This week’s authors share a common political vocabulary and offer a particularly critical lens for thinking about questions of democracy, although not necessarily agreeing on the purposes and strategies of political action. For Mouffe (2013), “What liberal democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, (…) but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned.” (07)
Dissent, in Mouffe’s agonistic political landscape, is “always present” (09) in the need for “consensus” (08), as a constitutive character of social division and as “a confrontation with no possibility of final reconciliation” (17). Jacques Rancière, on the other hand, stresses the importance of disagreement as a perception that “simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (12). Rancière calls this apportionment the “distribution of the sensible”. And different from Mouffe’s agonistic theory that presupposes an equal political ground among peers in equal conditions of appearance, the distribution of the sensible “reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community” (12), “it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language” (13), and “is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience” (13). The “stakes of politics” is precisely what is put into the debate in Étienne Balibar’s text, where the author questions the limits of that which is politically recognizable, relating this intelligibility to pre-existing structures of power that determinate the inside and outside spaces of our political life.
As Balibar points out, it is not enough to recognize the plural, striated and hegemonic sphere of politics. One must take into account the different conditions of appearance for each individual to take space within “the political”. Mouffe’s agonist vision fails to encompass the actual consequences each “outsider” is exposed to in order to take a stand against hegemonic structures of power. To put it simply, Mouffe interpretation “sublimates” the real, material risks involved in the struggle against dominant consensus and hegemonic political violence.