Phil Watts, Reader of Rancière

Abstract

title given to my remarks in the program, which I've kept here, is a bit misleading, for I am not going to try to situate Phil Watts among the interpreters of Jacques Ranciere. Were I to do that, it might involve my looking at whether Phil's ideas about Ranciere made sense, or if they illuminated a particular aspect of his thought; or, I might try to gauge how compelling his reading of Ranciere was by comparing it with of others--perhaps some of the readers of Ranciere whom Phil chose to include in the volume he coedited with Gabriel Rockhill in 2009. Instead, I'd like to do something different and try to see what effect reading Ranciere had on Phil's trajectory. I want to see what Phil's encounter with Jacques Ranciere enabled him to do differently, if anything. Did it cause him to use different materials or approach the same materials differently, from another angle? I want to see whether ideas Phil once considered significant or illuminating no longer seemed so, as well as what new relations or transversals between ideas he was able to make happen, what new modes of seeing and thinking became available to him after he began reading Ranciere. In short, Phil's poetique, to use a word that reappears throughout his writing: what he made of the texts he read and thinkers he encountered, the path he made for himself and was making when he died, what vistas were open to him and which had closed down. Where was he heading? Not, then, what it was that he knew about Jacques Ranciere but what he did with him. To quote one of Phil's favorite maxims from Joseph Jacotot, the ignorant schoolmaster, The first virtue of our intelligence is less to know than to make. 'Knowing is nothing, doing, making is everything.' (1) Very quickly, then, I want to suggest that after reading through Phil's work, some of which I knew, and some of which was new to me, it seems to me that his encounter with Jacques Ranciere was taking Phil away from a primarily ethical perspective and making him into a political thinker. movement I am looking at is this one: the move from The Spirit of the Trial (the title of the last chapter of Allegories of the Purge, the prizewinning book he wrote based on his thesis) to the title he gave to his Cerisy lecture on Ranciere, namely, Images of Equality. move from the chronotope of the trial, in other words, to the practice of equality. (Had we more time we might also trace out the transition from allegory to image, but that is another matter.) Justice, as Roland Barthes remarked in Mythologies, is a weighing operation and scales can only weigh like against like, human against human--a fundamentally ethical operation, fraught, like the immediate aftermath of World War II in France that became the subject of Phil's book, with accusations and verdicts, responsibilities and betrayals, collaborations, deceits, compromises, testimonies, retributions--the whole panoply of equivocations and the interior landscape of ambivalence surrounding individual moral and ethical choices. (2) subject of World War II itself, particularly in its French guise, is dominated by the trope of collaboration, a moral stain that Roland Barthes would argue from his more lighthearted perch in the mid-1950s was being washed away again and again in the state-led consumer frenzy for laundry detergents and shiny surfaces. subject matter of World War II lends itself to ethical reflections. And such reflections were also the dominant mode of thought during the years when Phil was writing his book in the 1980s--a period Daniel Bensaid characterized as one of massive judiciary escalation. (3) Bensaid was referring in part to the trend that flourished in the 1980s involving historians showing up in trials in France as expert witnesses. (The historian Henry Rousso, who figures prominently in Phil's book, wrote eloquently against such a practice.) That Phil was himself a scholar socialized in the 1980s was made very vivid to me by a remark he makes in passing in his notes for his new book: he refers to those of us for whom Deleuze's Image-temps was the first book we read by him. …