Jacques Rancire | Comment and Responses | Theory & Event 6:4

Comment and Responses

6:4 | 2003 Jacques Rancire

1.
JR: Different as they are, the comments and criticisms made by
the different commentators I think have one chief point in
common. This common point is time and issues of timeliness or
untimeliness. On the one hand, Kirstie McClure asks the question
whether this consideration about Plato, Aristotle, and the Greek
demos are relevant to the current political situation in the United
States, especially after September 11th and she tried to bridge the
gap with me, that would have been thought as a gap, and also as a
kind of transatlantic gap. On the other side, Michael Dillon also
set time as a key issue. Michael's point is quite different, I would
say attacking from the river side because according to him I make
politics the effect of the atemporal, ahistorical, structural
difference occurring in a kind of sheer chronological time. So I
would miss not so much a reference to the present than the
untimeliness of time itself, time as original difference as
conceptualized by Heidegger and Derrida.

2.
So what about time? And I would first ask the question: In which
time are we exactly? We are living here in the first year of the
third Christian millennium in the most advanced among advanced
countries. Now who is the main character, the main reference
claimed to legitimate both the World Trade Center attacks and the
strikes in Afghanistan? Neither Plato nor Aristotle, somebody
much older than them, God, the God of Moses and Haberon. And
which words did we hear arrayed everywhere during the days and
weeks following the attack? Good and Evil, hate and love. Two
couples of words that don't exactly sound as attuned to the ear of
digitalization and virtual reality that so many thinkers are
proclaiming. Precisely those words remind us that there is no
constraining relation between the rationality of scientific and
technological invention and any kind of rational government. The
current situation shows more than ever that there is no straight

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history leading to rational form of coexistence of rational

governments. You can be the head of a financial network and at
the same time a warrior of God.

3.
Each present is not of present and past, not of temporalities. Each
present may be grasped within a plot of temporality interweaving
and possibly clashing different lines of temporality. And politics
is one of those interweavings of time. The war of the servants of
God against the enemies of God is another. So let me assume that
my research is not irrelevant to the kind of situation we are now
facing. Incommensurable as the evidence maybe and as Aamir
Mufti said, I think that the situation we are facing now and here
has some strong relation with the kind of situations that prompted
me to write about politics. The "Ten Theses" epitomize an
investigation on politics, addressing some issues raised from the
national and international situation of the '80s and '90s. Over that
period, especially in the '80s, a notion turned out to be
increasingly pervasive -- the notion of the end. It was the time of
the end of communism, end of utopias, of ideology, of history,
and sometimes of politics itself. And it was claimed at every
street corner. And on the other end, especially in France maybe,
there was a seemingly opposite claim to a return of politics. I
insist that it was not a mere European or French affair. The end of
history, as is well known, came to France from the United States.
And even the return of politics or the return of "the political"
came to us strangely through reactualization of such thinkers as
Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt who were obvious used, I would
say, to bestow a sense of great philosophical Greek tradition on
American constitutionalism and eventually on values of the
Reagan era.

4.
So I think there is a kind of transatlantic transaction and only not
only a French affair. Note the question was, what is involved in
those seemingly opposite statements of the end and the return of
politic. In fact, it was the same idea. The idea that the old
schemata of politics in terms of conflict, class war, emancipation,
and so on, had collapsed. The notion of consensus that emerged in
that time did not mean only that conservatives and progressives
could make reasonable agreements in the name of common
interests. Not even the idea that economic necessity revealed
vanity of old social and political promises and conflicts.

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Consensus I thought meant much more. Consensus refers to that

which is censored. Experiences are the sensible configuration of
lived common word. Consensus means that whatever your
personal commitments, interests, and values may be, you perceive
the same things, you give them the same name. But there is no
contest on what appears, on what is given in a situation and as a
situation. Consensus means that the only point of contest lies on
what has to be done as a response to the given situation.
Correspondingly, dissensus and disagreement don't only mean
conflict of interests, ideas and so on. They mean that there is a
debate on the sensible givens of a situations, a debate on that
which you see and feel, on how it can be told and discussed, who
is able to name it and argue about it.

5.
So what appeared in a negative way through the investigation of
consensus was that politics is still an aesthetic affair, an aesthetic
conflict. Not at all in the sense of the aestheticization of politics
analyzed by Benjamin, but in the sense that politics in general is
about the configuration of the sensible, about questions such as
what is given, what is terrible about it, who is visible as a speaker
able to utter it. It's about the visibilities of the places and abilities
of the body in those places, about the partition of private and
public spaces, about the very configuration of the visible and the
relation of the visible to what can be said about it. All that is what
I call the partition of the sensible.

6.
If this makes sense it means that consensus is not rationalized
politics. It is much more. It is the dismissal of politics as a
polemical configuration of the common world. That was the first
element of the situation that prompted me to write about politics.
Now comes the second element. Just the same time as the ideas
and practices of consensus go up, especially in France, at the
same time in France and some other European countries grew up
something very different, new manifestations of racism and
xenophobia. And that's what's strange of course, because
supposedly, consensus was a good way of appeasing archaic
conflicts by appeasing politics itself. Now what appeared was
exactly the opposite, a much more archaic and radical form of
conflict, and of conflict about the sensible, about what could be
sensed. Arguing on the physical evidence that some ethnic groups
were visibly too numerous, visibly too different to be integrated,

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that they could not be tolerated anymore and had to be sent back
to their countries. The standout consensual explanation was that
those phenomena of hate and rejection where the fact of
economically backward groups of the population that were the
victims of economic modernization. My own account turned to
exactly the opposite.

7.
The new outbursts of racial hate did not rest on sociological and
economical backwardness, it had to be explained in political
terms. It did not happen in spite of consensus but perhaps because
of consensus, because the consensual view of the community
wants it to be comprised only of real groups. It dismisses the
archaic and parasitic subjects of old political conflicts. It swipes
aside the old essential symbolization of alterity in terms of class
conflict. Now that old dissensual symbolization, for instance, that
the migrant worker had a double identity -- as an immigrant
worker coming from outside the country but also as a worker
taken into the dissensual count of the community. That which
remained of that in the time of consensus was sheer identity of the
immigrant as the one in excess and the sheer hate of the other as
response. So the supposed appeasement turned to the contrary, it
brought about a reversal to a more archaic mode of framing
alterity and conflict. The conflation of time was also the
conflation of different ways of framing alterity. That made
politics appear as a specific practice whose principle precisely is
problematizing the count of the subjects and the objects given in a
community. Separating the community from the simple addition
of its parts and identities, bringing about a double count -- a count
of the uncounted.

8.
So my conclusion was that the practice of dissensuality and
miscount was that which truly deserved the name, "politics." Let
me be clear on this point. I don't purport to clear up the stage of
what is usually called "the political." I don't brush aside power or
government institutions. I only said that you may have always --
and possibly be very happy, always -- without having politics. I
only said that politics is something else, a specific practice of
configuring the common world -- the polemical world -- of
framing identity and alterity. By counting subjects that are not
identitic groups, not empirical parts of the society, that counting
common objects that are, first of all, objects of mitigation, the

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coincidence between the rise of consensus and the rise of new

ethnic conflicts make it appear -- by making politics vanish, make
it appear -- what it first meant when it was present, the miscount
or double count of the community which sometimes exists as an
exception to the exercise of power, management, or governance.
These exceptions, of course, may disappear and the question may
arise; maybe it is not necessary, maybe the good management of
collective interest is all that you can reasonably expect in our
societies.

9.
Now the situation appeared as more complex, because it may
appear that the lack of politics, some overt forms of counting the
community, of framing identity and alterity come to the fore, such
as ethnicity and religion. And that which could have appeared as a
kind of French eccentricity increasingly appeared, in the
following years, as a configuration of the present -- the opposition
of two worlds, the consensual, cosmopolitan world of the
management of the interests of wealth and of wealthy nations, on
one side, and on the other, the world of ethnicity and
fundamentalism. So that politics become more and more, during
the last years of the previous century, a vanishing secret of
something else, something more that could make the break
between the power of wealth and the power of birth and religion.
This is the first point about time and timeliness or untimeliness.

10.
The second point is, "why use such old philosophers and notions
such as Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and the Greek demos to address
the issues of our time?" Let me first make this clear. I am not a
political philosopher. My interest in political philosophy is not an
interest in questions of foundations of politics. Investigating
political philosophy, for me, was investigating precisely into what
political philosophy looked at and pointed at as the problem or the
obstacle for policy and for a political philosophy, because I got
the idea that what each found in their way of foundation might
well be politics itself, might be something else or something more
that disrupts the right order of policy. That is why I would rather
focus on ancient philosophy, because I think that modern political
philosophy tries to avoid the edge. It asks, "how can individuals
gather in a community, how can their interests match together,
how can the law of the common rule over the multiplicity of wild
drives or egoistic interests?" Ancient philosophy, on the contrary,

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I think, bumps into the edge. There should be a good, there should
be a good, straight way from the essence of the common to the
distribution of power. Now, there is something standing in the
way, and that "thing standing in the way" is not the disorder of
instincts or interests, it is an already-existing order of disorder or
disorder of order, which is called "democracy." And democracy,
in that context, meant two things.

11.
First, it meant the unavoidability of conflict, the war of the poor
against the rich. If one has explained the concept, the principle,
and the forms of good government, he has to add that,
unfortunately, it cannot go that way because, in each city, there
are rich and poor. And so the forms of good, peaceful government
are, in fact, a form of that war. That is the first thing that
democracy meant. Secondly, it means that the government of the
poor doesn't mean, I argue, the government of the lower class; it
means the government of those who are nothing -- the
government of those who have no title, no qualification for ruling.
There are a number of powers, based on birth, knowledge, virtue,
wealth, and there is the last form, the government based on
nothing, nothing but the lack of basis, the lack of an entitlement
or qualification for ruling. This means, properly, anarchy -- the
absence of any arche, meaning any principle leading from the
essence of the common to the forms of the community. This is
why -- and this was the scandal of democracy. But my argument
was that the scandal of democracy was nothing but the scandal of
politics itself -- that democracy is not in that sense a political
regime but is a regime of politics, because it is a sheer disruption
of the logic of qualification, making the exercise of power the
consequence of the arche of power. Political philosophy initially
faced this edge.

12.
There is a necessary twist in the deduction from the essence of
community to the forms of government, an initial splitting of what
community means, an initial doubling of social groups by the
count of those who do not count, who have no title to be counted.
It came upon politics as this oddity that disrupts its logic in
advance, meaning, properly, a disruption of legitimacy.
Democracy came before political philosophy, came in advance as
an exception to the ordinary order of things. The normal order of
things is that society is ruled by those who have the qualifications

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for ruling -- these qualifications, in turn, being proved by the very

fact that they are ruling. And democracy itself comes after, as a
disruption in the normal evolution leading from the archaic
government of birth to the modern government of wealth. This
means that there is no origin of politics. There is but an initial
doubling of time and disruption.

13.
I would stress here, as a response to Michael Dillon's comments,
that I don't construct an ontology of structural difference. When I
introduce the notion of the count of the uncounted, this notion
should not be understood as meaning the social category of poor
wretched people, homeless and so on, but it should be understood,
rather, in a structural meaning as designating a supplement to any
count of individuals, groups, and identities. I did not, for that,
intend to ground politics in an originary structure, an originary
ontological difference. The count of the uncounted doesn't mean
that the parties of the society cannot add up to a total sum,
because they do add up. What I call "polis" is this addition -- the
identification of the political community with the sum of the
components of the population. The count of the uncounted means
that there is an overcount, a polemical count separating the whole
from the sum of its parts. So I do not refer to politics as an
original and structural void in metalinguistic fashion. I said that
the demos of democracy is an empty part. It is empty, first, in
terms of census, of an enumeration of parts. And it is empty,
second, because it is the part of those who are nothing. But what
matters to me is not the void, it is the distinction between two
counts. So I tackle the issue of void in a polemical manner,
against the interpretation of democracy in psychoanalytical terms,
as the void provoked by the symbolic disembodiment of the king's
double body, in the interpretation of Claude Lefort. I did it
because I thought that interpretation restored the political
miscount to a meta-anthropology of ritual sacrifice and, in
consequence, it bound democracy up with terror and
totalitarianism as attempts to recreate a decentered political body.
What I tried to do was de-dramatize this matter of miscount.

14.
That also means de-ontologizing it, not restoring the miscount to
an originary difference, but dismissing the very issue of origin. In
the same way, I did not set up equality as a structural principle.
Equality, as I put it, is much more a de-structuring principle,

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restoring the contingency of domination to a prior contingency. If

you are to carry out the command of your master, you first have to
understand it. And for that, you have to be his equal. But that
doesn't suffice to make equality a structural operator. It is much
more a vanishing condition, because understanding a command,
in turn, implies understanding that you have to obey, as well. For
more to happen, equality has to take on the form of a wrong, of a
miscount, about what the command is, what it is speaking about,
what saying, understanding, and carrying out commands are. It
has to take the form of a dissensus on the givens of a situation and
on the part of the community involved in the situation.

15.
Equality has to be involved in operations of subjectivization, in
construction of scenes of enunciation and manifestation in which
uncounted objects are handled and signed objects are handled by
uncounted subjects, and put as objects of common dispute. It
sometime happens, but there is no necessity that it does, at any
time. So equality is a condition of political practice, but it is a
condition that political practice has instituted, as such, by
constructing cases of dissensus, by backward, afterward, effect.
This would be my answer to what appears in the comments as
suspicion of ahistoricity, the detour from Plato and Aristotle to
demos was part of an investigation aimed at spelling out, I would
say in its kernal form, the political dissensus. But what interests
me, basically, is investigating the modern forms of political
subjectivization.

16.
There is a history of politics, a history of the forms of dissensus,
of modes of subjectivization. I use the Greek demos to emphasize
the basic structure of the practice of politics, but the Greek demos
is certainly not the paradigm of political practice. It was taken, in
fact, out of the given -- the count of the uncounted was
immediately linked to a given collectivity, but did not give much
room for subjective invention of the same and the other. Modern
politics, on the contrary, was made of a multiplicity of the forms
of subjectivization, because the community immediately appears
as a litigious given. And it is the sense of the discussion about
inscription of equality, mentioned by Kirstie McClure; equality
and freedom were inscribed in modern constitutions, but, in a
strange way, even then they made clear that not all people were
equally equal and free, or they covered over the difference, but in

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both cases they open onto a wide process of dissensus, claiming

for the inclusion of the excluded, or witnessing to the exclusion of
the included, playing on all the forms of count and miscount
entailed by the very inscription of free and equal citizenship. That
meant constructing cases of manifestation of the effective
exclusion of the supposedly included, but also including the
excluded in the very demonstration of exclusion.

17.
My first research dealt with this double relation of inclusion and
exclusion in the struggles of the 19th century where new subjects
such as proletarians or women constructed the stage of their
inclusion by setting up the gap between their supposed inclusion
and their real exclusion. I said that the "Ten Theses" dealt with
contemporary political issues. They were also in the wake of that
research on the so-called workers' movement in France in the 19th
century. When I wrote the book, La Nuit des Proltaires (which
was translated as The Nights of Labor, but would have been better
translated as "the night of the proletarians") I did it precisely to
contrast the old schema of class identity to a new view of
subjectivization, of social emancipation viewed as the constitution
of an aesthetic dissensus, a break away from the circle of sensitive
experience in which the social identity of working class people
was enclosed. So I named it to stress that the key issue in that
aesthetic revolution was the issue of time, because Plato had said
that the artisans had no time to do anything else than their job.
That was a definition, not a description. The worker is he or she
who has no time to do anything else. As a consequence, the goal
of social emancipation, first, was invalidating the order of time,
the very relation of day and night, of work and rest, labor and
leisure.

18.
When I first met time in my research, in was under this form: time
as a principle of the partition of the perceptible, framing in
advance a common word, "exclusion" -- making evident the
exclusion -- and, at the same time, time reframed in a process of
subjectivization. They decided to break from the circle, decided
that they did not have time, but they had the possibility of the
impossibility. That subjectivization was the first step, the
condition of the reconfiguration of the partition between public
spaces and private spaces, the construction of all those signs of
dissensus.

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19.
In that way, the subjectivization of time, as a matter of possibility
and impossibility, exclusion and inclusion, could meet the issue of
political time as noetic temporality, framing a specific temporality
by interweaving different lines of temporality. For instance, in the
19th century, interweaving with the temporality of work and
labor, the temporality of the revolutionary inscription of equality,
which at the same time, opened the time of promise and a time of
re-memoration, or the temporality of the aesthetic sensus
communis, promising a new kind of equality, dismissing the old
participation of activity and partitions of activity and passivity
inscribed in the very constitution of the perceptible. So politics for
me is not at all the eternity of a structural difference. It's a broken
history of forms of subjectivization, a time of promises,
memories, reputations, anticipations, and so on.

20.
If I focused on argumentation and disagreement, I did it in
polemical fashion, aiming at challenging the Habermasian schema
of communicative action on communicative reality, and more
widely, in a kind of account of political debates in terms of
accomplishment of a natural destination of human language. I
made the point, against Habermas, that no telos of agreement is
involved in the uttering and understanding of statements, because
political dissensus is not the accomplishment of linguistic
capacity. It is, first of all, the framing of the stage on which the
argument may be heard as an argument, the objects of the
argument as visible common objects, the speaker himself or
herself as a visible speaking being, and so on. And so, what was
political was not so much the sequence of proposition and
exegesis of argument as the conflation of two worlds -- the world
where some subjects and objects were invisible and the world
where they were visible. Clearly, my way of stating political
disagreement was aimed at addressing both a certain idea of
consensus and a certain idea of dissensus. On the one hand, it was
addressing the idea of communicative action and rationality
sustaining the practice of consensus. On the other hand, it
addressed a certain idea of dissensus: dissensus as differance, as
the inescapable heterogeneity of language games and regimes of
sentences. But this also meant that I addressed two ideologies of
modernity: on the one hand, the idea of modernity as the rational
project still to be achieved by putting into place a power of reason
and argument. But on the second hand, there was also the idea of

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modernity as the great disaster of totalitarian reason, compelling

us to acknowledge radical otherness as the first and last principle
of life in common and, ultimately, to bow down in front of the
unrepresentable, unredeemable, unforgivable, and so on. When I
emphasize the discontinuity of politics, when I refer to the ways
of 19th century artisans in the actuality of our problems, I wanted
precisely to put the time of politics apart from the archaeologies
of history, including the counter-teleologies, from all signs of
modernity and postmodernity, equating the history of modern
politics to the development of principles supposedly inherent in
modernity as an epoch.

21.
Michael Dillon opposes me to the Heideggerian time as difference
and the very end of the construction of metaphysic. But for me,
those notions are part of those scenarios of modernity that I think
obscure the specificity of politics and of its temporality by
restoring them to a kind of original, ontological dissensuality.
What kind of politics can be grounded in this ontological
dissensuality? In the case of Heidegger, clearly there are two
answers: first, the agonistic politics of foundation as stated in the
analysis of Antigone in the Introduction to Metaphysics, which
probably sustain Heidegger's commitment to National Socialism.
Second, there is the claim that only God can save us. We knew
what the work of the founders was, and as for God and salvation,
we are still enjoying them. So I think that from ontological
discourse, from the time out of joint, no politics come. What
comes to the fore is something else; it's ethics, ethics posed as the
absolutization of dissensus, restoring matters of political litigation
to immemorial issues of death and sacrifice, God's mourning,
repentance, forgiveness, and so on.

22.
Timeliness and untimeliness are certainly key issues in the
reassessment of the political question. But, precisely, both are
highly controversial matters. We are often asked, "how do you
address the issues of the present time?" The problem is, very
often, that what we are asked to do is something different,
endorsing a whole teleology of modernity, sustaining the
question, "how do you think politics, in the time of world wide
networks, in the time when everything, every individuality, has
been digitalized and virtualized?" or "how do you think it after the
collapse, after Auschwitz, after the end of metaphysics, and so

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on?" I think that all these questions offer responses in advance.

They force us to endorse plots of modernity that eventually
restore it to the old plots of progress and decadence. On the one
hand, for instance, a plot that we can find in the book Empire by
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, of life, life overcoming all the
old dead forms that stay in the way for a while. It's a great epic of
the new technologies and networks, erasing all the boundaries and
making everything become fluid, hybrid, and nomadic.
Technological progress and capitalists' overall domination lead to
the break of the overwhelming, overcoming, overflow of life-
production, generation, and desire. And, on the other hand, there
is the plot of decadence, of the after-time when historical
promises have collapsed, and the meditation on disaster and
slaughter became the central concern.

23.
The first thing to do in response to those issues of the present, I
think, is to escape from those plots of progress and decadence. It
is certainly true that we are in a time of a lack of politics, of a
certain withdrawal of politics. Certainly we can list the
components the situation, the increasing number of states and
communities ruled by ethnic or religious law. The so-called
democratic states are extending their powers to the very extent
that they make themselves seemingly powerless -- obedient to a
global necessity and to an invisible power whose center is
nowhere. That means leaving less and less room for the
contestation, by the very fact of this apparent vanishing. And
there is the fragmentation of political struggle in separated space,
distributed by the New World Order, movements of protest
addressing international organization and protesting against the
meeting of representatives of the power of wealth. Such and such
workers try putting into questions or consensual evidence of the
invisible urging to destroy jobs or systems of social protections.

24.
Michael Dillon: I wanted to speak for Jacques in response to the
question about rhetoric, as it were, or at least speak in a voice that
is, in itself, so influenced by reading his work. So, specifically in
response to the question of rhetoric, I'd say that rhetoric is the
suasive language of faction. That's not the language of political
vocabulary of the conservative. Now, I can't speak for the
conservative in the United States, but I could speak for the
conservative in the UK. There, the language of speaking for

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everybody is to speak for a community that is said, putatively, to

add up. And all Brits speak with a British accent, eat roast beef,
drink warm beer, and play lousy cricket, adding on the
Thatcherite or indeed Blairite third way. Whereas, as I understand
it, the political language that Jacques is talking about, is
recounting the account of the uncounted, the account of
everybody who does not add up, and keeping open that space. So,
that's how I would, myself, differentiate those positions.

25.
Janet Bergstrom: I'm wondering if you'd be willing to say more
about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and if you
see this relationship having taken you toward the cinema?

26.
JR: It will be difficult to answer on the question of the cinema,
because what I did in the cinema has no strong relation to the
question of aesthetics and politics. Basically, what I can answer
on the question of aesthetics and politics in general, is that, first, I
try not to put forward what I call the "aesthetic dimensions of
politics," the fact that politics is about what we see and can see,
about whom we see and don't see as being common subjects,
sharing in a common world and speaking about common objects.
Politics is, first of all, a question about the visible, about the
audible, and so on -- about what I called the partition of the
sensible. I tried to oppose politics and polis as two partitions of
the sensible, a partition of the sensible where there is no extra
account, where there are only the groups, identities, places,
functions, and so on, and where what has to be seen is supposed
to be visible. I put politics as this partition of the perceptible,
where there is this debate on what is given, what is visible, what
is perceptible, audible, and so on-this way of putting two worlds
into one world. Of course, this means that there is a relationship
of that with what is called "aesthetics," aesthetics in the ordinary
sense of the word.

27.
There is a whole part of my investigation that was not possible to
present, but it is my current work, precisely. We have the same
objective, of de-dramatization, as I try to help construct a de-
dramatized history of modern politics. I try to de-dramatize the
history of modern aesthetics and modern art and so on. That is the
basic point. What is at the core of what people call modernity

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(and I don't like, and try to explain why I don't like the term,
"modernity") is precisely the birth of aesthetics--aesthetics as a
specific regime of visibility of works of art, but also aesthetics of
a certain kind of configuration, of the common world. There is, I
think, a "too easy" presentation of that in the Habermasian idea of
public life, the salons and so on. So aesthetics is being blamed for
a kind of public life, and of course it was vulgarized and
summarized in French authors like Ferry and others. I think we
have to investigate more deeply. Aesthetics was born precisely as
a new regime of visibility of works of art, but [also] as a new
regime of the sensible itself. The question about sensus communis
or Schiller's aesthetic education implies precisely that aesthetics
configurates a partition of the perceptible. That would mean a
new configuration of the common world. I especially think of
what is entailed in Schiller's aesthetic education of man. Where
precisely is the determination of the beautiful as a common
suspension of the law of understanding and the drive of sensibility
is translated in political terms, so that aestheticity as a double
suspension of the power of understanding and t he power of
sensibility, as a kind of sensible equality, becomes a kind of new
configuration of the common world, a configuration that
suspends, that destructs, the ordinary relation of activity to
passivity, power and resistance and so on.

28.
One of the great issues of modern politics is that of aesthetics,
aesthetics as claiming a new idea of the common world, and
aesthetics, eventually, proposing a kind of meta-politics. Indeed,
that is what happens in all proposals for aesthetic revolution, for
instance, in German idealism, where aesthetics becomes a
substitute, to do what the political revolution could not perform.
We are still in the wake of that history. It is also the reason why,
very strangely (not in the United States; I agree that things are
different on the opposite sides of the Atlantic), in Europe, the
whole discourse on the end of politics, of politics, utopianism,
communism, was exactly repeated as a discourse of the crisis of
art. There was the idea that there was, somewhere, a kind of
promise, a link to a new configuration of the sensible world, that
politics and art thrived on that promise, and that it must now be
exterminated.

Jacques Rancire is professor of aesthetics at the

University of Paris VIII (St.-Denis). He is the author of

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Jacques Rancire | Comment and Responses | Theory & Event 6:4

numerous books including: Dis-agreement: Politics and

Philosophy (1998), On the Shores of Politics (1995),
and The Names of History (1994).

Copyright 2003, Jacques Rancire and The Johns Hopkins

University Press

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