Abstract
Jacques Rancière's theory of democracy shares a great deal with Derrida's. Both view democracy as founded on paradox, define it as the irruption of alterity and, most notably, explain the disjunction between empirical and ideal democracy without recourse to the traditional opposition of the political and the social. Rancière diverges from Derrida, however, in two decisive ways. First, he argues that alterity can be comprehended within the system of democracy, which, therefore, should not be understood as constitutively suspended in a messianic temporality. Secondly, Rancière retains a theory of ‘the people’ as a political agent, while avoiding the metaphysics of an identitarian construction of class. This essay traces out the steps by which Rancière affirms Derrida's deconstruction of the notion that the social is the origin of the political, but derives from it a descriptive model of political subjectivation and agency that Derrida's approach would seem to foreclose.
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