Rather than founding or deconstructing, Ranciere (2011: 14) seeks to blur the boundaries that separate the genres and levels of discourse. One name that he gives to this practice is 'poetics of knowledge’. This can be viewed as a kind of deconstructive practice in as far as it seeks to trace established forms of knowledge to the poetic operations [fictive, performative, inaugurative, inventive?] that make its objects appear and give sense and relevance to its propositions. These operations include description, narration, metaphorisation, symbolisation and so on.
What Ranciere considers important in this consideration of epistemic discourse in its poetical (fictive-performative-inaugurative-inventive?) moment is that it emphasises the equality of speaking beings. This is the meaning of the equality of intelligence that he borrowed from Jacotot. It does not mean that every manifestation of intelligence is equal to any other.
Most importantly for Ranciere, it means that the same intelligence makes poetic fictions, political inventions or historical explanations; that the same intelligence makes and understands sentences in general. Political thought, history, sociology and so on use common powers of linguistic innovation in order to make their objects visible and create connections between them, as, indeed, does philosophy.
The implication of this is that philosophy cannot be seen as the discourse that grounds all other forms of discourse or spheres of rationality.
Rather, philosophy is the discourse that undoes the boundaries within which all disciplines predicate their authority on the assumption of a specific methodology fitting the specificity of their field of objectivity.
Thus, Ranciere’s practice of philosophy is an-archical, meaning that it traces back the specificity of disciplines and discursive competences to the egalitarian level of linguistic competence and poetic invention.
Reference
Ranciere, J. (2011). The thinking of dissensus: politics and aesthetics. In: Bowman, P. and Stamp, R., eds., Reading Rancière. London, UK: Continuum, pp.1–17.