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Tests and exams are more or less unquestioned parts of academic life. In his book on the "ignorant schoolmaster", the French educator Joseph Jacotot, Jacques Rancière argues for a radical critique of the disciplinary effects of these instruments of state education and thereby also rejects on anarchist grounds all progressive attempts of educational reform. In this early text, he already fully formulates the principle of "axiomatic equality", which will play a fundamental role in his later writings. My paper reconstructs Rancière's position, partly by tracing it back to its Foucauldian roots, and argues that although it is too spontaneist and thus voluntarist, Rancière's intervention poses an important challenge for every reflection on critical educational practice today.

Das politische Denken Jacques Rancières verspricht eine theoretische Auflehnung gegen die neoliberale Verwaltung des universalen Sachzwangs. Der Beitrag diskutiert seine Version einer radikalen Demokratietheorie aus der Perspektive der dialektischen Gesellschaftstheorie und -kritik im Anschluss an Adorno und untersucht sein Denken in Bezug auf die Feindbilder des dialektischen Denkens: Ontologie und Positivismus. Rancières Theorie radikaler Demokratie wird identifiziert als verdinglichtes Denken, das Konflikt als sozialanthropologische Konstante in einer positivistischen Ontologie des Sozialen theoretisch fixiert.

Over the past decade, Jacques Rancière's writings have increasingly provoked and inspired political theorists who wish to avoid both the abstraction of so-called normative theories and the philosophical platitudes of so-called postmodernism. Rancière offers a new and unique definition of politics, la politique, as that which opposes, thwarts and interrupts what Rancière calls the police order, la police — a term that encapsulates most of what we normally think of as politics (the actions of bureaucracies, parliaments, and courts). Interpreters have been tempted to read Rancière as proffering a formally pure conception of politics, wherein politics is ultimately separate from and in utter opposition to all police orders. Here I provide a different account of Rancière's thinking of politics: for Rancière politics goes on within police orders and for this reason he strongly rejects the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could never be pure; politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists purification. In carefully delineating the politique— police relation I show that the terms of Rancière's political writings are multiple and multiplied. Rancière consistently undermines any effort to render politics pure, and therein lies his potential contribution to contemporary political theory.

The democratic leadership literature emphasises those leadership practices that involve dialogue and communication within the frame of reference of existing organizational structures, discourses and hierarchies. Our contribution is to problematise this approach to democracy from the perspective of the work of Jacques Rancière, which highlights the importance of dissensus, that is to say a breaking away from organizational structures and hierarchies. We argue that this allows us to conceptualise collective leadership in a postfoundational way that connects a critique of individual and organization-bound leadership to a democratic logic, in particular through Rancière's analysis of the myth of the murder of the shepherd. This also enables us to study radically disruptive, non-hierarchical and pre-dialogic dimensions of leadership that may destruct as well as construct. Two democratic leadership practices are outlined: contingent acts of leadership and the practice of radical contestation. Our argument is that both practices of democratic leadership can be deployed as radical ruptures and disruptions of organizational orders, beyond dialogue.

This interview was conducted on 8 October 2011 at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. It was held during a symposium that reflected on the work of Rancière and was a part of a broader engagement with the concept of autonomy and its relation to art organized by an umbrella group of universities and arts organizations under the name of 'The Autonomy Project'. A number of the symposium's participants – Peter Osborne, Gerald Raunig, Isabell Lorey, Ruth Sondregger, Kim Mereiene and Adrian Martin – contributed questions that formed the basis of this interview. The interview took place at a time when the longer-term possibilities of the Arab Spring and Occupy/Indignados movements were under general scrutiny. It was also a moment when the Van Abbemuseum itself was compelled to reflect on its own position of political autonomy in relation to neoliberal state directives, political populism at the local level and its own critique of aesthetic autonomy. Rancière's work on aesthetics and politics has been as much appreciated as a clearance strategy against prevailing visual prejudices as it has served as a platform for rethinking the emancipatory potential of creative practice.