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Radicalizing Democratic Theory:
Social Space in Connolly, Deleuze and Ranciere
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Michael J. Shapiro
Department of Political Science
University of Hawai’i
Reconceiving Democracy: Ranciere and Connolly on Contingency
In a radical challenge to the dominant approach of traditional political theory to
democracy, Jacques Ranciere writes:
Democracy is not a regime or a social way of life. It is the
institution of politics itself. The system of forms of
subjectification through which any order of distribution of
bodies into functions corresponding to their ‘nature’ and
places corresponding to their functions is undermined, thrown
back on its contingency.
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Prepared for presentation at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 26-31.
Deploying a grammatical figure that implicates the becoming of subjects as intelligible
parts of the social order, he extends his challenge to the social sciences, pointing out that
they have historically assisted a “modern parapolitical enterprise,”
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an effacement of the
contingencies of political encounter in favor of “the problematization of origins of power
and the terms in which it is framed - the social contract, alienation, and sovereignty..”
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