This series of equations finds its equivalent in the movement that engenders civic equality from the community of Homeric heroes; equals, that is, in their participation in the power of arche. The first witness against this Homeric idyllic, however, is Homer himself. Against the garrulous Thersites - the man who is an able public speaker despite the fact that he is not qualified to speak - Odysseus recalls the fact that the Greek army has one and only one chief: Agamemnon. He reminds us of what archein means: to walk at the head. And, if there is one who walks at the head, the others must necessarily walk behind. The line between the power of archein (i.e., the power to rule), freedom, and the polis, is not straight but severed. In order to convince oneself of this, it is enough to see the manner in which Aristotle characterizes the three possible classes of rule within a polis, each one possessing a particular title: 'virtue' for the aristoi, 'wealth' for the oligoi, and 'freedom' for the demos. In this division, 'freedom' appears as the paradoxical part of the demos about whom the Homeric hero tells us (in no uncertain terms) that it had only one thing to do: to keep quiet and bow down.

In short, the opposition between praxis and poiesis in no way resolves the paradoxical definition of the politès. As far as arche is concerned, as with everything else, the conventional logic has it that there is a particular disposition to act that is exercised upon a particular disposition to 'be acted upon.' Thus the logic of arche presupposes a determinate superiority exercised upon an equally determinate inferiority. In order for there to be a political subject(ivity), and thus for there to be politics, there must be a rupture in this logic.

Thesis 3:
Politics is a specific rupture in the logic of arche. It does not simply presuppose the rupture of the 'normal' distribution of positions between the one who exercises power and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions 'proper' to such classifications.

In Book III of the Laws, Plato devotes himself to a systematic inventory of the qualifications (axiomata) for ruling, along with certain correlative qualifications for being ruled. Out of the seven he retains, four are traditional qualifications of authority based on a natural difference; that is, the difference in birth. Those qualified to rule are those 'born before' or 'born otherwise.' This grounds the power of parents over children, old over young, masters over slaves, and nobles over serfs. The fifth qualification is introduced as the principal principle that summarizes all natural differences: It is the power of those with a superior nature, of the stronger over the weak - a power that has the unfortunate quality, discussed at length in the Gorgias, of being indeterminate. The sixth qualification, then, gives the only difference that counts for Plato; namely, the power of those who know [savoir] over those who do not. There are thus four couplings of traditional qualifications to be had, along with two theoretical couplings that claim priority over them: namely, 'natural' superiority and the rule of 'science' qua knowledge.

The list ought to stop there. But there is a seventh qualification: 'the choice of god,' otherwise referring to a drawing of lots [le tirage au sort] that designates the one who exercises arche. Plato does not expand upon this. But clearly, this kind of 'choice' points ironically to the designation by god of a regime previously referred to as one only god could save: namely, democracy. What thus characterizes a democracy is purechance or the complete absence of qualifications for governing. Democracy is that state of exception where no oppositions can function, where there is no pre-determined principle of role allocation. 'To partake in ruling and being ruled' is quite a different matter from reciprocity. It is, in short, an absence of reciprocity that constitutes the exceptional essence of this relationship; and this absence of reciprocity rests on the paradox of a qualification that is absence of qualification. Democracy is the specific situation in which there is an absence of qualifications that, in turn, becomes the qualification for the exercise of a democratic arche. What is destroyed in this logic is the particular quality of arche, its redoubling, which means that it always precedes itself within a circle of its own disposition and its own exercise. But this exceptional state is identical with the very condition for the specificity of politics more generally.

Thesis 4:
Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a rupture in the logic of arche - that is, in the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it - democracy is the regime of politics in the form of a relationship defining a specific subject.

What makes possible the metexis proper to politics is the rupture of all those logics of allocation exercised in the part-taking of arche. The 'freedom' of a people that constitutes the axiom of democracy has as its real content the rupture of the axioms of domination: a rupture, that is, in the correlation between a capacity for rule and a capacity for being ruled. The citizen who partakes 'in ruling and being ruled' is only thinkable on the basis of the demos as a figure that ruptures the correspondence between a series of correlated capacities. Democracy is thus precisely not a political regime in the sense of a particular constitution that determines different ways of assembling people under a common authority. Democracy is the institution of politics - the institution of both its subject and its mode of relating.

As we know, democracy is a term invented by its opponents, by all those who were 'qualified' to govern because of seniority, birth, wealth, virtue, and knowledge [savoir]. Using it as a term of derision, they articulated an unprecedented reversal of the order of things: the 'power of the demos' means that those who rule are those who have no specificity in common, apart from their having no qualification for governing. Before being the name of a community, demos is the name of a part of the community: namely, the poor. The 'poor,' however, does not designate an economically disadvantaged part of the population; it simply designates the category of peoples who do not count, those who have no qualifications to part-take in arche, no qualification for being taken into account.

This is exactly what Homer describes in the Thersites episode evoked above. Those who want to speak, though they belong to the demos, though they belong to the undifferentiated collection of the 'unaccounted for' [l'hors-compte] (anarithmoi), get stabbed in the back by Odysseus' scepter. This is not a deduction but a definition: The one who is 'unaccounted-for,' the one who has no speech to be heard, is the one of the demos. A remarkable passage from Book XII of the Odyssey illustrates this point: Polydamas complains because his opinion has been disregarded by Hector. With you, he says, 'one never has the right to speak if one belongs to the demos.' Now Polydamas is not a villain like Thersites; he is Hector's brother. Demos thus does not designate a socially inferior category: The one who speaks when s/he is not to speak, the one who part-takes in what s/he has no part in - that person belongs to the demos.

Against these interpretations, let us say that the two-fold body of the people is not a modern consequence of the sacrifice of the sovereign body but rather a given constitutive of politics. It is initially the people, and not the king, that has a double body and this duality is nothing other than the supplement through which politics exists: a supplement to all social (ac)counts and an exception to all logics of domination.

The seventh qualification, Plato says, is 'god's part.' We will maintain that this part belonging to god - this qualification of those who have no qualification - contains within it all that is theological in politics. The contemporary emphasis on the theme of the 'theologico-political' dissolves the question of politics into that of power and of the grounding event that is its fundament. It re-doubles the liberal fiction of the contract with the representation of an original sacrifice. But the division of arche that conjoins politics and democracy is not a founding sacrifice: It is, rather, a neutralization of any founding sacrifice. This neutralization could find its exact fable at the end of Oedipus at Colonus: it is at the price of the disappearance of the sacrificial body, at the price of not seeking Oedipus' body, that Athenian democracy receives the benefit of its burial. To want to disinter the body is not only to associate the democratic form with a scenario of sin or of original malediction. More radically, it is to return the logic of politics to the question of an originary scene of power; in other words, to return politics to the state. By interpreting the empty part in terms of psychosis, the dramaturgy of original symbolic catastrophe transforms the political exception into a sacrificial symptom of democracy: It subsumes the litigiousness proper to politics under any of the innumerable versions of an originary 'crime' or 'murder.'

Thesis 6:
If politics is the outline of a vanishing difference, with the distribution of social parts and shares, then it follows that its existence is in no way necessary, but that it occurs as a provisional accident in the history of the forms of domination. It also follows from this that political litigiousness has as its essential object the very existence of politics.

Politics cannot be deduced from the necessity of gathering people into communities. It is an exception to the principles according to which this gathering operates. The 'normal' order of things is that human communities gather together under the rule of those qualified to rule - whose qualifications are legitimated by the very fact that they are ruling. These governmental qualifications may be summed up according to two central principles: The first refers society to the order of filiation, both human and divine. This is the power of birth. The second refers society to the vital principle of its activities. This is the power of wealth. Thus, the 'normal' evolution of society comes to us in the progression from a government of birth to a government of wealth. Politics exists as a deviation from this normal order of things. It is this anomaly that is expressed in the nature of political subjects who are not social groups but rather forms of inscription of 'the (ac)count of the unaccounted-for.'

There is politics as long as 'the people' is not identified with the race or a population, inasmuch as the poor are not equated with a particular disadvantaged sector, and as long as the proletariat is not a group of industrial workers, etc... Rather, there is politics inasmuch as 'the people' refers to subjects inscribed as a supplement to the count of the parts of society, a specific figure of 'the part of those who have no-part.' Whether this part exists is the political issue and it is the object of political litigation. Political struggle is not a conflict between well defined interest groups; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the community in different ways. The clash between the 'rich' and the 'poor,' for instance, is the struggle over the very possibility of these words being coupled, of their being able to institute categories for another (ac)counting of the community. There are two ways of counting the parts of the community: The first only counts empirical parts - actual groups defined by differences in birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute the social body. The second counts 'in addition' a part of the no-part. We will call the first police and the second politics.

Thesis 7:
Politics is specifically opposed to the police. The police is a 'partition of the sensible' [le partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement.

The police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. The essence of the police is neither repression nor even control over the living. Its essence is a certain manner of partitioning the sensible. We will call 'partition of the sensible' a general law that defines the forms of part-taking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed. The partition of the sensible is the cutting-up of the world and of 'world;' it is the nemeïn upon which the nomoi of the community are founded. This partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, that which separates and excludes; on the other, that which allows participation (see Editor's note 2). A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared 'common' [un commun partagé] and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined through the sensible. This latter form of distribution, in turn, itself presupposes a partition between what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible.

The essence of the police is to be a partition of the sensible characterized by the absence of a void or a supplement: society consists of groups dedicated to specific modes of action, in places where these occupations are exercised, in modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places. In this fittingness of functions, places, and ways of being, there is no place for a void. It is this exclusion of what 'there is not' that is the police-principle at the heart of statist practices. The essence of politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.

This partition constituting politics is never given in the form of a lot, of a kind of property that obliges or compels politics. These properties are litigious as much in their understanding as in their extension. Exemplary in this regard are those properties that, for Aristotle, define a political ability or are intended for 'the good life.' Apparently nothing could be clearer than the distinction made by Aristotle in Book I of the Politics: the sign of the political nature of humans is constituted by their possession of the logos, the articulate language appropriate for manifesting a community in the aisthesis of the just and the unjust, as opposed to the animal phone, appropriate only for expressing the feelings of pleasure and displeasure. If you are in the presence of an animal possessing the ability of the articulate language and its power of manifestation, you know you are dealing with a human and therefore with a political animal. The only practical difficulty is in knowing which sign is required to recognize the sign; that is, how one can be sure that the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths. And the same goes for the opposition so readily invoked between the obscurity of domestic and private life, and the radiant luminosity of the public life of equals. In order to refuse the title of political subjects to a category - workers, women, etc... - it has traditionally been sufficient to assert that they belong to a 'domestic' space, to a space separated from public life; one from which only groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger, or anger could emerge, but not actual speeches demonstrating a shared aisthesis. And the politics of these categories has always consisted in re-qualifying these places, in getting them to be seen as the spaces of a community, of getting themselves to be seen or heard as speaking subjects (if only in the form of litigation); in short, participants in a common aisthesis. It has consisted in making what was unseen visible; in getting what was only audible as noise to be heard as speech; in demonstrating to be a feeling of shared 'good' or 'evil' what had appeared merely as an expression of pleasure or pain.

The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not the confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the manifestation of a distance of the sensible from itself. Politics makes visible that which had no reason to be seen, it lodges one world into another (for instance, the world where the factory is a public space within the one where it is considered a private one, the world where workers speak out vis-a-vis the one where their voices are merely cries expressing pain). This is precisely why politics cannot be identified with the model of communicative action since this model presupposes the partners in communicative exchange to be pre-constituted, and that the discursive forms of exchange imply a speech community whose constraint is always explicable. In contrast, the particular feature of political dissensus is that the partners are no more constituted than is the object or the very scene of discussion. The ones making visible the fact that they belong to a shared world the other does not see - cannot take advantage of - the logic implicit to a pragmatics of communication. The worker who argues for the public nature of a 'domestic' matter (such as a salary dispute) must indicate the world in which his argument counts as an argument and must demonstrate it as such for those who do not possess a frame of reference to conceive of it as argument. Political argument is at one and the same time the demonstration of a possible world where the argument could count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that he or she 'normally' has no reason to either see or hear. It is the construction of a paradoxical world that relates two separate worlds.

Politics thus has no 'proper' place nor does it possess any 'natural' subjects. A demonstration is political not because it takes place in a specific locale and bears upon a particular object but rather because its form is that of a clash between two partitions of the sensible. A political subject is not a group of interests or ideas: It is the operator of a particular mode of subjectification and litigation through which politics has its existence. Political demonstrations are thus always of the moment and their subjects are always provisional. Political difference is always on the shore of its own disappearance: the people are close to sinking into the sea of the population or of race, the proletariat borders on being confused with workers defending their interests, the space of a people's public demonstration is always at risk of being confused with the merchant's agora, etc...

Thesis 9:
Inasmuch as what is proper to 'political philosophy' is to ground political action in a specific mode of being, so is it the case that 'political philosophy' effaces the litigiousness constitutive of politics. It is in its very description of the world of politics that philosophy effects this effacement. Moreover, its effectiveness is perpetuated through to the non-philosophical or anti-philosophical description of the world.

That the distinguishing feature of politics is the existence of a subject who 'rules' by the very fact of having no qualifications to rule; that the principle of beginnings/ruling is irremediably divided as a result of this, and that the political community is specifically a litigious community - this is the 'political secret' that philosophy first encounters. If we can speak of the privileged stature of the 'Ancients' over the 'Moderns,' it is a consequence of their having first perceived this 'secret' and not of having been the first to oppose the community of the 'good' to that of the 'useful.' At the head of the anodyne expression 'political philosophy' one finds the violent encounter between philosophy and the exception to the law of arche proper to politics, along with philosophy's effort to resituate politics under the auspices of this law. The Gorgias, the Republic, the Politics, the Laws, all these texts reveal the same effort to efface the paradox or scandal of a 'seventh qualification' - to make of democracy a simple case of the indeterminable principle of 'the government of the strongest,' against which one can only oppose a government of those who know [les savants]. These texts all reveal a similar strategy of placing the community under a unique law of partition and expelling the empty part of the demos from the communal body.

But this expulsion does not simply take place in the form of the opposition between the 'good' regime of the community that is both one and hierarchised according to its principle of unity, and the 'bad' regimes of division and disorder. It takes place within the very presupposition that identifies a political form with a way of life; and this presupposition is already operating in the procedures for describing 'bad' regimes, and democracy in particular. All of politics, as we have said, is played out in the interpretation of democratic 'anarchy.' In identifying it with the dispersal of the desires of democratic man, Plato transforms the form of politics into a mode of existence and, further, transforms the void into an overflow. Before being the theorist of the 'ideal' or 'enclosed' city-state, Plato is the founder of the anthropological conception of the political, the conception that identifies politics with the deployment of the properties of a type of man or a mode of life. This kind of 'man,' this 'way of being,' this form of the city-state: it is there, before any discourse on the laws or the educational methods of the ideal state, before even the partition of the classes of the community, the partition of the perceptible that cancels out political singularity.

But Plato also invents a 'concrete' mode for describing the production of political forms. In a word, he invents the very forms of the refusal of the 'ideal state,' the settled forms of opposition between philosophical 'a-prior-ism-' and concrete sociological or political-scientific analyses of the forms of politics as expressions of ways of life. This second legacy is more profound and more long-lasting than the first. The sociology of the political is the second resource - the deuteron plous - of political philosophy that accomplishes (sometimes against itself) its fundamental project: to found the community on the basis of a univocal partition of the sensible. In particular, de Tocqueville's analysis of democracy, whose innumerable variants and ersatz versions feed the discourses on modern democracy, the age of the masses, the mass individual, etc., fits into the continuity of the theoretical gesture that cancels out the structural singularity of 'the qualification without qualifications' and the 'part of the no-part,' by re-describing democracy as a social phenomenon, of the collective effectuation of the properties of a type of man.

>Thesis 10:
The 'end of politics' and the 'return of politics' are two complementary ways of canceling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the social and a state of statist apparatuses. 'Consensus' is the vulgar name given to this cancellation.

The essence of politics resides in the modes of dissensual subjectification that reveal the difference of a society to itself. The essence of consensus is not peaceful discussion and reasonable agreement as opposed to conflict or violence. Its essence is the annulment of dissensus as the separation of the sensible from itself, the annulment of surplus subjects, the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body, and of the political community to the relationship of interests and aspirations of these different parts. Consensus is the reduction of politics to the police. In other words, it is the 'end of politics' and not the accomplishment of its ends but, simply, the return of the 'normal' state of things which is that of politics' non-existence. The 'end of politics' is the ever-present shore of politics [le bord de la politique] that, in turn, is an activity of the moment and always provisional. 'Return of politics' and 'end of politics' are two symmetrical interpretations producing the same effect: to efface the very concept of politics, and the precariousness that is one of its essential elements. In proclaiming the end of usurpations of the social and the return to 'pure' politics, the 'return of politics' thesis simply occludes the fact that the 'social' is in no way a particular sphere of existence but, rather, a disputed object of politics. Therefore, the subsequently proclaimed end of the social is, simply put, the end of political litigation regarding the partition of worlds. The 'return of politics' is thus the affirmation that there is a specific place for politics. Isolated in this manner, this specific space can be nothing other than the place of the state and, in fact, the theorists of the 'return of politics' ultimately affirm that politics is out-dated. They identify it with the practices of state control which have, as their principal principle, the suppression of politics.

The sociological thesis of the 'end of politics' symmetrically posits the existence of a state of the social such that politics no longer has a necessary raison-d'être; whether or not it has accomplished its ends by bringing into being precisely this state (i.e., the exoteric American Hegelian-Fukayama-ist version) or whether its forms are no longer adapted to the fluidity and artificiality of present-day economic and social relations (i.e., the esoteric European Heideggerian-Situationnist version). The thesis thus amounts to asserting that the logical telos of capitalism makes it so that politics becomes, once again, out dated. And then it concludes with either the mourning of politics before the triumph of an immaterial Leviathan, or its transformation into forms that are broken up, segmented, cybernetic, ludic, etc...- adapted to those forms of the social that correspond to the highest stage of capitalism. It thus fails to recognize that in actual fact, politics has no reason for being in any state of the social and that the contradiction of the two logics is an unchanging given that defines the contingency and precariousness proper to politics. Via a Marxist detour, the 'end of politics' thesis - along with the consensualist thesis - grounds politics in a particular mode of life that identifies the political community with the social body, subsequently identifying political practice with state practice. The debate between the philosophers of the 'return of politics' and the sociologists of the 'end of politics' is thus a straightforward debate regarding the order in which it is appropriate to take the presuppositions of 'political philosophy' so as to interpret the consensualist practice of annihilating politics.

Notes