O político e a democracia no pensamento de Jacques Rancière

Abstract

Jacques Rancière's peculiar approach to politics places all those who set out to research it before the centrality of dissent and the assumption of equality. The strength of these two elements is an expression of a set of ideas that arises from the inheritance of Marxism, but it also leads to a critical distancing from this source as the disparities and inconsistencies, particularly intellectual ones, in Marxist theory and praxis are considered. Could those who positioned themselves as necessary mediators of knowledge for the masses emancipate them? Shouldn't those who argued that there is no reason for the logic of domination presuppose equality? In the work On the Shores of Politics, the philosopher points out that the encounter between the logics of equality and inequality takes place in a territory he calls political – a territory marked by a certain “equivocal” character, according to the author. In view of this, this work aims to clarify the ideas of “political” and “democracy”, and also to derive from the relationship between them the possibility that the expression “end of politics”, used by Rancière, refers to the pacification of democratic conflict. To this end, the research is structured in three parts: a presentation of the idea of the “political” as an “equivocal concept” and a space for political activity; an approach to the Rancièrean understanding of democracy as the actualization of political conflict and the establishment of its space; an analysis of the meaning of the “end of politics” as the pacification or regulation of democracy.