3
In the introduction, I raised a series of questions about Rancière’s understanding of the part that has no part. If the objects of dissensual politics are nothing other than the objects of the police order, and if the ‘class struggle’ is ‘politics itself, politics such as it is encountered, always in place already, by whoever tries to found community on its arkhê’ (DT 18, M 39), then how far do the terms on which speech counts as articulate in Rancière’s dissensual politics replicate the racializing and gender biases of Aristotle’s politics?1 Aristotle’s discourse about the specific ways in which slaves and women should be ruled in the household supports and informs his discussion of the struggle between the rich and the poor, which Rancière identifies as the defining characteristic of politics. Aristotle’s arguments about women tend to proceed by assuming that women are free, while his arguments about slaves tend to proceed by assuming that slaves are men, assumptions which build the invisibility of female slaves into his account. Female slaves relinquish their invisible status only in order for Aristotle to maintain that the proper rulers of slaves who are women are their free masters, and not their slave husbands, while the proper rulers of free women are their husbands.2
Rancière’s discussion of Aristotle proceeds, however, as if it involved no such entangled relationship between women and slaves, indeed, as if women were entirely absent from the discussion. In this chapter, I follow Rancière’s argument in the earlier chapters of Disagreement. Towards the end of the chapter, I turn to some feminist readings of Aristotle’s Politics in order to play out how his consideration of women in relation to slaves complicates Rancière’s presentation of it. I also turn to Charles Mills’s considerations in The Racial Contract, to see how racism structures social contract theory.
Rancière conceives of politics as an interruption of the police order. To understand this, it is necessary to grasp that Rancière redefines politics in such a way that what generally passes for politics, namely ‘the practices and legitimations of the consensus system’ (DT xiii, M 16), now come to be construed as ‘the police’ (DT 28, M 51). More specifically, ‘Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of collectivities is achieved, the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution’ (DT 28, M 51). In proposing to call such systems of distribution and legitimization the police, Rancière is concerned to bring to the fore a presupposition that politics as usual puts aside, excludes or eliminates. To bring this presupposition to the fore is to render explicit the constitutive ‘assumption’ (DT 33, M 57) or precondition on which politics rests, and in doing so, to expose the wrong that politics as usual is founded upon.
Politics is what puts back into play the presupposition that the police order has put out of play. It is for this reason that Rancière construes politics as that which interrupts, or is ‘antagonistic’ (DT 29, M 52) to the police order. Politics ‘comes about solely through interruption’ (DT 13, M 33).3 The precise nature of the interruption that politics effects when it interrupts the flow of the established order, when it ‘stops the current’ (see DT 13, M 33), is the incursion of equality.4 Plato and Aristotle agree that a just city is one in which the harmful (blaberon) has been eliminated, and all that is left is that which is useful (sumpheron) (see DT 4, M 22). Rancière points out that, along with the elimination of the harmful comes the bracketing of the fundamental equality of people. When those who make up the part of society that has been designated unequal in some capacity that ostensibly disqualifies them from rule, precluding them from the equality that in fact must be operative in order for them to be ruled, that part of society must find a way of asserting its equality, of making itself heard. Rancière identifies equality as the ‘sole principle’ of politics (DT 31, M 55), offering as a definition of equality, ‘the open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test equality’ (DT 30, M 53).
In what way is the basic, fundamental equality, the equality of all speaking beings, a presupposition that the fiction of the police order casts aside and keeps at bay? Rancière explains it in this way: ‘There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you’ (DT 16, M 37). Aristotle – whose Politics ‘and what this text stops short of’ (DT xiii, M 15) serves as the basis for Rancière’s understanding of politics – acknowledges this ‘equality quite precisely while avoiding naming it’, when he identifies the slave as ‘one who participates in reason so far as to recognize it (aesthêsis) but not so as to possess it (hexis)’ (DT 17, M 38).5 In doing so, Aristotle allocates to the slave ‘the capacity to understand a logos without having the capacity of the logos’ (DT 17, M 38). This is also a way of perpetrating a miscount. The very existence of politics is attributed to what Rancière calls a ‘basic miscount’ (DT 10, M 30). ‘There is politics … because there is a wrong count of the parts of the whole’ (DT 10, M 29). In this sense, the concept of wrong ‘belongs to the original structure of all politics’ (DT 39, M 63).
To make oneself heard when one is speaking for a part that has no part, for a class that is said not to exist, is not just a matter of finding a voice. It is a question of redistributing roles and positions in relation to the spaces occupied. It is a matter of becoming ‘an operator that connects and disconnects different areas, regions, identities, functions, and capacities existing in the configuration of a given experience – that is, in the nexus of distributions of the police order and whatever equality is already inscribed there, however fragile and fleeting such inscriptions may be’ (DT 40, M 65). The stakes of this project are high, due to the fact that the wrong that political subjectification seeks to deploy is constitutive of the political order itself – the rule of the rich over the poor.6 ‘The people are not one class among others. They are the class of the wrong that harms the community and establishes it as a “community” of the just and the unjust’ (DT 9, M 28). As such, their dispute is a ‘fundamental dispute’ – it interrupts the current, ‘short-circuits’ (DT 13, M 33) the order that has been imposed, and shored up by authority.
Politics occurs as an interruption of the fiction that the police order has established for itself, a fiction that it legitimates and thereby makes passes for reality. For Plato, this includes the idea that some are fit to govern, and some only to be governed, views that he justifies by arguing that the latter lack the capacity to rule themselves properly. One might say that the judgement that some are naturally unfit to rule proceeds from the effort of a social order to eliminate the ‘sheer contingency’ (DT 17, M 37) or ‘ultimate anarchy’ (DT 16, M 36) on which its hierarchy is based.
By not counting those considered to have no part in politics, because they are not considered to exist in any meaningful sense, the political community consigns those it refuses to see as properly human to the realm of animality. In place of speech and discourse, it hears only ‘noise signalling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt’ (DT 23, M 45). It thereby dooms ‘the majority of speaking beings to the night of silence’ (DT 22, M 44). Those who see themselves as having the capacity of logos (reason or speech) – and Rancière makes the point that ‘the logos is never simply speech because it is always indissolubly the account that is made of this speech’, relegating some speech to mere animal noise (DT 22-23, M 44) – perpetrate a miscount. They do so by taking it upon themselves to divide up what citizens have in common (see DT 5, M 24), thereby not only adjudicating what counts as logos, but on that basis also creating parts of a community, and assigning to these parts differential roles, tasks and duties. Consequently, for Rancière the ‘duality of the logos as speech and account of speech’ (DT 43, M 71) is intrinsic to the logic of politics.
Politics, in the sense that Rancière construes it, happens when the presupposition of equality comes to the fore, when the ‘mechanisms’ of the police order ‘are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone, or the paradoxical effectiveness of the sheer contingency of any order’ (DT 17, M 37). In putting back into play this presupposition of equality, politics is necessarily ‘contentious’ (DT 14, M 35), for it introduces the ‘constitutive wrong or torsion of politics itself’ (DT 14, M 34). It thereby institutes a ‘shift in the playing field’ (DT 39, M 64). In ancient Greece, the constitutive wrong is nothing but the ‘poor’, the class that is not a class, or the part that has no part, the part that is not counted as part of the whole. For Rancière, ‘the war of the poor and the rich is also a war over the very existence of politics’ (DT 14, M 34). Rancière surmises that the ‘party of the rich has only ever said one thing … the negation of politics: there is no part of those who have no part’ (DT 14, M 34).7 In contesting this, those who are designated as having no part introduce ‘an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of speaking bodies’ (DT 19, M 40).
In the context of ancient Athens, Rancière equates the poor with the very existence of politics, because the poor introduce a limitation into what would otherwise be the absolute rule of oligarchy. They do so through the exercise of an ‘empty freedom’ (DT 19, M 40). ‘The law of oligarchy is effectively that “arithmetical” equality should command without hindrance, that wealth should be immediately identical with domination’ (DT 8, M 27). Yet, the equality in question for politics is not arithmetical. It concerns the value apportioned to the parts into which the common is divided, and the entitlement that value secures for each part. ‘The political begins precisely when one stops balancing profits and losses and worries about distributing common lots and evening out communal shares and entitlements to these shares, the axiaï [values] entitling one to community’ (DT 5, M 24). The miscount concerns the counting of parts when it comes to what is held in common and its distribution.
In Plato’s formulation of the ideal city, there is a shift from an arithmetical order, in which transactions concern advantages that are cashed out between individuals, to an order in which the common good of the community is at stake. In asking what each part brings to the common good, this transition involves submitting the arithmetic order of exchange to a telos, to justice as the good of the whole. The harmony of the whole is defined no longer by arithmetical equality, but in relation to an idealized geometry, which is undergirded, however, by a ‘curious compromise with the empirical, an odd way of counting “parties” within the community’ (DT 6, M 24). Plato and Aristotle accomplish this sleight of hand by defining human nature differentially, and apportioning certain individuals to certain parts of society on that basis.
For the Athenians of ancient Greece, the liberty of the poor had the effect of reducing the ‘absolute right’ of the rich, transforming it ‘into a particular axia [value]’ (DT 8, M 27). Lacking the wealth of oligarchs and the virtue of aristocrats (see DT 6, M 25), as Aristotle sees it, the only value left to the demos, the people – the poor – was freedom or liberty. ‘The demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens. In so doing, this party that is not one identifies its improper property with the exclusive principle of community and identifies its name – the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position – with the name of the community itself’ (DT 8-9, M 27). The demos speaks in the name of an equality that is not in fact its own, but is precisely common to everyone.
As Rancière understands it then, for the classical authors, freedom ‘pops up’ to prevent the oliga rchy ‘from governing through the simple arithmetical play of profits and debts’ (DT 8, M 27). This freedom is empty in two senses. First, it is based on ‘pure invention’ (DT 7, M 26), since it is premised on the simple fact of being born within the city walls of Athens. This means, for Aristotle, that lowly shopkeepers and artisans, who in his view are no better than slaves – in fact they are worse than slaves in that they have not learnt virtue from their masters – are endowed with the freedom of citizens. The only thing that prevents them from being slaves is the geographical accident of their birth, now rendered a political qualification, but an empty one.
The people are the ‘undifferentiated mass’, who lack the positive properties of wealth or virtue, and who appropriate freedom as what is proper to them. Yet, freedom is not proper to them. ‘The people who make up the people are in fact simply free like the rest’ (DT 8, M 27). The demos appropriates for itself this ‘simple identity’ with those who have wealth and virtue, the equality that in fact belongs to all citizens, but which the people claims for itself. Hence, ‘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).8 The second respect in which freedom is empty, then, is that, lacking any other positive quality, the people, the demos, lay claim to the freedom they share with everyone else, as if it were theirs alone.
Informing the gesture that consigns some speaking bodies to insignificance, so that their existence is negligible, is the distinction that Aristotle draws between voice and speech, one that he lines up with that which differentiates humans from animals. While all animals, human beings included, have the capacity to vocalize pleasure or suffering, only human animals have the capacity of speech. This capacity enables them not merely to distinguish what is pleasurable from what is painful, but also to understand the useful as opposed to the harmful, the just as opposed to the unjust, what is good as opposed to what is evil (see DT 2, M 20). Aristotle defines the capacity of speech – and thus the ability to understand what is harmful or injurious as opposed to pleasurable, what is evil and what is good, what unjust and what just – as ‘exclusive to human beings’ (DT 2, M 20). The trouble is that at the same time, he constantly fudges the line that supposedly differentiates animals from humans, as Rancière acknowledges when he points to the different capacities with regard to logos that Aristotle assigns to slaves and freemen.9
For a community, to be political is for it to be concerned with what a community has in common. By dividing up the common capacity of rationality into different types, distributing these types to different parts of the community, and defining the value of each part of the community Aristotle takes it upon himself to designate who is entitled to a share in community, and who is not. If Aristotle defines slaves as those without a share in anything, for modern society, it is the proletariat that has no part (DT 9, M 28).10 But, if the inception of politics is understood as the counting by a community of its parts, and if it dismisses one part as of no account, as the part that has no part, then the part that has no part is also the founding of the political community as such. ‘It is through the existence of this part of those who have no part, of this nothing that is all, that the community exists as a political community – that is, as divided by a fundamental dispute, by a dispute to do with the counting of the community’s parts even more than of their “rights”’ (DT 9, M 28). Therefore, when the ancient poor or the modern proletariat mobilize themselves to contest the order that excludes them and makes them of no account, its contention is with the political order itself.
In order to make themselves heard, those who make up the part that has no part (slaves, the poor, the proletariat), will have to intervene in the very order of speech itself. ‘Disagreement occurs wherever contention over what speaking means constitutes the very rationality of the speech situation’ (DT xi, M 13). It is not only a ‘dispute over the object’ under discussion but also over ‘the capacity of those who are making an object of it’ (DT xii, M 15). It thus concerns the ‘tangible presentation of [a] common object, the very capacity of the interlocutors to present it’ (DT xii, M 14). It is this tangible aspect, bound up as it is with the speaker’s position in the political body, and the value the rest of the community attributes to the speaker’s words, that distinguishes the police order from a mere law.11 The police order organizes the ‘reality in which bodies are distributed in community’ (DT 28, M 51). Rancière concedes that the ‘police is, essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share or lack of it’ (DT 29, M 52), but differentiates his notion of the police from the ‘state apparatus’, where the ‘state is portrayed as a machine, a “cold monster” imposing its rigid order on the life of society’ (DT 29, M 52). At the same time, he differentiates policing from the Foucauldian notion of the ‘“disciplining” of bodies’ (DT 29, M 52).12 Rather, the police is a ‘rule governing’ the ‘appearing’ of bodies, the ‘configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed’ (DT 29, M 52).
Rancière specifies that in order to define the law-like operation of the police, one must first define the ‘configuration of the perceptible’ that inscribes the share a party has, or the lack of it. Hence for Rancière, in order to function as the law, the police is
first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise (DT 29, M 52).
It follows, then, that in order to intervene in the police order, politics must take the form of a disagreement, dispute or dissensus that makes a difference in the ways in which speaking bodies are allocated to some tasks or occupations, and others not, the way some are relegated to invisibility and silence, while others are not.
Thus, Rancière makes good on his stipulation that the split, conflict or dispute in which disagreement consists, and which politics introduces, is a tangible one, which concerns the capacity of those staging the conflict. Women, for example, turned the ‘domestic household’ into a ‘political space’ when it became ‘the subject of argument in a dispute over the capacity of women in the community’ (DT 32-3, M 56). By means of a process of subjectification, through the ‘declaration of a wrong’, feminism thereby brings into existence a party that hitherto did not exist as a party (DT 39, M 64). It does so by introducing a dispute, for instance, about whether ‘maternity is a private or a social matter, if this social function is a public function or not, if this public function implies a political capacity’ (DT 40, M 65).
Political subjectification ‘forces’ terms such as ‘women’ or ‘proletarian’ out of their ‘obviousness’ (DT 36, M 60), by redefining or reconfiguring ‘the field of experience’ (DT 40, M 65). It ‘measures the gap between the part of work as social function and the having no part of those who carry it out within the definition of the common of the community’ (DT 36, M 60). Subjectification ‘undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those that have no part’ (DT 30, M 53), thereby exposing the logic of the police order as resting upon an ‘inegalitarian distribution of social bodies’ (DT 42, M 67). Thus, a strike is political when it transforms the ‘relationships that determine the workplace in its relationship to the community’ (DT 32, M 56). It is political in that it ‘gives rise to a meeting’ (DT 32, M 56) of two heterogeneous logics, that of the police and that of politics, where politics is understood as the ‘process of equality’ (DT 30, M 53). It creates a space in which the ‘uncounted’ can be counted (DT 38, M 63). In the police order, the proletariat only counts ‘as those of no account’ – or as ‘the class of the uncounted’ (DT 38, M 62). Proletarians do not exist as a party ‘prior to the conflict they name’ (DT 27, M 49), that is, ‘prior to the declaration of wrong’ (DT 39, M 64). Before naming the wrong that is done to it, ‘the proletariat has no existence as a real part of society’ (DT 39, M 64).
Through subjectification, through naming a wrong, a naming that at the same time makes those of no account into a party, a party that did not exist as such brings itself into being by ‘tying the presentation of equality, as the part of those who have no part, to the conflict between two parts of society’ (DT 39, M 64). In so doing, the proletariat, or women, for example, demonstrate the particularization of the universal (see DT 42, M 67), and at the same time they institute a ‘single universal, a polemical universal’ (DT 39, M 64). They transform identities through ‘disidentification’ (DT 36, M 60), such that ‘women’ or ‘proletarian’ are no longer identified by the part that is allocated by the community of the police order. Women are removed from the naturalized roles in which they had been cast, they are ‘denatured’, and space is opened up where ‘those of no account are counted, where a connection is made between having a part and having no part’ (DT 36, M 60). Women or proletarians can now be seen differently, because ‘a fresh sphere of visibility’ (DT 42, M 67) has been made available. This sphere must be kept open, through repeated demonstration of the wrong of inequality, through the constant manifestation of the gap between the police order and politics, since left to itself, it will close down. ‘The persistence of the wrong is infinite because verification of equality is infinite’ (DT 39, M 64). Rancière resists the language of victimization, because the subjects who come into existence through subjectification are ‘subjects whose very existence is the mode of manifestation of the wrong’ (DT 39, M 64).
When, in 1849, Jeanne Deroin ‘presents herself as a candidate for a legislative election for which she cannot run’, she stages in ‘exemplary fashion’ (DT 41, M 66) the contradiction between the police logic and political logic. She ‘demonstrates the contradiction within universal suffrage that excludes her sex from any such universality’ (DT 41, M 66). In so doing she is, in effect, making reference to the ‘first requirement of universality’, namely that ‘speaking beings universally belong to the linguistic community’ (DT 56, M 86). She is behaving ‘as though there were a common world of argument’ (DT 52, M 81). Structurally this assumption, the ‘as though’, is similar to the ‘requirement of universality proper to’ the ‘as if’ operative in Kant’s aesthetics, in that it ‘includes those who are not included’ (DT 58, M 88). Deroin’s demonstration of universality takes shape in her inclusion of women among those subjects who have logos. Not only does she include women within the community of speaking beings, but also issues a demand to those who fail to recognize women as belonging to this community, she ‘demands the consent of the very person who does not acknowledge’ (DT 90, M 128), women as part of this community. In this way, she opens up a new community, one that includes those who previously had no part in it. She thereby ‘creat[es] a stage … on which the equality or inequality as speaking beings of the partners in the conflict can be played out’ (DT 51, M 80). In this case, the partners are women and the men who rule them.
The visibility of this demonstration, the fact that this stage becomes visible at all (see DT 26-7, M 49), depends on its sphere of visibility being held open. The fact that Deroin can stage a conflict is made possible through numerous other infractions and transgressions that have amounted to the incursion of equality into an inegalitarian police order. ‘A political subjectification is the product of these multiple fracture lines by which individuals and networks of individuals subjectify the gap between their condition as animals endowed with a voice and the violent encounter with the equality of the logos’ (DT 37, M 61). Deroin’s intervention is made possible by such multiple fractures, which serve to prepare the ground in such a way that the stage she creates by acting in a way that impinges on the police order becomes visible as a stage, comes into existence as a stage.
Archipolitics, metapolitics
parapolitics and Plato’s archipolitics, Aristotle’s parapolitics, and the metapolitics that Rancière sees as culminating in Marx, constitute what Rancière considers to be the ‘three great figures of political philosophy’ (DT 65, M 99). He sees them all as responses to the ‘paradox of the part of those who have no part’ (DT 65, M 99). While these responses vary, they all reformulate in some way or other the part that has no part, either formulating an ‘equivalent role for it’ or ‘creating a simulacrum of it, by performing an imitation of politics in negating it’ (DT 65, M 99). Thus, for example, Plato allows artisans to be part of the community so long as they do not interfere with its political functioning, while Aristotle produces an imitation of politics, which seeks to defuse its polemicism, as we’ll see further shortly.
Rancière construes political philosophy as various reiterations of the internal division of the people as the basic condition of politics (see DT 83, M 121). To understand this, it is necessary to see the sense in which philosophy always comes on the scene ‘too late’ (DT 62, M 96) with regard to politics. Political philosophy, for Rancière, is the name of a ‘polemical encounter … in which the paradox or scandal of politics is exposed: its lack of any proper foundation’ (DT 61, M 95). As Rancière sees it, political philosophy is a response to ‘democracy’s antecedence’, or to the fact that ‘politics is already in place, without waiting for its theoretical underpinnings’ (DT 62, M 96). The politics that is already in place takes shape as ‘a part of the community that identifies with the whole in the very name of the wrong that makes it the other party’ (DT 62, M 96). From the point of view of the archipolitics of the ancients, democracy is construed as a politics that falls short of the ‘essence’ of politics, an essence that philosophy is understood to provide from ‘above’ as the ‘truth’ of politics (see DT 82, M 119).
Thus, political philosophy is effectively the elimination of politics in favour of philosophy, whereby politics is supposedly elevated to its truth, but in the process the space of democracy is suppressed. This suppression is accomplished in Plato through the imposition from above of the myth of the three metals, according to which each part of the community must perform its proper function for the good of the whole. In the name of submitting to an ideal unity, based upon the notion that the purpose of each class is wholly subsumed in one overriding principle, namely the proper functioning of the whole community, the political participation of the artisan class is reduced to the principle of non-interference.
Rancière understands the three paradigms of political philosophy he maps out (archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics) as efforts to identify politics with the police. ‘The basis of the politics of the philosophers is the identity of the principle of politics as an activity with that of the police as a way of determining the partition of the perceptible that defines the lot of individuals and parties’ (DT 63, M 97). The truth that the assimilation of politics to the police order produces is the truth of philosophy, a truth, however, that the metapolitics of modern philosophy will locate not in a higher essence of politics, but ‘beneath or behind it … as the secret of life and death coiled at the very heart of any manifestation of politics’ (DT 82, M 119). Before examining the dynamic of metapolitics more closely, let’s first explore in more detail Plato’s archipolitics, Aristotle’s parapolitics, and the modern version of parapolitics that Rancière associates with social contract theory.
For his part, Plato will hold up the true ideal to which all should aspire, an ideal that is inculcated less through the force of law, and more through the thoroughgoing and all-encompassing education of citizens, who are ‘won over by a story rather than restrained by a law’ (DT 68, M 103). Their training ‘manifests itself as the temperament of the social body’ where the ‘law is the harmony of the ethos, the accord between the character of individuals and the moral values of the collective’ (DT 68, M 103). For Plato, the ideal politics of the city is one in which the community, operating as a harmonious whole, ceases to be political (see DT 71, M 107). Plato’s republic is ‘a community functioning within the regime of the Same’ (DT 64, M 98), one which eliminates the part of those who have no part. Plato’s republic substitutes for democracy a politics with ‘nothing left over’ (DT 65, M 100), one in which there is ‘no empty space’ (DT 68, M 103). The order that suffuses and unites the community is one that divides individuals into classes according to their function, such that individuals are usurped by their function, and the community is ‘reconstructed in terms of its functions’ (DT 66, M 101). It is the ‘counting of needs and functions’ that saturates ‘the space and time of the community’ (DT 67, M 102), so that artisans lack the time to do anything other than perform their function as manual labourers. They are the part that has no political function – the part that has no part.
Plato appeals to the image of the state as an ‘organism’, a ‘living body’ (DT 64, M 98-99), the parts of which must cooperate with one another for the proper functioning of the whole. This community is one in which the ‘head rules the stomach’ (DT 65, M 100), one in which the prevailing image is the health of this corporeal entity, so that politics is envisaged as the ‘medicine of community’ (DT 82, M 119). Thus, artisans are incorporated into the community on the condition that they observe a principle of non-interference in ‘the affairs of the community’ (DT 66, M 100). They must mind their own business (see DT 67, M 101), and occupy themselves solely with their proper function: their business is to carry out their trade. Plato’s ‘archipolitics’ is a form of ‘archipolicing’, which educates individuals into the rhythm of collective accord, dictating their mood in the spirit of the harmony of the whole, even to the point of eliminating the family (see DT 71, M 107).
Aristotle concedes that equality is the principle of politics, acknowledging that all are equal in that all share ‘the equal capacity to rule and be ruled’ (DT 71, M 106). In asserting that ‘all are by nature equal’ (DT 70, M 106), he skirts the question of ‘what makes such an equality natural or why it is natural in Athens but not in Lacedaemonia’ (DT 70, M 106), in order to focus on settling ‘his score with Plato’ (DT 70, M 105).13 This he accomplishes by distinguishing between the ‘virtue of the good man, which is to rule’ (DT 71, M 106) and politics, which exists ‘only because there are equals’ (DT 71, M 106).14 The problem, for Aristotle, is to reconcile two opposing ‘concepts of nature’ (DT 71, M 107). The logic of the first concept is that ‘the greatest good is the rule of the best’ (DT 71, M 107). This is the logic that operates in Plato’s republic, the one according to which those who are said to be less well equipped to rule must obey those who are said to be better equipped. The logic of the second concept of nature is that ‘the greatest good in terms of equality is equality’ (DT 71, M 107). The way in which Aristotle will ‘square the circle’ (DT 72, M 107) is to transform the opposition between the virtue of the good and the justice of politics, into a ‘practical paradox of government’ (DT 73, M 108), whereby it is a question of two parties or factions; one party imposes its law on the other, and the other party, the dominated party, is a party of dissension that must be accommodated.
Understanding that ‘politics is a question of aesthetics, a matter of appearances’ (DT 74, M 109), Aristotle advances the view that political regimes must ‘cancel [themselves] out’ (DT 74, M 110). Thus, for Aristotle the ‘best democracy is a peasant democracy’, where, in their dispersion and distance from the city, those who are out in the fields do not have access to the space of democracy, a democracy, then, where the ‘demos is missing from its place’ (DT 74, M 110). Similarly, the best tyranny is not one that serves ‘the interests and the pleasures of the tyrant alone’ since this would incite revolt, but rather one that preserves itself by submitting to ‘the rule of law’ and promoting ‘the material betterment of the people and the participation in power of men of substance’ (DT 73, M 109).
If Aristotle reconciles the question of virtue with politics by formulating a ‘theory of government’, in which one faction concedes to be ruled over by another, Hobbes produces a modern form of parapolitics when he substitutes for Aristotle’s theory of government a theory of ‘the origins of power’ and shifts the focus from ‘the level of “parties” in power to the level of individuals’ (DT 77, M 113). Unlike Aristotle, for Hobbes, humans have no aptitude for politics, and are not predestined to any final good. In the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ (DT 78, M 114), politics is of the second order – it emerges only as the quest for survival triumphs over desire. Within the scenario of social contract theory, which breaks down the people into individuals, sovereignty is no longer a matter of one party dominating another. Rather, for both Hobbes and Rousseau, ‘sovereignty rests solely on itself’ (DT 78, M 114). In social contract theory a new ‘structure of wrong’ (DT 78, M 115) is posited, where the dispute ‘relates each one to the whole of sovereignty’ (DT 79, M 115). The parapolitics of social contract theory invents the category of ‘individuality’, which it correlates to the ‘absolute of sovereign power’ (DT 78, M 114). Modern parapolitics thus transposes the paradox of the part that has no part into ‘the division of nature as the passage from natural right to natural law’ (DT 79, M 115), which plays itself out in the relation between individuals and the state.
Individuals invest themselves in the state through their rights; for modern parapolitical philosophy it is no longer a question of forms of the just that organize the parts of the community, as it is for Aristotle. The concept of right comes to replace the discourse of justice. In social contract theory, there is a ‘pure and simple’ admission of equality as the ultimate principle of politics (DT 79, M 115). It is only through ‘the total and irremediable alienation of all “freedom” in which such equality might take effect’ that freedom can be revoked. Thus, men are ‘dispossessed of’ freedom (DT 80, M 117) or alienated from their sovereignty, when they agree to exchange their freedom for absolute sovereignty; man becomes distant from himself in a move that ‘absolutizes’ the dispute about freedom into an ‘original contradiction’ (DT 80, M 117), in which each subject agrees to alienate himself from his own freedom.
Rancière thinks that the gap between the freedom of man and the chains he imposes on himself ultimately opens onto ‘the gulf of a dispute more radical than that of the Ancients’ (DT 79, M 115). The parapolitics of social contract theory moves away from the class politics in which the ancients had ensconced politics – and for the political philosophers it is essentially ‘class war of which politics consists’ (DT 78, M 114) according to Rancière. In establishing the category of the individual, and correlating it with absolute sovereignty, social contract theory submerges the people in the ‘tautology of sovereignty’, a tautology, however, that is only ‘thinkable’ on the basis of the people. This tautology describes the new structure of wrong, ‘the wrong done to those men “born free and everywhere in chains”’ as Rousseau famously puts it (DT 80, M 117), for it is the ‘distance of man from himself’ that has become the ‘primary and final basis of the distance of the people from itself’ (DT 80, M 117).
In his metapolitics, Marx recasts the gap between Rousseau’s ‘figuration of the sovereignty of citizenship’ and Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ (DT 82, M 120) as the reality of the interests of the property owner masked by the discourse of citizenship. The term ‘citizen’ covers over the reality ‘beneath this representation’, namely the ‘radical nonright’ of the ‘non-property owner’ (DT 83, M 120). Metapolitics operates as a ‘symptomology that detects’ signs of untruth, it is a ‘discourse on the falseness of politics’ (DT 82, M 119-120). It evaporates the trappings of citizenry to reveal the truth behind the appearances of the sign of citizen, the man who has no rights unless he is a property owner. Marx reintroduces the concept of class that ‘the fiction of man and sovereignty’ was meant ‘to do away with’ (DT 84, M 122). The truth of politics is played out in terms of the class struggle, between those who produce wealth and those who own it. The term ‘class’ operates as a ‘homonyn’, dividing the sense the term has in the police order from its political sense. For the police order a class ‘is a grouping of people assigned a particular status and rank according to their origins and activity’, whereas in its political sense it is ‘a name for counting the uncounted, a mode of subjectification superimposed on the reality of all social groups’ (DT 83, M 121).
In Marx’s discourse, the term ‘class’ functions ambiguously, oscillating between a positive truth and a force of negativity, as a truth that puts class beyond politics, and as a revolutionary force. In the first sense, class is a truth that resembles that of Plato’s archipolitics, the truth of the ‘illusion of politics’ (DT 84, M 122). The proletariat figures here as a ‘positive force’, as the ‘true movement of society’ (DT 84, M 122). At the same time, the proletarian workers figure as ‘mere performers of revolutionary acts’, as ‘nonclasses’ (DT 84, M 122), so that all political forms are reduced to the class struggle. In becoming the ‘hidden “political” truth’ of ‘all forms of subjectification’, the class struggle becomes the mechanism whereby the illusion of politics is denounced. The name for the truth of its illusion or falsity is ‘ideology’. Rancière discerns in the notion of ideology that Marx introduces a ‘completely new status of the true’ (DT 85, M 123). Truth is no longer ‘the clarity of the idea in the face of the obscurity of appearances’; it becomes ‘nothing more’ than an instrument for ‘highlighting’ falsity. In designating the ‘distance between word s and things’ ideology becomes ‘the concept in which all politics is canceled out’ (DT 85-6, M 123-4).
For metapolitics, there are two interpretations of the ‘internal division of the people’ (DT 87, M 125). There are ‘those who play the game of forms’, that is, those who work within the ‘system of juridical inscriptions and governmental institutions based on … the sovereignty of the people’ (DT 87, M 125). Then there are ‘those who direct the action designed to eradicate this play of forms’ (DT 87, M 125). These latter act in the name of a truth that sees the ‘ideal sovereign people’ as illusory, and the discourse of rights and representation as merely providing the appearance, rather than the reality, of democracy. The truth behind this appearance is the truth of property ownership and the class structure it supports. For metapolitics then, the appearance of democracy contradicts the reality. The appearance of democracy is to be denounced for the illusion that it is, so that the true forces of history can be revealed.
In contrast, for Rancière, politics is a matter of confirmation rather than contradiction. At issue is not the contradiction of appearances, as is the case for metapolitics, but rather to confirm that ‘the demos exists’ (DT 88, M 126), not only in ‘inscriptions of equality’ (DT 87, M 126) such as those that appear in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but also in workshops, suburbs and domestic spaces, where it is invisible to police logic. It is a question of dramatizing ‘the gap between a place where the demos exists and a place where it does not’ (DT 88, M 126). In demanding rights, workers or women, for example, take up this gap ‘between the egalitarian inscription of the law and the spaces where inequality rules’ (DT 89, M 128) and pose the question of whether they are ‘included in the sphere of manifestation of the equality of citizens’ (DT 89, M 127). In doing so, they ‘invent a new place’ for egalitarian inscriptions of the law. Demonstrations become ‘polemical space[s]’ that hold ‘equality and its absence together’. In presenting ‘both the egalitarian text and the inegalitarian relationship’ (DT 89, M 128), democratic politics engage in a practice akin to that of the Kantian aesthetic community, a ‘practice of the as if’ (DT 90), by calling on the consent of a ‘community whose nonexistence it at the same time demonstrates’ (DT 90, M 128). To demonstrate for a right that does not yet exist, to demand equality from an audience which does not recognize the equality of the constituency of the uncounted as equal to it, is to address an interlocutor ‘who does not acknowledge the interlocutory situation’ (DT 89, M 128), or who does not see that the demos exists in the place that the demonstrators assert its existence. The task of political demonstration, then, is ‘to connect the forms of visibility of the egalitarian logos with the places where it is invisible’ (DT 90, M 129).
There is another discourse concerning parts and wholes that subtends the one that organizes Rancière’s account of Aristotle. It is a discourse concerning the relationship of the household to the polis, in which context Aristotle examines the relations of slaves and women. The end for the sake of which the properly human life exists is the good life, and it is for the sake of the polis that households exist.15 The good life is a political life, a life in which the highest human excellence or virtue can flourish.16 The good life is reserved for male citizens, and underwritten by a logic of conditionality about the virtues appropriate to those who comprise the household, women, slaves and children, about their function and nature, and about how they should be ruled over.
The relation of the household to the polis is one of conditioning. As Spelman says,
In a well-ordered state, women and slaves are not part of the polis, but they are conditions for it. Without their work, the polis could not exist, but they do not participate in the activities of the polis. They are not capable of living lives that exhibit the highest form of human excellence, though it would not be possible for others to live such lives without them. (1988, 38)
Women and slaves provide the conditions necessary for free male citizens to have the leisure to pursue political life. In Aristotle’s words, quoted by Spelman, ‘In a well-ordered state the citizens should have leisure and not have to provide for their daily wants (Politics 1269a34-35)’ (1988, 38).17
Aristotle differentiates between the functions of slaves and free women and identifies virtues appropriate to these functions. He also differentiates between the type of rule applicable to the master over the slave and that of the husband over wife, comparing the relation of master and slave to that of the soul’s rule over the body, and suggesting that the relations of the ruler over his (free) wife is similar to the relation between two parts of the soul, the intellect and appetite, whereby the husband rules over the wife as the intellect rules appetite (see Spelman 1998, 40). The rule of master over slave he considers to be that of a despot, for the sake of the master, while that of a ruler over his wife he understands to be ‘for the sake of his wife’ (1988, 40).18 The latter relation is not despotic but constitutional, or as Dana Jalbert Stauffer glosses, it is ‘political’, with the proviso that women don’t get a turn to rule, unlike properly political rule.19 The man might, however, ‘hand over some of his affairs to his wife’ (Spelman 1988, 40). The rule of men over women might resemble political rule, but in Stauffer’s words it ‘lacks the main characteristic of political rule – namely that it is temporary’ (2008, 936). Let me pause to note that in characterizing the rule of (free) husbands over their (free) wives as political, while at the same time rendering this rule permanent, Aristotle seems to inscribe this relation as political, but in an ambiguous way, as part of the political, yet not fully political – a part that has no part, we might say.
Spelman argues that Aristotle’s account of the subordination of slaves is inseparable from the account of why women should be ruled; gender cannot be isolated from ‘race’ (see 1988, 56). As Spelman puts it, for Aristotle, ‘To have a gender identity is itself a “race” privilege’ (1988, 55) in the sense that ‘only certain males and females count as “men” and “women”’ (1988, 54). It is only in ‘a community that exists for the sake of the good life, not just for life itself’ (1988, 42) that males are properly men, and women are properly women. It is only in a political community of free male citizens, where men are said to naturally rule over both slaves and women (albeit with different kinds of rule) that human excellence can flourish (1988, 41). The well-ordered state of perfection is one in which slaves are inferior to masters in a different way from the way in which free women are inferior to men. As Spelman points out, Aristotle tends to utilize the categories of women and slaves as if they were mutually exclusive, yet it is clear that by ‘women’ he refers to free women, and by ‘slaves’ he refers to male and female slaves (see 1998, 46). ‘Though a slave may be a female, what defines her function in the state is the fact of her being a slave, not the fact of her being female’ (1988, 42). Thus, not only does the term ‘women’ apply to free women, but also the term ‘man’ applies only to free men ‘insofar as Aristotle uses the term in the Politics to refer to natural rulers’ (1988, 43).
Spelman argues that the crucial concept not only for Aristotle, but also for Plato, is masculinity. ‘In Aristotle what characterizes natural rulers is a form of rationality that is masculine. Plato and Aristotle are alike in presenting an ideal of humanity that is above all else a masculine idea. They only differ with respect to who could exemplify such an ideal’ (1988, 54). While Plato thinks that some women can have masculine souls, Aristotle does not.20 For Spelman, Aristotle’s concept of masculinity ‘is at once a gender and a “race” concept – for as is clear, even if only males can be masculine, not all males can be masculine. One must not only be male but be of a particular “race” to be masculine’ (1988, 54).
Let me pause at this point to articulate an important caveat. While I adhere to the terms of Spelman’s analysis here, which is expressed with reference to the terms ‘race’ and ‘gender’, how modern concepts of race and racism relate to ancient Greek views on slavery is a complex question. Arguments that proto-racism existed in ancient Greece need to be understood within a context where othering did not cohere with modern conceptions of subject and object. For a fuller discussion of this topic, I refer to the preface of one of my earlier works.21 The wider argument of the current book is to suggest that Rancière’s effort to displace the distinction between form and matter that Western philosophy inherits from Aristotle is not completely successful in that it continues to participate in a legacy that leaves in place the architectonic structures of race and gender that anchor the form and matter distinction in modern formulations of aesthetics and politics. This legacy remains invisible to Rancière’s analyses of the distribution of the sensible, and falls out of his account of the part that has no part.
If gender is itself a function of racial privilege in Aristotle, Spelman’s argument might seem to suggest that we should not concern ourselves with gender, but with race, since to utilize the concept of gender might seem in and of itself a racist gesture. Indeed, there is some validity to that argument, and it is one that others have made.22 Spelman’s demonstration that only free males and females count as men and women allows us to see that another logic subtends the logic of conditionality whereby those whose functions are defined by their roles in the household (slaves and women) make the life of the polis possible for free men. This is a racialized logic that grants only certain males and females a gendered status, and suggests that ‘only certain kinds of men are really human’ (1988, 55).
So Aristotle’s differentiation between slaves and females should be understood to differentiate between free females and slaves. When he says that ‘the slave has not got the deliberative part [of the soul] at all, and the female has it, but without full authority’, we should understand ‘female’ here to refer to free females.23 Witt points to the connection between Aristotle’s claim that there is ‘something lacking in women’s ability to deliberate’ and his association of females with matter and males with form.24 As Witt suggests, ‘It is clear that form is located in the male and matter in the female. Moreover, the female is virtually identified with matter’ (1998, 123). 25 The function of deliberating concerns ‘which form is the cause or principle’ (1998, 123). Witt suggests that
the idea is … that there is something wrong with [women’s] forms. There is the vague implication that form is really and fully at home in men (in men who are not slaves to be precise), and not in women. In these statements Aristotle conveys that there is something compromised about the forms that women have, or about the way that they have forms (1998, 123).
Quoting Saxonhouse, Stauffer suggests that ‘the phrase “the female has reason, but it lacks authority” may mean that women’s reason lacks authority in her own soul, or it may mean that women’s reason lacks authority in the world, i.e., with men’ (2008, 937). In favour of the latter reading, Saxonhouse appeals to Aristotle’s citation of Sophocles’s Ajax 293 in support of his argument that different virtues are appropriate to different functions.26 Ajax admonishes ‘his wife Tecmessa to keep quiet when she is attempting to give him life-saving advice, advice that he does not take, to his great detriment. The quotation expresses quite aptly, then, that women’s reason may be sound, but nonetheless lack authority with men’ (2008, 937). On this reading, then, females can deliberate soundly, but men do not accord their deliberations authority.27
Witt argues that Aristotle’s notion of function is a normative and teleological concept – what a thing does determines what it is (1998, 127).28 Furthermore, function ‘carries with it the idea of what is good for the entity in question’ (1998, 127). Since ‘the good life … is the chief aim of society’ (Pols 1278b), everything is subordinated to this end, such that ‘household management and the control of slaves’ (ibid.) find their rationale in the good life, the life of the polis, although slaves and free women do not take part in political. As Witt says, ‘Aristotle asserts that there is … a characteristically human function for which rational soul is the principle or cause. And it is the exercise of that function that constitutes the human good or excellence’ (1998, 127). This function is reserved for free male citizens, as we have seen.
While there is disagreement about the implications of Aristotle’s views on slavery and women, some arguing for more progressive interpretations and others for more conservative interpretations, there is little doubt, even among the latter, that, in Stauffer’s words, ‘For Aristotle, the best and highest form of human community is the political community’ (2008, 929), and that form and matter are gendered concepts.29 For Witt it is clear, for example, that Aristotle associates the ‘more divine principle’, form, with the male, while he associates matter, ‘the inferior, material principle’ with the female.30
The gendering and racializing of the politics of form and matter plays little role in the series of equivalences that orchestrate Rancière’s understanding of Plato’s suppression of political dissension, Aristotle’s pacification of it and Marx’s displacement of it.31 Yet, not only gendered biases but also racialized biases of political philosophy are well documented. Building on the work of Carole Pateman in The Sexual Contract, Charles Mills shows in The Racial Contract, for example, that social contract theory has racism built into it.32 ‘Racism and racially structured discrimination have not been deviations from the norm, they have been the norm … the Racial Contract has underwritten the social contract, so that duties, rights, and liberties have routinely been assigned on a racially differentiated basis’ (1997, 93). This has resulted in the norming of non-whites in moral, epistemic and aesthetic terms: ‘The terms of the Racial Contract norm non-white persons themselves, establishing morally, epistemically and aesthetically their ontological inferiority’ (1997, 118).
As Mills points out, citing Susan Moller Okin, feminist theorists have shown that whatever else they disagree about, Plato and Aristotle agree on the subordination of women, as do Hobbes and Rousseau (see 1997, 93-4).33 In The Racial Contract Mills establishes a similar pattern with regard to the inferiority of non-whites in the work of ‘Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and their theoretical adversaries’ (1997, 94). Mills argues for the importance of naming the hitherto ‘unnamed global political structure’ (1997, 125) – which became ‘global in the period of formal colonial administration’ (1997, 113) – ‘global white supremacy’ since there can be no ‘serious theoretical appreciation’ of its significance until such naming. He suggests that, ‘Political theory is in part about who the main actors are’ and that for a polity figured as ruled by whites the actors are ‘neither the atomic individuals of classic liberal thought nor the classes of Marxist theory but races’ (1997, 113). Here, I take it as established that the political theories of the Greeks, social contract theory and Marx are deeply implicated in problematic assumptions about race and gender, and ask how might this implication play out for Rancière’s work, not only for his politics but also for his reflections on art. If Mills is right that political theory concerns who the main actors are, in question is whether for Rancière the major political actors remain masculinist in the sense that Spelman suggests we should understand Aristotle’s male citizens. In question then is whether for Rancière the major political actors remain classes that must conform to the ideal of white, male citizens.
Notes
1 Rancière says that ‘politics has no objects or issues of its own’ (DT 31, M 55), and reiterates this idea when he says, ‘politics has no “proper” object, that all its objects are blended with the objects of the police’, in ‘The Thinking of Dissensus’ in Reading Rancière, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 5. If Rancière maintains that the objects of politics are nothing other than those of the police order, he also suggests elsewhere that the politics of dissensus can create its own objects when he claims that the politics of dissensus is ‘comprised of a surplus of subjects that introduce, within the saturated order of the police, a surplus of objects’ (Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 124).
2 See Spelman (1988), however, who argues for a distinction between the terms ‘female’ and ‘women’.
3 See also DT 99, 139.
4 Rancière is citing Plato’s Cratylus, 417 d/e.
5 See Aristotle, Politics I, 1254b 24–5.
6 By the term ‘political subjectification’ Rancière means ‘an ability to produce … polemical scenes, … paradoxical scenes, that bring out the contradiction between two logics, by positing existences that are at the same time nonexistences’ (DT 41, M 66).
7 As Rancière points out, although he distinguishes three values (wealth, virtue and freedom, and identifies each of them as yielding ‘a particular regime’ considered in their own right, namely, oligarchy, aristocracy and democracy (see DT 6, M 25), when it comes to how these blend together in a single community, ‘one single easily recognizable quality stands out: the wealth of the oligoï’ (DT 7, M 26). In the final analysis, politics comes down to a war between the rich and the poor (see DT 11, 30).
8 The reference is to Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 20 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), II: 2, p. 15.
9 Not only is Aristotle prone to statements such as ‘the usefulness of slaves diverged little from that of animals’ (Politics I II: 14). There are plenty of other instances in which Aristotle differentiates between the capacities of humans, as when he pronounces there are by nature various classes of rulers and ruled. ‘For the free rules the slave, the male the female, and the man the child in a different way. And all possess the various parts of the soul, but possess them in different ways; for the slave has not got the deliberative part at all, and the female has it, but without full authority, while the child has it, but in an undeveloped form’ (Politics, I V: 6).
10 Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, p. 15.
11 Distancing the notion of disagreement from Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend, Rancière stipulates that disagreement ‘is not to do with words alone. It generally bears on the very situation in which speaking parties find themselves’ (D xi, M 14). See Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). While it is true that Lyotard defines the differend in terms of genres, phrases and regimens (see p. 137, for example), it is also the case that what is at stake for Lyotard is suffering ‘from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away’ and that ‘to give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim’ (13).
12 Rancière cites Foucault’s elaboration of the police in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a ‘mode of government’ implicated in ‘everything relating to “man” and his “happiness”’ (DT 28, M 51). The reference is to Foucault, ‘Omnes et singulatim: vers une critique de la raison politique’, in Dits et Ecrits, vol. IV, pp. 134–61. Rancière goes on to say that the ‘petty police is just a particular form of a more general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community’ (DT 28, M 51). He adds that Western societies have evolved so that ‘the policeman is one element in a social mechanism linking medicine, welfare, and culture. The policeman is destined to play the role of consultant and organizer as much as agent of public law and order’ (DT 28–29, M 51).
13 Rancière is quoting Aristotle, Politics, II, 1261a 41–2.
14 This ostensible equality of all does not extend to women and slaves either in Aristotle’s theoretical ruminations or in the politics of his day, which excluded women and slaves from voting.
15 See Aristotle, Politics I, 1252b.
16 As Spelman points out, there is some dispute about whether the noblest life is one of contemplation or a life of politics, yet whichever life is highest, freedom from the activities of the household is still necessary for those who pursue it. (1988, 196 n. 4).
17 Aristotle also argues that it would be ‘degrading’ if free men were to perform the work of women and slaves, and their subjects would have ‘contempt’ for them, which might lead to ‘revolution’ (Spelman, 1988, 39).
18 See Aristotle, Politics 1278b.
19 Dana Jalbert Stauffer, ‘Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women’, The Journal of Politics, vol. 70, no. 4 (October 2008): 929–41, see esp. p. 936.
20 As is well known, Plato thinks that the wives of guardians should be allowed to rule in the ideal city. See Plato, Republic.
21 Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. xiii–xxviii. See also Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–an Argument’, The New Centennial Review,vol. 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337. Wynter shows that although on the one hand, according to Foucauldian orthodoxy, the concept of race could not have appeared on the scene before the concept of the subject arose, and that it is therefore intrinsically bound up with the shift from a theocentric to a ratiocentric model, at the same time, it is a work by a pre-Christian ancient Greek thinker, Aristotle’s Politics, that provides the pretext for the precise terms in which the argument is made for racial differentiation.
22 See, for example, Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection (Summer, 1987): 64–81.
23 Aristotle, Politics 1260a.
24 As Witt says, for Aristotle ‘there is something lacking in women’s ability to deliberate, a function concerning which form is the cause or principle’ (Politics 1260a 8–14)’ (1998, 123).
25 Witt is referring to Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, 732a 2–10.
26 The line that Aristotle qu otes from Sophocles is ‘Silence gives grace to a woman’ (Politics, I 1260a 30). Stauffer translates this as ‘To woman, silence is an adornment’ (2008, 937).
27 Stauffer reports Saxonhouse’s view but she herself maintains the ambiguity of Aristotle’s argument: he ‘allows himself to be interpreted in different ways. He could mean that women are intellectually inferior to men, or he could mean that men’s superior strength lies behind their rule’ (2008, 937).
28 Witt argues that Aristotle’s theory of hylomorphism is intrinsically normative, but that once we understand his functional and teleological metaphysics, we can detach its ‘inegalitarian gender associations’ (1998, 130). She argues that ‘form is normative because it is a functional concept that operates in the context of a teleological metaphysics’ (1988, 126). She also argues that ‘what a thing is, for Aristotle, is determined by what it can do’, or by its function, and that the ‘notion of function … carries with it the idea of what is good for the entity in question, and hence what that entity ought to do’ (1998, 127). I agree with Witt that Aristotle’s metaphysics includes a normative dimension, but not that its gender associations are ‘extrinsic and, in principle, removable’ (1998, 130). Witt says that ‘Aristotle’s ergon or function argument in the Nicomachean Ethics turns on the connection between the idea that there is a human function and that performing that function constitutes the good life for a human being’ (1998, 127), quoting Nicomachean Ethics I, 7 1097b25-29 in support of her point. The problem is, as we have seen above, that in so far as women and slaves are excluded from the life of the polis, they are excluded from the good life. They are the conditions of the good life rather than participants in it.
29 The conclusion Stauffer draws from this is that, ‘The growth and flourishing of political life is … a good common to both women and men, even if they partake of that good in different ways’ (2008, 939). Her argument is aligned in important respects with both Witt’s emphasis of the normative aspect of Aristotle’s functional and teleological metaphysics and with Jill Frank, who argues that Aristotle was not so much justifying slavery or indicating its ‘immutability’, but rather ‘cal[ling] to ethics and politics understood as perpetual and ongoing activities of boundary-setting and keeping’, ‘Citizens, Slaves and Foreigners: Aristotle on Human Nature’, The American Political Science Review, vol. 98, no. 1 (2004): 91–104, see esp. p. 102. Frank suggests that ‘Aristotle does not use nature to establish the prepolitical and necessary conditions of politics. He treats nature [phusis], instead as a question for politics’ (92). As Frank understands it, ‘Nature is thus not immutable but changeable, and this means that the hierarchy it underwrites, though necessary to politics, will be changeable too’ (2004, 92). Frank argues that for Aristotle ‘human nature is constituted, in large part, by the practice and effects of prohairetic activity [activity based on choice]’ (101) and that ‘Citizen identity is … a product of making and doing, where doing is a kind of self-making (by sharing in the constitution, I make myself a citizen)’ (94). Since politics itself is an ‘art and so a product of human activity’ it ‘produces the institutions that help make citizens slaves’ (99). For Frank, ‘Aristotle seems to imply that human nature is as much a product of the regime under which one lives as it is a regime’s cause’ (102). On this basis she argues that Aristotle’s argument that ‘Asians are naturally slavish’ is an argument about their habituation to tyrannies, which makes them act ‘according to the habits fostered by tyrannies’ (102), regimes that they then reproduce. On this basis, she also argues that ‘The hierarchies of the household and polity are reversible’ (102).
30 Witt argues, ‘The locations of the better principle and the worse principle reflects the value accorded to men and women in Aristotle’s culture’ (1998, 129). On my view, even if we agree that Aristotle infuses ‘his inherently normative metaphysics with the social and political realities of his time’ (1998, 130), this does not necessarily qualify his thinking on the matter as progressive, since to reflect the values of one’s time is also to endorse and perpetuate them.
31 See Rancière and Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 119.
32 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 19 97). Also see Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
33 Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).