Still, serendipity, and it's the Blog Days of Summer, and I'm both lazy and trying to reestablish that I will post whatever the fuck I want, so here, for your Memorial Day weekend consideration and/or disregard, Rancière's Ten Theses on Politics:
Thesis 1:
Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined in its own terms as a specific mode of action that is enacted by a specific subject and that has its own proper rationality. It is the political relationship that makes it possible to conceive of the subject of politics, not the other way around.
Thesis 2:
What is specific to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in contraries. Politics is a paradoxical form of action.
Thesis 3:
Politics is a specific break with the logic of the arkhé. It does no simply presuppose a break with the "normal" distribution of positions that defines who exercises power and who is subject to it. It also requires a break with the idea that there exist dispositions "specific" to these positions.
Thesis 4:
Democracy is not a political regime. As a rupture in the logic of the arkhé, that is, and the anticipation of ruling in its disposition, it is the very regime of politics itself as a form of relationship that defines a specific subject.
Thesis 5:
The people that comprises the subject of democracy, and thus the atomic subject of politics, is neither the collection of members of the community, nor the laboring classes of the population. It is the supplementary part in relation to every count of the parts of the population, making it possible to identify "the count of the uncounted" with the whole of the community.
Thesis 6:
If politics is the tracing of a vanishing difference with respect to the distribution of social parts and shares, it follows that its existence is by no means necessary, but that it occurs as an always provisional accident with the history of forms of domination. It also follows that the essential object of political dispute is the very existence of politics itself.
Thesis 7:
Politics stands in distinct opposition to the police. The police is a distribution of the sensible whose principle is the absence of void and of supplement.
Thesis 8:
The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one.
Thesis 9:
Inasmuch as the province of political philosophy lies in grounding political action in a specific mode of being, it works essentially to efface the litigiousness constitutive of politics. Politics effects this effacement in its very description of the world of politics. Moreover, the effectiveness of the effacement is also perpetuated in non-philosophical or anti-philosophical descriptions of the world.
Thesis 10:
The "end of politics" and the "return of politics" are two complementary ways of canceling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the social and a state of the state apparatus. "Concensus" is the common name given to this cancellation.
Gah! Motherfucking arkhé. Un specifica, was künder meat?
- Yes, it's an old joke, a rerun, but one of my favorites, needed.
- Thank you all for the Kind yesterday.
- Annals of career "progressive" idiocy.
- Small good news.
- I don't think it's naivety.
- Shocker!
- Police state!
- Serving statehood.
- Twitter!
- Crazy demand explained.
- Please please please please please.
- Male Democratic asshole calls female pig a slut!
- The right to choose.
- One of the superstars of our Stringtown Blegsylvania is apparently quitting. Watch for imitation suicides from some of his most devout. Think how many bleggers are thinking, dammit, he beat me to what I was about to say by a day again.
- I like dim-dim, but fuck you for making me think of a motherfucking Doors song.
- Kornheiser is an asshole.
- Buzzard Point! Fuck-me-jig, yo.
- The most depressing goal celebration ever.
- Heh, Jorie Graham icerockets herself, or has people do it for her. Hi!
- Cedar Sigo is this century's Frank O'Hara? I'll investigate.
- Animals.
- 100 least influential bands of all time.
- New My Morning Jacket. It's not love, but it's strong like.
- Mining the digital motherlode.
- Pere Ubu, LIVE! 4:00 PM EDT Saturday 5/28!
MUSIC
Frank O'Hara
If I rest for a moment near The Equestrian
pausing for a liver sausage sandwich in the Mayflower Shoppe,
that angel seems to be leading the horse into Bergdorf's
and I am naked as a table cloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.
I have in my hands only 35¢, it's so meaningless to eat!
and gusts of water spray over the basins of leaves
like the hammers of a glass pianoforte. If I seem to you
to have lavender lips under the leaves of the world,
I must tighten my belt.
It's like a locomotive on the march, the season
of distress and clarity
and my door is open to the evenings of midwinter's
lightly falling snow over the newspapers.
Clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear, trumpet
of early afternoon! in the foggy autumn.
As they're putting, up the Christmas trees on Park Avenue
I shall see my daydreams walking by with dogs in blankets,
put to some use before all those coloured lights come on!
But no more fountains and no more rain,
and the stores stay open terribly late.
