Frameworks, scenes of dissensus and the anti-hierarchical appearance: political action and resistance in Judith Butler and Jacques Rancière

Abstract

The article presents an attempt to articulate the approaches of Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler concerning the modes of political appearance of vulnerable subjects in enunciative spaces of dissent and demand for recognition. We argue that, although in different reflective ways, both value the resistances that destabilize and question the hierarchical orders that define normative regimes that regulate the visibilities and legibilities that authorize and validate the experiences of the subjects and their ways of life. Appearing is, at the same time, the reconfiguration of the sensible and the construction of new frames of meaning that allow new coordinates of expression and recognition of precarious lives. This involves not only considering the vulnerabilities of bodies in action, but also the fables and imagery that redraw socio-historical trajectories of survivals and struggles for justice.