For some reason this blog is the no.1 google citation for 'Ranciere'*. Odd. Anyway, am currently reading an interesting little book by Ranciere wherein he discusses Rossellini's Europe 51. I'd like to post something about this book and the 'Socratic' notion of 'atopos' - this concept surely underlies R's recognition of the symbolic place of the poor in philosophical discourse. Meanwhile, here is a useful essay on JR, from which this useful summary of Ranciere's Politics:
Government fulfills an ideal of order when it administers, manages, and tries to totally account for a population; but its reality is the police. The police keeps everyone in their place, imposes the calculations of value, apportions out the shares in society.
The political is an opposite process, and it is rare. It happens when outcasts stand up to say that the calculations are wrong, when they refuse the names and the places they've been given (we're not a surplus), to claim both a share in society and another name, which will signify their particular addition to universal equality (we're a plus). This is because the equality of one speaking being with any other—the fundamental presupposition of democracy—does not exist in the abstract. It only becomes universal each time it is proven, in a new language and on a newly visible stage. Equality is the groundless claim of a minority to have the rights of any other group, to be the demos, the people. But it is a claim whose naked truth does not suffice; it has to be put to the test, publicly verified. This is why the political always takes the form of a demonstration: a logical proof against all prevailing logic, and the mobile presence of a crowd against the fixed frames of an institution.
* 17/01/06 Not any more.
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