Demonstration, intermittent democracy and sortition. Rancière's three responses to the problem of political participation

Abstract

In some of his theoretical interventions, Jacques Rancière has been reluctant to the issue of political participation, frequently mobilized in contemporary theories of democracy as one of the explanatory factors of the crisis of representation (which would be due to a participation deficit) or as a suitable instrument to repair it (through a participation supplement). At the base of this reluctance, there seems to be the suspicion that the issue of participation accentuates the confusion between democracy and representation, endorses the representative system without questioning its foundation and reduces the disruptive force of democratic action, which is deprived of its polemical capacity to make visible objects and subjects excluded from the consensual frames of perception. However, at the same time, Rancière’s work contains a positive notion of political participation detached from the logic of representation, and, in very recent interventions, the French author even goes so far as to recognize the value of certain procedures of citizen mobilization and democratization of institutions, such as the lottery. The aim of this work is to identify Rancière’s ambivalent approach to the problem of political participation and to analyze the different levels of his argumentation through one of the central themes of his thought: the connection between democratic action (politics) and instituted forms of power (police).