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Politics after Aesthetics: Disagreeing with Rancire

David Ferris

Online Publication Date: 01 August 2009

To cite this Article Ferris, David(2009)'Politics after Aesthetics: Disagreeing with Rancire',Parallax,15:3,37 49 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13534640902982587 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534640902982587

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

` Politics after Aesthetics: Disagreeing with Ranciere

David Ferris

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` More than anyone else in the late twentieth century, Jacques Ranciere has undertaken a redenition of the relation of the aesthetic to politics. This redenition 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 the aesthetic 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, Ranciere undertakes a redenition of the aesthetic that not only challenges the representational categories into which it has been placed but also redenes the aesthetic in terms of political existence. This does not mean that politics is conated with the aesthetic, as if one could be simply identied as the other. Such identication disregards the specicity of the aesthetic and also the ` specicity of politics. The question Ranciere 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, Ranciere insists on a specic link between the aesthetic and politics: politics of literature means that literature does politics as literature that there is a specic link between politics as a denite way of doing and literature as a denite 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 denite way of doing and literature is a denite practice of writing. Although this ` remark distinguishes politics and writing as belonging to different spheres, Ranciere will still speak of a specic 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 and aesthetics but gives them to us within a way of thinking that remains steadfastly representational, what other link can be specied? In short, how can politics and aesthetics still be thought without recourse to the authenticity implied by any 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 signicant and what is not?

parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online q 2009 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13534640902982587

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` In the passage just cited from Politics of Literature, Ranciere already gives an indication of how he will think a specic link between politics and literature as well ` as the difculty of doing so. Before even dening politics as doing, Ranciere 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 signicance is at stake? ` As if to counter this quotational recourse, Ranciere, in subsequent remarks from this same essay, offers a denition of literature as such, a literature that presumably should not and cannot be put within quotation marks. Here, literature as such promises the specicity of literature, that is, what makes literature literature rather ` than something else. As Ranciere provides this denition, the notion of a specic 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 specic state of the language, but as a historical mode of visibility of writing, a specic link between a system of meaning of words and a system of visibility of things.3 ` Ranciere 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 Ranciere refers to when he refers to the meaning of words is also a visibility. Thus, literature, by bringing words ` to visibility, enters into a link with what Ranciere calls the visibility of things while being differentiated according to the object that it makes visible. On the basis of this ` link, Ranciere goes on to dene 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 that doing, it attains visibility. With this visibility, literature as such occurs for ` Ranciere. At the same time, this occurrence is justied to the extent that a link takes place in some way. Without such a link, literature as such would remain ` insignicant, it would have no intervention in what Ranciere 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 specicity of this link that everything depends and above all else the
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recovery of a signicance for an aesthetic that challenges the historical and critical ease with which the aesthetic is conned 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 Ranciere, the political signicance of the aesthetic is tied crucially to this nonrepresentational 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 Kojeve after Hegel, the master already represents the slave), nally 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 sacricing the signicance of its desired social critique and the politics that such a ` desire assumes. Ranciere, 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 rst published under the title Le partage du sensible: esthetique et ` politique, Ranciere offers the following condensed denition 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 dene 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. Ranciere then denes 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 specic 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 Rancieres understanding of how politics exists in its actuality. The rst, in ` Rancieres 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 conguration results from the activity of what Ranciere calls the police.7 What the police produces is a community congured according to a consensus about the roles played by each of the parts they dene within that community. In contrast, ` Ranciere gives the name politics to the way in which this distribution can be recongured 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. ` Ranciere describes the effect of this claim as follows:
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Political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible 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, Ranciere continues, is the occasion of politics but a politics that only becomes real once two heterogeneous processes meet. The rst 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 confused with 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 specic 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 conrmation of equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute, of a community existing solely through being divided.9 ` The specicity of the act that denes Rancieres understanding of politics removes theory as well as any other general principle from a role in determining politics as the 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 ` Ranciere has given as politics is also something that has built into the impossibility of ` agreement. In this case, Rancieres 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 Ranciere and, here, work is another name for conguration. From this work, there arises the sense of politics as a denite way of doing referred to in the passage from Politics and Literature cited at the beginning of this article. When the specicity 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 Rancieres 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 denes the literary in a fundamentally political way. Ranciere writes: The modern political animal is rst 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. Ranciere denes this disordering by the literary in the following sentence: It inscribes a subject name as being different from any identied part of the community.12 Where the literary possesses a politics it is in the difference between a name and what has been identied as the parts that can be given names. This understanding is very ` much in line with Rancieres 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 superuous. 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 ` Rancieres understanding of politics done no more than nd 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 signicance of the aesthetic in political terms. The aesthetic has always posed a problem with respect to determining its signicance 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 identies 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. Rancieres account of politics clearly distinguishes itself from the representational mode that the aesthetic took on with this transformation. ` In fact, if Rancieres 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 Ranciere is that the aesthetic possesses a visible specicity in the form of sensibility in the earliest stage of its history. ` Although Ranciere will not rest his account of politics on the historical specicity of the aesthetic as a mode of visible apprehension, his remarks in Politics and Literature already insist on such specicity as the means through which the aesthetic retains its proper signicance.
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In Disagreement, this signicance appears as the autonomization of the aesthetic. This ` means two things for Ranciere. First, the specicity achieved through autonomization 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 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.13 In its specicity, 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 meaningful and 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 Rancieres account of aesthetics in ` terms of politics. But, for Ranciere, this does not mean that politics is merely ` appearance. Ranciere is rm 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, rst, that there is a principle to which politics submits and, second, without the aesthetic there ` can be no politics in the sense that Ranciere develops this word. ` The rst of these claims appears to counter Rancieres 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 a ` question about Rancieres 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 specic operation of politics. Ranciere 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 Rancieres 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), Ranciere 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 reconguring the distribution of the sensible that denes 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 the mobilization of the masses that Benjamin called the aestheticization of politics.17 ` Rancieres 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 ` Ranciere 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 Ranciere pursues when he makes disagreement the ` basis of politics. However, when Ranciere 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 reconguration.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, Ranciere places one side of a relation within quotation marks as he did when he spoke of how literature does politics in Politics and Literature while politics remained a denite way of doing. Not only does this pose the question of why this recurs, but also raises ` the question of a difference that Rancieres 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 Ranciere 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 fulll 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 specic link Ranciere speaks of between politics as a denite way of doing and literature as a denite 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 Rancieres engagement with this link demands that such a link cannot be in any way representational. Accordingly, the signicance 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 ` specic yet also articulate the disagreement that informs Rancieres sense of politics?
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` In a later passage from Malaise dans lesthetique, Ranciere takes up again the question of the autonomy of art invoked in Disagreement and takes up its relation to the ` distribution of the sensible against and through which Rancieres 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 identication 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 new humanity, of a new form of individual and collective life.21 ` On this occasion, Rancieres 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 Ranciere now calls the aesthetic regime of art. ` Ranciere identies three such regimes for art: the ethical regime of images; the ` representative regime of the arts; and the aesthetic regime of art. For Ranciere, the rst 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, Ranciere 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 identication in which it is apprehended (saisie). There is rst of all a regime in which the statue is exclusively apprehended as an image of the divinity.23 This regime is ethical because its signicance rests on an identication 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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identication 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 gured 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 Ranciere. ` With this third regime, Ranciere 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 redened as canons) of representation. Instead, the aesthetic property is located in a specic ` sensorium.24 Ranciere 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 this determination 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 Rancieres presentation of last regime shows, this freeing occurs within a triadic structure that marks a movement from an identication in which the sensible is rst 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 signicance. 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 specicity as art. This question is particularly crucial if the aesthetic is unable to take on a political signicance without either deriving its force from a mirroring of the intervention that equality makes when the part that has no ` part speaks, or, without becoming indistinguishable from politics as in Rancieres 26 assertion that politics is aesthetics in principle and as in the reversal of politics ` and aesthetics that places an indifference at the centre of how Ranciere 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 specic link between aesthetics and politics, the aesthetic must be identied 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 Rancieres account of the politics, there is a necessary indifference that allows politics to determine whatever it touches or is touched by. The most important issue this indifference raises is not, however, a ` critical issue or even a critique of what Ranciere 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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conict 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 signicance. Here, the aesthetic emerges as the category against which politics, in its role as what determines the signicance 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 Ranciere rst articulates the signicance 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 Rancieres central 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 Ranciere congures 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 signicance 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 timespace, of a suspension in relation to the ordinary forms of sensible experience. Art is not political in the rst place because of the messages and feelings it transmits onto the order of the world. Nor is art political by the manner in which it represents the structures of society, the conicts 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 signicance 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 to modes of determination and representation that appropriate art. In the case of the ` aesthetic, Ranciere 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 signicance 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. Ranciere 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 specicity of a sensible experience in which politics and aesthetics meet. ` In an interview from 2000, Ranciere 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, Rancieres 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 specic 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 an arrest of what has always been at stake in politics and the aesthetic: an object or an ` issue that afrms their existence in time and space. Ranciere, by afrming 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, Ranciere 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 Ranciere is to recognize this double sense, a double sense that his sense of disagreement has identied as a politics and an aesthetics. In the end, there is something unseen in this identication. 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 the agreement 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 Ranciere, 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 Ranciere claims that the sensible experience through which the aesthetic regime of art institutes the relation between the forms of identication 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 to historical signicance? 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 Stael in her De la litterature consideree ` dans ses rapports avec les institutions socials which Ranciere reads as the inauguration of literature as the art of writing.33 Here, writing is gured 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 signicance from an appearing without appearance, without an appearance that arrests and distributes signicance 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 ` signicance of Rancieres engagement with the long history of politics and aesthetics appears in the form of delimiting a history that is touched irreconcilably with the politics of an apparent emancipation. As a result of this appearance, such history must ` always disagree with itself, has already disagreed with itself. Rancieres account of politics and aesthetics, is the witness of that disagreement, the witness of that history.
Notes While Schillers intention is entirely positive the goal of the Aesthetic Education is the construction of a true political freedom which Schiller denes as the the most complete of all artworks the justication 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 Muller Nielaba, (Paderborn: Fink Verlag, 2009). 2 ` Jacques Ranciere, Politics of Literature, SubStance 33:1 (2004), pp. 10-24. 3 ` Jacques Ranciere, Politics of Literature, p.12. 4 ` Jacques Ranciere, Politics of Literature, p.13. 5 ` Jacques Ranciere, 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 Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, p.13. 7 On the police see Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp.21-42. 8 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.30; translation modied. 9 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.30. 10 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.30; translation modied. 11 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.37. 12 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.37. 13 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.58; translation modied. Ferris 48
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` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.58; translation modied. 15 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.31. 16 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.33; translation modied. 17 Jacques Ranciere, Malaise dans lesthetique (Paris: Galilee, 2004), pp.38-9. This work will be subsequently referred to as Malaise. All translations from 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 Ranciere, Malaise, p.39. 20 ` See Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.63. 21 ` Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.48. 22 ` Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.43. 23 ` Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.43. 24 ` Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.44. 25 ` Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.44. 26 ` Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.58. 27 ` Jacques Ranciere, 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, Ranciere writes: there is therefore no conict between the purity of art and its ` politicization. Ranciere, Malaise, p.48. 29 ` Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.37. 30 ` Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.36-7.

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31 ` Jacques Ranciere, Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement, SubStance 29:2 (2000), p.4. 32 ` Jacques Ranciere, Malaise, p.48. As Benjamin identied in his essay The Work of Art in the Age

of its Technical Reproducibility, the modern question of the political signicance of the aesthetic is the question of the formation of a collective. 33 ` See Jacques Ranciere, Politique de la literature (Paris, Galilee: 2007), p.13.

David Ferris is Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at the University 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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