Incompatibility without contradiction: The parallax relation of Jacques Ranciere and Pierre Bourdieu

The opposed approaches that are found in the political thought of Jacques Ranciere and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, it is argued, are contradictory, but not incompatible. In conceiving the relation between the two thinkers as a parallax, this thesis argues that because the political is itself a contested or objectively incomplete phenomenon, that no single perspective is capable of filling out a complete conception of it.;Keywords: Ranciere, Bourdieu, Political Theory, Aesthetics, Sociology, Field, Habitus;The work of Ranciere and Bourdieu is incompatible because the condition of possibility for analyzing social and political phenomena from one disposition precludes any acknowledgement of the other. The source of this near complete theoretical divergence, yet also the source of their more fundamental lack of contradiction, the thesis argues, is two radically different notions of contingency that each theorist uses to explain the emergence of social and political order (arkhe). For Ranciere, contingency operates as a logical conception, while for Bourdieu it functions as a component of complexity. The thesis uses the opposed notions of contingency to account for the difficulty of translating between these two disparate theoretical discourses. Instead of offering a comparison and contrast, the thesis argues that the necessary limit-point of each theory is reached and marked out as it runs up against the other. On this basis, the thesis proposes a way to re-read both Bourdieu and Ranciere in light of one another's work.