Paradoxes of Equality: Jacques Rancière’s Politics and Nonhumans (original) (raw)

2023, Parrhesia. A Journal of Critical Philosophy

The article examines the internal tensions in Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of equality in order to explore the possibility of including nonhumans in his politics. It demonstrates how Rancière sketches the contours of two different equalities, one in human politics and the other in literature, and how these equalities exponentially multiply and contradict each other. The first part of the article focuses on the diverse meanings and paradoxes of equality in Rancière’s writing on human politics. Notably, it points out a paradox with regard to Rancière’s interpretation of Aristotelian logos that, to some extent, undercuts his explicit rejection of nonhumans as possible political subjects. In the second part, the article argues that Rancière’s turn to literature to deal with a ‘politics of matter’ was perhaps not necessary, if we consider the parameters of his philosophical framework. The article argues that, if we take Rancière’s concept of politics to its logical conclusion, we have to include nonhumans too. It shows how the internal tensions between various paradigms of equality can be productively explored for nonhumans and politics alike. The main claim of this article is that Rancière’s philosophy, with its tacit assumptions and internal logic, can be made to think nonhuman politics without a detour into literature.

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