Taking account of the ‘part of those that have no part’

Abstract

In this commentary, I argue that Rancière’s concept of the ‘part of those that have no part’ is a valuable and overlooked intervention in how the constitution of ‘the political’ can be understood. While some reject the narrowing of what counts as ‘political’ in Rancière’s work, I argue that by drawing attention to inevitability of the constitutive outside of the social, Rancière forces a constructive reckoning with the way more capacious conceptions of the political can elide and reproduce the inherently partial nature of the attendant social formation.