Jacques Ranciere' s Aesthetic

Communities

1. The 'Return' to the Aesthetic

We are, again, witnessing a 'return' to the question of the aesthetic. By

this, of course, I don't mean that criticism has returned to concerning
itself with making distinctions between good and bad art. Few of
us within literary studies, barring notable exceptions such as Harold
Bloom, have rediscovered a Leavisite urge to classity artistic production
in order to identity those items worthy of inclusion in the tradition,
great or otherwise. Rather, what has been increasingly apparent is a
movement (back) towards the philosophical question of aesthetics.1
Such a movement is, of course, more or less explicitly a re­
engagement with the legacy of German idealist and romantic thought.
As such, it presents an invigoration of the European philosophical
tradition in which the definitions, forms and functions of art are
again open to widespread critical debate both within and beyond
(,Continental' or 'Modern European') philosophy as a discipline.
Such debate has more decisive importance than might at first appear
from this peremptory sketch of a critical fashionability, however. Its
significance may be read, as Jay Bernstein and others have done, as
the crucial dimension of the Kantian Critical project to elaborate the
underlying unity of reason through analyses of pure reason, morality
and aesthetic judgement.2 Such a characterization of this 'return' as an
extension of the Kantian project is eminently plausible, since it offers
a reading of modern European philosophy that finds its pre-echo in
one of the central texts of the idealist tradition. As has by now become
well-known, the trace of the full stakes of this debate about the place
of the aesthetic may be found in the so-called 'Oldest Programme
for a System of Gernlan Idealism', which states unequivocally: 'I am
now convinced that the highest act of reason, by encompassing all
ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are only siblings in
beauty,.3 I cite this text not only because of its encapsulation of the
spirit of the early idealism, but also because it focuses on the relation
between nature, freedom and beauty. 4 As such, it is both an extension
of the Kantian project and bears the marks of Schiller's response to
78 Paragraph
Kant. In both the Kantian and Schillerian versions, the aesthetic takes
on a crucial role as an exemplar of judgement per se, operating as
the desired articulation between pure and practical reason, that is,
between modalities of the rational itself and their determinations of
the realm of moral decision and decisive action.
Just as in the German thought from which it derives, in contem­
porary discussions the aesthetic has again taken on a systemic place
in philosophy's attempts to identify (with) itself Peter Osborne has
even suggested that it is this relation to the question of the aesthetic
that marks out the specific project of Continental philosophy, and
that the modern European philosophical tradition - defined here
in opposition to Quine's 'Anglo-American' or 'Analytical' sense of
philosophy as seeing the world 'from a logical point of view' - sees
the world precisely 'from an aesthetic point of view'.5 Let us merely
note in passing the complication that lies within this phrase - from an
aesthetic point of view - that would be introduced by a recognition
of 'point of view' as precisely a matter of aisthesis. An 'aesthetic point
of view' would thus be readable as containing the two modalities of
'aesthetics', on the one hand, that of the thought of art, and on the
other, that which designates the broader field of perception.
This context is invoked in order to help us orient what remains
particular to Jacques Ranciere's project. What the sketch that I have
just provided might seem to imply, of course, is that art has simply been
re-colonized by philosophy, taken again as one (and only one) of its
objects, but the systemic role of the aesthetic is what guards against such
an incorporation. Since Kant's elaboration of the aesthetic, then, art
has remained a foreign body to philosophy, never simply absorbed into
or under conceptual determination.6 Aesthetics is not, consequently,
one realm of philosophy among others. In part this is because art has
always been the point at which philosophy is forced to open itself out
to and into a world that it cannot dominate. And, in part, this is where
philosophy meets the political, and not in terms that are too easily
thought of as 'political philosophy' J In such an encounter between
art, politics and philosophy, there is ample evidence for the need to
exercise caution. Addressing the relations involved in this encounter,
Ranciere proposes at the conclusion of an article entitled 'What
aesthetics can mean' that: 'Aesthetics is not the fateful capture of art
by philosophy. It is not the catastrophic overflow of art into politics.
It is the originary knot that ties a sense of art to an idea of thought and
an idea of the community.'8 This article is an attempt to understand
what aesthetics (in the work of Jacques Ranciere) can mean.
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 79

II. The Fatiful Capture (Aesthetics and Philosophy)

Ranciere has given us a distinct version of this re-reading of the
Kantian legacy. In L'inconscient esthhique ( The Aesthetic Unconscious),
for example, he tells us that the aesthetic is understood in the Critique
ofJudgement not as 'theory' but as an 'adjective', that it designates a
type of judgement and not a domain of objects. He further proposes
that 'the "aesthetic" is not a new name to designate the domain of
"art". It is a specific configuration of this domain. It is not the new
rubric under which is lined up that which previously came under
[relevait9] the general concept of the poetic. It marks a transformation
of the regime of thought about art. And this new regime is the place
lO
where a specific idea of thought constitutes itself. It is only through
the post-Kantian writings of Schelling, the Schlegels and of Hegel that
the aesthetic comes to take on its restricted sense as thought about art,
but not without, as Ranciere wryly notes, an insistent declaration of
the inappropriateness of the term (IE, 13).
At the opening of his essay 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its
Outcomes', Ranciere cites a statement from the Fifteenth Letter of
Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education if Man. Schiller states that man
'is only fully a human being when he plays' and Ranciere offers
the following gloss: 'We could refomlUlate this thought as follows:
there exists a specific sensory experience - the aesthetic - that holds
the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for indi­
viduals and the community'. 1 1 The aesthetic - here clearly thinking
in broad temlS of aisthesis rather than in the narrower sense of
the perception and judgement of works of art - is the articulation
between art, the individual and the community. The nature of this
promise becomes clearer if we look again at the relevant passage
of Schiller:

For, to mince matters no longer, man only plays when he is in the fullest sense
[Bedeutung] of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when
he plays. This proposition, which at the moment may sound like a paradox, will
take on both weight and depth of meaning [Bedeutung] once we have got as far as
applying it to the two-fold [doppelten] earnestness of duty and of destiny. It will,
I promise you [ich verspreche es Ihnen],prove capable of bearing the whole edifice
of the art of the beautiful [der asthetischen Kunst],and of the still more difficult art
of living [Lebenskunst]. 12

Only in philosophy, says Schiller, does this account of the relation

between life and beauty sound unexpected; in Greek art and feeling
such a relation was perfectly common, both alive and operative.
80 Paragraph
Schiller here places himself in the line of romantic thought that has
been called 'the German dream of Greece', in which these two arts,
asthetischen Kunst and Lebenskunst, come togetherY Where Ranciere
locates the promise within a 'specific sensory experience' that is called
the aesthetic, we can see from the passage from Schiller that it is
the author who makes the promise -ich verspreche es Ihnen-rather
than (the experience of) the aesthetic itself This is not to suggest that
Ranciere is mistaken in his location of the promise, rather that what
his commentary reveals is that Schiller's promise is a two-fold one. In
other words, Schiller promises that the aesthetic holds this promise.
A possible reading opens up here that would link this promise, the
promise of the aesthetic, with the other promises that characterize a
certain vision of the nineteenth century. For it should already be clear
from the passage from Schiller that the aesthetic is, from the outset,
bound up with a notion of the political. This is a binding that is
the burden of philosophy since Kant, but as readers of Ranciere are
frequently reminded, this was ever so. In such a bind, the relation of
the beautiful to the art of living figures the promised communities, the
promised utopias, that Ranciere discusses in On the Shores oj Politics. 1 4
Schiller's promise is thus a modality of the 'dream of the people'
(OSP, 5), it is an aspect of a relation to time that links the present
moment of a speech act-its 'context' of enunciation in Austin's
terms-to an idea of the future and to the idea of another place.1 5
This may be a utopic idea, an idea that can only be recognized in its
perfection simultaneously with a recognition of its non-presence (as
a no-place or nunquam, as Thomas More describes it).16 We should
be cautious, however, since Ranciere warns in The Flesh if Words
that he works with a very specific sense of the spatial dimension of
utopianism: 'Utopia for me is not the place that exists nowhere, but
the ability of overlapping between a discursive space and a territorial
space; the identification of a perceptual space that one discovers
while walking with the tapas of the community. '1 7 To the extent
that this must always be a perceptual space, it is already in relation
to aisthesis.

(A parenthetical promise. One path that opens up here, but that for
reasons of space will not be taken in this article, would allow us to
trace the figure of the double and its cognates in Ranciere's work.

• Beginning perhaps with the texts collected under the title 'Le
Proh�taire et son double' ('The Proletarian and his double'), recently
reprinted as section 1 of Les Scenes du peuple.
18
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 81

• We would have to take into account Ranciere's sense of the

duplicity of political philosophy (OSP, 12).
• This path would also lead us to an encounter with Ranciere's
habit of 'doubling' titles by allusion, including examples such as:
i) the echo of Artaud's Le Theatre et son double ( The Theatre and Its
Double) in the title above; ii) of Derrida's 'De l'economie restreinte
a l'economie generale' ('From Restricted to General Economy:
A Hegelianism without Reserve') in naming the first part of La
Parole muette (Silent Speech) 'De la poetique restreinte a la poetique
generalisee' ('From Restricted to General Poetics'); 19 and iii) of
Freud and Leclaire in the essay 'Un enfant se tue'.20
• It would take us through Ranciere's stylistic doubling in which, as
more than one reader has noted, it is not always possible to separate
paraphrase from 'commentary'. While all commentary seeks to
offer a double of the text of which it speaks, Ranciere's texts offer
especially striking models of such practice.21
• Any approach to this matter of doubling would also have to proceed
from an awareness of the extent to which Ranciere re-reads himself,
often highly critically, as for example in 'Un enfant se tue' or 'How
to Use Lire Ie Capital'. 22
• It would also be necessary to think a little more carefully about
the role that Ranciere assigns to mimesis. From a return to Schiller
and doubling-as a way oflinking the mimetic imperative and the
role of art-we might proceed to a consideration of the politics
of mimesis, offering as a comparative context the work of Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, Rene Girard and Jacques Derrida.23
• Finally, here at least, the double or two-fold is a crucial figure in
both Disagreement and On the Shores if Politics.

This parenthetical note should end by doubling my own promise to

pursue this at a later date. And so it does.)

In responding to Schiller's double promise, Ranciere proposes that this

bringing together of the arts of life and beauty could be read negatively
as indicative of an 'aesthetic illusion' masking the class deternunation
of aesthetic judgement, and thus as a form of ideological mystifi­
cation itself doubled in and as an overly abstract and universalizing
philosophy.24 But, he goes on to suggest, it is more fruitful to pursue
the truth-content of the statement about the link between being
human and playing, and further to pursue the truth-content of this
promise concerning aesthetic experience. It is possible, says Ranciere,
that rather than adopting a view which would lead to the voiding and
82 Paragraph
avoiding of this supposed mystification, we should recognize that 'the
statement and the promise were only too true, and that we have ex­
perienced the reality of that "art of living" and of that "play", as much
in totalitarian attempts at making the community into a work of art as
in the everyday aestheticized life of a liberal society and its commercial
entertainment'. He continues: 'The point is that neither the statement
nor the promise were ineffectual. At stake here is not the "influence"
of a thinker, but the efficacy of a plot-one that reframes the division
of the forms of our experience'. (AR, 133) The promise, read in terms
of its effect, is thus seen as performative, in the terms made familiar br
speech act theory, and what it performs is both a 'plot' and a division.2
Experience itself-in ternlS which extend far beyond the subject­
centred 'influence' of a Schiller-is at stake in the division that
Ranciere invokes. The spectre of the community as a work of art,
of the aestheticization of politics, offers an immediate warning of
the import of the relation between aesthetics and politics.2 6 Yet, as
Ranciere remarks, this should not be thought of too quickly in terms
of Walter Benjamin's warnings on the aestheticization of politics, but
instead in terms of politics as a confi uration of perception, or of the
B
sensible, of what it is possible to see.2 Elsewhere, Ranciere has called
this division the 'partage du sensible', the sharing and sharing out of
the 'sensible' or perceptible.28 This is not just a matter of recognition,
but of what it is possible to recognize. This takes on an explicitly
political dimension in Ranciere's thought around the question of the
'count', of what is taken into account, and thus of the identification
of those who may play a part, participate or 'part-take' in politics:

Ways of counting, of counting oneself, of getting oneself to count. Ways of

defining interests that cannot be reduced even to the simple calculation of
pleasure versus pain; forms of profit that are also ways of being together (of
resembling one another or being distinct from one another) and of defining
those gaps which Hannah Arendt
. saw as the very principle of political inter esse.
( OSP, 64)29

Central to this partage is the division of what Ranciere calls regimes of

art.30 In a footnote to 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes',
he gives a summary of his thinking on three distinct regimes of art
which I hope, for the sake of brevity, you will forgive me for citing
at length:

In the ethical regime, works of art have no autonomy. They are viewed as images
to be questioned for their truth and for their effect on the ethos of individuals
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 83

and the community. Plato's Republic offers a perfect model of this regime. In the
representational regime, works of art belong to the sphere of imitation, and so
are no longer subject to the laws of truth or the common rules of utility. They
are not so much copies of reality as ways of imposing a fom1 on matter. As such,
they are subject to a set of intrinsic norms: a hierarchy of genres, adequation of
expression to subject matter, correspondence between the arts, etc. The aesthetic
regime overthrows this normativity and the relationship between form and matter
on which it is based. Works of art are now defined as such, by belonging to a
specific sensorium that stands out as an exception from the nonnal regime of the
sensible, which presents us with an immediate adequation of thought and sensible
materiality. (AR, 135, note 1)

There are then, three distinct regimes: the ethical, the representational
and the aesthetic. Each of these regimes offers a privilege not so
much to a type of art as to a mode of relating to art, which is to
say, to a different articulation of the rational and the moral through
the aesthetic.
This notion of the regime, and of its determining role in the history
of philosophy's encounter with the aesthetic, is central to Ranciere's
recent work. In a discussion of Alain Badiou's 'inaesthetic', he returns
to this division of aesthetic history, and the essay begins by adding
a little flesh to the skeletal account reproduced above. Ranciere
proposes that the first regime of philosophy's encounter with art may
be associated with Plato (as he indicates in the passage cited above), but
not if we think of the Platonic attitude to art expressed in the Republic
in terms of a subordination of art to politics. As Ranciere comments: 'In
this order of things the notion of art as we understand it is nowhere to
be found. ( . ) For as a matter of fact Plato does not subordinate art
. .

to anything. More radically still, he knows nothing of art'. 31 Truth and

art are radically separated since in the Platonic dichotomy of truth and
simulacrum (as 'mere' appearance) there is no space between truth and
simulacrum in which art might exist. Art is judged by its impact upon
the ethical dimension of the community and the individuals within it,
not for any inherent relationship to truth. It is this ethical imperative
that leads to the elevation of rhetoric over poetics, although even
this requires some negotiation of the problem that the orator needs
only to be persuasive, without necessarily making the oration true.
For this reason, among others, Plato is famously suspicious and even
contemptuous of democracy. As Ranciere glosses it: 'The people are
the mere appearance produced by the sensations of pleasure and pain
manipulated by rhetoricians and sophists to stroke or intimidate the
great animal, the morass of folk who have nothing, gathered together
84 Paragraph
at the assembly.' (D, 10) And so Ranciere again stresses sensation, and
thus an implicit sensorium, in this case made apparent through the
aisthesis of pleasure and pain.32
In this invocation of pleasure and pain, Ranciere echoes a famous
passage in Kant, in which the double-edged experience of sensation
is related to aesthetic value. In §53 of the Critique ifJudgement, Kant
attempts to distinguish between the arts, claiming the highest place for
poetry (a philosophical gesture common to Heidegger and others), in
part because of its undisguised relationship to play, and thus to pleasure.
This emphasis on play lies behind the section of Schiller that we have
already seen. Carefully disentangling poetry from oratory, and led by
the Platonic objection to the division of oratory from truth, Kant
stresses the impact of the poetic on the imagination, emphasising its
'honesty and sincerity'. When he comes to the commentary upon these
passages (§54), Kant notes that a further distinction is necessary, in this
case between that which may be liked when it is merely judged and that
which genuinely gratifies us. If this distinction is maintained: 'we can
explain how a gratification can be disliked by the very person who feels
it (.. .) or how profound grief may yet be liked by the person suffering
,
it (as a widow's sadness over the death of her worthy husband) Y
There is something in this question of pleasure and pain that we can
trace through Ranciere's work like a red thread. We have already seen
that for him the count of politics cannot be reduced to the calculation
of pleasure and pain, and we have seen his somewhat ironized stance
towards the Platonic denigration of the people, who are seemingly
led by such 'mere' sensation rather than by reason. But it is precisely
such sensation that Ranciere discovers at the root of communication,
and it is precisely such sensation that leads him towards the 'goal'
of an equality that is not simply the idea of the Platonic (or the
Althusserian) master. Yet thinking of equality as a goal is already to
have made a mistake in understanding Ranciere's project. In his work
on Joseph Jacotot and pedagogy in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, we again
find reference to pleasure and pain, but this time in the context of
the community of equals, a community based on the presumption of a
shared intelligence, a shared capacity that is not the gift of a political
organization, leader or institution:

The principal service that man can expect from man depends on that faculty of
intercommunicating their pleasure and pain, hopes and fears, in order to be moved
reciprocally (. . . ) Intelligence is not a power of understanding based on comparing
knowledge with its object. It is the power to make oneself understood through
another's verification. And only an equal understands an equal. (IS, 72-3)
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 85
In contrast to a Platonic drive to know the capacity of the human
being, Ranciere follows Jacotot in the generosity of this presump­
tion: 'It is true that we don't know that men are equal. We are
saying that they might be.' (IS, 73) Such an apparently simple propo­
sition has dramatic consequences for conventional notions of the
relation between tutor and student, offering a profound disturbance
to the mechanistic doxa of 'student-led teaching' that dominates the
pedagogical practices of so many Western institutions.34
Again, however, this notion of equality has an aesthetic dimension.
For Ranciere, following Jacotot, relates the equality of this shared
intelligence to the possibility of an expression that is equal to that of
the artist. This does not mean, of course, that we all create works that
are equal as art- Ranciere's notion of equality is both simpler and
more profound than this - but instead that there is a process which
may be shared:

The artist's emancipatory lesson, opposed on every count to the professor's

stultifYing lesson, is this: each one of us is an artist to the extent that he carries
out a double process; he is not content with being a mere journeyman but wants
to make all work a means of expression, and he is not content to feel something
but tries to impart it to others. The artist needs equality as the explicator needs
inequality. (IS, 70-1) (Let us simply note in passing another double.)

Aisthesis, both as that which is felt and as that which is to be felt by the
others, is at the heart of this equality. There is again a sense that this
is part of a promissory structure, however: 'We can thus dream of a
society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists.' (IS, 71)
As has already been suggested, to leave it here would be to miss the
impact that Jacotot's work - through Ranciere - has for our familiar
ideas of pedagogy. Explicatory pedagogical practices presume not only
an inequality - in which the teacher leads the student from ignorance
to knowledge - but also a temporal scheme that is analogous to
notions of Progress. Personal enlightenment and the Enlightenment
ideal share a structure that emphasizes a guided movement from a
shadowy ignorance into the light. Jacotot's approach is so remarkable
because it begins from a position of equality, and thus breaks with this
promissory structure; if it is a dream it is one that does not fall into a
linear temporality of deferred Progress.
In order to understand the role of art in this thinking more fully,
let's return to the delineation of the aesthetic regimes. The second,
representational regime is more readily associated with Aristotelianism,
centred on the paired terms mimesis and poiesis: 'Art does not exist
86 Paragraph

here as an autonomous notion. But there does exist a criterion of

discrimination within the general realm of the tekhnai, namely the
criterion of imitation'. (AlA, 219) Art in general does not exist in
the representational regime, but the criterion of imitation makes it
possible to identifY what work particular arts are supposed to do, and
to judge whether a specific example is or is not 'art'. The principle of
imitation distinguishes within a realm of 'making' (as poiesis implies),
but it does not allow for an independent realm of art, nor for an
artwork that might stand outside the realm of making or doing in
general. Ultimately, this is a regime governed not by a principle of
truth in or as art, but by conventions and structures that are not
themselves specific to art.
Since both the ethical and representational regimes sever art from
truth, it is only the third regime that deserves the name of the 'aesthetic'
proper. In this regime, 'the identification of art it carries out no longer
operates by way of a specific difference within the realm of various
ways of doing and by way of criteria of inclusion and evaluation
that allow one to judge these conceptions and executions, but instead
by identifYing a mode of sensible being proper to artistic products'
(AlA, 219). The sensorium that is central to Ranciere's approach
is thus neither an abstraction from perception nor a taxonomical
convenience; it is the sensorium that makes perception possible
through the structures that govern the regime. Rather than simply
being opposed to a representational mode, Ranciere proposes that
the discrimination that is at the heart of the thinking of this aesthetic
regime is in fact a return to mimesis, properly understood. Mimesis was,
Ranciere argues, always a matter of distinguishing between that which
was and was not art. It is mimesis that allows for the delimitation of a
specific realm, making possible the inclusion and comparison of objects
within that realm. Yet this leads us to a paradox. Rather than posing
an obligation to resemblance, an aesthetic identification of art that
takes proper account of mimesis leads to an exposure to non-identity:

The products of art make manifest in sensible mode that quality of the made that
is identical with the un-made, that quality of the known that is identical with the
un-known, or of the willed that makes it identical with the un-willed. In short,
what is proper to art, and finally nameable as such, is its identity with non-art.
And it is in this respect that, henceforth, the notion of truth positively pertains to
art. (AlA, 220)

This is perhaps best understood through a recognition of the crucial

difference created by two possible translations of the word mimesis. If it
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 87

is rendered as 'imitation', then there is a suggestion of mere repetition,

and in particular of the following of rules, precepts and examples.
Put crudely, while such imitative practices were central to the artistic
production and pedagogy of the early modern period, carrying no
negative connotations, in post-romantic poetics such activities are
subsumed in notions of imagination, inspiration and genius.
Such a vision is changed by translating mimesis as 'representation'.
Again, however, it seems necessary to point out that in shifting our
focus to the political dimension, we should not be thinking of repre­
sentation in the terms made familiar by 'representative' democracy, in
which pre-existing entities are given a share in the political process,
but instead of a regime of representation in which it is possible for
political entities to appear which may well transforn1 that process.

III. From the Catastrophic Oveiflow to the Originary Knot (Art and
Community)
Let's accelerate (or redouble) our reading. The stakes of our conceptu­
alizations of art become clear when we return to the relation between
art and politics. This relation is the backdrop to our restagings of
the debates about aesthetics within and outside of philosophy. That
Ranciere reaches for the figure of catastrophe should not surprise us.
Catastrophe has turned itself into a trope of the fate of art, a turn
(strophe) within a turn (trope). As such, catastrophe takes a detour
through the tragic, threatening to plunge us into the mournful or the
melancholic.35 Yet this catastrophe is not itself artistic, as a matter
simply of 'bad' art; it takes on a disastrous aspect in its relation to the
realm of the political. Catastrophe occurs precisely from and as this
'overflow', from this passage of art into politics.36
Yet Ranciere, of course, wishes to mark out the aesthetic in
terms which do not, or at least do not too easily, with too evident
a necessity, lead to this catastrophic overflowing. As I began by
stating, to some extent the articulation of the aesthetic in terms of
a relation between art, politics and philosophy is a matter of the
stance adopted towards the romantic and idealist inheritance in the
Continental tradition. Another way of putting this would be to see
it as a narrative of modernity, since it has become common to see
philosophical modernity as a specific after-effect of the Kantian Critical
project. From this connection, we might begin to trace the outlines
of a catastrophic modernity that is itself the inheritance of a certain
romantic or idealist thought. But, again, we should be cautious in
88 Paragraph
attempting to map Ranciere's delineation of the regimes of art on
to a temporal scheme. In particular, Ranciere has repeatedly stressed
his discomfort with the very idea of modernity. 37 It is instructive,
then, to compare Ranciere's approach to the aesthetic with one of
the more influential presentations in recent years of the post-Kantian
tradition.
'Aesthetic', as we have seen, is used by Ranciere in two distinct
though not unconventional ways, one fairly general and one more
specific. The first is used in phrases such the 'aesthetic of the political',
in which what he wishes to stress is the idea that politics is a conflict
which centres upon the perceptible or sensible - what can be seen
or heard, whose voices register, and so on - in order to define the
representational system implied by a certain sensorium (based on a
notion of aisthesis). The more restricted sense of the aesthetic refers
to particular artistic practices and the regimes through which they
present specific modes of thought.38 Aesthetics, then, is always the
manifestation of a mode of thought, either in terms of a particular
politicized notion of representation (which is at the heart of Ranciere's
elaboration of the connection of aesthetics to democracy), or else in
terms of a thought about art which will nonetheless have political
entailments. It is easy to see the extent to which this participates in
the post-Kantian European philosophical inheritance, but we should
not - in recognizing this family resemblance - overlook the degree
to which Ranciere's rethinking of the aesthetic offers a challenge to
that inheritance.
The high point of this romantic conception of the dissolution of
the boundaries between art and philosophy is found in the work of
the Jena thinkers. Schlegel's elevation of poetry over the other arts,
like that of Lessing, makes of poetry an art form that becomes the art
form. As is well-known, in the Athenaeum fragments and the essay on
Goethe (reproduced in CR), Schlegel conceives of a romantic artwork
that would be both itself and the Idea of itself 39 The poem itself takes
on the transcendental function previously the preserve of philosophy,
such that there is no separate philosophy of art. But this means not
only that philosophy becomes poetry, but that poetry must also take
on a philosophical function; in short, it must become philosophy. In
this conception, Schlegel lays the ground for the modern sense of
the autonomous work of art, as well as setting forth its fragmentary
and ironic characteristics. There are clearly connections between this
Schlegelian conception of the functions of art and philosophy, and
the 'idea of thought' that Ranciere locates in the aesthetic.
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 89
How, then, does Ranciere respond to what we might think of, with
the hindsight offered by our place in philosophical modernity, as an
originary rethinking of philosophy's role? If we go back to the regimes
of art - ethical, representational and aesthetic - we are returned to
the question of sense experience. The ethical identifications of the first
(Platonic) regime, like the poietic ones of the second (Aristotelianism),
divide art from truth precisely by being unable (or simply unwilling)
to open a space for art as art. But the space offered by the aesthetic
regime is not strictly an autonomous one either. Ranciere's account
of the aesthetic, as we have seen, in drawing together art, thought
and community depends upon the notion of division, or of partage.
Politics arises within this constellation, but neither as a determinant
nor as a product of the regimes of art. Partage effects an ordering, a
division and a sharing that cannot be thought of in terms of 'power':

Democracy, in fact, cannot be merely defined as a political system, one among

many, characterized simply by another division of power. It is more profoundly
defined as a certain sharing of the perceptible, a certain redistribution of its sites.
And what orders this redistribution is the very fact of literarity: the 'orphan'
system of writing, on reserve, the system of those spaces of writing that, with
their overpopulated void and their overtalkative silence, riddle the living cloth of
the communal ethos. (FW, 104)40

The comments on literature that we find in a text such as The Flesh

of Words are entirely of a piece with the 'political' arguments of a
text such as Disagreement: 'The speech that causes politics to exist is
the same that gauges the very gap between speech and the account
of it. And the aisthesis that shows itself in this speech is the very
quarrel over the constitution of the aisthesis, over this partition of the
perceptible through which bodies find themselves in community. This
division should be understood here in the double sense of the term: as
community and as separation.' (D, 26) The analysis in Disagreement of
police and politics, of the 'wrong' and of dissensus, while deepening
the implications of Ranciere's understanding of the stakes of political
entanglements, never takes us away from this question of the 'sensible'.
Any attempt to switch our attention from art to politics simply leads
us back to the matter of how we make sense (and of how sense may be
sensed). Politics neither stands outside of perception nor determines
it: 'Politics is not made up of power relationships; it is made up of
relationships between worlds.' (D, 42)
Of course, such comments make any discourse on the autonomy
of art hard to sustain. But, as we might expect from a thinker
90 Paragraph

who has devoted so much effort to artworks and their interpretation

(including, alongside literature, film and what we now call visual
culture), autonomy can itself be used as a term, so long as it is
reconceived in an appropriate manner:

The modern emergence of aesthetics as an autonomous discourse deternlining

an autonomous division of the perceptible is the emergence of an evaluation
of the perceptible that is distinct from any judgment about the use to which
it is put; and which accordingly defines a world of virtual community - of
community demanded - superimposed on the world of commands and lots that
gives everything a use. ( . . . ) So the autonomization of aesthetics means first freeing
up the norms of representation, and second, constituting a kind of community of
sense experience that works on the world of assumption, of the as if that includes
those who are not included by revealing a mode of existence of sense experience
that has eluded the allocation of parties and lots. (D, 57-8)

Much turns on the as if, on the constitutive possibilities of a kind of

fiction. It is perhaps in this context that we can explain Ranciere's
rewriting of Aristotle and of Althusser: 'The modern political animal
is first a literary animal' (D, 37). This world of assumption, of the
as if, is thus analogous to the pedagogical presumption of Jacotot.
Both pedagogy and the aesthetic are revealed as inevitably drawn
into a political dimension of which they were always a constitutive
element. Inclusion, like equality, is a question of where you start
from, not of a goal to be attained through Progress. The catastrophe
implied within a notion of aestheticization, tied as it is to a concept
of modernity, is too limited in its account of the aesthetic.41 And yet,
within a given world, not all assumptions are possible. Or at least,
not all assumptions may be sensed within a particular division of the
sensorium. The power of this as if stems precisely from giving the
connection between an idea of thought and an idea of community an
originary status. As Ranciere's work reminds us, we have never left
the aesthetic, but neither have 'we', as moderns, invented it.

MARK ROBSON
University of Nottingham

NOTES

1 Among many examples which might be cited, see From an Aesthetic Point
oj View: Philosophy, Art and the Serlses, edited by Peter Osborne (London,
Serpent's Tail, 2000); The New Aestheticism, edited by John J. Joughin
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 91
and Simon Malpas (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003); and
Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, second
edition (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003).
2 Such a reading is to be found in J.M. Bernstein, TIle Fate if Art: Aesthetic
Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge, Polity, 1992).
3 See Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, edited by J.M. Bernstein
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1 85-7. Henceforth CR.
The fragment is here attributed to Friedrich Holderiin, although it is most
likely the product of a collaboration between Holderiin, Schelling and Hegel
in the summer of 1796. Obviously this complicates the 'I' in the cited
sentence. This brief text has been widely discussed and frequently takes on
a strategic, emblematic use. See, for example, Simon Critchley, Continental
Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001)
and Bowie's Aesthetics and Subjectivity which both include i t a s a n appendix.
4 Ranciere refers to this text in TIle Politics oj Aesthetics: TIle Distribution if the
Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London, Continuum, 2004), 27. (I
am grateful to the publishers, and especially Rowan Wilson, for the chance
to see this volume prior to publication.) Henceforth PA.
5 Osborne, 'Introduction: From an Aesthetic Point of View', in From an
Aesthetic Point if View, 1-10 (4-5). The reference is to W.V. Quine, From
a Logical Point oj View: Logico-Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 1953).
6 The obvious reference here is to §40 of Immanuei Kant, Critique oJJudgment,
translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1987), in which he
states, in a discussion of the sensus communis, that 'We could even define
taste as the ability to judge something that makes our feeling in a given
presentation universally communicable without mediation by a concept', 162.
7 There isn't the space here to do more than remark that Ranciere's Disagreement
begins precisely with this question: 'Is there any such thing as political
philosophy?' (vii). Later, he proposes: 'The tenn "political philosophy"
does not designate any genre, any territory or specification of philosophy.'
(Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, translated by Julie Rose, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1999,61). Henceforth D.
8 Ranciere, 'What Aesthetics Can Mean', translated by Brian Holmes, in From
an Aesthetic Point if View, 13-33 (33). Henceforth WA.
9 I insert the original relevait simply to mark a term that perhaps contains more
than is apparent. 'Releve' has been used by Derrida to translate the Hegelian
mifhebung, usually rendered in English as 'sublate', and this has been adopted
by others. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to unfold the appearance
in Ranciere's text here, but for a sense of the complications of 'relever', see
Derrida, 'What Is a "Relevant" Translation?', translated by Lawrence Venuti,
Critical Inquiry 27 (2001), 174-200.
92 Paragraph
10 Ranciere, L'Inconscient esthCtique (Paris, Galilee, 2001), 14. My translation.
Henceforth IE.
11 Ranciere, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of
Autonomy and Heteronomy', New Lift Review 14 (2002), 133-51 ( 1 33).
Henceforth AR.
12 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education if Man: In a Series if Letters
[English and Gennan Facing], edited and translated by Elizabeth M.
Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982), 106-9.
·
Ranciere comments on Schiller's notions of nai ve and sentimental poetry
in La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la litterature (Paris, Hachette
Litteratures, 1998),58,62. Henceforth PM.
13 On this idea of Greece in Gernlan idealist and romantic thought see,
among many discussions which might be cited, Jacques Taminiaux, 'The
Nostalgia for Greece at the Dawn of Classical Germany', in Poetics, Speculation,
al1d Judgment: TIle Shadow of the Work of Art frol1l Kant to Phenomel1ology,
translated and edited by Michael Gendre (Albany, SUNY, 1993), 73-92;
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica ficta (Figures if Wagner), translated by
Felicia McCarren (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1994) and Peter L.
Rudnytsky, Freud and Oedipus (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987).
14 On the Shores if Politics, translated by Liz Heron (London, Verso, 1995).
Henceforth OSP.
15 On this notion of the nineteenth-century dream, see also Ranciere's The
Nights ifLabor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by
John Drury (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989). Henceforth NL.
16 Such an idea may be found, for example, in Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kantor (Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 1997),247.
17 Ranciere, The Flesh if Words: The Politics if Writing, translated by Charlotte
Mandell (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004), 18. See also the explo­
ration of the notion of utopia in Short Voyages to the Land of the People,translated
by James B. Swenson (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003), 25-40
(Henceforth Sf/),in PA, 40-1, OSP,5-37,in 'Overlegitimation', translated
by Kristin Ross, Social Text 31/32 (1992),252-7,and throughout NL.
18 See Ranciere, Les Scenes du peuple (Les Revoltes logiques, 1975/1985) (Lyon,
Horlieu, 2003). It is hard to know whether the title might best be translated
as 'The Scenes of the People' or as 'The Stages of the People', since the
alternatives stress differently the ideas of perception and perfornlance, both
of which are key to Ranciere's sense of the 'sensible' dimensions of political
participation. This may be traced back to a positive reading of Plato's negative
notion of 'theatrocracy'.
19 Derrida, L'ecriture et la d[fef rence (Paris, Seuil, 1967), 369-407. Translated
by Alan Bass as Writing and D[fference (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1978),251-77.
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 93
20 Ranciere, 'Un enfant se tue', in Court voyages au pays du peuple (Paris, Seuil,
1990), 139-71; 'A Child Kills Himself, in S V, 107-34. Sigmund Freud,
"'A Child is Being Beaten": A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of
Sexual Perversions', in On Psychopathology: Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
and Other Works, edited by Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library 10
(Hannondsworth, Penguin, 1993), 163-93. Serge Leclaire, On tue un erifant:
Un essai sur Ie narcissisme primaire et la pulsion de mort (Paris, Seuil, 1975); A
Child is Beil1g Killed: all Primary Narcissisll1 and the Death Drive, translated by
Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998).
21 On the question of style, see the Introduction to Ranciere's The Philosopher
and His Poor, edited by Andrew Parker, translated by John Drury, Corinne
Oster and Andrew Parker (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004), xiii
(Henceforth PP) and Donald Reid's Introduction to NL, xxxii.
22 Reprinted in Ideology, Method and Marx: Essays from Economy and Society,
edited by Ali Rattansi (London, Routledge, 1989), 181-9.
23 On mimesis and doubling, one must mention Derrida's essay on Mallarme
'The Double Session', in Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1 73-285. Compare Ranciere's
'Musique, danse, poeme: Ie cercle de la "mimesis"', in his Mallarmc: La Poli­
tique de la sirclle (Paris, Hachette, 1996), 88-98 (Mallarme: The Politics of
the Siren). Ranciere cites Derrida's essay here. Many Girard texts might
be cited, beginning perhaps with 'To Double Business Bound': Essays 011
Literature, Milllesis and Anthropology (London, Athlone, 1988). See Lacoue­
Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, edited by Christopher
Fynsk (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989).
24 This is a reference to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. For Ranciere's negative
assessment of Bourdieu's reading of Kant's Critique of Judgement, see PP,
chapter 9. For other comments on Bourdieu, see aSP, 52-4 and The
Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, translated by
Kristin Ross (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1991). Henceforth IS. The
question of ideology in Ranciere's work is a complex one, but see the
translation of a 1969 essay 'On the theory of ideology', reprinted in Ideology,
edited by Terry Eagleton (London, Longman, 1994), 141-61.
25 Ranciere's sense of 'plot' here seems to have been influenced by the work
of Hayden White, who provides an introduction to Ranciere's The Names of
History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, translated by Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), vii-xix. On emplotment, see White,
Metahistory: The Historical Imagillation in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5-1 1. As White points out (93-7),
a version of this idea of emplotment is to be found in Hegel's Philosophy
of History.
26 Ranciere touches here on territory influentially explored by Philippe Lacoue­
Labarthe in Heidegger, Art and Politics: TIle Fiction of the Political, translated by
94 Paragraph
Chris Turner (Oxford, Blackwell, 1990); Poetry as Experience, translated by
Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) and Heidegger:
La Politique du poeme (Heidegger: The Politics ojthe Poem) (Paris, Galilee, 2002).
27 On the distinction from Benjamin, see 'Comment and Responses', Theory
and Event 6:4 (2003), §5. This piece is a response to a collection of articles
themselves responding to Ranciere's 'Ten Theses on Politics', in Theory and
Event 5:3 (2001). See also the comment: 'Politics did not have the misfortune
of being aestheticized or spectacularized just the other day. (...) There has
never been any "aestheticization" of politics in the modem age because
politics is aesthetic in principle.' (D, 57-8) The Benjamin text to which
this refers is, of course, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility'. Three versions of this essay are to be found in Selected
Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings and others, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996-2003).
28 For explorations of these ideas in addition to PA and IE, see also Ranciere's
La Fable cinematographique (Paris, Seuil, 2001), translation by Emiliano Battista
forthcoming as Film Fables (Oxford, Berg), Le Destin des images ( The Fate oj
Images) (Paris, La Fabrique, 2003), and Malaise dans ['esthetique (Paris, Galilee,
2004). This last title is again problematic in terms of translation, with the
French malaise carrying senses of unease, unrest or a feeling of faintness.
29 On Arendt, see also Ranciere's recent 'Who Is the Subject of the Rights of
Man?', The South Atlal1tic Quarterly 103:2-3 (2004), 297-310 (special issue:
'And Justice for All? The Claims of Human Rights', edited by Ian Balfour
and Eduardo Cadava).
30 'Partage' has been a central tenn in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, who
also, if rather differently, relates this notion to a sense of community. See,
most obviously, 'Sharing Voices', in Tral1sformin�,< the Hermeneutic Context:
From Nietzsche to Nancy, edited by Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift
(Albany, SUNY, 1990), 211-59; The Inoperative Community, translated by
Peter Connor and others (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991);
'Of Being-in-Common', in Community at Loose Ends, edited by the Miami
Theory Collective (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1-12;
and La Commul1aute 4Jrontee (Community Confrollted) (Paris, Galilee, 2001).
31 Ranciere, 'Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics', translated by Ray
Brassier, in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future oj Philosophy, edited
by Peter Hallward (London, Continuum, 2004), 218-31 (219). Henceforth
AlA. See Badiou, Handbook oj Inaesthetics, translated by Alberto Toscano
(Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003).
32 For a brief note on the role of pleasure and pain in aesthetic thought, see
my 'Defending poetry, or, is there an early modern aesthetic?', in The New
Aestheticism,119-30 (122).
33 Kant, Critique oJJudgmcllt, 201.
 Ranciere's Aesthetic Communities 95

34 See my 'Impractical Criticism', forthcoming in English: The Condition oj the

Subject, edited by Philip W. Martin.
35 On this figure in the context of Nietzsche's thinking of tragedy, see Lacoue­
Labarthe, 'The Detour', translated by Gary M. Cole, in The Subject oj
Philosophy, edited by Thomas Trezise (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1993), 14-36.
36 It is tempting to take up this notion of 'overflow' in a discussion of
Wordsworth's famous suggestion in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that
'all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'. See
William Wordsworth: A Critical Edition oj the Major Works, edited by Stephen
Gill (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984), 598. Ranciere discusses
Wordsworth in S V, PM and FW.
37 See the comments in PA,20-30 and also in 'The Archeomodern Turn', in
Walter Benjamin and the Demands oj History, edited by Michael P. Steinberg
(Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996), 24-40.
38 See 'Jacques Ranciere: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Demo­
cratic Disagreement' (interview with Solange Guenoun and James H.
Kavanagh), translated by R. Lapidus, SubStance 29:2 (2000), 3-24 (11-12).
39 For a commentary on this conception of literature (to which Ranciere
frequently refers), see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The
Theory oj Literature in German Romanticism, translated by Philip Barnard and
Cheryl Lester (Albany, SUNY, 1988).
40 On this relation of literature to community, see also the comments on Hegel's
conception of epic in F W,119-20.
41 To do justice to the complexity of Benjamin's position on both aesthetics
and catastrophe is not possible here, but it must at least be acknowledged.
A discussion of catastrophe in this context would have to begin from the
comments scattered through the work on the Trauerspiel.