1

Introduction: The Schizophrenia of Impossible Identification, and the Impossible Identification of Schizophrenia

Politics, for Rancière, is the ‘introduction of an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of speaking beings’ (DT 19, M 40). Rancière plays this out with reference to the struggle between the rich and the poor. ‘Politics (that is the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity’ (DT 11, M 31). While Rancière is very clear that the role he intends the poor to play is symbolic of a more general wrong, suggesting that the ‘poor themselves are not really the poor’ but rather ‘the constitutive wrong or torsion of politics as such’ (DT 13-14, M 33-34), the question arises as to whether his formulation of this wrong (and what this formulation ‘stops short of’) ties him to a notion of politics that remains too wedded to the Aristotelian version of the police order of politics he seeks to challenge.¹ Does Rancière only acknowledge dissensus to operate in a way that is liable to replicate the limitations of ancient democracy to Greek males, transposed into the European metropolis?²

In the opening gesture of Disagreement, Rancière appeals to the distinction Aristotle makes in the Politics between speech (logos) and voice (phonê), a distinction he aligns with humans and animals. While all animals can voice their pain, only humans are endowed with speech, and it is speech that allows humans not merely to vocalize pleasure and pain, but also to differentiate the useful from the harmful, good from evil, the just from the unjust. It is ‘sharing a common view’ of what is good and just that constitutes the political. Herein lies Aristotle’s ‘idea of the political nature of man’ (DT 1, M 19).³ Rancière goes on to stipulate, however, that a slave participates in logos, according to Aristotle, ‘by way of comprehension but not understanding’, so that ‘the slave is the one who participates in reason so far as to recognize (aesthêsis) it but not so as to possess (hexis) it’ (DT 17, M 38); thus for Aristotle, says Rancière, the slave represents a ‘transition from animality to humanity’ (DT 17, M 38).⁴ For his part, Rancière contests the difference that Aristotle maintains between perceiving or recognizing logos as the distinction between slaves and those who are free, surmising that if you understand an order and you ‘understand that you must obey it … you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you’ (DT 16, M 37). Since it is precisely ‘a dispute over the object of the discussion and over the capacity of those who are making an object of it’ that is the proper subject of disagreement (DT xii, M 14–15), the question of how a slave participates in logos would appear to be decisive for Rancière’s project, in which he maintains the ‘equality of anyone at all with anyone else’ (DT 15, M 35).

Although slaves serve as the occasion for Rancière to part ways with Aristotle’s argument on the crucially significant issue of whether people differ in their capacity for logos, it is not slaves but the poor on whom Rancière focuses both in Disagreement and throughout his work. Thus, Rancière states that ‘the whole basis of politics is the struggle between the poor and the rich. … It is the actual institution of politics itself. There is politics when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor’ (DT 11, M 31).⁵ While Rancière comments in some detail on Aristotle’s argument in the Politics, a text in which Aristotle attends to the theme of slavery, the role that slavery plays in Rancière’s argument is largely confined to establishing the peculiar character of the freedom that the poor are granted when they eschew the fate of slavery (see DT 7, M 26). Slavery is admitted into the discussion inasmuch as it affords Rancière the opportunity to elaborate on the ‘empty’ (DT 8, M 27) freedom bestowed upon the poor.

What would be the proper way to engage critically and productively with Rancière’s articulation of the relation between politics and art? What would be improper ways of doing so? How might disidentification figure into how one positions oneself in relation to the part that has no part? What would it mean to articulate that which Rancière identifies as the ‘improper property of freedom that establishes the demos simultaneously as both part and whole of community’ (DT 13, M 33) differently, improperly, with impropriety? What would it mean to complicate and multiply the ways in which the part that has no part lacks any part? Is there only one way in which the part that has no part has no part, or are there many? If there is more than one way, what is the relation between these parts that have no part? Is it similar or different to the relation that Rancière conceives between the police order and dissensus? Is there a hierarchy between several parts that have no part? Despite Rancière’s efforts to move away from it, does class remain the spectrum or filter through which voices must pass in order to be acknowledged as really speaking, as opposed to merely mimicking ‘the articulate voice’? (DT 22, M 44). If this is the case, are gender, race, sexuality and a host of other crucial configurations of power and oppression neutralized or rendered invisible by this filter? If logos or the intelligibility of speech is the measure by which one must establish one’s political viability, rather than a re-evaluation of the worth of physical labour or reproduction, must there always be invisible others who perform this work behind the scenes, unaccounted for?

If politics is not just speech but also ‘indissolubly the account that is made of this speech: the account by which a sonorous emission is understood as speech, capable of enunciating what is just’ (DT 22-3, M 44), what are we to say about the politics of Rancière’s own account, which renders Aristotle’s work as if he had nothing at all to say about women or ‘barbarians’? If ‘politics is the setting-up of a dispute between classes that are not really classes’ (DT 18, M 39), what about those whose existence is so negligible as to not even rise to the level of Rancière’s commentary, so as to fail to quali fy as ‘not really classes’? What about Athenian women, whose bodies serve as vessels in order to qualify the male children they bear as potential citizens, those who must count as free in order to bequeath freedom on their male offspring, but whose freedom does not extend far enough for them to count as political citizens themselves? What about ‘barbarian’ women, those whose existence Aristotle barely acknowledges, let alone theorizes, those who, it would seem, serve no political function – except the manual labour of slaves and reproduction of ‘barbarians’?

When Aristotle does mention female slaves, it is to suggest that among barbarians, it is impossible to discern any hierarchy of natural rulers. Aristotle claims that, ‘among barbarians, female and slave have the same rank. The reason for this is that they do not have a natural ruling principle but their union is one of female slave with a male slave’.⁶ As Holt Parker says, for Aristotle, ‘There is no distinction between slave and female because all barbarians … are by nature slaves’.⁷ Were it the case that male slaves had authority over female slaves, this would interfere with the hierarchies Aristotle establishes within the household, in which he maintains that while neither free women nor slaves are, in Elizabeth Spelman’s words, ‘fit to rule’, the ‘function, virtue and nature of women differ from those of slaves’.⁸

It is hard to know where to break in, how to interrupt or intervene in what presents itself as the imperturbable flow of a narrative that sweeps us along. It is as if Rancière establishes his own version of circularity, a variation of a ‘logic of equivalence’, as Davide Panagia points out, which he denounces in others, but which he might be said to reiterate in narrating the logic of a dissensual politics that claims to speak for anyone and everyone, but passes over some in silence.⁹ Even as it breaks through the barricades that philosophers have sought to erect between their political theories and dissensual politics, Rancière’s circular narrative presents itself as hermetic as it counterposes a logic of identity with a logic of the ‘heteron’.¹⁰ It is not the ‘claim for identity’ that matters, it is the power of the ‘anyone’ at all.¹¹ It is not ‘the self of the community’ that matters, it is ‘subjectivization’. It is not ‘identification’ that matters, it is ‘disidentification’ (1992, 59–61). If the logic of emancipation is going to differentiate itself from the logic of policy or of the police, so Rancière’s story has it, it must rely on something other than identification. If it is in the name of a specific category that dissensus intervenes, it is neither the specific value, nor the ‘lived situation’ (2009, 17), nor the ‘attributes or properties of the community in question’ (1992, 60) that matters.

Nor, we are told, must we appeal to a notion of universality that resides in the concepts of ‘citizen or human being’ that have operated in such a way as to exclude ‘the worker’ from being ‘a citizen’ or ‘the black’ from ‘being a human being’ (1992, 60). Rather, universality only exists in the enactment of equality: ‘The only universal in politics is equality. … Equality exists, and makes universal values exist, to the extent that it is enacted’ (1992, 60). Universality lies in ‘what follows’ from playing out the consequences of the ‘disjunctive junction of two logics’ (2009, 10), that of the police, and that of equality. Equality is not an end, it is an axiom.¹²

Let’s look a little more closely at this story to discern whether there are ways in which, like the operation of exclusion for consensus thinking that Rancière puts into question, his own thinking succumbs in certain ways to the very impulse he condemns, that which, in Panagia’s words, ‘erases the difference between inside and outside, between community and non-community, so that there is nothing to dispute’ (2014, 289). Perhaps the ‘nothing to dispute’ is legislated through a silent interdiction on particular ways of acknowledging the political, or by the oversight that allows Rancière to ask ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed’, without detaining himself to wonder if it might have had something to do with what has been explored under the heading of the ‘“feminisation” of mass culture’, as Rita Felski adumbrates.¹³ Or rather, by legislating that such a consideration be outlawed by the series of equations or equivalences that orchestrate the story Rancière tells about history of philosophy, such that the gendered status of the character of Emma Bovary cannot figure as politically relevant.

Let me develop this example. Emma, says Rancière, is ‘sentenced to death’ by Gustave Flaubert ‘as a bad artist, who handles in the wrong way the equivalence of art and nonart’ (WE 240). Flaubert sublimates in her, his own ‘temptation of putting art in “real” life’ (WE 240) by making his character embody the ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ (WE 239) he cannot tolerate in himself, cannot reconcile with his idea of himself as an artist. What better way to purge himself than by embodying his own desires in the character of a woman, and then to kill her off? If, as Rancière suggests, ‘Madame Bovary is the first anti-kitsch manifesto’ (WE 240), Emma is the means by which Flaubert differentiates himself as a writer, as an artist, from the character whom he makes succumb to the crime of w hich he can only rid himself through the compensatory mechanism of literature itself. Emma must be put to death in order to save Flaubert from the crime of betraying mysticism, the crime of bad art.¹⁴ In putting Emma to death, Flaubert is also putting to death symbolically that part of himself he cannot integrate into his image of himself as the ideal artist. Emma must die so that he can live as an artist, unsullied by the evil she is made to represent and for which she must be punished.

In differentiating himself from his female character who conflates art with ‘a nice blotting pad and an artistic writing case … nice curtains … a pair of blue vases on the mantlepiece’ (WE 239), Flaubert enacts precisely the symbolic divide that preserves art for what Felski identifies as the ‘educated elites’ (1990, 1). Felski points out that the divide between high and low culture, high art and kitsch associated the ‘working class’ and ‘the non-intellectual middle classes’ with the ‘banality and triteness of mass-produced art’ (1990, 1). It also characterized ‘the sphere of consumption rather than production’ and that of ‘sensationalism and emotionalism rather than critical thought’ with feminization (1990, 1). That which Rancière identifies as Emma’s disease of ‘sentimentalism’ (WE 235) becomes the perfect foil for the critical distance her inventor can assume, and her death the vehicle that enables Flaubert to distance himself from her culpability.¹⁵

Although Rancière points out that ‘Flaubert needs for his own sake to construct Emma’s wrong or disease as the confusion between literature and furniture’ (WE 240), or between the enjoyment of spiritual art and material life, Rancière fails to notice – or rather the machinery of equations he has put in place to enable him to differentiate between an Aristotelian distribution of the sensible, and the capacity of Flaubert’s democratic and artistic style disqualifies its registration in advance – that in the cure he administers, Flaubert reinscribes gender stereotypes in the most hackneyed way. He sacrifices a woman, albeit within the confines of the literary – by containing the sacrifice in ‘a book’ (WE 238) – for the greater good of the male artist. In the final analysis, what ails Emma is her confusion of the ‘words and images’ (WE 246) that had become readily available to ‘anybody’ (WE 235) with ‘objects of desire, goods to consume, ends to achieve, persons to conquer’ (WE 246). Hers is the ‘wrong interpretation of sensation[s] … their solidification as objects of desire and love – as causes of pain’ (WE 246). In a word, it is ‘hysteria’ (WE 246). It is ultimately only ‘at the cost of having some of them [hysterics] die’ (WE 247) that Flaubert can destroy ‘the illusion of life, of individuality’ (WE 245).

Rancière exempts himself from having to deal directly with the associations of Emma’s hysterical ‘solidification’ (WE 246) with femininity by strategically introducing hysteria into his text only after the fact, in two senses. First, he acknowledges its importance once it had already begun to detach itself from its habitual associations with the feminine. ‘Hysteria … underwent a radical shift during the second half of the nineteenth century, as what was considered an organic feminine disease became a psychic disease common to both sexes’ (WE 246), says Rancière. Hysteria had become an equal opportunity employer, freed from any naturalizing attachment to the female body, and affecting both men and women by the time it arrives on the scene in Rancière’s narrative, ‘between the time of Flaubert and the time of Proust’ (WE 246). Secondly, Rancière turns his attention to the term only after his consideration of Flaubert’s Emma. Through the simple but effective narrative device of retrospection, Rancière equalizes hysteria by distributing it among everyone. He thereby implicitly absolves Flaubert of any sexism, affording himself the opportunity of avoiding the gendered implications of Flaubert’s hystericization of his character Emma.

The term ‘hysteria’, says Rancière, came to ‘designat[e] the way in which bodies suffer from a pain that has no organic cause but is provoked by an “excess” of thought. As such, the word hysteria became an approximate synonym for the “excitement” caused by the excessive availability of words, thoughts, and images that was supposed to be inherent to modern life’ (WE 246). In other words, since excitement was considered synonymous with democracy (WE 235), hysteria was understood – by those who decried the disappearance of the old, hierarchical order, where people knew their place – as the disease of democracy, the disease where it is possible for people to equate art with furniture, to solidify sensations. It was the democratic disease of hysteria, according to this analysis, that allowed Emma and her like to solidify ‘swirls of dust, bubbles of water, and patches of color’, to treat them as ‘objects of desire and love – as causes of pain’ (WE 246).

The ‘literary cure’ (WE 247) on the other hand, was to ‘splinte[r] those solid qualities and retur[n] them to the identity of particles whipped by the impersonal flood’ (WE 246–7). The literary health of the writer is bought at the expense of the disease and punishment of his hysterical character. The writer thus adopts the position of the healthy schizophrenic, by releasing ‘the swirls and bubbles of impersonal, preindividual life, but he does not let himself be split up by them’ and he thereby separates himself from ‘true schizophrenia’ (WE 247). Emma must die for the sake of Flaubert. Such a bargain Virginia Woolf cannot make with the character of Rhoda, as we will see. Woolf knows what it means to be ‘truly split up’ (WE 248). She knows ‘that the impression … only hurts and wounds us. And it condemns to death as well’ (WE 248).

It is clear that the ‘literary health’ (WE 246) Flaubert achieves is reserved for artists like himself, artists who (unlike Emma) understand that art is not personal, but impersonal. It is not a matter of will, not a matter of making ‘art visible’, as Emma makes it, by putting ‘art in her life – ornaments in her house, a piano in her parlor’; it is a matter of doing what Flaubert the writer does, in making art ‘invisible’, a matter of expressing ‘in its magnificence, the nonsense of life in general’ in a prose that is ‘still muter’ than the ‘prose of everyday life’.¹⁶ As Rancière sees it, Flaubert’s art is neither individuated, nor does it concern subjects who act in plots (art is not what Aristotle thought it was), nor is it about consumerism, nor about ends and desire (art is the neither/nor of Kant’s aesthetic idea). Art is about the pure, impersonal flow of atoms, microevents, sensations, haecceities (art is Deleuzian).¹⁷ It concerns ‘the impersonality of the flow of sensations’.¹⁸

Flaubert’s artistic project, which Panagia identifies as playing an ‘archetypal role’ for Rancière’s ‘political theorizing’ (2014, 285), construes literature as that which ‘blurs the distinction between the realm of poetry and the realm of prosaic life’ and thereby ‘makes any subject matter equal to any other’ (WE 237).¹⁹ Rancière thus casts Flaubert as anti-Aristotelian in this respect, since, for this new regime of literature, there are no longer ‘noble subjects or ignoble subjects’, nor any border separating the ‘poetic’ from the ‘prosaic’ (WE 237). The social and political hierarchy in which Aristotle’s poetics was embedded would appear to be dispelled, as poetry liberates itself to become the poetry of the novel, in which it is no longer a question of representing the actions of distinguished personages pursuing ‘great designs or ends’ (WE 237). Literature is no longer set over against history, which deals with life and its reproduction, and which concerns, specifies Rancière, ‘mostly women’ (WE 237).

Rancière understands Flaubert to have overturned the essentially Aristotelian hierarchy ‘between two kinds of humanity’ (WE 237). By specifically associating women with ‘those who were satisfied with living, reproducing life’ and who thus were taken to embody one side of the division of humanity, Rancière’s implication is that it was men ‘who dedicated themselves to the pursuit of great designs or ends’ (WE 237). Thus, the further implication is that in overturning the Aristotelian view of poetics, in blurring the line between the poetic and the prosaic, Flaubert was also, at least in principle, disassociating women from the prosaic. This allows for the assumption that it just happened to be the case that the character who mistakes art for life is the female character of Emma, but it could have been otherwise – after all, as Rancière stipulates (after the fact), hysteria came to be recognized as a disease affecting both sexes. Yet, far from this being the case, I suggest that it is precisely a gendered dynamic that structures the symbolic divide Flaubert exploits between kitsch embodied by Emma, and art embodied by the artist (Flaubert).

The ‘pure art’ of Flaubert is ironically an art in which there is no pure art, one in which anything or anyone can become the subject of art. As Rancière says, ‘Among the new possibilities available to anybody, there is the possibility of “fusing art and life”. Flaubert can make art out of the life of a farmer’s daughter to the extent that the farmer’s daughter can make art of her life and life out of his art’ (WE 238). It is precisely because of this equivalence that, as Rancière sees it, Flaubert must find a way to differentiate himself from Emma, and one of the means by which he does so (and this is what Rancière does not see) is through the leverage of gender. Let me pause to note that by referring to Emma as the daughter of a farmer, or as a ‘young gir[l]’ (WE 245), and not as a woman in her own right, Rancière downplays the gendered dynamic that Flaubert is exploiting. It is not gender that matters, it is class.²⁰ It is not being a woman that counts in this instance, it is being the daughter of a farmer, or the inexperience of youth. This erasure of gender happens in the name of the part that has no part, the anonym, the logic of the heteron. Rancière overlooks the specificity of gender by making it the equivalent of class.

The same logic of equivalence operates elsewhere, as when Rancière introduces the distinction between ‘active men and passive women’ as a gendered gloss on ‘the old order’, only to immediately submerge the specificity of gender in the generality of class by linking the ‘upsetting of the old opposition’ with ‘the child of the plebeian’.²¹ By the ‘old order’ Rancière means the Aristotelian distribution of the sensible (or its more recent equivalent, the order of belles-lettres). Rancière departs from his more established way of indicating Aristotle’s hierarchy as the distinction between two kinds of humanity when he genders the opposition, but then goes on to subsume Emma Bovary under the generic description ‘child of the plebeian’, counting her as one among the ‘daughters of peasants’ (2014, 207). She is aligned with ‘sons of artisans’, like Woolf’s ‘“half-educated, self-educated”’ Septimus, or with the ‘sons of country parsons like [Conrad’s] Lord Jim’ (2014, 207). Again, it is not gender that matters, it is class.

According to Rancière, Flaubert wants to ‘untie the knot that ties artistic equality’ to the availability of ‘ideal pleasures’ to ‘anybody’ (WE 238). In other words, he wants to assert his distinction as an artist from the character of Emma. He wants to claim his expertise as an artist.

There must exist two opposite ways of handling the equivalence of art and nonart. There must be an artistic and a nonartistic way to deal with it, and the character [Emma] is constructed as the embodiment of the wrong way. The right way, the artistic way of dealing with the equivalence consists in putting it in the book only, in the book as a book. The wrong way, the way of the character, consists in putting that equivalence in real life. (WE 238)

In order to preserve his distinction from his ‘antiartist’ character, Flaubert sees his ‘virtue’ not only as ‘making any nonartistic subject artistic’ but also in making his character a ‘nonartist’ (WE 238). In this sense, says Rancière, Flaubert ‘needs the hysteric for his own schizophrenic health, which means the health of literature. … He needs him or her, he needs the fiction of his or her cure, in order to separate healthy literary schizophrenia from true schizophrenia’ (WE 247). With the words ‘him or her’ Rancière elides the equivalence between literary health and the true male artist, and the corollary equation between the schizophrenia/hysteria of his character Emma, who embodies practically minded sentimentalism (see WE 235), and the gendered consumerism of mass production.

Rancière disavows the feminization of mass culture that Flaubert embodies in not only putting Emma to death, but ‘scoff[ing]’ at her as he does so (WE 240). If Flaubert is disdainful towards Emma, Rancière attributes the disdain to Flaubert going ‘overboard’ in his attempt to demonstrate himself as the ‘exact opposite’ (WE 240) of Emma. If Flaubert ‘treats the whole story of Emma’s life and misfortunes as Emma treats … Mass; as a set of sensations and images’ (WE 239), he must find a way of distinguishing himself from his character. This he does through his absolute, impersonal style, by showing that the ‘right way to achieve … the equivalence of art and life’ is through ‘seeing things when you are no longer a personal subject, pursuing individual aims’ (WE 241).

This ‘absolute’ writing style is one in which Flaubert sees things ‘released from all the ties that make them useful and desirable objects’, where one enjoys ‘sensations as pure sensations’ (WE 241). It is a style in which the ‘real events’ of the novel are ‘the perfume of lemon and vanilla’ or sunshine darting through ‘little blue bubbles’ of water (WE 242). As art, the real events of the novel are not to be tied into what happens ‘within the plot of a subject of desire’ (WE 244). Rather, it is an ‘impersonal flood of haecceities’ that pure literature ‘releases … from the chains of individualization and objectification’ (WE 243). Rancière quotes Deleuze who understands by ‘haecceities’ the ‘relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected’ (WE 243).²² The artist weaves out of these ‘microevents … an impersonal sensory life’ (WE 243-4). While Flaubert ‘extracts the impersonal haecceities from the personal appetites and frustrations’, Emma ‘reinscribes the haecceities as qualities of things and persons; hence she reinscribes them in the turmoil of appetites and frustrations’ (WE 243). To invoke the way in which Emma is implicated in appetites, rather than the impersonality of ‘pure’ literature, is not a million miles away from the logic of Aristotle’s argument for differentiating women’s relation to logos/reason from that of men, an argument that Rancière passes over in silence, as we will see in chapter 3.²³

Not only does Emma have to be killed in order to save Flaubert from true schizophrenia, so too does she have to be bored with the provincialism of her life in order to save him from confronting the implications of his own Orientalism. In her article entitled ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Bored: Echoes of Flaubert’s Egyptian Travel Writing in Madame Bovary’, Aubrey Porterfield points to the affinity between the language of ingestion that Flaubert uses to describe the scenes confronting him on his Egyptian travels, and his characterization of Emma. In her solidification or reinscription of haecceities in a life of desire, Emma reinserts them into the plot from which the writer had extracted them. Quoting Flaubert, Porterfield says, ‘Of his arrival at Alexandria, [Flaubert] writes, “I gulped down a whole bellyful of colors like a donkey filling himself with hay,” as if the hues of the city exceeded the visual register and required the operations of taste, touch, and digestion’.²⁴ Flaubert’s responses to Egypt ranged from registering its sublimity to feeling boredom. Flaubert’s transposition of his boredom onto Emma Bovary is a displacement of his Orientalism onto her. By juxtaposing Flaubert’s account of his travels in Egypt with the novel Madame Bovary, Porterfield argues that Flaubert ‘project[s]’ his ‘malady’ of boredom ‘onto [the] domestic, feminine figure’ of Emma Bovary.²⁵ Porterfield concludes that ‘Flaubert … had need of such a character in order to treat the malady of boredom afflicting the colonial traveller with aesthetic and critical distance’.²⁶ Not only, then, does Flaubert make Emma represent the feminization of mass culture, he also displaces onto her his own Orientalism, thereby achieving his critical distance as a writer by inscribing the hapless Emma with his own displaced colonial attitudes. If, in one way, Flaubert succeeds in distancing himself from the Aristotelian plot by appealing to impersonal haecceities, this distance is achieved only by relying on the plot of the hysteric, onto whom he projects his Orientalism, from whose solidification of haecceities he can then distinguish himself.

What exactly is at stake in an ostensibly impersonal style achieved through the condemnation of a fictional subject who must be put to death for the inauthenticity of her relationship to art, a subject who echoes Flaubert’s own Orientalism? Has Flaubert rendered the voice of the narrator, as Panagia suggests, ‘so utterly impersonal that it was entirely impossible to determine the nature of the subjectivity of he, or she, or it who spoke’ (2014, 292)? Or is Flaubert rather putting into question the coherence or desirability of female subjectivity before any political legitimacy has granted stability for the subject position in question, in part by making Emma stand-in for his own Orientalism? If the latter, how far does Rancière acquiesce to the conflation of gendered and racialized tropes in Flaubert’s characterization of Emma? Does Rancière’s elaboration of the truth of the absolute, impersonal style of Flaubert prematurely forfeit subject positions that cannot be recognized as properly political or appropriately civilized subjects? In this sense, is not Emma the fictional stand-in for anonyms, who have not yet managed to distinguish themselves from the part that has no part?

Is Rancière complicit with Flaubert in putting Emma to death, symbolically killing off women – and their associated Oriental counterparts – before their voices can be heard as political speech? If so, does Rancière’s complicity escape the taint of Flaubert’s Orientalism? Emma’s literary death occurs eighty-eight years before French women would be granted the vote in France; the argument that Rancière insists on framing in terms of the question ‘Does a French woman belong to the category of Frenchmen?’ (1992, 60) had yet to be successful. Just as the suffragettes were dismissed as hysterical, barbaric and uneducated, suggesting that they were insufficiently civilized (white) or educated (middle class) to warrant the vote, so Flaubert establishes Emma’s inadequate, uncritical manner of handling art on the basis of his own Orientalism.²⁷ Inasmuch as Rancière fails to distinguish himself from the gendered and racialized mechanisms by which Flaubert achieves his own distanciation from his character, Rancière would appear to endorse them, or at least to blindly acquiesce to them.

For Rancière, if in one way, Flaubert moves away from the hierarchical Aristotelian vision that splits humanity into two different kinds – those whom poetry concerns and those it does not – he also ‘remains cognizant of the old Aristotelian poetics which turns ignorance into knowledge through peripeteia and recognition’ (WE 247). Flaubert ‘needs the fiction of his or her cure, in order to separate healthy literary schizophrenia from true schizophrenia’ (WE 247). Emma must be hysterical in Flaubert’s place; Flaubert absolves himself of hysteria by demarcating himself from her through his allegedly impersonal (but in fact gendered, Orientalist) literary style as an artist. Woolf, by contrast, ‘can no longer play the part of the healthy schizophrenic writer’ (WE 248). She no longer observes the rules of Aristotelian poetics, whereby the ‘plot of the hysteric allows’ the writer ‘to make the difference between healthy schizophrenia and real schizophrenia’ (WE 247).

In The Waves Rhoda, in Rancière’s words, might be ‘cured of the disease that prevented Emma from choosing the true enjoyment’ (WE 248), but she is not cured of schizophrenia. She cannot ‘link a moment with the following one’ (WE 247). She ‘cannot write’ (WE 248). She is not an artist. She cannot transcribe her feeling of the ‘haecceities of impersonal life’ (WE 248) into writing, and so she cannot save herself. She does not know ‘the laws of literary metaphorization’, she is not, like Flaubert ‘a good doctor’ (WE 247) of words. She is not like the character who must write in Rhoda’s stead, she is not like Bernard, who is ‘too healthy’ (WE 248). Woolf does not make Rhoda’s life – or death – into a ‘lesson’ (WE 248). She does not relapse into using the plot to differentiate herself from the insanity of her character. She does not buy her own literary health at the cost of her character. Rhoda dies, but her death serves no writerly purpose. It is pure loss – at least from the point of view of the literary health of her inventor. Rhoda dies in ‘one sentence, a very short sentence’ (WE 248) – in Bernard’s sentence, in the sentence of another character, who writes for her. So Rhoda’s death, suggests Rancière, can only serve the writer-narrator who is also a character; it cannot ‘save’ Woolf, the writer (WE 248), as if, somehow, it was meant to.

Doesn’t a certain logic of equivalence also assert itself when Rancière runs together the literary deaths of Flaubert’s Emma, Marcel Proust’s Albertine, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude with William Faulkner’s Joe Christmas and Woolf’s Septimus – as if there were absolutely no difference between them, as if Woolf’s gender and Joe Christmas’s biracial characteristics were negligible? (see 2014, 206) Do we not have to mark the difference between Flaubert’s killing of Emma, and Woolf’s killing of Septimus? Do we not have to register the seamlessness with which a gendered regime allows Flaubert, Proust and Hardy to kill off their female protagonists, and a racialized regime permits Faulkner to kill off Joe Christmas with relative impunity? Is it not incumbent upon us to notice that when Septimus dies at the hands of Woolf, something different is happening? When Woolf decided to let Septimus die, it was still relatively rare for the author who had the power to confer life or death on her characters to be a woman, and rarer still for a male character to be deprived of his life at the hands of a female author (even if it was under the respectable fictionalized cloak of suicide in a traumatized response to war). In this rarity, do we not find Woolf protesting, retaliating against the long litany of female deaths at the hands of their (usually male) literary executioners? Should we not be troubled by the fact that none of this appears relevant, significant, or perhaps even visible to Rancière? Not only does it fade into irrelevance: there appears to be a mandate, an interdiction, operating in his work to banish it from relevance.

Is it really enough for Rancière to resist overtly ‘political’ readings of Flaubert’s fiction by invoking on Flaubert’s behalf the ‘purity of literature’ (WE 233-34) as a way of warding off all the work that feminist and race theory has accomplished? Rancière stipulates that the ‘right question’ is what is the relation between ‘Emma’s death and the purity of literature’ (WE 234), suggesting that it consists in her insistence on individualizing the sensations that the impersonal writer has been at pains to extract from individualization. Yet, what if the impersonal turns out not to be so impersonal insofar as it participates in Orientalism and sexism’s refusal to see certain persons as worthy of individualization? Surely literary fiction is deeply implicated in either sustaining and legitimating, or interrogating and disrupting the gendered and Orientalist social fictions that pass themselves off as reality, as if they were just the fact of the matter, as if they were impervious to dispute, as if they were not merely reflective of the police order? In denying that the aesthetic regime has any ‘specific connection with political equality’, and in his attempt to keep at bay a ‘pervasive sociologizing vision … committed to the reduction of cultural inequalities’ doesn’t Rancière allow himself to overlook some crucial questions regarding the part that has no part?²⁸ The problem is that Rancière fails to perform the ‘disappropriation of identity’ (DT 139, M 187) for which he calls.

Rancière offers as an ‘anti-Platonic myth’ the ‘countermyth of the joiner’ in an effort to break ‘the circle’ that Plato establishes with his myth of metals (2009, 17), whereby he orchestrates social space so that certain bodies are restricted to certain functions, according to their alleged capacities. With thi s countermyth Rancière wants to break the ‘circle of the arkhè, the logic according to which the exercise of power is anticipated in the capacity to exercise it and this capacity in turn is verified by its exercise’ (2009, 9). The joiner who stops his work in order to appreciate the beauty of the view he beholds steps out of the distribution of the sensible that is characteristic of the ethical regime, breaking up the ‘Platonic circle, the ethical circle’ (2009, 8). When he ‘stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy it’ (2009, 7), he thereby dismantles ‘a certain body of experience that was deemed appropriate to a specific ethos, the ethos of the artisan’ (2009, 8). He takes the time he should not take, when he sees and appreciates the beauty it is not his place to see and appreciate. He enjoys it in a way he should not be able to enjoy, according to his occupation. In doing so, the joiner aligns himself with Kant and against Plato on the question of aesthetics. He ‘agrees with Kant on a decisive point: the singularity of the aesthetic experience is the singularity of an as if’ (2009, 8). He thereby breaks out of another ‘as if’, the one that legislates Plato’s hierarchical world, which ‘must be viewed as if God had put gold in the souls of the men who were destined to rule and iron in the souls of those who were destined to work and be ruled’ (2009, 8). The point of this myth is not its literal credibility. ‘It was enough’, says Rancière, that the workers ‘sensed it, that is they used their arms, their eyes, and their minds as if this were true’ (2009, 8).²⁹

Rancière reads the words of the joiner as a ‘personalized paraphrase’ (2009, 7) on the disinterestedness that is key to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The singularity of aesthetic judgement suspends the hierarchies that situates an object either as an object of knowledge or as an object of desire, and appreciates it ‘without considering its social use and signification’ (2009, 7). It is this Kantian move, the suspension of the rules that align the understanding with a ‘class of intelligence’, and sensibility with a ‘class of sensation’ (2009, 3) that Rancière takes up and extends to politics. He thereby appeals to aesthetic judgement as disrupting the hierarchy that would otherwise obtain between Kant’s faculties, the same hierarchy that organizes Plato’s division of the parts of the soul, a division which also dictates the hierarchies of the community, keeping those who are to be ruled over in their place. In extending the ‘as if’ of aesthetic judgement to politics, Rancière suggests that politics ‘also obeys this principle of judgment’.³⁰ The scene of dissensus is one that

puts two worlds – two heterogeneous logics – on the same stage, in the same world. It is a commensurability of incommensurables. This also means that the political subject acts in the mode of the as if; it acts as if it were the demos, that is, as the whole made by those who are not countable as qualified parts of the community. (2009, 11)

The enactment of the as if in the political arena amounts to saying, in Panagia’s words, ‘It may not be my place to be, to speak, to act, to read, or to write in this way, but I will do it anyway’ (2014, 288).

Still, there seems to be something missing in the world of dissensual politics that Rancière has created, a world in which I find not just myself and my concerns minimized, but those of whole communities of feminist readers, writers, thinkers and philosophers, whole communities of race theorists, communities that are themselves still being torn apart over the question of whether gender or race comes first. By what mechanism are such concerns dismissed, elided or rendered equivalent to a part that has no part, a part that does not see, must not see, race and gender? What lies in the background of Rancière’s application of Kant’s aesthetic judgement to politics, in his equation of Kantian faculties with the Platonic parts of the soul, in ‘the dismantling of a certain body of experience’ (2009, 7–8), and in the ‘supplement that both reveals and neutralizes the division at the heart of the sensible’? (2009, 3) When Rancière turns to Aristotle’s Politics, in the opening line of the first chapter of Disagreement, entitled ‘The Beginning of Politics’, he says, ‘Let’s begin at the beginning’ (DT 1, M 19), as if the beginning of Aristotle’s Politics were his distinction between speech and voice, his identification of the capacity for politics as specifically human. Yet, Rancière does not begin at the beginning. Rancière’s beginning is not where Aristotle begins. Aristotle begins Book I of the Politics by distinguishing the household from the polis.

Informing, preceding and framing Aristotle’s this distinction between those who merely register pain as all animals do and those capable of sensing/perceiving what is just and unjust is another discourse about parts and wholes, a discourse about how the household is constituted, about the roles of women and slaves, and the ways in which they should be ruled. Aristotle will develop this discourse when he identifies certain virtues as appropriate to women, and others to be appropriate to slaves (as if they were two mutually exclusive categories).³¹ This discourse about the respective roles of women and slaves subtends the discourse that Rancière elaborates about wealth, virtue and freedom, about the three values that get reduced to a struggle between the rich and the poor. Yet this discourse about women, which is interwoven with his considerations about slavery, is rendered invisible in Rancière’s account, as if it did not exist.

It is a discourse to which I suggest we need to attend, in order to retard the slide I think Rancière makes too easily, too quickly between, on the one hand, the enactment of equality ‘in the name of a category’ (1992, 59), between ‘workers, women, people of color’ (1992, 59), and ‘the name of the anonym’ (1992, 60), the name of anyone at all, on the other hand. What Rancière slides over, when he fails to mention the complex ways in which slaves and women are played off one another in analogical patterns, does not just go away.³² It returns again and again, in different historical configurations, under different guises, with different names, and in different struggles, just as it returns in Flaubert’s feminized Orientalism. Charlotte Witt has shown that ‘form and matter are gendered notions’ and that their gendering is characteristic of Aristotle’s biology and his politics.³³ Although he does not follow through the fractures it introduces into his own narrative, we have seen that Rancière himself on more recent occasions acknowledges the gendered aspects of Aristotle’s distribution of the sensible, only to reinscribe it within the discourse of class. More often, Rancière articulates this division between two different classes of humans as an opposition between men of intelligence and action who are associated with form, and men of sensation and passivity who are associated with matter. I suggest that where, why and how Rancière’s texts stop short – and I will say this even though it is not my place to say it – will take us through some conceptual and political thickets of thinking that complicate his narrative.

In the spirit of complication, I offer a counternarrative to the story of the part that has no part that Rancière tells us, one that puts pressure on, creates friction between, some of his equivalences. It is a narrative that is well known by feminist and race theorists – the story of Sojourner Truth. Here is the speech Sojourner Truth made in Akron in 1851.

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?³⁴

As Avtar Brah and Anne Phoenix observe, when they turn to this speech by Sojourner Truth in order to illustrate the intersections between race and gender, the identity that Sojourner Truth maps out with her rhetorical refrain ‘And ain’t I a woman?’ is a relational identity.³⁵ One might say that she illustrates Rancière’s notion of the ‘in-between’ (1992, 61) – except that her addressees are white women, feminists who are still fighting for the right to vote. The recognition she seeks is not that from men but from women. Don’t I count as a woman, she is asking, what can your feminist struggle offer me as a slave woman, who works in the field as hard as any man? Is your struggle merely the struggle of white, free women, or is it a struggle that can accommodate black women who are slaves? The rhetoric of Sojourner Truth’s speech suggests that in the case of Sojourner Truth – and innumerable examples could be offered – it was not ‘the name of the anonym, the name of anyone’ (Rancière, 1992, 60) that was invoked, but the specificity of black womanhood against the background of an invisibly white figuration of women.

Here, then, is an instance of political speech that does not follow the model that Rancière suggests is applicable ‘generally speaking’ when he outlines the logic of dissensus. ‘The logical schema of social protest, generally speaking may be summed up as follows: Do we or do we not belong to the category of men or citizens or human beings, and what follows from this?’ (1992, 60). What is eclipsed by the phrase generally speaking are the ways in which the politics of racialization are played out in the very articulation of feminist and race struggles, that the logic of politics does not just consist of asking whether or not workers are citizens, or blacks are human beings, but also in the question of whether slaves are women or women are slaves. Even if such questions remain relegated to the background, do they not continue to haunt Rancière’s analysis? I think they do.³⁶ To press this point, let’s return to the opening pages of Disagreement, where Rancière expounds upon the empty freedom of the miscount.

In Rancière’s view the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, indeed political philosophy in general, amounts to ‘policing’ (DT xiii, M 16). By this he means that political philosophy attempts to ‘rid itself’ (DT xii, M 15) of the ‘logic of disagreement proper to political rationality’ (DT xiii, M 16). In expelling that which should be the stuff of politics, political philosophy concentrates instead on order and control, an exercise it maintains with reference to the various parts of the community it designates. For Aristotle, justice, which goes beyond the mere balancing of individual interests in that it concerns that which citizens have in common, is a matter of creating an order and instituting a standard for what citizens have in common (see DT 5, M 23). It is the dividing up of what is in common. What entitles parties to their share of the common lot is the value they bring to the community, as determined by the common good, measured by justice. The entitlement of each party, their right or dues, is in strict proportion to the value it contributes to the common good. The problem on which Rancière focuses is that this involves ‘an odd way of counting “parties” within the community’, which he refers to as a miscount (see DT 6, M 24).

Aristotle identifies three values that contribute to the community – wealth, virtue and freedom. These correspond to three parties – although Rancière points out that, in practice, those who have wealth and virtue are usually ‘coextensive’ (DT 11, M 30), so that in effect the three parties are reduced to two – the rich and the poor. The question arises as to what value the freedom of the peop le brings to the community. In answering this question, Rancière says that ‘the fundamental miscount rears its head’ (DT 7, M 26). The value he associates with the poor, those who lack wealth and virtue, is freedom, yet this freedom is ‘empty’ Rancière suggests.³⁷ By this he means first that it is not a ‘positive property’, and secondly that ‘it is not proper to the demos at all’ (DT 8, M 27). With regard to the first point, Rancière explains that it is by dint of the abolition of slavery that the people are counted as part of the community:

The freedom of the demos is not a determinable property but a pure invention. … Simply by being born in a certain city, and more especially in the city of Athens once enslavement for debt was abolished there, any one of these speaking bodies doomed to the anonymity of work and of reproduction, these speaking bodies that are of no more value than slaves – even less, says Aristotle, since the slave gets his virtue from the virtue of his master – any old artisan or shopkeeper whatsoever is counted in this party to the city that calls itself the people, as taking part in community affairs as such. (DT 7, M 26).

Only through the accident of birth, through the contingency of having been born in Athens, does one avoid the fate of slavery.

With regard to the second point, freedom is empty in the sense that it is not in fact proper to the demos because it is common to all, yet ‘the people appropriate the common quality as their own’ (DT 9, M 28). Rancière says, ‘The people are nothing more than the undifferentiated mass of those who have no positive qualification – no wealth, no virtue – but who are nonetheless acknowledged to enjoy the same freedom as those who do. The people who make up the people are in fact simply free like the rest’ (DT 8, M 27).³⁸ Thus, for Rancière, what the people ‘bring to the community strictly speaking is contention’ (DT 9, M 28). Not only is it the case that far from being an exclusive property of the people, freedom is what the people share with all the other citizens, those who possess the positive qualities of wealth and virtue; the people identify with the community through a wrong. The ‘mass of men without qualities identify with the community in the name of the wrong that is constantly being done to them by those whose position or qualities have the natural effect of propelling them into the nonexistence of those who have “no part in anything”’ (DT 9, M 28).

Who exactly is counted as belonging to the community, despite the fact that they have no value to bring to it apart from the freedom they appropriate as their own, which is in fact not theirs to bring, since it is common to all the parties who make up the community? It is artisans or shopkeepers who are counted. More precisely it is male artisans and shopkeepers; Rancière makes no mention of women. Had he done so, he might have had to qualify his remark about the people as an undifferentiated mass with no virtue, since in contradistinction to Plato, for whom virtue is one, Aristotle attributes specific virtues to women and to slaves, virtues he argues are appropriate to their subservient functions. Yet women remain invisible in Rancière’s commentary on Aristotle, although the very thing that qualifies the class of contention, the class that has no part, is the ‘birth’ of those who make up this class within a certain geographic area. Women, then, and more specifically the implicit reference in Aristotle’s account is to women whose bodies are contained within the geopolitical space of the city of Athens, women who give birth to those who become free simply by being born there, constitute the indispensable condition for the inclusion of male artisans within the community to become free citizens. Yet, women themselves are not worthy of mention. They themselves are neither counted as citizens nor deemed capable of contributing anything – except manual labour and reproduction, which Aristotle consigns to the pre-political realm of necessity.

Two questions arise. The first is, why does slavery drop out of Rancière’s account, after it has served to help get his analysis off the ground? The second is, why is there no mention at all of another theme in Aristotle’s Politics, namely women? To turn the question around, what accounts for Rancière’s focus upon the poor? There are biographical and political answers that come to mind. Rancière is a recovering Althusserian, and as such he wants to theorize the poor/proletariat in a different register than the concept of ideology permits.³⁹ He spent a good deal of time reading, reflecting upon and writing about what workers themselves said and thought. So when he reads Aristotle and Plato, he is primed to attend to the problem of the poor. Rancière’s intellectual itinerary predisposes him to this particular focus. One might say, borrowing Rancière’s own vocabulary, that the distribution of the sensible that helped to form his political and philosophical vision, which bodies were permitted to occupy which spaces, whose logos established itself as the authoritative milieu, how a certain aesthetic allowed particular intellectual and political questions to attain pertinence and legitimacy while precluding others, what was seeable, sayable and doable, and what was not – all this surely played a role in shaping Rancière’s enquiries. In question is whether as a consequence, a particular wrong becomes salient in his account, a certain miscount comes to predominate, while other wrongs and miscounts go unacknowledged, remaining invisible or nonsensical. If so, what would it do to Rancière’s thinking to mobilize these sites of invisibility?

To adapt what Rancière has said in a different context, what might it mean to think with and against Rancière, by staging an ‘intrusive encounter … by interrupting the organization of a class of objects or a series of performances’?⁴⁰ What would it mean to rethink the part that has no part, and the way that it orchestrates Rancière’s writing? How might one displace this object of thought, moving it ‘away from the site of its original appearance or attending discourse’ by shifting its ‘discursive register, its universe of reference’? (ibid.). What would it mean to restage a politics of reading that might be explicable biographically by inflecting it through a ‘theoretical framework’ (2000, 121) that respects the democratic impulse of Rancière’s thinking, while extending it in ways that he himself has not? If the accidents of Rancière’s own birth (intellectual, as much as geopolitical) might have rendered some questions obscure in his work, a dissensual model of thinking might ask how a field that is saturated with the discourse of class might be put in question through the structure of the supplements that race theory and feminist theory can bring to it.⁴¹

In posing these questions, my concern is to clarify the theoretical significance that Rancière’s structural focus has on the poor throughout his work. What accounts for the privileged place that the poor occupies in the logic of his analysis? What drives this singular focus, and what effects does it have? How does it shape the democracy in which he is invested? Does it ultimately limit the purchase of his analysis? Is Rancière’s political logic of dissensus a white, masculinist logic? Are questions about women and slavery relegated to the realm of the pre-political in Rancière’s analysis in such a way as to reproduce the normative framework that allows Aristotle to observe that ‘among barbarians the female and the slave have the same rank’ because (unlike Greeks) ‘barbarians have no class of natural rulers’?⁴² Even as Rancière’s analysis tracks the incursion of equality as the irruption of the pre-political into the police order, insofar as he upholds the struggle of the poor against the rich as the model of political dissensus, does he leave intact an imaginary that feminizes non-Greeks (read non-Europeans), and racializes women? If so, how might we approach this cultural imaginary in order to challenge it?

If Rancière’s conception of politics as policing is formulated on ‘the basis of Aristotle’s text (and what this text stops short of)’ (DT xiii, M 15), how far does Rancière’s understanding of politics as dissensus succeed in going beyond Aristotle, and how far does it remain caught up in Aristotelian terms of analysis? If imperialism shapes the colonial imaginary of ostensible democracy as much as it shapes the colony, how far does Rancière’s understanding of politics remain colonial, how far does it participate in discourses that replicate the invisibility of whiteness? If the poor is the constitutive wrong of politics itself, does Rancière’s analysis remain a class analysis despite itself, does it require dissensus to fit the cast of the struggle between rich and poor?

Despite its effort to put in question an understanding of the police along the lines of the state apparatus, does Rancière’s logic replicate the law in that only one wrong can be articulated at a time, and in doing so, does it fall prey to the problematic Kimberlé Crenshaw points out when she shows that even apparently progressive laws concerning equality only recognize one axis of difference at a time?⁴³ In short, does the privilege Rancière accords to the poor in his analysis operate in such a way as to permit any other class of people to appear only as a substitute for the poor? Does Rancière’s analysis of dissensual politics mimic the police order in this sense? Or does his analysis displace this logic of substitution?

Two caveats are in order. First, the problem of the invisibility of women and slavery in Rancière’s analysis of Greek texts as foundational for Western democracy is far from unique to him; it is a systemic problem. We need only point to two discussions whose strategic importance bear upon Rancière’s own considerations of Aristotle’s appeal to the distinction of logos from voice as defining the political. Both Arendt’s discussion of the bios politicos as opposed to the activity of labour, and Agamben’s focus on the distinction between life as bios and life as zoē also fail to elaborate on the question of women or slavery.⁴⁴ The second caveat is that, while he does not attend to the role that women play for Aristotle, it is not that Rancière entirely neglects feminism. On the contrary, unlike most of his contemporaries he includes examples of feminist and race struggles in his explication of political dissensus.⁴⁵ At issue is how he frames women and feminism, how and where women and racial minorities enter into his texts and whether they might enter them differently. Does Rancière’s silence about Aristotle’s discussion of women, and his curious elision of slavery once it has kick-started his discussion, render invisible the problematic backdrop of interwoven Aristotelian assumptions about barbarians and women? If this background is whitewashed, rendered negligible, discounted, does it return to haunt these analyses, and those of Rancière’s commentators, most of whom perpetuate this whitewashing?

If these questions qualify as textual, they have arisen out of interpretation shaped by my own intellectual, political and philosophical itinerary, and are conditioned in part by the prevailing debates of the communities in which I have circulated in the United States and the United Kingdom. The questions I formulate are indebted to the symbolic economies that predominate in communities of reading, thinking, teaching and writing of feminist theory, postcolonial theory and race theory. The absences, gaps, ellipses, erasures and silences that inhabit Rancière’s texts leap out at me, because of my own history and practices of reading, habits of thinking, and exercises in disidentification, which have steeped me in the difficulty of how to do intersectional work well.

I write out of a sense that something is awry. There is something missing. Reading Rancière is like performing the balancing act of the schizophrenic who does not want to save the writer in her at the expense of sacrificing the woman. I do not want to make writerly sense of Rancière at the cost of complicity, abandoning the casualties he casts aside, not just for my sake, but also for the sake of others whose existence his logic of equivalence equivocates. The more I read, the more doggedly I pursue the lines of fracture that Rancière so expertly papers over, the more I follow the cracks to see where they might lead, the less imperturbable the edifice he has created appears to be. ‘The real difference’, says Deleuze, ‘is not between the inside and the outside, for the crack is neither internal nor external, but is rather at the frontier. It is imperceptible, incorporeal, and ideational’.⁴⁶ The more I worry at, exacerbate, these nearly invisible fissures holding together the various iterations of the narratives Rancière presents in his ‘indisciplinary’ fashion (not quite philosophy, not quite history, not merely politics, perhaps more akin to the style of literature than anything else), the more the crevices deepen into chasms.⁴⁷

Until, one day, I tumble into a hole, not unlike the rabbit hole into which Alice fell, and I find myself in a topsy-turvy world, one I enter only after having been spun round and round, turned upside down, where I find everything is stood on its head. The world in which I believed myself, like Rancière’s joiner, to be ‘at home’ (2009, 7) is not my world. It is a world in which I have become very, very tiny. I am barely visible. I have almost ceased to exist. I cannot climb back up, without also reconstructing the world I fell away from. The ‘entire play of the crack has become incarnated in the depth of the body at the same time that the labor of the inside and the outside has widened the edges’, says Deleuze (LS 155). Like Alice, I find myself having to move between the surface and depths, to discern whether the cracks that appear on the surface of Rancière’s ‘porcelain’ (LS 155) prose, which follow the path of least resistance, deepen into wounds that tend to cut into certain types of bodies, typically feminized and racialized bodies.⁴⁸ It is not that I do not believe that literature is about the beautiful nonsense of life in general, it is that in Alan Lopez’s words, ‘nonsense, even if “emitted [only] at the surface” is still “carved into the depth of bodies” [LS 84]’; it is that the right to the affirmation of nonsense is still granted more easily to some than to others, and its granting and carving is gendered and racialized.⁴⁹

Perhaps, to write and to be political (in Rancière’s sense, in the sense of challenging the inegalitarian distribution of the sensible) as a woman, is to strive for invisibility as a writer and for visibility as a woman (just image google ‘Professor’ to see why the latter is still necessary). To be a feminist writer, for me, is in itself to flirt with a schizophrenic enterprise. It is not just that if I slip into the invisibility of nonsense, I might never be able find a way out, I might just slip through the cracks and into an abyss.⁵⁰ It is also that I do not want to hold at bay my own schizophrenia at the cost of others.⁵¹ ‘It’s not you that’s cracked – it’s the Grand Canyon’, says Deleuze, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald (LS 155). So, if I infuse the impersonal with the personal, if I reinsert the signifier ‘I’ into the flow of prose, from which the true, pure, art of absolute literature has excised it, I do not invoke this signifier on the ‘mistaken assumption of an absolute signified’ (Lopez, 2004, 116). I reinsert it to mark the places where such signifiers fail, how the poetic movement, the rhythms of Rancière’s writing, the way it rests and how it moves on, the temporality and spatiality of his style, papers over symptomatic cracks in his prose, apertures that become abyssal, deep, underground holes into which I keep falling. Such insertions might also serve to alert others to beware of the holes through which they might experience a falling sensation, black holes, perhaps.

Does Rancière’s politics preclude or facilitate a serious investigation of the cultural imaginary that continues to play itself out as an informal network of biases in his own work? How might Rancière inform feminist and race theory and how might feminist and race theory inform and inflect Rancière’s work? What happens when we allow these sites to shape and speak to one another? What might a productive conversation between feminist theory, and race theory and the questions Rancière poses look like? Should it make good on the lacunae in Rancière’s textual readings of Aristotle and Plato, the places where he could have incorporated women and slaves into his analyses but doesn’t? Should it identify ways in which the cultural imaginary that allows women and slaves to fade into the background of Rancière’s political analyses reasserts itself elsewhere in his texts, haunting his analyses, inhibiting them? Should it learn from Rancière’s approach by exploring dissensus in contexts that he himself does not? Should it apply Rancière’s dissensual politics to the difficult work of intersectional politics?

Perhaps it should not decide between these approaches, but slip between them, moving in and out of them, perhaps it should perform a series of identifications and disidentifications. In what follows, I draw on the work of feminist and race theorists who have demonstrated the ways in which political theory and aesthetics remain entrenched in damaging racialized and gendered assumptions, and suggest that there are moments in which Rancière does not escape this legacy. I sometimes identify with Rancière’s understanding of dissensus by extending its purchase, as when I explore how a racialized and gendered cultural imaginary organizes the redistribution of the sensible in the film Rabbit-Proof Fence (Chapter 2). I sometimes identify with what I take to be the overall sense of Rancière’s prose, as in explicating his understanding of political dissensus (Chapter 3), his relationship to Kant (Chapter 4), or the relation of artistic to political dissensus in his work (Chapter 5). I also identify with Rancière’s understanding of art as political in order to disidentify with Heidegger’s understanding of art (Chapter 6). I disidentify with the sense of Rancière’s work in considering works by the Guerrilla Girls and other artists (Chapter 7). In concluding, I turn to the work of Gillian Wearing and Claudia Rankine, artists whose work I think communicates with, supplements and augments Rancière’s understanding of dissenusal art.

In Chapter 2 I begin to play out how dissensus can be understood to function in relation to art by considering the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. In 1931 Molly (Everlyn Sampi), along with her younger siblings, escaped from the Moore River Settlement, to which they had been forcibly removed, and set out on foot to find their way back home by following the fence from which the film derives its title, Rabbit-Proof Fence. The fence had been erected in a vain attempt to keep the rabbits that had been introduced to Australia by the English from ruining agricultural crops. When the three girls, fourteen-year-old Molly, ten-year-old Gracie and eight-year-old Daisy escape from the Moore River Settlement, they find their way home by following the fence, which provides them with a road map. Seeing the fence through their eyes is a way of redistributing the sensible. Against all the odds, the girls walk over 1,000 miles home, defying police attempts to find them. The film puts in question the effort of government to impose racial homogeneity by intervening in kinship practices. I read the film as one in which the legitimating narratives that serve to frame that which is publicly sanctioned as visible are aesthetically displaced. Sanctioned narratives, precisely because they confirm and corroborate ruling powers, circulate more or less invisibly in their work of legitimation, as they encourage, verify and reward behaviours that conform to the version of events that governments espouse. When displacements and disruptions occur, the mythical frameworks that organize and orient national collectivities, but which are not always made readily available for interrogation, can present themselves for reworking.⁵² Sanctioned ways of seeing are those that are most readily publicly available, which are facilitated by unarticulated myths that limit and constrain in advance the possibilities of vision, predisposing us to see that which we habitually see, that which we are allowed to see, that which available narratives suggest, corroborate, encourage and confirm. We are presented with something that appears as permanent, as though this is the only appearance possible. In Rancière’s terms, we are presented with the police distribution of the sensible.⁵³ When art disrupts such narratives, it can redistribute the sensible, providing us with new ways of seeing. Rabbit-Proof Fence, I suggest, can be read as dissensual art, art that intervenes in a given distribution of the sensible, and redistributes it, framing the world in such a way as to make available new ways of seeing, thus paving the way for new meanings to establish themselves, correcting the miscount and writing those who previously had no part into full subjectivity.

When Molly reads the rabbit-proof fence as a guide to show her how to find her way home, she employs the skill of someone who has been taught to be observant of her surroundings, someone who is accustomed to thinking about the impact that her footprints leave on the paths she travels through the landscape, someone who is not simply a passive observer, but rather is a girl who intelligently reads the landscape, and in doing so changes the fence that carves up agricultural land to protect it from rabbits into a mechanism of survival. As a young girl who is astute and skilful, she contests what passes for knowledge, and who passes for legitimate knowers, outwitting an entire administrative bureaucracy backed up by a police force, and challenging the standards of the knowledge they presume to have and to control.

After exploring Rancière’s reflections on aesthetics in relation to Rabbit-Proof Fence, I turn my attention to some other works of art including works by Ingrid Mwangi, who has fused her artistic persona with that of her husband, and goes by the name of Mwangi-Hutter. In Chapter 3 I turn to Rancière’s characterization of archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics, which he identifies as the three major configurations of political philosophy. Rancière takes each of these figurations, which he associates with Plato, Aristotle and Marx respectively, to conflate politics with the police order. By contrast, Rancière conceives of politics as the interruption of the inequality that passes for politics as usual. In this chapter, I reference critiques of political philosophy by race and gender theorists, and raise the question of what these critiques mean for Rancière’s own interventions into political philosophy.

In the ensuing chapters (Chapters 4 and 5), I pay particular attention to the importance of Kant and Hegel for Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime. I attend to Rancière’s understanding of the ethical, representative and aesthetic regimes in Chapter 4. With particular reference to the notions of dissensus and the ‘identity of opposites’, I show how both Kant and Hegel inform Rancière’s approach to aesthetics. In this chapter, I also explore Rancière’s critique of Jean-François Lyotard. Just as he resists positing an absolute difference between politics and art, so Rancière resists the absolutization of the Other that he sees as characteristic of the ethical turn in contemporary aesthetics. He resists the tendency to turn alterity into the unrepresentable, the inassimilable, the unthinkable, and he refuses to hypostasize the Other as a given identity. He sees Lyotard’s appropriation of the sublime as representative of such a tendency. He thinks for all its talk of art witnessing that which is unrepresentable – and the Holocaust is the unrepresentable per se, for Lyotard, the trauma beyond all trauma – by departing from representational art, the ethical turn only manages to rejoin a discourse of purism. It reserves certain art (Barnett Newman’s abstract expressionist Onement, for example) as an appropriate expression of the Holocaust, and rules out any other artistic approach as inappropriate. Lyotard thereby ends up doing precisely what he doesn’t want to do. He celebrates Newman’s orange gash as representative of the only type of art capable of representing the unrepresentable. He thereby preserves a representationalist view of art, despite himself. For Rancière, the lines separating art and politics, blur; their indistinction is not to be lamented.

In Chapter 5 I elaborate Rancière’s understanding of the aesthetic regime and political dissensus, and at the same time continue to elaborate his debt to Kant, developing the suggestion introduced in Chapter 2 that in order to understand how key notions such as the police order, dissensus, and the redistribution of the sensible operate, attention needs to be paid to how Rancière reformulates a Kantian approach to temporality and spatiality.

Chapter 6 draws together and thematizes a thread that runs through the previous chapters, namely how the distinction between form and matter, and its attendant distinctions, operates in aesthetics. After reviewing how the form/matter distinction figures in Rancière’s work, I consider Heidegger’s attempt to displace this guiding distinction in his reflections on the work of art, drawing on Rancière to suggest that Heidegger is not completely successful in his effort to overcome the legacy of the form/matter distinction. Rancière’s analysis itself is susceptible to a similar critique.

Attending to works by the Guerrilla Girls, and a series of related works by other artists, I argue in Chapter 7, raises some important questions regarding Rancière’s analysis. A work that might seem old hat to feminist audiences presents challenges to more mainstream audiences, and in doing so it suggests that we take seriously the question of context and audience in thinking through the relationship between Rancière’s conception of politics, the police order, and the redistribution of the sensible. I suggest that the blanket sense in which Rancière conceives of the museum as having facilitated a more egalitarian relationship to art across the board is in need of rethinking.

I conclude by discussing Gillian Wearing and Claudia Rankine, and by suggesting that it is not only a question of politics staging dissensus in relation to the police order, but that multiple worlds come into play.

In this book, I am trying to pick myself up, and dust myself off, to stand myself up, having stumbled and tripped my way through Rancière’s prose, sometimes losing my way in it, becoming completely mired in it, unable to move anywhere at all, sometimes borne along by it, skipping happily over its surfaces, sometimes abruptly falling out of it, into another world. As my Dad (who died while I was writing this book) used to say, ‘I’ve come unstuck, I’m stymied’, as if unstuck and stymied meant the same thing – and of course they do in a way. If you come unstuck you lose your bearings, you become unmoored. When you are lost, you are stymied. You are confused. You have fallen through the cracks. You have lost sight of any way forward. You have reached an impasse, come to a standstill. You have to begin again, to think things through a different way. You have to plot out another path, to navigate a new, uncharted channel through the waters, which have become, all of a sudden, unnavigable, impossible. It is out of the impossibility of identification that I write:⁵⁴ the impossibility of identifying with the father, the impossibility of not identifying with the father; the impossibility of identifying with the working class, the impossibility of not identifying with the working class; the impossibility of identifying with being a woman, the impossibility of not identifying with being a woman; the im possibility of identifying with others, the impossibility of not identifying with others. the impossible identification of the part that has no part, the impossibility of identifying with yourself.

You are no longer the one you thought you were, no longer where you thought you were. You are no longer there at all. The impersonal world has taken you over. All that you can do is desperately hold on to things, to sensations: the round smoothness of stones in a circle of friendship; the liquorice of the lake’s horizon at 4 o’clock on an impossibly warm winter’s afternoon; the sharp, harsh spikes of windblown sand that whip your skin and cut into the surface of your face. There is nothing else left of you. You don’t have to try to experiment with writing, you don’t have to try to reach for the style of the impersonal. You’ve already survived the impersonal, but barely. You are not trying to arrive at a place where there is no longer a subject or plot. You are trying to get with the plot, while tweaking it here and there. One of the ways you do that is by writing impossible identifications into the history of the plot that has already written itself, as if it were impersonal, the plot of philosophy/politics/literature.

Notes

1 Rancière tries ‘to answer the question, what can be thought of specifically as politics’ on ‘the basis of Aristotle’s text [the Politics] (and what this text stops short of)’ (DT xiii, M 15).

2 See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

3 See Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 21 (London: Harvard University Press, 2005), I, 1253a 9–17.

4 See Aristotle, Politics, I, 1254b 24–25.

5 While it is clearly the police version of politics that Rancière is describing here, rather than the dissensual model he himself develops, in question is how far this dissensual model replicates the police model.

6 Aristotle, Politics, I, 1252b 5–7.

7 Holt N. Parker, ‘Aristotle’s Unanswered Questions: Women and Slaves in Politics’ EuGeStA, no. 2 (2012): 71–122, see esp. p. 76.

8 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), p. 40.

9 Davide Panagia, ‘Rancière’s Style’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 284–300, see esp. p. 287. Panagia discusses the logic of equivalence in relation to Marx.

10 Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 1 (Autumn 2009): 1–19, see esp. p. 10.

11 Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, October, vol. 61, The Identity in Question (Summer 1992): 58–64, see esp. p. 59.

12 See Jacques Rancière and Davide Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, Diacritics, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 113–26, see esp. p. 121.

13 Rancière, ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 233–48. Hereafter cited as WE. Rita Felski, ‘Kitsch, Romance Fiction and Male Paranoia: Stephen King meets the Frankfurt School’ Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 4, no. 1 (1990): 1–11, see esp. p. 1.

14 Rancière quotes from one of Flaubert’s letters to Louise Colet in which Flaubert ‘confesses … his own dream’ in which he also confuses ‘literature and furniture’ (WE 240).

15 As Rancière says, Flaubert’s Emma is both sentimental and at the same time sentimental without contradiction, in that she wants to solidify or render concrete the ideal pleasure of art and literature: ‘Flaubert characterizes her attitude by two apparently opposed adjectives; she is said to be both sentimental and practically minded. But there is no contradiction. Sentimentalism and practical-mindedness mean the same thing. The sentimental character wants the pleasures of art and literature to be real, concrete pleasures. He or she wants them to be more than a matter of intellectual contemplation: a source of practical excitement’ (WE 235).

16 Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, Substance, no. 103, vol. 33, no. 1 (2004): 21–2.

17 Although Rancière will distinguish his own view of art in other respects from that of Deleuze elsewhere, he endorses the notion that art concerns the impersonal flow of haecceities.

18 Rancière, ‘Aesthetics against Incarnation: An Interview by Anne Marie Oliver’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 172–90, see esp. p. 189.

19 As I develop below, Flaubert departs from Rancière’s egalitarianism in that Flaubert wants to distinguish between himself as a ‘pure artist’ and the ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ that he makes Emma represent (WE 239). As Alison Ross points out, Rancière ‘complains that Flaubert still wishes to defend the semantic integrity of the concept of art against the democratic intrusions of the merely prosaic … the entry of prosaic really does mean (despite Flaubert’s condemnation of Emma Bovary) that anything can have aesthetic significance for anyone’, ‘Equality in the Romantic Art Form: The Hegelian Background to Jacques Rancière’s “Aesthetic Revolution”’, in Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, edited by Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross (London: Continuum, 2012), pp. 87–98, esp. p. 94.

20 Rey Chow and Julian Rohrhuber make a similar point, but develop it in a different direction than my argument here. See ‘On Captivation: A Remainder from the “Indistinction of Art and Nonart”’, in Reading Rancière, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 44–72, see esp. pp. 58 and 60.

21 Rancière, ‘The Thread of the Novel’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 196–208, see esp. p. 207.

22 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 261.

23 Aristotle aligns men with intellect and women with appetites, arguing that women’s logos lack deliberative authority.

24 Aubrey Porterfield, ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Bored: Echoes of Flaubert’s Egyptian Travel Writing in Madame Bovary’, Studies in the Novel, vol. 48, no. 3 (2016): 259–78, see esp. p. 264; Porterfield is quoting Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. A Narrative drawn from Gustave Flaubert’s Travel Notes & Letters, trans. and ed. Francis Steegmuller (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1996), p. 29.

25 Porterfield, ‘Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Bored’, p. 268.

26 Ibid., p. 276.

27 Newspaper reports of the suffragettes’ destruction of orchids at Kew Gardens in 1913 accused them of barbarism, and suggested that their uncivilized, hysterical actions proved that they were unfit for the vote by appealing to their animality and inadequate literacy, thereby implicitly locating them by race and class. See newspaper reports included in the Royal Botanic Gardens Metropolitan Police Correspondence, 1845–1920, held at the Royal Botanic Gardens Archives, Kew.

28 Rancière in ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An interview with Jacques Rancière’, Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi and Enea Zaramella, Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 289–97, p. 296. Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, see esp. p. 122.

29 See Panagia, ‘Rancière’s Style’ on the importance of sensing rather than the analytic of arguing and its association with the faculty of understanding in Rancière’s work.

30 Rancière, ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited’. See also Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Dimension’, p. 11.

31 See Spelman, Inessential Woman, ch. 2.

32 See Parker, ‘Aristotle’s Unanswered Questions’, p. 72.

33 Charlotte Witt, ‘Form, Normativity and Gender in Aristotle: A Feminist Perspective’, in Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, edited by C ynthia A. Freeland (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1998), pp. 118–37, see esp. pp. 122–3.

34 Quoted in Avtar Brah and Anne Phoenix, ‘Ain’t I a woman? Revisiting intersectionality’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (2004): 75–86, see esp. p. 77.

35 Brah and Phoenix, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, p. 76.

36 Although women play no role in his analysis in Disagreement, in a later interview Rancière acknowledges that citizenship was confined to free males when he says, ‘The presupposition of equality is a basis for the existence of politics in general. This means that it is already valid for ancient democracy. Now it is well known that the presupposition in that context concerned the free male citizen, and the fact is that that the practice of arts in classical Greece was mostly founded on an ethical principle,’ ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi and Enea Zaramella, Critical Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 289–97, p. 296. There is no exploration of how the ostensibly ethical principle upon which the practice of the arts was founded was also permeated with presuppositions that confined women to very specific roles, excluding them from acting in tragedies for example. Nicole Loraux has argued that while Athenian politics excludes women, the feminine ‘haunts the Athenian civic imagination’, and she thus she makes it her project to ‘record the difficulties that civic discourse encounters as it tries to imagine fully the utter exclusion of women’, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes, trans. Caroline Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 11, 21.

37 Whether the poor lack virtue on Aristotle’s account is unclear.

38 To say that the people are an undifferentiated mass who lack virtue is to overlook the fact that Aristotle differentiates between men and women, and argues for virtues that are specific and appropriate to women.

39 Rancière treats ‘the poor of ancient Greece’ as equivalent to the ‘modern proletariat’, and both as exemplary of ‘whoever has no part’ (DT 9, M 28).

40 Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 120.

41 I am playing on what Rancière says of the police order here: ‘The essence of the police is the principle of saturation; it is a mode of the partition of the sensible that recognizes neither lack nor supplement. … The political is what disturbs this order by introducing either a supplement or a lack. The essence of the political is dissensus … the political persists as long as there is a dissensus about the givens of a particular situation of what is seen and what might be said, on the question of who is qualified to see or say what is given’ (2000, 124).

42 Aristotle, Politics I, 1252b.

43 Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 140 (1989): 139–67.

44 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). In the background of Arendt’s discussion are Martin Heidegger’s reflections on man as animale rationale or zoon logon echon in ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 193–242, while both Arendt’s considerations and those of Foucault provide a context for Agamben’s discussion.

45 An example of a female activist invoking a right in a way that challenged the basis upon which the public sphere functioned is Rosa Parks. On the basis of their skin colour, African Americans were denied the right to occupy the same seats on public transport as white Americans. In full knowledge of this, as an act of civil protest, Parks exercised the right that she was denied when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in the state of Alabama in 1955. Her protest was followed by a boycott of the transportation company by African Americans, and as we know, it eventually became one of a series of events that led to the success of the civil rights movement in the United States in overcoming segregation, at least in its legal configuration. Of course racial segregation remains in many forms: residential, cultural, educational, environmental, for instance. The boycott, says Rancière, ‘staged the double relation of exclusion and inclusion’ at stake in ‘the duality of being a human being and a citizen’, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2009), p. 61, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), p. 69. Hereafter cited as HD, HDE. In the case of Parks, an individual acted in a way that amounted to embodying, exercising, and thus claiming a right that had been denied. She thereby enacted, or brought into existence, that which was withheld (the right to occupy a seat on a bus), and in doing so, exposed the inequality of the political order as failing to grant the equality demanded. This failure was based upon a double standard, which treated people of colour as if they were second-class citizens, not worthy of equal treatment, and as such, not deserving of full recognition. They were not considered fully human in the sense that they were allowed to exist while not being construed as capable of bearing full political or civil rights as citizens. Their worth was restricted to the performance of menial labour, co nceived of as occupying the private realm, as instrumental in supporting and maintaining the lives of those who assumed the full array of political and civil rights in the public realm, a privilege that African Americans were denied. In protesting this marginalization, the action of Parks thus contested the prevailing order, the authority it assumed, and the appearance of necessity with which the particular shape of the public sphere infused itself. Far from being self-evident, the configuration of the boundary between public and private comes to be seen as based on an exclusionary order that is capable of being challenged and refigured.Rancière also refers to Olympe de Gouges, and, as we shall see in Chapter 3, Jeanne Deroin, for example. For a discussion of Olympe de Gouges see my ‘The public, the private, and the aesthetic unconscious: reworking Rancière’, Public Sphere from Outside the West, edited by Divya Dwivedi and Sanil V. (Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 297–313.

46 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 155. Hereafter cited as LS.

47 See Rancière’s discussion of militancy, history, philosophy and literature in Abraham Geil, ‘Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 47, no. 2 (2014): 301–10, see esp. 302–04. See also an interview by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello, ‘Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity’, trans Gregory Elliot, Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 1–10, see esp. p. 2. See also Deleuze, who says, ‘How could the silent trace of the incorporeal crack at the surface fail to “deepen” in the thickness of a noisy body? How could the surface gash fail to become a deep Spaltung, and the surface nonsense a nonsense of the depths? … If the order of the surface is itself cracked, how could it not itself break up … How could we not reach the point at which we can only spell letter by letter and cry out in a sort of schizophrenic depth, but no longer speak at all? … should we … be … a little of a guerilla – just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably? … If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable, it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges thought occurs’ (LS 156–60). I am grateful to Helen Palmer for discussion of the significance of Deleuze’s appeal to the image of the crack.

48 As Hannah Stark says, ‘On her strange adventures in Wonderland, Alice must navigate surface and depth, negotiate size as her own body and the things around her shift’ Feminist Theory after Deleuze (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 35.

49 Alan Lopez, ‘Deleuze with Carroll: Schizophrenia and Simulacra and the Philosophy of Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 9, no. 3 (2004): 101–20, see esp. p. 110.

50 Deleuze and Guattari say that girls ‘slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes’ (1988, 277).

51 Since it is not always a question of what I want or do not want, it is rather a question of a cultural unconscious, perhaps I should say I want to try to be accountable for the ways my efforts to hold onto sanity might have schizophrenic effects for others. In this regard, Claudia Rankine’s discussion of anger and insanity in relation to Serena Williams comes to mind. See Citizen: An American Lyric (Penguin, 2015), pp. 24–36. Hereafter cited as C.

52 While it is impossible to tell exactly how much, if at all, the impact of Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) fed into the change of heart witnessed on the part of Australian government, which under John Howard had refused to grant the official apology that Kevin Rudd did in fact grant in 2008, I think it is likely that the impact of the film (which was widely seen) on public opinion played a role in this shift. See http://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/oct/27/features.review1 (last accessed 26 August 2016).

53 There are one or two subtle signs in the film that a shift of authority, a shift in vision, might be possible at some future point, as when the tracker sent to bring the girls back to the Moore River Settlement, after repeatedly being frustrated in his efforts to do so, acknowledges that Molly is ‘clever’, conceding an attribute that Neville manifestly denies her, and then after a moment’s pause, simply adds these words, which need no further commentary: ‘She wants to go home’.

54 See Rancière, ‘Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization’, pp. 61–2.