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David Ferris

Online Publication Date: 01 August 2009

Ferris, David(2009)'Politics after Aesthetics: Disagreeing with Rancire',Parallax,15:3,37 49

10.1080/13534640902982587

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Politics after Aesthetics: Disagreeing with Ranciere

David Ferris

More than anyone else in the late twentieth century, Jacques Rancie` re has

undertaken a redefinition of the relation of the aesthetic to politics. This redefinition

occurs against the long history through which politics has turned to the aesthetic as

either a support or an ideological antagonism, a history that has condemned theaesthetic to a representative role whether in the positive sense intended by Schiller

in his Aesthetic Education or in the negative sense so crucial to how the aesthetic has

social and political meaning in Adornos Aesthetic Theory.1 Rather than reassert such

a role one more time, Rancie` re undertakes a redefinition of the aesthetic that not

only challenges the representational categories into which it has been placed but

also redefines the aesthetic in terms of political existence. This does not mean that

politics is conflated with the aesthetic, as if one could be simply identified as the

other. Such identification disregards the specificity of the aesthetic and also the

specificity of politics. The question Rancie` re confronts is then how to think their

relation without recourse to the history that has overdetermined the relation of

politics and aesthetics.

In a remark from his Politics of Literature, Rancie` re insists on a specific link

between the aesthetic and politics: politics of literature means that literature

does politics as literature that there is a specific link between politics as a definite

way of doing and literature as a definite practice of writing.2 There is no ambiguity

here and certainly not the kind that allows for the easy substitution of politics and

literature so present in contemporary critical discourse. Ranciere is clear: politics is a

definite way of doing and literature is a definite practice of writing. Although this

remark distinguishes politics and writing as belonging to different spheres, Rancie` re

will still speak of a specific link through which literature becomes known in terms of

politics. Yet, if this link is to avoid rehearsing yet again the history that not only gives

us politics andaesthetics but gives them to us within a way of thinking that remains

steadfastly representational, what other link can be specified? In short, how can

politics andaesthetics still be thought without recourse to the authenticity implied byany mode of representation, whether positive or negative? Another way of posing

this question is to ask whether the pairing of politics and aesthetics can be thought

otherwise in an age when politics still continues to determine what is significant and

what is not?

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ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online q 2009 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/13534640902982587

parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 3, 3749

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In the passage just cited from Politics of Literature, Rancie` re already gives an

indication of how he will think a specific link between politics and literature as well

as the difficulty of doing so. Before even defining politics as doing, Rancie` re refers

to literature as something that does politics. The placing of does within quotation

marks is a curious act especially in a context that would avoid the representational

history in which literature and the aesthetic were tied to the political: to quote is to

re-present. But, do these quotes simply mean that literature is an imitation of the

doing that characterizes politics? A weak form of politics? But, if not an imitation or

a weak form of politics, why must literature be placed within quotes? Why must

literature be quoted as literature when the articulation of its political significance is

at stake?

As if to counter this quotational recourse, Rancie` re, in subsequent remarks from this

same essay, offers a definition of literature as such, a literature that presumably

should not and cannot be put within quotation marks. Here, literature as suchpromises the specificity of literature, that is, what makes literature literature rather

than something else. As Rancie` re provides this definition, the notion of a specific

link is again evoked although in this context it is no longer explicitly given as a link

between writing and the visibility of things:

Literature as such: literature conceived neither as the art of writing in

general nor as a specific state of the language, but as a historical mode

of visibility of writing, a specific link between a system of meaning of

words and a system of visibility of things.3

Rancie` re presents literature as a system separated from another system, a

separation embodied by the respective modes of existence of these two systems: the

meaning of words and the visibility of things. Yet, what Rancie` re refers to when herefers to the meaning of words is also a visibility. Thus, literature, by bringing words

to visibility, enters into a link with what Rancie` re calls the visibility of things while

being differentiated according to the object that it makes visible. On the basis of this

link, Rancie` re goes on to define the visibility of literature (literature as such) as a

way of linking meaning and action, of framing the relation between the sayable

and the visible, of enabling words with the power of framing a common world.4

Such a literature, in effect, attains what politics has always as its goal whenever its

purpose is under question, namely, linking meaning and action. However, in this

instance, what is at stake is not the well-worn cliche of theory and praxis that

increasingly hovers behind political discourse since Marx, but rather a doing that

occurs through literature as it makes visible the system of meaning. In other words,

it is not a question of meaning being represented by an action, and vice versa.

Instead, meaning is understood to be action, something that does, and in thatdoing, it attains visibility. With this visibility, literature as such occurs for

Rancie` re. At the same time, this occurrence is justified to the extent that a link takes

place in some way. Without such a link, literature as such would remain

insignificant, it would have no intervention in what Rancie` re refers to as the

distribution of sensible, to a distribution that organizes and structures what can be

apprehended by the senses, in other words, the apprehension of the visible. It is thus

on the specificity of this link that everything depends and above all else the

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recovery of a significance for an aesthetic that challenges the historical and critical

ease with which the aesthetic is confined to the ideological on the one hand, and, on

the other, to a political philosophy that is no more than an account of politics as a

form of representation, in short, such political philosophy would be no more than an

aesthetics without ideology.

For Rancie` re, the political significance of the aesthetic is tied crucially to this non-

representational link between two systems of visibility. As such, the link itself, if it is

to remain non-representational, poses the question of what form of existence this

link can take when representation is no longer available to it. Here, Adornos

development of a negative dialectics is interpretable as a symptomatic response to

such a question. The negation of negation demanded by Adornos dialectical

account of the aesthetic, that is, his embrace of a politics of aesthetics through the

denial of negation as the representation of what it is different from (to cite the

famous example of Koje` ve after Hegel, the master already represents the slave),finally remains unproductive with respect to the tradition it would transform. To

put this another way, the Frankfurt School could only arrest the dialectical

foundation of its own thought. As such, it pushed the realm of representational

politics to a negative extreme but could not break with that realm without

sacrificing the significance of its desired social critique and the politics that such a

desire assumes. Rancie` re, through what he calls the distribution of the sensible,

undertakes another thinking of the relation of politics and aesthetics, one that would

no longer submit itself to such a radical negation of representation but which seeks to

position such a relation without characterizing it in either positive or negative terms.

In a series of interviews first published under the title Le partage du sensible: esthe tique et

politique, Rancie` re offers the following condensed definition of what he means by the

distribution of the sensible:

I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts

of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of

something in common and the delimitations that define the respective

parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore

establishes at one and the same time something common that is

shared and exclusive parts.5

This double determination of commonality and exclusivity structures a community

so that everything that possesses visibility is assigned a part. Rancie` re then defines

this visibility in relation to politics in the following terms: politics bears upon ( porte

sur) what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and

the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.6

Here, the realm of language and the realm of the visibility of things (to which

literature as such possesses a specific link) make up, not what politics is, but what

politics bears upon. This distinction made here introduces two senses of politics,

one that speaks of politics as social organization, and one that goes to the core

of Rancie` res understanding of how politics exists in its actuality. The first, in

Rancie` res terminology is not an authentic politics but rather the way in which

roles are assigned to only those parts of a community that possess visibility.

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This configuration results from the activity of what Rancie` re calls the police.7

What the police produces is a community configured according to a consensus about

the roles played by each of the parts they define within that community. In contrast,

Rancie` re gives the name politics to the way in which this distribution can be

reconfigured by a part that remains invisiblewhich he refers to as the part of those

who have no part. This understanding of politics places a group within a

community in such a way that only those parts given visibility can participate in the

consensus such a community is built upon. But, because a group has no part, its

claim to have a role, that is, to become visible, challenges the grounds on which the

distribution of the sensible has taken place in the hands of the police, namely,

inequality. Making this claim is the beginning of politics.

Rancie` re describes the effect of this claim as follows:

Political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes theperceptible divisions of the police order by putting into act a

presupposition which is in principle heterogeneous to the police, that

of the part of those without a part, which manifests itself, in the end,

as the pure contingency of that order, the equality of any speaking

being with any other speaking being.8

Equality, so often taken as if its determining characteristic were similarity, functions

here as the mark of a heterogeneity that arises as soon as those who have no part

contest their invisibility by speaking. This contesting, Rancie` re continues, is the

occasion of politics but a politics that only becomes real once two heterogeneous

processes meet. The first process is the distribution of the sensible performed by the

police; the second is the process of equality initiated by those who have no visibility

in the former distribution. Here, the assertion of equality should not be confusedwith politics; politics only occurs in the antagonism between this assertion and how

the sensible has been distributed by the police. As a result, equality cannot be

recognized as the object or issue of politics, nor can it, as a principle, be restricted to

politics. All equality does is to

give politics reality in the form of specific cases [ . . . ] what makes an

action political is not its object or the place where it is carried out, but

solely its form, the form in which the confirmation of equality is

inscribed in the setting up of a dispute, of a community existing solely

through being divided.9

The specificity of the act that defines Rancie` res understanding of politics removes

theory as well as any other general principle from a role in determining politics asthe appearance of one meaning or another. Already here, the tendency to appeal to

politics as a source of meaning for either the aesthetic or for the activity of criticism is

unsustainable since such a tendency demands that there is something political in

itself that can be referred to and used as a measure for judgment. If even the

principle through which politics is expressed cannot belong to politics then what

Rancie` re has given as politics is also something that has built into the impossibility of

agreement. In this case, Rancie` res sense of politics can only be based on, as he

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admits, the recognition of presuppositions that ought to be discerned in the

practices that put them to work.10 Presuppositions, as enabling principles, are not in

themselves political until they have been put to work. It is this notion of work that is

crucial to Rancie` re and, here, work is another name for configuration. From this

work, there arises the sense of politics as a definite way of doing referred to in the

passage from Politics and Literature cited at the beginning of this article. When the

specificity of this way of doing takes place in an act of speaking or making visible that

is carried out by those who have been given no part in the distribution of the

sensible, this act is irresolvable precisely because, within the community or place

where it occurs, there is contention over what the act of speaking means to the

parties involved in it. This contention centers on the irreconcilable difference

between those who think that all speaking beings are equal and those who do not. By

speaking, those who belong to the part that has no part understand the former, and

by speaking those who have a part understand the latter.

The irresolvable disagreement that lies at core of Rancie` res understanding of

politics is what his understanding of the aesthetic and also the literary must in some

way be linked to. Remarks in Disagreement already point to this link as something

that defines the literary in a fundamentally political way. Rancie` re writes:

The modern political animal is first a literary animal, caught in the

circuit of a literariness that undoes the relationships between the

order of words and the order of bodies that determine the place of

each.11

Here, the literary is understood as a disordering of those relationships between words

and bodies through which the order instituted by the police functions. Rancie` re

defines this disordering by the literary in the following sentence: It inscribes asubject name as being different from any identified part of the community. 12 Where

the literary possesses a politics it is in the difference between a name and what has

been identified as the parts that can be given names. This understanding is very

much in line with Rancie` res account of politics as disagreement. In fact, politics and

the literary are so much in line with the one other that the question of a link between

them seems superfluous. Are they not in fact so much in agreement with one another

that the aesthetic can only, yet again, be a form of politics? If so, to what extent has

Rancie` res understanding of politics done no more than find another albeit much

more resourceful and far reaching answer to the question of what the aesthetic is

even as he refuses the place of such a question with respect to politics? Another way

of framing these questions is to ask why Ranciere is still compelled to decide the

significance of the aesthetic in political terms.

The aesthetic has always posed a problem with respect to determining its

significance if not just its function, a problem recognized from the very beginning of

political discourse in Platos Republic and also in the history through which literature

is continually re-determined as one form of representation or another. The word

aesthetic also bears the imprint of this problematic. In the transformation of the

aesthetic from the name that identifies sense perception (that is, the sensible) in the

eighteenth century to its emergence as the category naming the form in which art

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appears, the sensible recedes as the visible gives way to an invisible yet still

representable meaning. Rancie` res account of politics clearly distinguishes itself

from the representational mode that the aesthetic took on with this transformation.

In fact, if Rancie` res account of politics is placed within this history of the aesthetic,

it would mark a recovery of the aesthetic as the realm of the sensible rather than the

limited and imprecise appearance of the idea, as in Kant, or of the spirit, as in Hegel.

The difference indicated by this positioning of Rancie` re is that the aesthetic possesses

a visible specificity in the form of sensibility in the earliest stage of its history.

Although Rancie` re will not rest his account of politics on the historical specificity of

the aesthetic as a mode of visible apprehension, his remarks in Politics and

Literature already insist on such specificity as the means through which the

aesthetic retains its proper significance.

In Disagreement, this significance appears as the autonomization of the aesthetic. This

means two things for Rancie` re. First, the specificity achieved through autonomiza-tion is a freeing up [of the aesthetic] in relation to the norms of representation

thereby effectively ending their reign as decisive where the aesthetic is concerned.

Second, this autonomization provides

the constitution of a kind of community of sense experience that works

on the world of presumption, of the as ifthat includes those who are

not included by revealing a mode of existence of sense experience that

has eluded the allocation of parties and lots.13

In its specificity, its autonomy, and in its freeing from the norms of representation,

the aesthetic constitutes the possibility of an as if, of a category that is at once

sensible but at the same time has no part within the distribution of meaning that

belongs to the norms of representation that decide what is aesthetically meaningfuland what is not. The as if returns representation to the appearance it already is. It

is this return to appearance that forms the basis of Rancie` res account of aesthetics in

terms of politics. But, for Rancie` re, this does not mean that politics is merely

appearance. Rancie` re is firm on this point: there has therefore not been any

aestheticization of politics in the modern age because politics is aesthetic in

principle.14 Still, to claim that politics is aesthetic in principle is to claim, first, that

there is a principle to which politics submits and, second, without the aesthetic there

can be no politics in the sense that Rancie` re develops this word.

The first of these claims appears to counter Rancie` res earlier remark that the sole

principle of politics is equality.15 While this earlier statement does not make politics

the same as equality (equality is not peculiar to [politics] and is in no way in itself

political), the subsequent insistence that politics is aesthetic in principle raises aquestion about Rancie` res account of how disagreement is fundamental to the

political make-up of a community. In particular, it raises a question about the

insertion of the aesthetic into an account of politics that has placed principles outside

the specific operation of politics. Rancie` re not only states this emphatically, but does

so by insisting that nothing is political in itself for the political only exists by a

principle that is not proper to it, equality.16 For politics to come into existence

through the impropriety of a principle is to assert, at the very least, that politics

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attains meaningfulness by means of what it is not. Can such an assertion, at this

point of Rancie` res account of politics, be reconciled with the claim that politics is

aesthetics in principle? If not, why is such a claim even made? Or, why does it need

to be made?

In a later work, Malaise dans lesthetique (2004), Rancie` re again rejects the

aestheticization of politics that held such sway over Benjamins account of art and

politics. Here, the stake is again the relation of politics and aesthetics:

Politics consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible that

defines the commonality of a community, in introducing subjects and

objects, in rendering visible those who were not, and in making

understood speakers who had only been perceived as noisy animals.

This work of creating dissensus constitutes an aesthetic of politics that

has nothing to do with the forms of establishing power and themobilization of the masses that Benjamin called the aestheticization

of politics.17

Rancie` res reference to Benjamin refuses the separateness of aesthetics and politics

by refusing the possibility that politics can be aestheticized a position that

presupposes that politics is an object that can be submitted to such an act. Yet, when

Rancie` re grants politics the ability to create dissensus it occurs when politics is

understood in terms of the aesthetic. While the creation of this dissensus is

distinguished from the aestheticization of politics that Benjamin associates with

fascism, it is not completely unrelated to what Benjamin had called the politicization

of the aesthetic.18 Benjamins politicized aesthetic also sought to produce a dissensus

that would resist the aesthetic appropriation of politics but this dissensus was not

developed to the extensive scale Rancie` re pursues when he makes disagreement thebasis of politics. However, when Rancie` re articulates this difference to Benjamin in

Malaise dans lesthetique, his phrasing resorts to the chiasmatic structuring Benjamin

had also relied upon:

The relation between aesthetics and politics is, more precisely, the

relation between this aesthetic of politics and the politics of the

aesthetic, that is, the manner in which the practices and the forms of

visibility of art themselves intervene in the distribution of the sensible

and in its reconfiguration.19

The relation of aesthetics and politics is a double relation comprised of an inversion

of the positions occupied by politics and aesthetics. But here, again, Rancie` re places

one side of a relation within quotation marks as he did when he spoke of howliterature does politics in Politics and Literature while politics remained a definite

way of doing. Not only does this pose the question of why this recurs, but also raises

the question of a difference that Rancie` res politics, and the disagreement it

advances, cannot yet resolve, or can only resolve by setting disagreement against the

project of a philosophy that achieves politics by eliminating politics, a project that

validates that there is something to eliminate in the name of the unity Rancie` re

accords to philosophy.20 However, the possibility of such an elimination remains

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a distraction. The principal question is why politics and aesthetics must still fulfill a

dual role: co-extensive and inseparable. Why the articulation of disagreement as the

basis of what a political community holds in common must disagree with itself in

relation to the aesthetic?

The specific link Rancie` re speaks of between politics as a definite way of doing and

literature as a definite practice of writing is implicated in these questions. Such a link

demands that there should be a separation between politics and aesthetics but, at the

same time, the terms of Rancie` res engagement with this link demands that such a

link cannot be in any way representational. Accordingly, the significance of one

cannot be seen through the other since, in this case, they could not be distinct systems

of visibility. But how, then, is their relation to be understood if they must both be

specific yet also articulate the disagreement that informs Rancie` res sense of politics?

In a later passage from Malaise dans lesthetique, Rancie` re takes up again the questionof the autonomy of art invoked in Disagreement and takes up its relation to the

distribution of the sensible against and through which Rancie` res politics of

disagreement is established:

It is really therefore in the form of autonomous experience that art

touches the distribution of the sensible. The aesthetic regime of art

institutes the relation between the forms of identification of art and the

forms of political community in a way that recuses in advance every

opposition between an autonomous art and a heteronomous art, an art

for arts sake and an art in the service of politics, a museum art and an

art of the street. Aesthetic autonomy is not the autonomy of doing art

that modernism celebrated. It is the autonomy of a form of sensible

experience. And it is this experience that appears like the seed of a newhumanity, of a new form of individual and collective life.21

On this occasion, Rancie` res remarks emphasize how the autonomous experience of

art touches the distribution of the sensible in a way that the claim to equality had

also done when voiced by those whose part is to have no part in a community. Here,

such touching does not occur through the equality of speaking beings but through

what Rancie` re now calls the aesthetic regime of art.

Rancie` re identifies three such regimes for art: the ethical regime of images; the

representative regime of the arts; and the aesthetic regime of art. For Rancie` re, the

first does not properly belong to art since the images involved in this regime, because

they are images of the divine, have to be judged as a function of their intrinsic truth

and their effects on the manner of being of individuals and collective existence. 22

Whether such images or art or are not art depends, Rancie` re states, on how they are

apprehended: the same statue of the same goddess can be art or not be art or can be

art differently according to the regime of identification in which it is apprehended

(saisie). There is first of all a regime in which the statue is exclusively apprehended as

an image of the divinity.23 This regime is ethical because its significance rests on an

identification that presupposes the divine. The second regime (the representative

regime of the arts) no longer concerns judgments about the image as a valid

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identification of a divinity but instead understands art as a function of an imitation

or representation that gives particularity to what is created so that imaginary

existence (the divine) is accompanied by an expressivity that has vraisemblance to

what is known expressivity figured as traits of femininity where the statue of a

goddess is concerned. The third regime, the aesthetic regime of art, is the regime that

distinguishes itself from both the ethical and the representative for Rancie` re.

With this third regime, Rancie` re locates what he views as properly aesthetic, that is,

a work of art that does not depend on an idea or on the norms (here redefined as

canons) of representation. Instead, the aesthetic property is located in a specific

sensorium.24 Rancie` re explains: the property of being something artistic refers not

to a distinction between modes of making (faire), but to a distinction amongst

modes of being. That is what the aesthetic means: the property of being art in the

aesthetic regime of art is no longer given by criteria of technical perfection but by

the assignment to a certain form of sensible apprehension.

25

With thisdetermination of aesthetic, art makes visible what it is rather than what it was or

should be, that is, it becomes free from the role that traditional aesthetics has

assigned to it, it becomes free appearance. Yet, as Rancie` res presentation of last

regime shows, this freeing occurs within a triadic structure that marks a movement

from an identification in which the sensible is first subjugated to the idea, then it

appears in a limited form within art as representation, then, freed from the demand

to imitate, it is left with the appearing of sensible experience as the index of its

significance. While such a determination of the aesthetic clearly marks an

intervention within the history of aesthetics and the regimes by which it distributes

meaning to art, there remains the question of how the sensible experience of the

aesthetic can retain its specificity as art. This question is particularly crucial if the

aesthetic is unable to take on a political significance without either deriving its force

from a mirroring of the intervention that equality makes when the part that has nopart speaks, or, without becoming indistinguishable from politics as in Rancie` res

assertion that politics is aesthetics in principle26 and as in the reversal of politics

and aesthetics that places an indifference at the centre of how Rancie` re links these

two modes of sensible experience.27 In the case of the intervention based on the

claim of equality, the aesthetic must in some way parallel the politics that is

embodied in disagreement. However, it must do so without being derived from a

claim that underpins such disagreement, a claim whose generality, the ability to

speak and become visible in that speaking, is indifferently present as the condition of

being human. In this case, if there is to be a specific link between aesthetics and

politics, the aesthetic must be identified in its difference to politics. If this link were

to be established on the basis of indifference on the principle that politics is

aesthetics then, at the core of Rancie` res account of the politics, there is a

necessary indifference that allows politics to determine whatever it touches or istouched by. The most important issue this indifference raises is not, however, a

critical issue or even a critique of what Rancie` re claims. Rather, the issue is why the

compulsion to submit the aesthetic to politics returns. This recognition of this issue

poses yet another series of questions. What is at stake for politics in the

determination of the aesthetic? Why, when a decision about the meaning of modern

politics is at stake, must the aesthetic be brought to heel, even to the point of

insisting that its most purely aesthetic moment, lart pour lart, does not remain in

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conflict with politics but is itself already politicized?28 And, in the end, why can

politics not let go of the aesthetic?

The very idea of a pure art is an affront to political significance. Here, the aesthetic

emerges as the category against which politics, in its role as what determines the

significance of modern existence, must always test itself. That this test has failed

whenever the aesthetic is claimed to derive meaning from either an idea or as a

representational form has only exacerbated this affront. What then remains for

politics is the task of articulating itself as a possibility that cannot be reduced to or

restricted to indifference or to a state of mere existence, in effect, a condition. The

indifference of equality on which Rancie` re first articulates the significance of politics

as disagreement runs the risk of such a restriction and nowhere more so than when

politics is embodied in an irreconcilable difference that sustains itself through the

most essential example of what it is to be human: the equality of the claim to speak.

The disagreement that arises in the equality of this claim is not only Rancie` rescentral insight into what a community holds in common, but, as such, it is a

determination of politics as what exists in its self-separation from itself. That the

aesthetic is also constituted in this way is evident from how Rancie` re configures the

three regimes of the aesthetic. When the aesthetic becomes free appearance, it does

so by separating out appearance from the ethical and representative regimes. When

this aesthetic attains political significance it is because it institutes a type of time and

a type of space29 as the result of a separation:

What links the practice of art to the question of the common is the

constitution of art, at once material and symbolic, of a certain time-

space, of a suspension in relation to the ordinary forms of sensible

experience. Art is not political in the first place because of the

messages and feelings it transmits onto the order of the world. Nor isart political by the manner in which it represents the structures of

society, the conflicts or identities of social groups. Art is political by

the separation (ecart) it takes in relation to these functions, by the type

of time and the type of space it institutes, by the manner it delimits

(decouper) this time and populates this space [ . . . ] what is proper to art

is this delimitation (decoupage) of material and symbolic space. By this

means, art touches politics.30

As the possibility of disagreement is maintained by the distribution of the sensible,

the possibility of the political significance of the aesthetic is maintained by its

separation from the mediating functions of transmission and representation. As free

appearance, art is given a political function but only to the extent that this role is a

function of what it is not. Such an aesthetic, like disagreement, is a resistance tomodes of determination and representation that appropriate art. In the case of the

aesthetic, Rancie` re thinks this resistance in terms of the creation of a time and space

in which art occurs in the purity of its appearance, free from the task of mediating

another significance but also free to populate that space itself. This appearance is

deemed political precisely because of its difference to those forms through which

another object or issue is represented or transmitted. However, the moment when

this aesthetic becomes linked to politics is the moment when it marks its difference to

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politics. Rancie` re writes, cest par la` que lart touche a` la politique. Toucher a`: to touch,

border on both senses establish a border and that border is the specificity of a

sensible experience in which politics and aesthetics meet.

In an interview from 2000, Rancie` re remarks for me, the political always comes into

play in questions of divisions and boundaries.31 If this remark is taken into

consideration here, it is this touching that is also a separation that institutes politics.

In other words, politics is not just the self-separation of a community within itself,

and the aesthetic is not just the separation of its mode of visibility (appearance) from

itself, it is also the separation of these two modes of separation. This separation that

cannot be reconciled, that is, Rancie` res disagreement, is metapolitical in essence. It

is the moment of a politics that is indifferent even to itself to the extent that what

matters is its capacity to recur as a self-separation delimited by a specific time and

space. It is in such a delimitation, such a cutting or decoupage, that art, the aesthetic,

and politics are in principle the same since the principle at stake in each case is anarrest of what has always been at stake in politics and the aesthetic: an object or an

issue that affirms their existence in time and space. Rancie` re, by affirming their

existence as the arrest of what is at stake in each, has opened the question of the limit

within which both politics and the aesthetic exist. By making each the sensible

experience of that limit, Rancie` re has given the rationale of a history in which

politics is always after aesthetics in the double sense that the word after holds

here. Politics is the pursuit of a separation it can only have come after. To disagree

with Rancie` re is to recognize this double sense, a double sense that his sense of

disagreement has identified as a politics and an aesthetics.

In the end, there is something unseen in this identification. It is not the unseen of a

part that has no part (that is merely the limit of visibility, a part that is invisible in

quotation marks, or to reuse a locution from Kant, partness without part), but theagreement of a separation, the agreement of a politics to separate from itself and

delimit itself as politics in that separation. Only then can politics claim the difference

displaced by its indifference to itself. But, to claim that difference, does it not also

require a disagreement with Rancie` re, a disagreement with his delimitation of a

space and a time as the common frame within which politics and aesthetics agree

with one another? A disagreement with a politics of indifference that can only

reproduce its disagreement? In this case, what name can be given to such a

disagreement? Politics? Aesthetics? Does the problem of such a naming then account

for why Rancie` re claims that the sensible experience through which the aesthetic

regime of art institutes the relation between the forms of identification of art and the

forms of political community is an experience that appears like the seed of a new

humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life? 32 And this call for a new

form of individual and collective life, is this not the most insistent claim of politics tohistorical significance? And, is this not what literature is conceived as at the moment

of its inception as literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century? Not the

conception of literature given by Madame de Stae l in her De la litterature consideree

dans ses rapports avec les institutions socials which Rancie` re reads as the inauguration

of literature as the art of writing.33 Here, writing is figured as the possibility of a

literature no longer determined as a transitive exercise but as an intransitive one in

which the possibility of its future is always in play. The aesthetics inaugurated in the

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name of this literature derives its significance from an appearing without

appearance, without an appearance that arrests and distributes significance

according to the designation of an object or purpose. Is this indifference of literature

with respect to its own future the point at which modern aesthetics necessarily

coincides with a politics that cannot in the end surrender its claim to be indifferently

present, to be the commonality of a history that arrests its promise of emancipation

and progress in the name of a politics that has no part to call its own? And, in the

necessity of such coincidence, which form of visibility is to be placed within

quotation marks? Politics or aesthetics? Which one is condemned to quote the

other, to separate the other from itself in the name of a promise that must always

promise to interrupt itself? Is this a new form of individual and collective life or is

such a new form the promise of a politics that must survive even its disagreement

with itself and does so by appropriating the aesthetic once more? Here, the

significance of Rancie` res engagement with the long history of politics and aesthetics

appears in the form of delimiting a history that is touched irreconcilably with thepolitics of an apparent emancipation. As a result of thisappearance, such history must

always disagree with itself, has already disagreed with itself. Rancie` res account

of politics andaesthetics, is the witness of that disagreement, the witness of that history.

Notes

1 While Schillers intention is entirely positive

the goal of the Aesthetic Education is the construc-

tion of a true political freedom which Schiller

defines as the the most complete of all artworks

the justification of this intention depends, however,

on laws that can only be known negatively. On this

issue in Schiller, see my The Gift of the Political:

Schiller and the Greeks, in Schiller Gedenken Vergessen Lesen, ed. Rudolf Helmstetter, Holt

Meyer, and Daniel Mu ller Nielaba, (Paderborn:

Fink Verlag, 2009).2 Jacque s Rancie` re, Politics of Literature,

SubStance 33:1 (2004), pp. 10-24.3 Jacques Rancie` re, Politics of Literature, p.12.4 Jacques Rancie` re, Politics of Literature, p.13.5 Jacques Rancie` re, Le partage du sensible: esthetique

et politique (Paris: La fabrique, 2000), p.12. This

text is translated under the title The Politics of

Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004).6 Jacques Rancie` re, The Politics of Aesthetics, p.13.7 Onthe policesee Disagreement: Politics andPhilosophy

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1999), pp.21-42.8 Jacques Rancie` re, Disagreement, p.30; translation

modified.9 Jacques Rancie` re, Disagreement, p.30.10 Jacques Rancie` re, Disagreement, p.30; translation

modified.11 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.37.12 Jacques Rancie` re, Disagreement, p.37.13 Jacques Rancie` re, Disagreement, p.58; translation

modified.

14 Jacques Rancie` re, Disagreement, p.58; translation

modified.15 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.31.16 Jacques Rancie` re, Disagreement, p.33; translation

modified.17 Jacques Ranciere, Malaise dans lesthetique (Paris:

Galile e, 2004), pp.38-9. This work will be

subsequently referred to as Malaise. All translationsfrom this work are mine.18 These phrases are used by Benjamin to describe

the fascist appropriation of politics and the

communist response, respectively, in his essay,

The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical

Reproducibility.19 Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.39.20 See Jacques Rancie` re, Disagreement, p.63.21 Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.48.22 Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.43.23 Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.43.24 Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.44.25 Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.44.26 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.58.27

Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.39.28 After speaking of aesthetic autonomy as a form

of sensible experience and after claiming that this

experience appears like the seed of a new

humanity, Rancie` re writes: there is therefore no

conflict between the purity of art and its

politicization. Ranciere, Malaise, p.48.29 Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.37.30 Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.36-7.

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31 Jacques Rancie` re, Literature, Politics, Aes-

thetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement,

SubStance 29:2 (2000), p.4.32 Jacques Rancie` re, Malaise, p.48. As Benjamin

identified in his essay The Work of Art in the Age

of its Technical Reproducibility, the modern

question of the political significance of the aesthetic

is the question of the formation of a collective.33 See Jacques Rancie` re, Politique de la literature

(Paris, Galile e: 2007), p.13.

David Ferris is Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at theUniversity of Colorado at Boulder. His recent work includes essays on Giorgio

Agamben, Friedrich Schiller, Adorno and Modernism, Benjamin and photography,

Vattimo and the postmodern. He is currently working on a book entitled Politics after

Aesthetics.

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politics after aesthetics

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