Vatter, Miguel. Review of Todd May's THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF JACQUES RANCIERE. NDPR (February 2009).

May, Todd. The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2008. Todd May is one of the first English language interpreters of French poststructuralist thought to have shown the importance of this tradition for radical democratic political theory. He did so back when it was fashionable in some circles to dismiss Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and others as being anti- or a-political. His new book argues that Rancière's thought offers an alternative path for democratic politics than the one presented by egalitarian liberalisms. In reality, the book is less an in-depth interpretation of Rancière than it is a plaidoyer for the claim that democratic politics belongs within the tradition of anarchism, as opposed to those of liberalism or Marxism. May brings together two quite distinct understandings of anarchism. The first, which arguably characterizes much French poststructuralist thought, attempts to connect radical democratic theory to a "principle of anarchy." Rancière's thought would be one example among many that wrestles with the great and still unresolved problem of how such an antinomian principle should be understood. In this French poststructuralist sense, anarchy means the absence of a metaphysical foundation for the distinction between who rules and who is ruled (that is, the necessary failure of all hegemonic principles of legitimacy of rule). But it also refers to a no less antinomian "ontological" privileging of a "materialism of events" over an "idealism of forms." The second sense of anarchism at issue in May's book concerns the tradition of late 18th and 19th century classical anarchism from Godwin to Kropotkin, and its rejection of both Marxism and liberalism. May's book attempts to harness the philosophical and political potentialities withheld by the first sense of poststructuralist anarchy for the sake of advancing the program of classical anarchism. I suspect that one of the motivations for this book is ultimately polemical. In the last decade, post-Marxist theorists like Badiou, Žižek, Laclau, and others have employed poststructuralist anarchy, in the sense described above, for the purpose of revitalizing the connection between Marxism and a revolutionary (but not necessarily "democratic") politics. I read May's book as a sort of response to this challenge which employs Rancière's thought to argue for a return to democratic politics from the standpoint of classical, anti-Marxist anarchism. In what follows I shall quickly review what May has to say regarding Rancière's thought proper, and then raise a few questions about the strategy he employs in carrying out his polemical goal. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15405.