November 11, 2007
‘disagreement’ is the political concept par excellence. According to Rancière in his Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998), a disagreement is:
a determined kind of speech situation: one in which one of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying. Disagreement is not the conflict between one who says white and another who says black. It is the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it or does not understand that the other is saying the same thing in the name of whiteness. (Rancière 1998: x)
Rancière’s notion of disagreement refers to an internal periphery, a site of antagonism around a word or concept. For Rancière, that word is equality.
The text is a critique of what he called the “police”—that is, the way in which a society assigns roles, places, and identities to its members. Much of this critique is directed at proponents of consensus democracy, to which Rancière has two main objections: first, that these societies relentlessly produce individuals and groups that take no part in the system of politics by consensus; and second, that democracies produce communities that are configured in such a way that individuals are counted according to ethnic or national identities rather than political potential.
According to Rancière, disagreement is what happens when the consensus is broken, when nonparticipating individuals demand their part in society and assert, through their speech, their equality.
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