Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization

Abstract

In a sense, the whole matter of my paper is involved in a preliminary question: In what language will it be uttered? Neither my language nor your language, but rather a dialect between French and English, a special one, a dialect that carries no identification with any group. No tribal dialect, no univeral language, only an in-between dialect, constructed for the aims of this discussion and guided by the idea that the activity of thinking is primarily an activity of translation, and that anyone is capable of making a translation. Underpinning this capacity for translation is the efficacy of equality, that is to say, the efficacy of humanity. I will move directly to the question that frames our discussion. I quote from the third point of the list of issues we were asked to address: What is the political? Briefly and roughly speaking, I would answer: the political is the encounter between two heterogeneous processes. The first process is that of governing, and it entails creating community consent, which relies on the distribution of shares and the hierarchy of places and functions. I shall call this process policy. The second process is that of equality. It consists of a set of practices guided by the supposition that everyone is equal and by the attempt to verify this supposition. The proper name for this set of practices remains emancipation. In spite of Lyotard's statements, I do not assume a necessary link between the idea of emancipation and the narrative of a universal wrong and a universal victim. It is true that the handling of a wrong remains the universal form for the meeting between the two processes of policy and equality. But we can question that encounter. We can argue, for example, that any policy denies equality and that there is no commensurability between the two processes. In my book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, I advocated the thesis of the French theorist of emancipation, Joseph Jacotot, according to whom emancipation can only be the intellectual emancipation of individuals. This means that there is no political stage, only the law of policy and the law of equality. In order for a political stage to occur, we must change that assumption. Thus, instead of arguing that

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