في فلسفة "سوء الفهم": قراءة جديدة مؤسِّسة للراهنيّة السياسية وتفكيك الأوهام

In his book “Misunderstanding”, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière monitors a dangerous transformation in contemporary societies, represented by what he calls the end of politics within the “post-democratic society”. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière (born 1940) is re-issuing his book “Misunderstanding” (La Mésentente) in a new edition issued by the publishing house "**vrin**" in Paris (2025), 30 years after the publication of its first edition in 1995. This work comes as an extension of a philosophical path that Rancière began decades ago, through which he sought to redefine the concepts of politics, political philosophy, and democracy. Jacques Rancière recovers, with great depth, classical philosophical theses in order to present a new reading that establishes political currentism and dismantles the illusions that have enveloped modern political thought, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a global discourse that celebrates what was called “the return of politics” and “the victory of peaceful and consensual democracy.” But Rancière saw this alleged return as a liquidation of politics, not a revival of it, since politics in its essence is not the administration of harmony, but rather the power of “the people,” that is, the power of those who have no right to exercise power and lead the city, and this paradoxical power of those who do not have a share of it is what, from ancient Greece until modern liberation movements, has been in the way of a “natural” order in which leadership returns to those who are destined to hold the reins of power by virtue of their birth, wealth, or knowledge. In this book he proposes Rancière gave a definition of politics and the reasons for its emergence, defining at the same time the scope and goals of political philosophy based on the Platonic and Aristotelian debate that dealt with this concept.