Ranciere and Queer Theory: On Irritable Attachment (Jacques Ranciere) (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

[I]n our examination of left-wing politics today we have been superficial or, so to speak, epidermic [epidermiques]. For it is in the touchiness of our skin's sensitivity [la sensibilite des epidermes] that we are perhaps most confident of having preserved, amid the daily round of compromises and the carnival of modish transgressions, something of what changed in 68. (Ranciere et al, 1978: 5) [1] In this opening presentation, by Ranciere and the other members of the Revoltes Logiques collective, of a special issue of the journal commemorating the tenth anniversary of May 1968, the intriguing suggestion is that in the susceptibility of the epidermic surface to irritation is to be found both something essential about May 68 and the basis of an enduring attachment to its notoriously elusive spirit: their task, self-appointed, is to remain '"epidermically" sensitive' ['"epidermiquement" sensible'] to hierarchy and authority and to see past the temptation of unspecified forms of 'modish transgression' (Ranciere et al, 1978: 6, 5). [2] Superficiality is salvaged from ordinary language and tentatively advanced as a methodological principle; irritability or touchiness is reclaimed from the conventional archive of negative affect as the basis of a new epistemology, an emotional disposition capable of bearing historical and political meaning. Before 'le sensible' becomes synonymous in Ranciere's work with the sensory, with that which is available to perception, and before, in the expression 'le partage du sensible', it features in the key connecting term of his new politics of aesthetics, perception stood in an essential relation to the touchiness of the skin's surface [la sensibilite des epidermes]. Before 'le sensible,' the sensory, occupies its pivotal position in the seamless assertoric formulations of Ranciere's mature politico-aesthetic thought, its close adjectival relative denoting sensitivity first figures a susceptibility to irritation, an 'allergic' awareness, a raw exposure to potentially excoriating trauma and also a mode of transmission or filiation: in our irritability lies our fidelity to May 1968. Irritable attachment, I shall argue, is at once a distinctively queer and a characteristically Rancierian form of relationality and one which better captures the nature of much of our affect-laden and embodied social and political experience than 'disagreement' and 'dissensus,' the more detached and rationalistic conceptions which prevail in Ranciere's mature work.