By RENAN FERREIRA DA SILVA*

Considerations about the recently edited book by Jacques Rancière and Javier Bassas

The translation of The words and the damage. Dialogue on language policy, along with other works by Jacques Rancière that have come to light in the last four years, such as The space of words: from Mallarmé to Broodthaers (Reliquary, 2020), The margins of fiction (Editora 34, 2021), The scene method (Quixote Do, 2021), Aisthesis: scenes from the aesthetic regime of art (Editora 34, 2021), The work of images: conversations with Andrea Soto Caldéron (Chão de Feira, 2021), João Guimarães Rosa: fiction on the edge of nowhere (Reliquary, 2021) and Aesthetic discomfort (Editora 34/PUC-Rio, 2023), follows the recent critical and systematic interest of Brazilian academic circles in the work of Jacques Rancière, a moment that Pedro Hussak van Velthen Ramos calls the “third moment in the reception of the work of Jacques Rancière, in Brazil , linked to the interest in the theme of aesthetics”.[I]

This interest begins, points out Pedro Hussak, with the launch of Writing policies (1995), which followed Jacques Rancière's own theoretical path towards the theoretical domain of aesthetics. After the 1990s, especially with the translation of Sharing the sensitive (Editora 34, 2005), Brazilian researchers began to pay greater attention to the aesthetic reflections of Jacques Rancière, an interest that began, says Pedro Hussak, and in a not unsurprising way, with the field of contemporary art, which, through text, envisioned an alternative way of reconsidering the links between aesthetics and politics.[ii]

 Subsequently, Jacques Rancière's work gained more attention in philosophy departments and their researchers, so that we increasingly see articles, monographs, master's dissertations and doctoral theses dedicated to exploring this intersection proposed by the philosopher, thus constituting, according to Pedro Hussak, “a solid reception [of his thought] in Brazil (…) one of the most interesting and original in the world”.[iii]

Such as Sharing the sensitive, The scene method e The work of images: conversations with Andrea Soto Caldéron, to mention just a few, The words and the damage. Dialogue on language policy It adopts, as its title already indicates, dialogue as a textual form, a genre that, we could say, is dear to Rancière. Result of the seminar organized by the Spanish philosopher and translator Javier Bassas, professor at the University of Barcelona, ​​together with Rancière, held in La Virreina Center de la Image, in 2018, the work we have in hand is born from this dialogical movement established between Bassas and Rancière.

If we emphasize the importance of the formal aspect of Words and damage, this is due to the notable, but not occasional, role of dialogue in the philosopher's theoretical production, as Laurent Jean Pierre and Dork Zabunyan remember^[iv]. According to Jacques Rancière himself in conversation with researchers, an interview should not be confused with the results of a research work. However, it denotes a non-negligible part of the “equality method”, a process defended by Jacques Rancière since the beginning of his theoretical production in the 1970s.

For the philosopher, an interview does not diminish the effectiveness or power of thought, commonly considered to be extremely effective in research work. With the method of equality, Jacques Rancière postulates that “there is no proper place for thought”, as it is found everywhere, being “always in activity”.^[v]

If thought does not maintain a specific place, then what can we say about its relationship with words, especially in the form of writing? Being one of the themes dear to Jacques Rancière's work, the connection between words, writing and thought will be explained in Words and damage. For the philosopher, words, contrary to what was bequeathed by the Platonic tradition (which privileges the Logos, that is, speech in all its presence to the detriment of the muteness of writing), are not shadows opposed to the solid reality of things. They themselves are realities whose action builds or subverts a world order.

Constituting realities in themselves, words are incarnated through scriptural activity, establishing or subverting a certain sharing of the sensible. And such a disruptive relationship between language and thought is the very thread of Les mots et les torts, as we can see right at the beginning: based on the logic of equality, which constitutes the foundation of Rancièrian thought, like thinking a word (passwords) not to betray her^[vi]?

Every activity of thought, reminds Javier Bassas, implies an intellectual capacity, which, according to Jacques Rancière, is something commonly shared, primordial and axiomatic, found at the principle of all politics: the equality of intelligences. This equality, the philosopher attests, is the testimony of all contingency of the order, revealing the lack of foundation of any social order.

In this sense, if everyone has the same intellectual capacity, then the work of thought would not be the exclusivity and privilege of some, as the logic of the division of labor wants that links each body to a certain activity, hierarchizing practices and, at the limit, establishing the domination of thought over manual work by distinguishing two types of human beings, some linked to the activity of abstraction, wise men who argue and explain, while others find their destiny linked to the materiality of the world, ignorant without the possession of intellectual discourse.

In this way, Jacques Rancière's philosophical exercise seeks to break with this logic “which makes a common power [intelligence] a specific work”^[vii], in an attempt to build, through writing, “a plane of equality between blocks of language and blocks of thought normally separated”^[viii] by the division of functions established by the social order. Here another main idea of ​​the book is revealed, namely that writing should not be taken as a pure illustration of thought.

It is the activity of thought itself, whose work breaks the thread of the consensual fabric that makes up the vertical relations between thought and sensitivity, thus shuffling the hierarchies between the different discursive modes. Whether in philosophical writing or in political emancipation practices, what Rancière seeks is a plane of horizontality, an action that shuffles the divisions that separate and define in their proper place the experience of praxis and the activity of thought.

It is important to emphasize that the theme of Words and damage, namely, the relationships between language, thought and politics, is an essential part of Jacques Rancière's theoretical production. During another interview, given to the magazine Diacritics, the philosopher is questioned by Davide Panagia regarding his philosophical enterprise: one could qualify his reflections on democracy as a “poetics of politics”, taking into account the emphasis attributed to the political efficacy of words^[ix]?

Now, if we go through his bibliography, we can see that this effectiveness is present in different moments of his thought: if we take, for example, The names of history: essay on the poetics of knowledge (1992), we will see how the philosopher shows us that the excess of words among individuals is underlying every revolutionary event, appearing in “the specific form of a displacement of saying: an appropriation 'outside the truth of the other's word' that the makes it mean differently”^[X], consequently “conflagrating speeches, shuffling their times and moving words from their nominative path”[xi].

This theme can also be found in the misunderstanding (1995). In this writing, Jacques Rancière elaborates the concept of political subjectivation, understood as the process through which those who do not have their part recognized in the social order, those who are politically invisible and inaudible, who have no part in the community, the “part of the partless”^[xii], they begin to declare and verbally enunciate, in a collective way, their claim to political existence – a claim that may be conscious or not.

This struggle for political recognition must be interpreted as a manifestation on the part of the “sem-parcela” in the community – the demos Athenian, or even the modern proletariat – of a fundamental error, of a dispute deposited at the origin of the social fabric, that is, of a “damage” (cake) caused by the other parts and which is found in the principle of organization of the political community: a counting of the parcels and parts of the community, a counting that is, in fact, a “false count, a double count or a counting error”^[xiii], as it relegates the people to non-existence, at the same time as it reveals the contingency of all social organization.

It is through the process of subjectivation that this damage is treated, enabling political subjects to redesign the sensitive, that is, aesthetic, dimension of the community. Therefore, Jacques Rancière conceives politics as disagreement, contrary to a consensual space through which there could be some agreement in relation to the common good; it is, essentially, a dispute through which the parties without parties express, through words, the extent of their damage. In this context, the “excess of words” appears under the concept of “literarity”, which indicates the potential of this excess to undo “the relationship between the order of words and the order of bodies”^[xiv]. Furthermore, “literarity” also concerns the regime of writing, that is, the very condition of possibility of literature and its limit, beyond which it becomes indistinct from other discursive regimes.[xv]

These examples serve to illustrate and highlight this fundamental issue that lies at the heart of Jacques Rancière's philosophy: his concern around words, their political effectiveness and their disruptive force, the power that their excess represents in the fields of politics, of arts and knowledge, as well as their effects on the reconfiguration of the order of the sensible. This concern is not accidental or circumstantial, as it comes from a specific and important point in his thought, arising from his years of intellectual formation, and which can be fixed, as the philosopher Alain Badiou states, in the dialectical relationship between knowledge and power, between knowledge and authority^[xvi].

In this sense, Les mots et les torts is in the wake of this concern, and in this work the philosopher synthesizes, through a speech that highlights the method of equality, the different moments of his philosophical reflection and research that deal with the theme of language and politics, confronting questions that go from its position towards Althusserianism, to others that involve its relationship with phenomenology or even with Derridean deconstruction.

In explicit reference to The words and things, by Michel Foucault, Words and damage presents the reader with a dialogical reflection on the specific form of equality, the controversial and universal point according to which, according to Rancière, politics becomes possible.[xvii]

*Renan Ferreira da Silva is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at USP.

Reference

Jacques Rancière and Javier Bassas. The words and the damage. Dialogue on language policy. Translation: Lílian do Valle. São Paulo, Editora 34, 2024, 114 pages. [https://amzn.to/3yvOWoP]

REFERENCES

BADIOU, A. The adventure of French philosophy in the XNUMXth century. Trans. by Antônio Teixeira, Gilson Iannini. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2015.

HUSSAK vV RAMOS, P. “Preface”. In: SILVA, RF da. Jacques Rancière and the silent revolution in literature. São Paulo: Editora Dialética, 2022.

RANCIÈRE, J. La methode de l'égalité. Entretien with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan. Montrouge: Bayard Éditions, 2012.

RANCIÈRE, J. “L'arme theory d'un recommencement du marxisme”. In: LASOWSKI, AW Althusser et nous. Paris: PUF, 2016.

RANCIÈRE, J. The disagreement. Trans. by Ângela Lopes Leite. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2018.

RANCIÈRE, J. The names of history: essay on the poetics of knowledge. Trans. by Mariana Echalar. São Paulo: Unesp, 2014.

RANCIÈRE, J; BASSAS, J. Words and harm: dialogue on the politics of language. Trans. by Lílian do Valle. São Paulo: SOFIE/Editora 34, 2024.

RANCIÈRE, J.; PANAGIA, D. “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière". In: Diacritics, v. 30, no. 2, 2000.

SILVA, RF da. Jacques Rancière and the silent revolution in literature. São Paulo: Editora Dialética, 2022.

Notes

[I] HUSSAK vV RAMOS, P. “Preface”. In: SILVA, RF da. Jacques Rancière and the silent revolution in literature. São Paulo: Editora Dialética, 2022, p. 13.

[ii] Ibidem, p. 15.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] RANCIÈRE, J. La methode de l'égalité. Entretien with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan. Montrouge: Bayard Éditions, 2012, p. 7-8.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] RANCIÈRE, J; BASSAS, J. Words and harm: dialogue on the politics of language. Trans. by Lílian do Valle. São Paulo: SOFIE/Editora 34, 2024, p. 15.

[vii] RANCIÈRE, J. “L'arme théorique d'un recommencement du marxisme”. In: LASOWSKI, AW Althusser et nous. Paris: PUF, 2016, p. 247.

[viii] RANCIÈRE, J; BASSAS, J. Words and harm: dialogue on the politics of language, P. 23.

[ix] RANCIÈRE, J.; PANAGIA, D. “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière”. In: Diacritics, v. 30, no. 2, 2000, p. 113.

[X] RANCIÈRE, J. The names of history: essay on the poetics of knowledge. Trans. by Mariana Echalar. São Paulo: Unesp, 2014, p. 46.

[xi] SILVA, RF da. Jacques Rancière and the silent revolution in literature, P. 29.

[xii] RANCIÈRE, J. The disagreement. Trans. by Ângela Lopes Leite. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2018, p. 24.

[xiii] Ibidem, p. 21.

[xiv] Ibidem, p. 49.

[xv] On the idea of ​​“literarity” in Rancière, see SILVA, RF da. Jacques Rancière and the silent revolution in literature, p. 75 et seq.

[xvi] BADIOU, A. The adventure of French philosophy in the XNUMXth century. Trans. by Antônio Teixeira, Gilson Iannini. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2015, p. 178.

[xvii] Partially modified version of the review, originally published in Prometeica – Revista De Filosofía y Ciencias (DOI: 10.34024/prometeica.2022.24.12945). Available at: https://periodicos.unifesp.br/index.php/prometeica/article/view/12945

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