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==Introduction==
Schelling's statement according to which, `the beginning is the negation of that which begins with it', fits perfectly the itinerary of Jacques Ranciere who began as a strict Althusserian (with a contribution to Lire le Capital) and, then, after a violent gesture of distantiation (La lecon d'Althusser), followed his own path, which focuses on what he perceived as the main negative aspect of Althusser's thought: his theoreticist elitism, his insistence on the gap which forever separates the universe of scientific cognition from that of ideological (mis)recognition into which the common masses are immersed. Against this stance, which allows theoreticians to `speak for' the masses of people, to know the truth about them, Ranciere endeavours again and again to elaborate the contours of those magic, violently poetic moments of political subjectivization in which the excluded ('lower classes') put forward their claim to speak for themselves, to effectuate the change in the global perception of the social space, so that their claims would have a legitimate place in it. Ranciere's last book, La mesentente,l provides a definite formulation of this endeavour.
==Politics and its repressions==
How, for Ranciere, did politics proper begin? With the emergence of demos as an active agent within the Greek polis: of a group which, although without any fixed place in the social edifice (or, at best, occupying a subordinated place), demanded to be included in the public sphere, to be heard on equal footing with the ruling oligarchy or aristocracy, i.e. recognized as a partner in political dialogue and power exercize. As Ranciere emphasizes against Habermas, the political struggle proper is therefore not a rational debate between multiple interests, but, simultaneously, the struggle for one's voice to be heard and recognized as the voice of a legitimate partner: when the 'excluded', from the Greek demos to Polish workers, protested against the ruling elite (aristocracy or nomenklatura), the true stakes were not only their explicit demands (for higher wages, work conditions, etc.), but their very right to be heard and recognized as an equal partner in the debate-in Poland, the nomenklatura lost the moment it had to accept Solidarity as an equal partner. Furthermore, in protesting the wrong (le tort) they suffered, they also presented themselves as the immediate embodiment of society as such, as the stand-in for the Whole of Society in its universality, against the particular power-interests of aristocracy or oligarchy ('we-the 'nothing', not counted in the order-are the people, we are All against others who stand only for their particular privileged interests'). Politics proper thus always involves a kind of short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular: the paradox of a singular which appears as a stand-in for the Universal, destabilizing the 'natural' functional order of relations in the social body. The political conflict resides in the tension between the structured social body where each part has its place-what Ranciere calls politics as police in the most elementary sense of maintaining social order-and `the part with no-part' which unsettles this order on account of the empty principle of universality, of what Etienne Balibar calls egaliberte,2 the principled equality-in-freedom of all man qua speaking beings. This identification of the non-part with the Whole, of the part of society with no properly defined place within it (or resisting the allocated subordinated place within it) with the Universal, is the elementary gesture of politicization, discernible in all great democratic events, from the French Revolution (in which le troisieme etat proclaimed itself identical to the Nation as such against aristocracy and clergy) to the demise of ex-European Socialism (in which the dissident Forum proclaimed itself representative of the entire society against the Party nomenklatura). In this precise sense, politics and democracy are synonymous: the basic aim of antidemocratic politics always and by definition is and was depoliticization, i.e. the unconditional demand that `things should return to normal', with each individual doing his or her particular job. Ranciere, of course, emphasizes how the line of separation between police and politics proper is always blurred and contested; say, in the Marxist tradition, 'proletariat' can be read as the subjectivization of the `part of no-part' elevating its injustice into the ultimate test of universality, and, simultaneously, as the operator which will bring about the establishment of a post-political rational society.3
the Marxist (or Utopian Socialist) meta-politics: the political conflict is fully asserted, as a shadow-theatre on which processes-whose proper place is on Another Scene (of the economic infrastructure)-are played out; the ultimate goal of 'true' politics is thus its self-cancellation, the transformation of `administration of people' into `administration of things' within a fully self-transparent rational order of collective Will.4 the most cunning and radical version, ultra-politics: the attempt to depoliticize the conflict by way of bringing it to an extreme, via the direct militarization of politics: the 'foreclosed' political returns in the real, in the guise of the attempt to resolve the deadlock of the political conflict, of mesentente, by its false radicalization, i.e. by way of reformulating it as a war between 'Us' and 'Them', our Enemy, where there is no common ground for symbolic conflict (Schmitt et al.5).
==Appearance versus simulacrum==
Crucial here is Ranciere's critical distance towards Marxist meta-politics. The key feature of meta-politics is that, to put it in the terms of Jacques Lacan's matrix of four discourses,6 the place of the 'agent' is occupied in it by knowledge: Marx presented his position as that of `scientific materialism', i.e. meta-politics is a politics which legitimizes itself by means of a direct reference to the scientific status of its knowledge (it is this knowledge which enables meta-politics to draw a line of distinction between those immersed in politicoideological illusions and the Party which grounds its historical intervention in the knowledge about effective socio-economic processes). This knowledge (about class society and relations of production in Marxism) suspends the classic opposition of Sein and Sollen, of Being and Ought, of that which Is and the ethical Ideal: the ethical Ideal towards which the revolutionary subject strives is directly grounded in (or coincides with) the `objective,' 'disinterested' scientific knowledge of social processes-this coincidence opens up a space for 'totalitarian' violence, since, in this way, acts which run against the elementary norms of ethical decency can be legitimized as grounded in the (insight into the) historical Necessity (say, the mass killing of the members of the `bourgeois class' is grounded in the scientific insight that this class is already in itself `condemned to disappear', past its `progressive role', etc.). Therein resides the difference between the standard destructive, even murderous, dimension of strictly adhering to the ethical Ideal, and modern totalitarianism: the terrorism of the Jacobins in the French Revolution, grounded in their strict adherence to the ideal of egaliberte, i.e. in their attempt to realize directly this ideal, to impose it onto reality, this coincidence of the purest idealism with the most destructive violence already analysed by Hegel in the famous chapter of his Phenomenology on absolute terror, is not enough to explain contemporary, 20th century totalitarianism: what the Jacobins lacked was the reference to an objective/neutral 'scientific' knowledge of history legitimizing their exercise of unconditional power. It is only the Leninist revolutionary, not yet the Jacobin, who thus occupies the properly perverse position of the pure instrument of historical Necessity made accessible by means of scientific knowledge.
This is also how one has to read Hegel's famous dictum from his Phenomenology, according to which `the Suprasensible is appearance qua appearance.' In a sentimental answer to a child asking him how does God's face look, a priest answered that, whenever the child encounters a human face irradiating benevolence and goodness, whomever this face belongs, he gets a glimpse of His face. The truth of this sentimental platitude is that the Suprasensible (God's face) is discernible as a momentary, fleeting appearance, a 'grimace', of an ordinary face. It is this dimension of 'appearance' which transubstantiates a piece of reality into something which, for a brief moment, irradiates the suprasensible Eternity, that is missing in the logic of simulacrum: in a simulacrum which becomes indistinguishable from the real, everything is here, so that no other, transcendent dimension effectively 'appears' in/through it. We are back at the Kantian problematic of the sublime here: in Kant's famous reading of the enthusiasm evoked by the French Revolution among the enlightened public around Europe, the revolutionary events functioned as a sign through which the dimension of transphenomenal Freedom, of a free society, appeared. `Appearance' is thus not simply the domain of phenomena, but those `magic moments' in which the other, noumenal, dimension momentarily 'appears' in (`shines through') some empirical/contingent phenomenon. So, back to Hegel, `the Suprasensible is appearance qua appearance' does not simply mean that the Suprasensible is not a positive entity beyond the phenomena, but the inherent power of negativity which makes appearance `merely an appearance', i.e. something that is not in itself fully actual, but condemned to perish in the process of self-sublation. It also means that the Suprasensible comes to exist only in the guise of an appearance of Another Dimension, which interrupts the standard normal order of phenomena.
==The post-political regime==
What we have in all the four cases-arch, para-, meta- and ultra-politics-is thus an attempt to gentrify the properly traumatic dimension of the political: something emerged in ancient Greece under the name of polis demanding its rights, and, from the very beginning (i.e. from Plato's Republic) to the recent revival of liberal political thought, `political philosophy' was an attempt to suspend the destabilizing potential of the political, to disavow and/or regulate it in one way or another: bringing about a return to a pre-political social body, fixing the rules of political competition, etc. `Political philosophy' is thus, in all its different shapes, a kind of `defence-formation', and, perhaps, its typology could be established via reference to the different modalities of defence against some traumatic experience in psychoanalysis.10 Its four versions form a kind of Greimasian logical square in which arch- and ultra- are the two faces of the traditionalist attitude (self-enclosed community versus its war with external enemies), and para- and meta- the two versions of modern politics (democratic formal rules versus the notion that this field of the democratic game just expresses and/or distorts another level of pre-political socio-economic processes at which `things really happen'), while, on the other axis, both meta- and ultra-politics involve the notion of insurpassable struggle, conflict, antagonism, against the assertion of a harmonious collaboration in arch- and para-politics. In contrast to these four versions, today's 'postmodern' post-politics opens up a new field which involves a stronger negation of politics: it no longer merely `represses' it, trying to contain it and to pacify the `returns of the repressed', but much more effectively 'forecloses' it, so that the postmodern forms of ethnic violence, with their 'irrational' excessive character, are no longer simple `returns of the repressed', but rather present the case of the foreclosed (from the Symbolic) which, as we know from Lacan, returns in the Real.
Ranciere is right to emphasize how it is against this background that one should interpret the fascination of `public opinion' by the unique event of holocaust: the reference to holocaust as the ultimate, unthinkable, apolitical crime, as the Evil so radical that it cannot be politicized (accounted for by a political dynamics), serves as the operator which allows us to depoliticize the social sphere, to warn against the presumption of politicization. Holocaust is the name for the unthinkable apolitical excess of politics itself: it compels us to subordinate politics to some more fundamental ethics. The Otherness excluded from the consensual domain of tolerant/rational post-political negotiation and administration returns in the guise of inexplicable pure Evil. What defines postmodern `post-politics' is thus the secret solidarity between its two opposed Janus faces: on the one hand, the replacement of politics proper by depoliticized 'humanitarian' operations (the humanitarian protection of human and civil rights and aid to Bosnia, Somalia, Ruanda, North Korea …); on the other hand, the violent emergences of depoliticized `pure Evil' in the guise of 'excessive' ethnic or religious fundamentalist violence. In short, what Ranciere proposes here is a new version of the old Hegelian motto `Evil resides in the gaze itself which perceives the object as Evil': the contemporary figure of Evil, too 'strong' to be accessible to political analysis (holocaust, etc.), appears as such only to the gaze which constitutes it as such (as depoliticized). To put it in Hegel's terms, what is crucial is their speculative identity, i.e. the `infinite judgement', `Humanitarian depoliticized compassion is the excess of Evil over its political forms'.
==From the sublime to the ridiculous==
How do these insights enable us to throw new light on the prospect of today's Leftist (re)politicization of our common predicament? Let us return to the disintegration of Eastern European Socialism. The passage from really existing Socialism to really existing capitalism in Eastern Europe brought about a series of comic reversals of the sublime democratic enthusiasm into the ridiculous. The dignified East German crowds gathering around Protestant churches and heroically defying Stasi terror, all of a sudden turned into vulgar consumers of bananas and cheap pornography; the civilized Czechs mobilized by the appeal of Havel and other cultural icons, all of a sudden turned into cheap swindlers of Western tourists … The disappointment was mutual: the West, which began by idolizing the Eastern dissident movement as the reinvention of its own tired democracy, disappointingly dismisses the present post-Socialist regimes as a mixture of the corrupted ex-Communist oligarchy and/or ethnic and religious fundamentalists (even the dwindling liberals are mistrusted as not `politically correct' enough: where is their feminist awareness?, etc.). The East, which began by idolizing the West as the example of affluent democracy to be followed, finds itself in the whirlpool of ruthless commercialization and economic colonization. Perhaps, however, this double disappointment, this double failed encounter between ex-Communist dissidents and Western liberal democrats is crucial for the identity of Europe; perhaps, what transpires in the gap that separates the two perspectives is a glimpse of a 'Europe' worth fighting for.
On the other hand, when these movements exploded in a broad mass phenomenon, their demands for freedom and democracy (and solidarity and …) were also misperceived by Western commentators. They saw in them the confirmation that the people of the East also want what the people in the West already have, i.e. they automatically translated these demands into the Western liberal-democratic notion of freedom (a multiparty representational political game cum global market economy). Emblematic to the level of caricature here was the figure of Dan Rather, the American news reporter, on Tien An Mien Square in 1989, standing in front of the copy of the Liberty Statue and claiming how this statue says it all about what the protesting students demand (in short, if you scratch the yellow skin of a Chinese, you find an American …). What this Statue effectively stood for was a utopian longing which had nothing to do with the actual USA (incidentally, it was the same with the original immigrants to America for whom the view of the Statue stood for a utopian longing, soon crushed down). The perception of the American media thus offered another example of the reinscription of the explosion of what Etienne Balibar called egaliberte (the unconditional demand for freedom-equality which explodes any positive order) within the confines of a given order.
==A tertium datur==
Are we then condemned to the debilitating alternative of choosing between a knave or a fool, or is there a tertium datur? Perhaps the contours of this tertium datur can be discerned via the reference to the fundamental European legacy. When one says `European legacy', every self-respectful Leftist intellectual has the same reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture as such-he reaches for his gun and starts to shoot out accusations of proto-Fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a Leftist appropriation of the European political tradition? Was it not politicization in a specific Greek sense which re-emerged violently in the disintegration of Eastern European Socialism? From my own political past, I remember how, after four journalists were arrested and brought to trial by the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia in 1988, I participated in the `Committee for the protection of the human rights of the four accused'. Officially, the goal of the Committee was just to guarantee fair treatment for the four accused; however, the Committee turned into the major oppositional political force, practically the Slovene version of the Czech Civic Forum or East German Neues Forum, the body which coordinated democratic opposition, a de facto representative of civil society. The program of the Committee was set up in four items; the first three directly concerned the accused, while the devil which resides in the detail , of course, was the fourth item, which said that the Committee wanted to clarify the entire background of the arrest of the four accused and thus contribute to creating the circumstances in which such arrests would no longer be possible-a coded way to say that we wanted the abolishment of the existing Socialist regime. Our demand `Justice for the accused four!' started to function as the metaphoric condensation of the demand for the global overthrow of the Socialist regime. For that reason, in almost daily negotiations with the Committee, the Communist Party officials were always accusing us of a `hidden agenda', claiming that the liberation of the accused four was not our true goal, i.e. that we were `exploiting and manipulating the arrest and trial for other, darker political goals'. In short, the Communists wanted to play the 'rational' depoliticized game: they wanted to deprive the slogan `Justice for the accused four!' of its explosive general connotation, and to reduce it to its literal meaning which concerned just a minor legal matter; they cynically claimed that it was us, the Committee, who were behaving `non-democratically' and manipulating the fate of the accused, coming up with global pressure and blackmailing strategies instead of focusing on the particular problem of the plight of the accused.
Therein resides the ambiguity of the process symbolized by the name 'Maastricht': is this (anti-)politics of consensus, of `post-ideological' administration and creation of the ideal conditions for the capital, supplemented by empty pep-talk about safeguarding specific cultural identities against Americanization, enough? From the sublime heights of Habermas' theory to vulgar market ideologists, we are bombarded by different versions of depoliticization: no longer struggle but dialogic negotiation, regulated competition, etc. If the European Union is to be only this, only a a more efficient and multiculturally tolerant centre of power able to compete with the USA and Eastern Asia as the three nodal points of the New World Order, then this goal, although quite legitimate and worthwhile, involves renouncing the fundamental European democratic legacy. No wonder that border controls emerge as one of the main points of the European Union's administrative negotiations-a clear indication that we are dealing with anti-politics, with the reduction of politics to social Polizei. Against this `end of ideology' politics, one should insist on the potential of democratic politicization as the true European legacy from ancient Greece onwards. Will Europe be able to invent a new model of repoliticization questioning the undisputed reign of global capital? Only such a repoliticization of our predicament can break the vicious cycle of liberal globalization destined to engender the most regressive forms of fundamentalist hatred.
==Notes and references== 1. #J. Ranciere, La mesentente (Paris: Galilee, 1995). 2. #See E. Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas (New York: Routledge, 1994). 3. #Sometimes, the shift from politics proper to police can only be a matter of the change from the definite to the indefinite article, like the East German crowds demonstrating against the Communist regime in the last days of the GDR: first they shouted `We are the people!' ('Wir sind das Volk!'), thereby performing the gesture of politicization at its purest-they, the excluded counter-revolutionary 'scum' of the official Whole of the People, with no proper place in the official space (or, more precisely, only with titles such as `counter-revolutionaries', 'hooligans', or, at best, `victims of the bourgeois propaganda', reserved for their designation), claimed to stand for the people, for 'all'. However, a couple of days later, the slogan changed into `We are a/one people!' ('Wir sind ein Volk!'), clearly signalling the closure of the momentary authentic political opening, the reappropriation of the democratic impetus by the thrust towards the reunification of Germany, which meant rejoining Western Germany's liberal-capitalist police/political order. 4. #More precisely, Marxism is ambiguous here, since the very term `political economy' also opens up the space for the opposite gesture of introducing politics into the very heart of economy, i.e. of denouncing the 'apolitical' character of the economic processes as the supreme ideological illusion: class struggle does not 'express' some objective economic contradiction, it is the very form of existence of this contradiction. 5. #It is deeply symptomatic that, instead of class struggle, the radical Right speaks of class (or sexual) warfare. 6. #See J. Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991). 7. #Perhaps the distinction between Communist and Fascist Master resides in the fact that-in spite of all the talk about racial science, etc.-the innermost logic of Fascism is not meta-political, but ultra-political: the Fascist Master is a warrior in politics. #8. See J. Ranciere, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 144-146. #9. This crucial distinction between simulacrum (overlapping with the real) and appearance is also easily discernible in the domain of sexuality, as the distinction between pornography and seduction: pornography `shows it all', `real sex', and for that very reason produces the mere simulacrum of sexuality, while the process of seduction consists entirely in the play of appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing, For a more detailed analysis of the libidinal impact of pornography, see Appendix I to S. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997). #10. The metaphoric frame which we use in order to account for the political process is thus never innocent and neutral: it 'schematizes' the concrete meaning of politics. Ultra-politics has recourse to the model of warfare: politics is conceived as a form of social warfare, as the relationship to 'Them', to an Enemy. Arch-politics today usually has recourse to the medical model: society is a corporate body, an organism, social divisions are like illnesses of this organism, i.e. what we should fight, our enemy, is a cancerous intruder, a pest, a foreign parasite to be exterminated if the health of the social body is to be re-established. Para-politics uses the model of agonistic competition, which follows some commonly accepted strictly established rules, like a sporting event. Post-politics involves the model of business negotiation and strategic compromise. #11. See J. Rancire, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 162.
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