Abstract

“Reversal”, in dialectics, takes place between two things located on the same level of substantiality, while “inversion” participates in a paradoxical ontology where the things to be inverted do not pre-exist the inversion itself. Such is the meaning of an ontological thesis largely shared by today’s Marxism : the primacy of class struggle over classes. While making a clear distinction between the two in The Capital, Jacques Rancière insistently asks whether these two operations can be separated without resorting to “kautskism”, which introduces it within the struggle from the exterior of the struggle, thus denying the ontological primacy of struggle. The solution he provides is unheard of : on the one hand, he radicalises inversion as a politics of subjectivation within which there no longer is any “constituted” ; on the other hand, he reconfigures the reversal as an activity of the imagination which perpetually differs from itself, as in “labor’s dream” or in “heretical speech”. He thus presents these two operations as mutually conditioning and producing each other