Archipolitics, parapolitics and metapolitics are three neologisms with which Jacques Ranciére, in a central chapter of his 1995 book Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (English translation 1998), proposes to reflect upon the dominant figures of what he calls “the politics of the philosophers”, from Plato to Hobbes and from Marx to Bourdieu. Precisely what is at stake in this reflection – whence the chapter's centrality in the book – is the very question of the relation between politics and philosophy, which is but one instance among others of the relation between the real and the thought of the real. The ultimate goal is to come to an understanding of politics without prefixes, of the real of politics set free from the typical efforts of philosophers to appropriate, displace, cover up and/or unmask its essential scandal, which is none other than the scandal of democracy when properly understood, that is, the staging of equality in the form of an empty liberty, over and against the purported naturalness of the existing order of domination. “This equality is simply the equality of anyone at all with anyone else: in other words, in the final instance, the absence of arkhê, the sheer contingency of any social order,” writes Ranciére. “Every politics is democratic in this precise sense: not in the sense of a set of institutions, but in the sense of forms of expression that confront the logic of equality with the logic of the police order” (D 15, 101).