"Reading Ranciere's "Disagreement" today: Politics, policing, and the extreme right"

Conference paper presented at www.c-scp.org/">The Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy (CSCP)annual conference November 15-17 (2018), Calgary, Alberta.
In this talk I revisit Rancière’s politics as it is set forth in his landmark book Disagreement (1995). I argue that his politics involves a practice of both the symbolization of equality and the subversion or destruction of hierarchical relations of force or command that implement oppressive social relations. Then, I will argue that, by emphasizing the way that egalitarian politics combats reified structures of command, coercion, force, or violence, we can draw a sharp opposition between our egalitarian politics and the so-called “political” mobilization of the extreme right, which, on Rancière’s account, would be a form policing rather than politics.