The readings this week, to be quite frank, were a struggle. However, after much metaphorical weed-whacking, it is clear that one of the ways in which these three theorists interact with one another is on the basis of equality and emancipation. Ranciére states that, “Politics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted, a supernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a society” (51). The unrecognized party – the minoritarian subject, in this case – struggling for equal recognition is what constitutes politics. Balibar supplements an understanding of this struggle for emancipation with, “The autonomy of politics…is not conceivable without the autonomy of its subject, and this in turn is nothing other than the fact, for the people, that it ‘makes’ itself, at the same time as the individuals who constitute the people confer basic rights upon one another mutually” (4). In this sense, the political again is only “made” within the body of the subject; it is made within the struggle of the subject’s body for equal recognition and emancipation, of which can only be gained through an outside source. Meanwhile, Mouffe, (in my view) takes the idea of a binary, of an “us/them” dichotomy in politics and puts it in the framework of the positive. “My claim is that it is impossible to understand democratic politics without acknowledging ‘passions’ as the driving force in the political field” (Mouffe 6). She moves toward a productive view of conflict. Or rather, moves toward a view in which politics should provide the “arena” for a productive and passionate conflict, which in itself constitutes politics. There is an undeniable exploration of the ‘dominant’ power bloc and hegemonic ideologies within these texts, and I am left with questions of embodiment, of power, of the visual representation of the struggle for equality, and of political aesthetic in performance.