Place of Event: Arrangement of the Political in Theory of Jacques Rancière

Abstract

This article examines the concept of politics in terms of event and process in the theory of Jacques Rancière. The author attempts to place it in wider theoretical boundaries of continental political philosophy in order to show its genealogy, dependence and also innovation. He appeals to such philosophers as Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort to which the theory of Rancière refers to: this allows us to measure the Rancière's contribution in existing tradition of understanding politics as event and extraordinary moment. Sealed vocabulary of his theory thus receives the possibility to be decrypted and the circle of problems to which it pretends to be a solution appears more clear. The intermediate goal of this article consists in analysis of the way through which politics acquire a status of the event and, in particular, the figure of anti-political and its role in constitualization of politics. The author demonstrates the inner restrictions and normative limits of such understanding of politics and shows that the logic of Rancière's conception requires the introduction some additional notions and theoretical differentiations. This doesn't understate the meaning of the theory of Jacques Rancière but, in the contrary, open to us new theoretical tasks: on a base 15 of this conceptions we should think how the space of political argumentation organizes, how its language produces itself and how politics and police communicate with each other. We come to conclusion that the dissensual theory of Jacques Rancière suggests a "normativist horizon", in frame of which politics as disagreement can be productive and not catastrophic.