Abstract:
Jacques Rancière's account of democratic politics attempts to capture the logic of dissent: that is, the way in which a political dispute can be staged by people who are normally disqualified from the circle of those able to participate in rational deliberation and the exercise of rule. In this paper I consider Rancière's account of political action with special attention to his critique of Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. I attempt to provide a partial harmonization of these three accounts though highlighting the “communicative presuppositions” of Rancière's democratic politics.
