Abstract
<i>An-arché</i> in the thinking of politics and aesthetics beyond the tradition of "political philosophy" of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt in 20. century, or in contact with the ideas of political emancipation by Joseph Jacotot, and Karl Marx and anarchism, marks the theory of politics as a disagreement (<i>mésentente</i>) in the writings of Jacques Rancière. The intention of this text is to show how and in what way the thinking of the political should confront to the philosophy of politics who always take care theoretically about the politics of norms, postulates and rules of action. Since Rancière believes that political preceded by politics as a police or regime of the oligarchic law in contemporary liberal democracies, and it should be a matter of radical equality among citizens, then it is the fundamental problem of determining politics in an attempt to think of <i>an-arché</i>. In this contingency, we are doomed to a constant struggle with the order of inequalities and chaos in its own vagueness. That must be a reason why we use the word "mysticism" for what comes out of the state in-between two ways of comprehending a politics: (1) as the power of a hierarchically predicated society on which a state is constructed and (2) as a spontaneous struggle for democracy. The true politics of the equality must face what lies in its own bargain. And that is the powerful and chaotic <i>an-arché</i>. The paradox and aporia are not that democracy and freedom are derived from this principle <i>without</i> principles. Anyway, the scandal that rules in neoliberal oligarchy represents a confirmation of the same <i>an-arché</i>. For this reason, its <i>archi-politics, para-politics and meta-politics</i> are "the cunning of reason" of a perverted order of the world where the power of the "police" sets limits to the "politics" of freedom and not vice versa. Contemporary oligarchy is based in this <i>an-arché-ic</i> model of chaos and ambiguity in all its visible and invisible areas of action, from the management of the economy to marketing policy. But the problem with Rancière's metapolitics has been seen from the beginning to be a problem of the impossibility of political without the articulation of power. Equality without power remains unfulfilled by the demands of the "people" as temporary <i>demos</i>.
Highlights
Why do we have a certain kind of manner to say very often that today anything has become political and that almost everything is happening as aesthetic body shaping? Do that two terms contradict, though it may be that behind Janus' face masks conceal the abyss of other definitions except what suspends any possible over-determination? It should be said that politics designates the power of ruling the people in the community
The people are, subjectified through cultural-political struggle and the action of the oppressed and humiliated, of all those thrown out of the game of the networked machine of capitalist globalization and state with limited sovereignty. What if in this new uncanny framework any so-called revolution or emancipatory policy is already very restricted because it lives from the "mysticism" of the event of the egalitarian rebellion, and the absolute power of oligarchic rule in "the new world order" states cannot be hurt at all precisely because it is no longer a problem to reach the heights of democratic politics but to preserve the mystical common good that is relentlessly absorbed under the excitement of the effectiveness of governance for the benefit of the community of "democratic individualism"? Rancière's response through a series of paradoxes and aporias, with a multitude of redefined concepts from the "political philosophy" tradition, remains within yet another irreducible confines of the impossible
Emancipatory politics is, namely – as it is paradigmatically stipulated by Marx in his early text On the Jewish Question - a certain kind of reduction
Summary
Why do we have a certain kind of manner to say very often that today anything has become political and that almost everything is happening as aesthetic body shaping? Do that two terms contradict, though it may be that behind Janus' face masks conceal the abyss of other definitions except what suspends any possible over-determination? It should be said that politics designates the power of ruling the people in the community (politeia, civitas dei, republic, monarchy, democracy). His late thinking in which the notion of event (Ereignis) appears as a sort of attempt to overcome metaphysics and nihilism of technology is by no means an unambiguous way to the political and politics at all. If the event of what is escaping the logic of founding a policy is related to criticism of power and experience, or politics and aesthetics as the relationship of something that is already essentially established in itself as a power-experience of naturalizing the order of leading ideas of history, Rancière considers this thinking concerning the egalitarian turn of history. I will try to explain how the thinking of political and policy in Rancère’s writings becomes the question of the boundaries between the philosophy of politics and the new theory of radical political action
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