What Times Are We Living In?

A Conversation with Eric Hazan

Jacques Rancière, Steve Corcoran, Steve Corcoran

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509537006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In this short book, Jacques Rancière takes stock of the state of contemporary politics and examines current developments in the light of his writings. Rancière takes issue with what he sees as the consolidation in recent years of an increasingly oligarchic class of professional politicians within the system of representative democracy, while simultaneously objecting to leftist animosity towards electoral politics. He discusses a wide range of contemporary political movements and figures, from Nuit debout and Marine le Pen to Occupy, Trump, Syriza and Podemos, and he offers a trenchant critique of a variety of ideas and thinkers associated with radical politics, such as the ideas of immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism and the concept of insurrection put forward by the Invisible Committee. But above all he talks about the time in which it makes sense to talk about all this, a time for which history has made no promises and the past has left no lessons, only moments to be extended as far as possible. In politics, there are only presents. It is at every moment that the bonds of unequal servitude are renewed or that the paths of emancipation are invented. Presented in the form of a dialogue between Jacques Rancière and Eric Hazan, this timely reflection by one of the most influential radical thinkers writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.

What Times Are We Living In?

ERIC HAZAN In Hatred of Democracy, published in France in 2005, you put forward some rules designed to permit a representative system to declare itself democratic: short and non-renewable electoral mandates, a monopoly of the people’s representatives over the drafting of laws, control against the interference of economic powers in electoral processes … In other texts from the same period, you suggest that a large role be given to drawing lots in the selection of a ‘government staff’, to prevent its being composed of those who ‘like power’ and are adept at taking it.

It is now more than twelve years since Hatred was written. Do you think that democracy is the central notion around which political questions continue to revolve? That the choice of those who represent us remains determinant? Have we not seen the growing decay of the representative system of government in recent years? Is the question today not to find a way to get rid of it – and at last to live without government?

JACQUES RANCIÈRE Hatred of Democracy laid out a reflection on the idea of democracy, not a political agenda. The reflection set out from a contradiction that saw, in states that defined themselves as democracies, fierce campaigns develop denouncing democracy as the reign of mass individualism and the destruction of the social link. The book’s central thesis was that democracy is not a political regime, that it is the egalitarian condition, the anarchic condition of the very existence of a specifically political power – but also, by the same token, the condition that the exercise of power strives incessantly to repress. I showed that what we commonly call politics is actually the contradiction in act that brings the exercise of power to rest on the democratic principle that contradicts it and of which it is the contradiction. This is the framework within which I studied the opposition of principle between democratic logic and representative logic and the forms of crossover between them. I recalled in particular a certain number of principles and rules that can be deduced from the democratic principle and that are liable to inject more democracy into institutions, for example drawing lots and short, non-renewable and noncumulative mandates. I recalled these rules and principles not as recipes to apply for ‘revitalizing democracy’, as they say today, but as demands suited to creating a break with the prevailing view, which assimilates democracy and representation, and to showing that our representative regimes are in fact increasingly oligarchic and that, in France, republican campaigns against the horrors of equality are the theoretical crowning of the process of growing inequality in our societies and our institutions.¹

I admit to finding comical the idea that we have moved beyond all that. The republican campaign that I denounced back then has intensified ever since, becoming the main national cause – which, for example, makes the wearing of this or that swimming costume ‘the question’ on which the future of our civilization depends. As for the decay of the representative system, this is an outdated notion that has sustained the hopes and illusions of a ‘radical’ left since the 1880s, a left always given to seeing in the low participation rates in this election or that the proof that there has been massive disinvestment from the electoral system. But there is no decay of the representative system. Institutions are not living beings: they do not die from their illnesses. This system is staying the course and finds ways to accommodate the anomalies and monsters that it secretes. Through its very mechanisms, it creates a place for those who claim to represent the unrepresented, and it turns its own mediocrity into a principle of resignation to its necessity. Facing this, recent extra- or anti-parliamentary movements have not created any real alternative political space. The squares movements, which have produced the most vigorous affirmations of democracy in recent years, have been unable to lead to the creation of political movements autonomous of state agendas. Their heritage has sometimes dissipated, sometimes extended into alternative forms, but it has also been captured by ‘left of the left’ parties such as Podemos or Syriza, which play the game of electoral programmes and of alliances and negotiations between governmental parties. The energy of Occupy Wall Street gave impetus to the Bernie Sanders campaign, which in the end was left no choice but to support Hillary Clinton. And, in France, the electoral circumstances risk being marked by the usual stampede of leftist souls who subscribe to a logic of the ‘least worst’. Those who once asked us to vote for Hollande because he wasn’t as bad as Sarkozy will urge us this time to vote for Macron because he isn’t as bad as Fillon, or for Fillon because he isn’t as bad as Marine Le Pen, and in five years’ time to support Marine Le Pen because she isn’t as bad as her niece. The brains of Nuit debout [Up All Night] called upon us to say: we will never vote socialist again. I think that he should rather have said: we want no more presidents or presidential elections. I think that a head-on campaign challenging the ‘democratic’ primaries and the very procedure of the presidential election was a wholly logical outcome of the movement and precisely the occasion to mark the fact that democracy is something other than the choosing of the few by the many.

Living without government is certainly a great aim to have. But this was similarly the case in 2005, and indeed in 1850, when the defeated revolutionaries seized on the idea of ‘direct legislation by the people’ and began to oppose the ‘association’ or the ‘social’ to the government. This means that we are no closer to reaching this goal than we were in 1850. To get closer to reaching it, we must begin precisely by shedding the idea that this goal is carried by the general run of things. We must do away with the old Marxist idea that the world of domination secretes its own destruction, that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, and that the institutions and beliefs that sustained the old order will dissolve by themselves in the famous ‘icy waters of egotistical calculation’. According to this logic, states, parliaments, religions and ideologies will supposedly disappear through capitalism’s very development. Still today, the dominant discourse on ‘neoliberalism’ sees in neoliberalism the moment when economic domination is laid bare through the dissolution of all beliefs and institutions. But the fact is that we have ever more states – even suprastates – and ever more government; that the representative system does not cease to gain in strength by following its natural, anti-democratic bent; that ‘liberal’ capitalism does not cease to impose ever new norms and regulations; that religion today plays the massive role that it does; and that nationalisms and ethnicisms, along with all reactionary ideologies, have been powerfully reinforced in recent decades.

I certainly understand that the dominant state of the world is one thing and that our thinking is not constrained to fall into line with it – on the contrary, it is sustained by the energies of those who fight against it. Yet these energies themselves must not feed on fabricated analyses and sophisms regarding this state of affairs. In particular, they must overcome the reasoning that transforms the brutal advances of state and capitalist oligarchies into signs that these oligarchies are increasingly exposed and rendered powerless, and that sees in the defeats of democracy the tumbling of the illusions, paving the way to the final struggle. Defeats of democracy are defeats of equality, not the flight of illusions. More profoundly, we must get out of the logic that enlists historical developments in the service of one’s desires by interpreting the history of domination as that of a world of appearances destined to crumble for the benefit of naked reality. ‘Appearances’ are solid. Hence also the necessity to leave behind the pseudo-radical logic according to which the battle for institutions and the procedures of politics (which is not that of choosing representatives) are disqualified as mere appearances and all political equality is returned to a simple inverted reflection or deceptive instrument of capital’s domination. When it comes to radicality, this logic strictly shares the official view of things: just like this view, it bases itself on the presupposition that the representative system is the simple expression of an underlying social reality. The official version casts this system as an expression of the opinions of a people deemed to exist before this system. The critical version casts this system as the mystified expression of a class struggle that also exists before this system. But the people is not the great collective body expressed in representation. It is the quasi-body produced by the functioning of this system. And representation is not an expression, or even an instrument, of class struggle. It is a form of this struggle’s existence: not the passive expression of a pre-given reality but an effective matrix for constructing the common, for producing significations, behaviours and affects. The way in which our electoral system creates the body and the emotions of a ‘true people from below’ is a significant example of this today.

The modern metapolitical view turns politics into the expression of a socioeconomic process situated ‘underneath’ or ‘behind’.² But appearances and reality are not what there is. What there is is different forms of construction and symbolization of the common, which are all equally real and equally traversed by the conflict between equality and inequality. Constructing different forms of life also amounts to constructing different views of the ‘problems’ with which the dominant order presents us. In no way do I believe that inequality would disappear, as though by enchantment, if one decided to have assemblies drawn by lot. The question is, indeed, to know, first of all, who this ‘one’ is. I set out simply from the fact that this idea, which is per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the book
• What Times Are We Living In?
• End User License Agreement