The Rationality of Political Disagreement: Rancière's Critique of Habermas

Abstract

Jacques Rancière's political thought is worked out in the form of disputes. He has engaged in polemics against an array of theorists including Althusser, Arendt, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lefort, Lyotard, Derrida, Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Badiou and Nancy. But among this pantheon of greats, it strikes us that the dispute with Jürgen Habermas plays an especially pivotal role. It is hard to gauge the significance of Rancière's conception of politics for contemporary political theory without addressing his attempt to break with the Habermasian linguistic-pragmatic paradigm and to set up an alternative model of political speech (dissensus) which “has the rationality of disagreement as its very own rationality.”1 But Rancière's departure from Habermas's theory of communicative action is subtle and difficult to assess.2 At first glance there appears to be considerable common ground between the two thinkers. Both reject the pessimistic diagnosis that proclaims in the name of critical theory the ubiquity of domination and instead affirm the capacity of everyday speech and action to effect emancipatory social change. Both theorize a democratic politics that is grounded in the presupposition of the equality of humans as speaking beings and that consists in a procedure of argumentation and demonstration. But there is in fact a fundamental disagreement between the two thinkers and it leads them to markedly different conceptions of the procedure of contestation that is proper to politics. In this essay we aim to explicate and examine this disagreement. In doing so we also seek to measure the distance between the two thinkers. We argue in what follows that Rancière's critique of Habermas is cogent and represents an innovative and provocative contribution to the theory of democracy.