Love and May's article 12.2

Love and May's article 12.2

Jeff Love, Todd May

From Universality to Inequality: Badiou’s Critique of Rancière

Alain Badiou argues in “Rancière and Apolitics” that Rancière has appropriated his central idea of equality from Badiou’s own work. We argue that Badiou’s characterisation of Rancière’s project is correct, but that his self-characterisation is mistaken. What Badiou’s ontology of events opens out onto is not necessarily equality, but instead universality. Equality is only one form of universality, but there is nothing in Badiou’s thought that prohibits the (multiple) universality he posits from being hierarchical. In the end, then, Badiou’s thought moves in a Maoist direction while Rancière’s in an anarchist one.

12.2 (Fall/Automne 2008)

51-69