Jacques Rancière (2007) _On the Shores of Politics_ trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso.

In 'The Uses of Democracy', Rancière charactises Western democracy as a shadow of the real thing ('real-existing democracy'), a fiction masking selfishness and exploitation:
'And in the current atmosphere of disillusionment we would seem to have the choice between only two position: either to recollectivize the idea of democracy, while accepting liberal democracy as an irreversible face (whence the search for an injection of more soul, as epitomized by the idea of participation); or else to frankly accept that what we call democracy is nothing but liberalism, and all the dreams of happy polities have never been anything but dreams, the self-deceit of a society of big and small capitalists who are finally complicit in the advent of the reign of the possessive individual.' (2007: 39-40)
Both contain false assumptions according to Ranciere, based on revolutionary and romantic nostalgic assumptions about a totality of active citizens (or people as subjects). Democracy is not defined in relation to a sense of unity but is characterized by diverse agencies. 

Whereas participation is a strange fantasy filling the empty spaces of power, a mongrel idea according to Rancière, based on fallen grand narratives related to reformism and the revolutionary idea of the full involvement of its citizen-subjects in all domains. He says:
'The guarantee of permanent democracy is not the filling up of all the dead times and empty spaces by the forms of participation or of counterpower; it is the continual renewal of the actors and of the forms of their actions, the ever-open possibility of the fresh emergence of the fleeting subject.' (2007: 61).

In 'Democracy Corrected', speech is considered. The democratic subject speaks, and constructs a distance between words and things in terms of political rationality. 'Thus, democracy is not "just a word" or an illusion. Rather, it is a disposition of the name and appearance of the people, a way of keeping the people present in their absence.' (2007: 93) In other words, politics is the way people negotiate their relation to the reality and fiction of the public sphere. Consensus simply leads to compromise and dogma (such as Racism). Instead Rancière argues for a repoliticisation of conflicts and social problems, and to 'restore names to the people and give politics back its former visibility in the handling of problems and resources'. (2007: 106). This is based in the realm of representation and conflict. The theory of names is intriguing. He argues that the disappearance of the the name (such as 'worker') amounts to the disappearance of the politics around the name. Naming goes together with declaring a politics of that issue (for instance, naming 'class struggle' helps to establish it as active, and without a subject or object).  

Note: The word democracy: contains the words 'demos' (the people) and 'kratein' (to rule).