured in ‘virile homosexuality’?
The second part of this paper then shows how Rancière effectively inverts Derrida’s approach to fraternal friendship. He thinks democracy not in terms of fraternity, but first as equality: democracy (of equals) interrupts or ‘muddles’ (1995: 67) any fraternal community insofar as the communal desire to ‘forge equals through brotherhood’ always disavows those ‘mongrels’ who ‘bear the stamp of inequality’ (1995: 80). Thus, if the community of fraternity disguises the division of the equal/unequal that makes it possible, the community of equals must always remain ‘an insubstantial community of individuals, engaged in an ongoing creation of equality.’ (1995: 80) This shift in emphasis – from Derrida’s aporia of an ‘insult’ to an open-ended ‘creation’ of relations between individuals – echoes the way in which Foucault’s final works (1986; 1997) inflect a queer politics of friendship by shifting the terrain from a means of identification to modes of subjectivation, wherein friendship ‘reopens affective and relational virtualities’ (1997: 138). This paper concludes, then, by indicating a rapprochement between Rancière and Foucault around the historical torsions of friendship, which promises more productive potentialities for future queer theorising of its politics.
Biography:
Richard Stamp teaches cultural studies at Bath Spa University. He is an editor of the online journal Film-Philosophy, is co-editor with Paul Bowman of The Truth of Žižek (Continuum, 2007), and has published work in books such as Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust (Rodopi 2000); Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers (Rodopi 2001); and Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (Rodopi 2008).
Patricia MacCormack
Inhuman Evanescence
Abstract:
In On the Shores of Politics Rancière describes the task of politics as giving substance to the evanescent moment which regulates the multiplicity of ecstatic pleasure found in demos, what he calls a ‘jubilant’ ethics. Evanescence is found in the ‘in-between’. This paper will use Rancière’s exploration of the philosophical encounter between art and politics where the effacement of the centre effaces the concept of the subject as not empirical but constitutive, and ‘becoming-inhuman…is the very language whereby aesthetic fiction is opposed to representative fiction’ (FoI 126). Genius according to Rancière is not knowing, jubilance not being and ethics found in the unrepresentable but nonetheless encountered. The future of the image and the flesh of words are found through their seduction in excess of meaning as anticipation, gesture and effect. These ideas have many resonances with queer theory. As Rancière corporealises politics, so too queer theory takes representations of subjectivity and sexuality away from centralised human positions into a dissipative multiplicity. Sexuality is an example where becoming-inhuman requires a not-knowing and not-being, not through what Rancière critiques as ‘nihilistic humanism’ but the human becoming-aesthetic, an enfleshed corporeal aestheticisation of politics, not a series of empty shopping-list perversions. Rancière’s ethics offer techniques of regulating the risks and limits of queer and the politics of sexual aesthetics – the evanescent in-betweens of desire, seduction and the body as anticipation, jubilance and gesture.
Biography:
Dr Patricia MacCormack is senior lecturer in English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published extensively in the areas of the visceral dimension of cinema, corporeality, the post-human, queer theory, feminism, ethics and continental philosophy. Essays on perversion, masochism, body modification, non-huMan rights, polysexuality and the ethics of becomings have appeared in Theory Culture and Society, Body and Society, Rhizomes and collected anthologies. Her particular interests lie in the work of Guattari, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, Blanchot, Irigaray, Rancière and Serres. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Ashgate 2008) which invokes spectatorship as an ethico-political configuration and, with Ian Buchanan, the editor of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) where she addresses ecosophy as cinema-world traversal. She is currently planning a book on post-human ethics.
Adrian Rifkin
Commentary
Biography:
Adrian Rifkin is Professor of Art Writing in Goldsmiths, Department of Art, currently writing a long illustrated essay provisionally entitled Losing Myself which is a study in image driven self-narrative and has recently published a longer version of his essay Sexual Anaphora in Parallax.
Nina Power
Non-Reproductive Futurism: Rancière’s rational equality against Edelman’s body apolitic
Abstract:
Lee Edelman’s recent queer theory polemic against ‘reproductive futurism’ seeks to align his project against all ‘reason’ and against all ‘politics’. This paper will argue that to write from ‘the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive’ as Edelman puts it, involves deliberately superimposing various ‘political’ categories with various non-political categories. Thus Edelman elides democracy with the Child, rationality with a naïve concept of progress and heterosexuality (straightforwardly) with reproduction in a bid to ward off the threat of collective organisation and action.
Against Edelman’s attempt to rid thought of all politics, Rancière’s conception of politics will be presented as capable of avoiding many of the main targets of Edelman’s attack, as not being committed to a notion of politics that is based on reproduction, but is nevertheless ‘rational’ in a specific way. The paper will also draw on empirical historical examples of certain left-wing and alternative political movements, such as early kibbutzim, collectives and groups that explicitly refused reproduction, but that nevertheless were most definitely political, and quite often ‘queer’.
Biography:
Nina Power is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. She is the co-editor of Alain Badiou's writings on Beckett and has published several articles on Badiou, Feuerbach, Sartre and theories of the subject in 19th and 20th century philosophy. She has also published articles on Iran, education and vintage pornography. She is currently writing two books, one on contemporary feminism and one on Feuerbach.
Paul Bowman
Aberrant Pedagogies: JR, QT, and Bruce Lee
Abstract:
“This was the ’60s, remember: everyone talked like that then”
~ Dan Inosanto, friend and student of Bruce Lee
Gender-, sexuality-, queer-, cultural-, and many of the other more infamous ‘studies’-suffix subjects have a constitutive investment in interrogating the vexed question of pedagogical institutions and operations. Yet little consideration has been given in these fields to Jacques Rancière’s radical reconsideration of education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. This is so, despite the strength of the consensus in the post-1968 intellectual formation about the contingent character and the ethical and political biases of all cultural and social institutions: From Althusser to all of the Foucauldianisms, from Bourdieuian sociology to the Frankfurt School, the resurgence of Gramscian post-Marxism and to the proliferation of the politicised ‘studies’-suffix subjects (cultural-, gender-, queer-, ethnic-, women’s-), and way beyond, the shared concern has been with the interpellating, disciplining, and subjectivating work of institutions.
Prime here, therefore, is the matter of the cultural/political work of pedagogical and educational institutions and apparatuses. This is something that Rancière’s work – as part of the same (post-1968) moment, movement and discursive formation – tackles head on. Yet it remains a largely ‘misrecognised’, overlooked or under-considered intervention. So, this article will consider the relationship of Rancière’s radical retheorisation of education to the formation that he largely takes his distances from: Bourdieuian sociology, deconstruction and Foucauldianism, in particular. It will do so by examining what will be shown to be an exemplary case of both postmodern inter- or anti-disciplinary pedagogy and Rancièrean/Jacototian “emancipatory”, egalitarian, “verificationist” pedagogy: namely, the texts, teachings and other ‘lessons’ of Bruce Lee.
The article argues that Bruce Lee is an exemplary case, here, in many registers: in its historicity, its inter- and anti-disciplinarity, and indeed its ideology. Moreover, any study of Bruce Lee’s interdisciplinary (and) Rancièrean pedagogy immediately enters out into realms and problematics shared fundamentally by gender-, queer-, cultural-, identity- and ideology studies: questions of authority, authenticity, performativity, institutionality, hegemony, and so on. The appropriateness of the ‘case’ of Bruce Lee for considering questions of “alternative” pedagogies and (directly or indirectly) “queer” topics has not gone unnoticed by many scholars in gender and cultural studies. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the uncanny proximity of many of Bruce Lee’s ‘lessons’ to the work of seminal thinkers in queer theory (Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler in particular) as well as to Rancière’s representation of Jacotot’s method in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. This article will verify these arguably overdetermined and overdetermining relations and consider their significance and possible consequences.
Biography:
Paul Bowman teaches cultural studies at Cardiff University. He is author of
Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2007),Deconstructing Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2008), and Theorizing Bruce Lee (Rodopi, 2009) editor of Interrogating Cultural Studies (Pluto, 2003) and co-editor of The Truth of Žižek (Continuum, 2007).
Samuel A. Chambers
Unintelligibility and the Miscount of Democratic Politics: Towards a Politics of Inaudibility
Abstract:
Recent work in contemporary political theory appears to converge on a critique of liberalism – for example Wendy Brown’s recent work on tolerance, or Benjamin Arditi’s latest book on populism and its attendant critique of interest-group pluralism. Working in parallel with projects such as these, this essay argues for the limits of representation, for what Davide Panagia calls ‘a politics of unrepresentability’. I describe this as a politics of unrecognisability; and, going back to Jacques Rancière’s radical reading of Aristotle’s famous account of ‘man as a political animal’ – of anthropos (the human animal) as that being that possess logos (reasoned speech) – I name this a politics of inaudibility.
My resources for making the case for such a politics will be Judith Butler’s recently-introduced concept of unintelligibility and Rancière’s understanding of democracy as the fundamental miscount of politics. Taken on their own, I would suggest, each conception is easily misunderstood: Butler’s notion of unintelligibility is quickly reduced to a call for liberal inclusion (Edelman), and Rancière’s conception of democracy is easily dismissed as out of touch or simply too abstract. This paper sets out to demonstrate that each conception can productively illuminate the other. Thought together, we see emerge both a trenchant critique of interest-group liberal pluralism and, more significantly, we construct the outlines of a powerful alternative vision of politics.
Biography:
Samuel A. Chambers teaches political theory at Johns Hopkins University. He writes broadly in political theory, including work on language, culture, and the politics of gender and sexuality. He has recently published one monograph, Judith Butler and Political Theory (with Terrell Carver, Routledge, 2008), and has another in press, The Queer Politics of Television (IB Tauris, 2008). With Terrell Carver, he has also edited two recent volumes, Judith Butler's Precarious Politics (Routledge, 2008) and Democracy, Pluralism, and Political Theory (Routledge, 2007). His current teaching and research revolves around intersections between queer theory and contemporary political thought and is oriented to the task of rethinking democracy outside the terms of contemporary liberalism.
Daniel Williford
Trans-Pop: Ranciere and the Post-modern Queer Image
Abstract:
In a recent lecture titled "The Misadventures of Critical Thinking," Jacques Rancière identifies troubling trends within critical inquiry on both the left and the right that spell out dead ends for any sort of resistance. On the left, Rancière says, there is a melancholic acquiescence to the post-modern machine which we can ironically identify but from which we can never escape; on the right, we live in a world where democracy has become a dangerous sort of fluidity where nothing has limits and every Western enterprise serves to expand the regime of capitalist consumption. Indeed, these "ends" are, for Rancière, part of a long tradition of a fear of the expansion of democracy/capitalism that threatens the natural world, and this is often cast as the proliferation of the image. Rancière's most recent work on the politics of aesthetics and the place of the sensible (relating to the senses) in politics has staged radical possibilities for how we might understand visual culture beyond the limited discourses that warn of inevitable ends. I wish to articulate how Rancière's ideas of the sensible and of the politics of the image apply specifically to a queer context, and how queer theory might intervene on Rancièrean turf. I will do so specifically through the close analysis of a recent photograph by David LaChapelle depicting transgendered model Amanda LePore as Andy Warhol's Marylin Monroe silkscreen. The image seems at first a cheeky post-modern gimmick that is devoid of any real meaning; or else it depicts the very excess of the modern, boundless result of democracy as consumer culture. I will argue that the image does something far more interesting and aggressive: that it shows that the real threat of the image is that it continues to speak out of turn, to show up uninvited, to come alive, like some monstrous undead creature, at the very worst time. The illegibility of the image, the image of meaninglessness or depressing excess, to borrow from Rancière's critique, is a way to contain the threat that the image poses: its own promiscuity and its radical democratic accessibility.
Biography:
Daniel Williford is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in British literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Continental Philosophy, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, and Lesbian and Gay Studies. His most recent publications were in the journals Poroi and Film and History.
Todd May
There are no Queers: Jacques Rancière on Democratic Politics
Abstract:
Much of the discussion of homosexuality and homosexual rights these days centers on issues of identity. Is homosexuality natural? Are there genetic or other physiological predispositions for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and others? Is homosexuality found in every culture and society? What characteristics, if any, are to be associated with homosexuality aside from attraction to someone of the same gender (and what do we mean by the term “gender”)?
Many of us are uncomfortable with these questions, not because we are squeamish, but because they seem somehow like the wrong questions. They seem, like so many questions in identity politics, to isolate political struggles against oppression of homosexuals from other solidarity struggles. And yet we wonder how to conceive such struggle without returning to the liberal politics of individualism.
Here is where the thought of Jacques Rancière becomes useful. For Rancière, any democratic politics is a collective struggle from the presupposition of equality. We all live in what Rancière calls “police” orders. These orders are hierarchically arranged so that certain groups in a society are marginalized. Their specific marginalization depends on their specific history and circumstances, but what all marginalizations have in common is that those marginalized are considered to be less than equal. Political struggle, then, consists in insisting upon one’s own equality, not simply be demanding it (which still implies a hierarchical relation), but by acting out of the presupposition of equality.
Therefore, it is not, for instance, homosexuality or queerness that is at issue in the political resistance against oppression of gays, lesbians, and others; it is equality. This equality is not the equality of liberal individualism in which each individual is equally respected by state institutions. It is, rather, a lived equality among those who struggle and those in solidarity with those who struggle. In ways that will be explained in the paper, the embrace of a Rancièrean politics shifts struggle decisively away from any identity politics and toward a more general politics of solidarity, without losing sight of the fact that oppressions have different and particular histories. The embrace of this more democratic politics opens up a productive future for conceiving gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc. politics.
Biography:
Todd May is Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University. He is author of eight books of philosophy in recent Continental thought, including The Politics of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality (Edinburgh University Press and Penn State Press, 2008). He has also been involved in numerous political movements over the past several decades, and was advisor to Clemson University’s gay and lesbian student group for seven years.
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