2
Social science takes as its starting point an “individuality,” where entitlement is simply “the
entitlement of anyone at all to question the state or to serve as proof of its fidelity to its own
principle.”
4
In contrast, politics, in Ranciere’s sense, escapes the compass of social and
political science’s concern with policy. “The political” makes an appearance through a
“polemicization,”
5
an action in which a part that has had no part makes itself manifest, an
enactment of what he calls subjectification. The political is therefore not a set of structures
or a continuing process accessible to an application of disinterested knowledge to the
arithmetic distribution of identical bodies, or to the reality expressed in the discourses of
individuals and modes of governance.
A contemporary version of the traditional–liberal-arithmetic approach to politics
has been recently rearticulated by Ronald Dworkin, who resorts to the model of the
“auction” to treat the equality of resources
6
and to the model of the insurance actuarial to
analyze the issue of whether an equality of opportunity for weathering a catastrophe
reigns: “[I]f everyone had an equal risk of suffering some catastrophe that would leave him
or her handicapped, and everyone knew what the odds were and had ample opportunity to
insure - then handicaps would pose no special problem for equality of resources.”
7
Dworkin’s political arithmetic effaces a history of violence. Effectively, he obscures the
institutionalized catastrophe visited on those wronged during what social scientists have
euphemistically constructed as the period of “nation building” and affects their subsequent
supply of economic and social capital (a voiced perspective that would be heeded by
authorities) to insure themselves, even when they know the “odds.”
Convention