Space, Politics, and the Political

Abstract

In this paper I offer a reading of Jacques Rancière's conceptualization of politics, and consider its implications for the links between space, politics, and the political. I provide an overview of Rancière's conceptualizations of ‘the police’, politics, and the political, and try to recover the spatiality of these notions. Based on this overview, the argument pursued in the paper is that space does not become political just by virtue of being full of power or competing interests. It becomes political by becoming the place where a wrong can be addressed and equality can be demonstrated. This definition makes space not only an integral element of the defining moment of the political, but an integral element of the disruption of the normalized order of domination as well.