Harm without Victims as a Political Dimension in Jacques Rancière

Abstract

The article considers the political dimension of harm within the wider conceptual field of aisthesis as conceptualized by Jacques Rancière. Within humanistic and postmodern perspectives, harm has always been thought of as indivisible from the image of the victim, whose main characteristic is that he passively suffers his harm. Within this same perspective, harm also cannot be thought of, because of its particularity, as universal and thus political. On the contrary, Rancière thinks of harm as the moment of the establishment of politics, which is not linked to any image of victim. For Rancière, harm never represents the consequence of a particular accident, but rather indicates the structural fact that the political community as a barred community is established by the existence of the “part of those who have no part,” and that part is identified with the whole community.