19
While Connolly’s social arena is, in his terms, “agonistic,” in Ranciere’s it is
“polemical.” Critical of historians of ideas who, when critical, distinguish what is thought
versus unthought, Ranciere argues that the more basic issue is “the very right to think.”
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The contention within Ranciere’s polemical social space is a struggle between the forces of
policing: the familiar social policies within which some bodies receive recognition as
bonafide political subjects and others do not, versus the forces of politics: events of
subjectification in which excluded parts of the social order demand to be heard.
Articulated with a spatial idiom, such episodes disturb the institutionalized “distribution of
bodies into functions” and also challenge the epistemic basis for the prior exclusion, the
naturalization of the differences among bodies and of the appropriate “places” where
those bodies belong; they disturb, in Ranciere’s terms (already quoted), “the order of
distribution of bodies into functions corresponding to their ‘nature’ and places
corresponding to their functions...”
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As part of his conception of the episodic partitioning of social space, Ranciere sees
the political as arising from a continuous mobility within the social configuration. Because
democracy rests not on specific leadership qualities but rather on “an absence of
qualifications that, in turn, becomes the qualification for the exercise of a democratic
arche,”
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democratic challenges to the policing order arise from a non-place. While what is
proffered by Ranciere appears to be a structural phenomenon, a “democratic void” that is
“a given constitutive of politics”; it is also implicitly a temporal phenomenon. The moments
of democratic enactment come from a supplement that arises as disconnected from that
part of the population which, at any time, is regarded as politically qualified.
Convention