DANIELE ELENE CORTE CARDOSO

This dissertation analyzes the intersections between words, thought and politics in Jacques Rancière's notion of democracy. For the philosopher, there is a problem inherent in the definition, namely how political calculation, necessary for democratic production, encompasses the multiplicity of the population's demands. In other words, how the government of the demos meets the demands of its own concept. This fact, or miscount, in the philosopher's terms, is treated by tradition, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, as an element to be suppressed from the community. Damage, or democratic excess, is what political science has chosen as a problem for the balance of opinion within a society, in other words, the principle of social corrosion. However, the pretension to scientific objectivity, for Rancière, aims to determine a principle in what is by nature indeterminable, dissent. For the author of The distributions of the sensible, the political figure par excellence is disagreement, the mark of a dispute over insertion within a community of equals.