Practices of Equality and Freedom Rancière and Foucault

This thesis is an offering of an auto-emancipation from practices of the normative self in the innovative form of a synergy of Jacques Rancière’s practices of equality and Michel Foucault’s practices of freedom. It brings together Rancière’s understanding of ‘dissensus’ as a transgression of the hierarchal distribution of social space and time–le partage du sensible (the distribution of the sensible)–and Foucault’s offering of parrhesia (frank speech/truth speaking) as a transgression of normative discourses in an exploration of the connection between subjectivity and truth: a truth speaking in the written and spoken word and the courage to live the truth in actions and non-actions. In bringing together dissensus and parrhesia, it also brings together these thinkers’ respective offerings of an aesthetics of the self made manifest in the simultaneity of transgression and transformation illustrated by Rancière’s politics and aesthetics and Foucault’s parrhesia and ethics of the self.

In combining practices of equality and freedom, this thesis traces a way of life as an autodidactic emancipation via a self-tutelage (an authority over and instruction of oneself). As such, it is not a descriptive ontology incorporating an understanding of a teleological essence to the human form that must be freed, but a creative ontology that is autotelic. Therefore, rather than following the lines of a politics of destination in a didactic and dialectic deferral of an equality and freedom to come, it traces an immanent and aesthetic revolution for the individual that is lived in everyday lives where practices of equality and freedom happen now. Thus, it offers Rancière’s and Foucault’s quotidian practices as an immanent and agonistic middle path in-between conformity and political revolution. As acts of individual emancipation expand communally into worlds within worlds within the manifestation of other social spaces–heterotopias–and other forms of social time–heterochronies, and thus form a togetherness, this synergy also strikes a middle path in-between liberal individualism and social atomism and communitarian positions and their stress on collective identities. To help bring practices of equality and freedom together, this thesis also incorporates Rancière’s archival research on the emancipatory life of the nineteenth-century worker-poet/philosopher Louis-Gabriel Gauny and offers a novel interpretation of Gauny as having lived both equality and freedom as everyday practices