Larry’s Reviews > La Mésentente: Politique et philosophie > Status Update

Reading Ranciere’s explanation of the Marxian notion of ideology makes me understand how much Žižek is right

“L’universel [en politique] y est toujours en jeu singulièrement, sous la forme de cas où son existence et sa pertinence sont en litige.”

To understand an order, you need to be the equal of the one who is giving it to you, but the order implies the opposite is true. Aristotle said the slave only had the capacity to understand, to receive language, not to speak it. Hence two senses of “understanding”.

Process of subjectivation: Jeanne Deroin is candidate for the 1849 legislative elections, but she can’t run (because she’s a woman). Her “running”, by itself, exposes both the inner contradiction of the Republican universality (universality by position of an exception: masculine logic), and the split it inscribes in the feminine

Ranciere anchors politics in a kind of torsion: it is not the economic order of the attribution of shares, but the split between the haves and the have-nots. Like Plato, JR opposes an arithmetic of the common measure to the mathematics of the incommensurable. He goes on to identify the have-nots with the proletariat qua subject of a process of subjectivization, ie split between a stable, social identity and a void