Staging democracy

emancipatory operations and the contentious redefinition of the sensible

Abstract

This article explores concepts developed by Jacques Rancière in his book Disagreement, defining democracy as a process stemming from the inscription and enunciation of subjects within a scene of dissensus—a scene they create and recreate through their actions. Through the political emergence and acts of insurgency of two women, Jeanne Deroin and Rosa Parks, we see how Rancière establishes a method and a mode of writing to highlight the aesthetic dimension of politics, including its excessive, interstitial, and dramaturgical characteristics. He sets out to present and reconstruct these two events through a mise-en-scène that fractures the system of established identities and invents new ways of experiencing alternative forms of enunciation and existence. In this light, these contentious scenes are shaped in the intervals between "police" and "politics," carving out time, space, the visible, and the invisible in new ways, and creating consensual or dissensual frameworks that guide our experience of the world. This clash redefines the political imaginaries that structure how we envision our existence alongside others.