The Politics of

Aesthetics

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 TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES

Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno

On Religion, Karl Barth
The Intelligence of Evil, Jean Baudrillard
In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda
A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin
Discourse on Free Will, Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther
Education for Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire
To Have or To Be?, Erich Fromm
Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer
All Men Are Brothers, Mohandas K. Gandhi
Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer
After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre
Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri
The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière
An Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski
Building a Character, Constantin Stanislavski
Creating a Role, Constantin Stanislavski

Some titles are not available in North America.

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 The Politics of
Aesthetics
The Distribution of the Sensible

Jacques Rancière
Edited and translated by Gabriel Rockhill

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

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 Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth Avenue

London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10010
UK USA

www.bloomsbury.com

First published in France under the title Le Partage du sensible:

Esthétique et politique
© La Fabrique-Éditions, 2000
© Gabriel Rockhill, 2004

First Published 2004

Reprinted 2005
Paperback edition first published 2006
Reprinted 2006, 2007 (twice), 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011

This paperback edition first published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: PB: 978-1-7809-3535-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in India

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 Contents

Note on the Updated Edition vii

Editor’s Preface viii
Editor’s Introduction xii

The Distribution of the Sensible 1

Foreword 3

The Distribution of the Sensible:

Politics and Aesthetics 7
Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of
the Notion of Modernity 15
Mechanical Arts and the Promotion of
the Anonymous 27
Is History a Form of Fiction? 31

On Art and Work 39

Interview for the English

Edition 43

The Janus-Face of Politicized Art:

Jacques Rancière in Interview with
Gabriel Rockhill 45

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 vi Contents

Afterword by Slavoj Žižek 63

The Lesson of Rancière 65

Interview with the Machete Group (2009):

Farewell to Artistic and Political Impotence 77

Appendix I: Glossary of Technical Terms 83

Appendix II: Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources 99
Notes 109
Index 115

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 Note on the Updated
Edition

This edition has been slightly augmented by the addition of a brief

interview with Jacques Rancière from 2009, entitled “Farewell to Artistic
and Political Impotence.” The bibliography has also been updated to
include many of the important works that have been published since
2004. Everything else in the original text has been maintained as such,
with the exception of a few minor typographical changes. - Ed.

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 Editor’s Preface
The Reconfiguration of Meaning

Gabriel Rockhill

Translation is often deplored, with a sense of self-satisfied

disillusionment, as an impossible project. Since there are no objective
criteria for evaluating the relationship between the source language and
the target language, it is claimed that the latter remains fundamentally
undetermined by the former. This situation has given birth to a myriad
of possible responses: the cynical condemnation of all translation, the
enthusiastic acceptance of the archipelago of independent language
games, the valorization of translation as a unique form of writing with
its own properly literary forms, the celebration of the abyss separating
languages as an aesthetico-ethical opportunity to introduce a Proustian
langue étrangère dans la langue . . .
These various reactions are at least correct in one respect: they
reject the purportedly universal criteria of translation argued for by their
adversaries (the deep structure of all discourse or the pure language
whose echo can be heard in the interstices between individual
languages). Nonetheless, this very polarization between universal
translatability and the utter impossibility of a faithful rendering of the
original – not to mention the middle ground cunningly occupied by
those who declare translation to be at once possible and impossible – is
in fact dependent on concrete criteria that provide an overall framework
for thinking about translation.

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 Editor’s Preface ix

The first of these criteria is, broadly speaking, historical. The

conceptual network defining the basic elements and modalities of
what is generally understood as translation is necessarily dependent
on a historical situation. The very distinction between translation and
adaptation, for example, has by no means remained a historical constant,
and the same could be said of the relationship between original prose
and plagiarism, transcription and revision, fidelity and infidelity.1 In fact,
these categories can only operate within a general logic of signification
that confers meaning on them by situating them in a relational network.
This explains why they are not even necessarily distributed according
to the oppositions they appear to fall within and do not simply exist as
empty categories whose content is provided by each new epoch. To
put this point rather succinctly, the very meaning of ‘translation’ – and
all of its corresponding parts – cannot be separated from the historical
situation within which it functions.
The second major criterion is social. In order for a translation to be
recognized as such and considered worthy of the name, it has to abide
by the broad parameters operative in a particular community. These
parameters need not necessarily impose a single model or method
of translation, but they define the general coordinates within which
translation can be distinguished from other discursive procedures. Each
community establishes a logic of signification that presupposes a specific
understanding of what meaning is, how it operates, the normative
principles it should abide by, its function in social discourse, etc.
Communities do, of course, come into conflict – both with themselves
and with other communities – but the basic point remains unchanged:
just as the translator never works in a historical vacuum, translation
is never an isolated soliloquy uninformed by a community. In short,
translation is neither based on universal criteria nor is it condemned
to a solitary encounter with the intractable original. It is a historical
practice that always takes place – implicitly or explicitly – within a social
framework.
This means that translation, as I propose to understand it under the
current circumstances, is not simply a form of mediation between two
distinct languages. It is a relational reconfiguration of meaning via a logic
of signification that is rendered possible by a socio-historical situation.
This process can, in fact, take place within a single language, which
does not, however, mean that understanding itself is an act of translation

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 x Editor’s Preface

or that we are condemned to endlessly paraphrasing our original ideas.

An alternate logic of signification can actually use the exact same words
to mean something entirely different because it determines the very
structure of meaning, the horizons of what is qualified as language, the
modi operandi of words and sentences, the entire network that defines
the process of signification. Thus, when translation does occur between
two languages, the overall logic of signification is often more important
than the differences between the languages themselves because it
determines the very limits between these two languages, how meaning
operates in each of them, the semantic relationships that need to be
preserved and those that can be discarded, etc.
Prior to being a choice about certain words, the act of translation
is a choice concerning the logic of signification in which these words
function. In the case of the present translation, I have chosen to
distance myself from one of the dominant methods of translation
for rendering contemporary French intellectuals in English, which is
historically the heir to a logic of signification based on the inviolable
sacred status of the original text. This method has led to the use of
every possible typographical and etymological artifice to prove – with
indisputable success in some cases – that it is impossible to translate
between different languages. The end result has often been a sacred
jargon of authenticity that is cunningly appropriated by the high priests
of the unknown in order to reconstruct the original syntax behind
the translation and unveil the unsaid in the said. Thus, in spite of its
obsessive preoccupation with the impossibility of grasping the original
text, this method of translation is paradoxically based on establishing
the greatest possible typographic proximity to the sacred original.
In fact, the ultimate telos of this method can only be described in
terms of an asymptote where the vertical axis would be the verbatim
identity between the translation and the original work (whose ultimate
consequences were deduced by Borges’ Pierre Menard).2
Rather than aiming at asymptotically transcribing Jacques Rancière’s
work into an idiom for the initiated, the following translation was made
within the coordinates of an entirely different logic of signification. The
primary unit of translation was not taken to be the typography of an
individual word or the uniformity of a particular concept, but the entire
relational system of signification at work. Strictly speaking, there is no
basic unit of translation since there are only relations within and between

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 Editor’s Preface xii

systems of signification. This has meant abandoning the supposed

autarchy of the individual text and the mantra-like motto ‘sola scriptura’
in order to analyse the relational network within which Rancière’s
work has emerged. More specifically, it has required studying, in both
French and English, Rancière’s entire corpus, his standard historical
references (from Plato and the New Testament to Balzac and Rossellini),
and the work of his contemporary interlocutors. The objective of the
current translation might therefore best be described in terms of a
relational reconfiguration of meaning that recasts Rancière’s work in an
alternate system of signification. This reconfiguration inevitably masks
certain aspects of his work in French, but hopefully only insofar as it
simultaneously opens up the possibility that other aspects thereby
become visible.

Only part of the current publication is a translation of Jacques Rancière’s

Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique–
Éditions, 2000). In addition to a brief introduction to Rancière’s work
and an afterword by Slavoj Žižek, the reader will also find an interview
conducted for the English edition, a glossary of technical terms, and a
bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
I would like to extend a special thank you to Tristan Palmer, who
originally agreed to take on this project, as well as to the editorial staff at
Continuum Books (Hywel Evans, Sarah Douglas, and John Cox). I would
also like to personally acknowledge the invaluable contribution made
by Radmila Djordjevic as well as by Emiliano Battista, Pierre-Antoine
Chardel, Andrew Parker, Ludovic Soutif, and Yves Winter. Finally, my
gratitude to Jacques Rancière is inestimable. In addition to agreeing
to an interview for the English edition, he has taken the time to clarify
certain passages and has provided helpful suggestions concerning the
glossary and bibliography. His generous contribution has helped make
the current volume much more than a translation of the original French
publication.

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 Editor’s Introduction
Jacques Rancière’s Politics of
Perception3

Gabriel Rockhill

As Alain Badiou has aptly pointed out, Jacques Rancière’s work

does not belong to any particular academic community but rather
inhabits unknown intervals ‘between history and philosophy, between
philosophy and politics, and between documentary and fiction’
(1998: 122). His unique methodology, eclectic research habits, and
voracious propensity for assimilating European intellectual and cultural
history are comparable perhaps only to the unclassifiable work of
Michel Foucault, an author with whom he himself acknowledges
certain affinities. If his voice has yet to be heard in full force in the
English-speaking world due to a lack of translations and sufficient
secondary literature, it is perhaps attributable to what Rancière
himself has called the distribution of the sensible, or the system of
divisions and boundaries that define, among other things, what is
visible and audible within a particular aesthetico-political regime.
Although closely affiliated with the group of neo-Marxists working
around Althusser in the 1960s, Rancière’s virulent criticisms of the latter
as of 1968 served to distance him from the author with whom he
had shared the common project Lire le Capital in 1965. As Rancière
explained in the Preface to La Leçon d’Althusser (1974), the theoretical
and political distance separating his work from Althusserian Marxism was

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 Editor’s Introduction xiii

partially a result of the events of 1968 and the realization that Althusser’s
school was a ‘philosophy of order’ whose very principles anaesthetized
the revolt against the bourgeoisie. Uninspired by the political options
proposed by thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard, Rancière saw in the
politics of difference the risk of reversing Marx’s statement in the Thesis
on Feuerbach: ‘We tried to transform the world in diverse ways, now it
is a matter of interpreting it’ (1974: 14). These criticisms of the response
by certain intellectuals to the events of May 1968 eventually led him
to a critical re-examination of the social, political, and historical forces
operative in the production of theory.
In the first two books to follow the collection of essays on Althusser,
Rancière explored a question that would continue to preoccupy him
in his later work: from what position do we speak and in the name of
what or whom? Whereas La Nuit des prolétaires (1981) proceeded via
the route of meticulous historical research to unmask the illusions of
representation and give voice to certain mute events in the history of
workers’ emancipation, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (1983) provided
a conceptualization of the relationship between thought and society,
philosophic representation and its concrete historical object. Both of
these works contributed to undermining the privileged position usurped
by philosophy in its various attempts to speak for others, be it the
proletariat, the poor, or anyone else who is not ‘destined to think’.
However, far from advocating a populist stance and claiming to finally
bestow a specific identity on the underprivileged, Rancière thwarted the
artifice at work in the discourses founded on the singularity of the other
by revealing the ways in which they are ultimately predicated on keeping
the other in its place.
This general criticism of social and political philosophy was
counter-balanced by a more positive account of the relationship
between the ‘intellectual’ and the emancipation of society in
Rancière’s fourth book, Le Maître ignorant (1987). Analysing the
life and work of Joseph Jacotot, Rancière argued in favour of a
pedagogical methodology that would abolish any presupposed
inequalities of intelligence such as the academic hierarchy of master
and disciple. For Rancière, equality should not be thought of in terms
of a goal to be attained by working through the lessons promulgated
by prominent social and political thinkers. On the contrary, it is the
very axiomatic point of departure whose sporadic reappearance

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 xiv Editor’s Introduction

via disturbances in the set system of social inequalities is the very

essence of emancipation. This explains, in part, Rancière’s general
rejection of political philosophy, understood as the theoretical
enterprise that abolishes politics proper by identifying it with the ‘police’
(see below). It also sheds light on his own attempt to work as an
‘ignorant schoolmaster’ who – rather than transmitting performatively
contradictory lessons on the content of emancipation – aims at giving
a voice to those excluded from the hierarchies of knowledge.
With the more recent publication of Aux Bords du politique (1990)
and La Mésentente (1995), Rancière has further elaborated a politics
of democratic emancipation, which might best be understood in
terms of its central concepts. The police, to begin with, is defined as
an organizational system of coordinates that establishes a distribution
of the sensible or a law that divides the community into groups, social
positions, and functions. This law implicitly separates those who take
part from those who are excluded, and it therefore presupposes a prior
aesthetic division between the visible and the invisible, the audible and
the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable. The essence of politics
consists in interrupting the distribution of the sensible by supplementing
it with those who have no part in the perceptual coordinates of the
community, thereby modifying the very aesthetico-political field of
possibility. It is partially for this reason that Rancière defines the
political as relational in nature, founded on the intervention of politics
in the police order rather than on the establishment of a particular
governmental regime. Moreover, politics in its strict sense never
presupposes a reified subject or predefined group of individuals such as
the proletariat, the poor, or minorities. On the contrary, the only possible
subject of politics is the people or the de-mos, i.e. the supplementary
part of every account of the population. Those who have no name, who
remain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police order via
a mode of subjectivization that transforms the aesthetic coordinates of
the community by implementing the universal presupposition of politics:
we are all equal. Democracy itself is defined by these intermittent acts
of political subjectivization that reconfigure the communal distribution of
the sensible. However, just as equality is not a goal to be attained but a
presupposition in need of constant verification, democracy is neither a
form of government nor a style of social life. Democratic emancipation is
a random process that redistributes the system of sensible coordinates

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 Editor’s Introduction xv

without being able to guarantee the absolute elimination of the social

inequalities inherent in the police order.
The irresolvable conflict between politics and the police, most visible
perhaps in the perennial persistence of a wrong that cannot be resolved
by juridical litigation, has led many readers to interpret La Mésentente
as a simple continuation of Lyotard’s Le Différend (1983). Although a
conceptual proximity is readily apparent, Rancière is careful to distinguish
his project from what he considers to be the essentially discursive nature
of le différend. According to his definition, disagreement is neither a
misunderstanding nor a general lack of comprehension. It is a conflict
over what is meant by ‘to speak’ and over the very distribution of the
sensible that delimits the horizons of the sayable and determines the
relationship between seeing, hearing, doing, making, and thinking. In
other words, disagreement is less a clash between heterogeneous
phrase regimens or genres of discourse than a conflict between a given
distribution of the sensible and what remains outside it.
Beginning with the publication of Courts Voyages au pays du peuple
(1990) and up to his most recent work on film and modern art, Rancière
has repeatedly foregrounded his long-standing interest in aesthetics
while at the same time analysing its conjunction with both politics and
history. In positioning himself against the Sartrean preoccupation with
engagement and the more recent hegemony of the Tel Quel group,
Rancière presents his reader with a unique account of aesthetics as
well as an innovative description of its major regimes. According to the
genealogy he has undertaken, the ethical regime of images characteristic
of Platonism is primarily concerned with the origin and telos of imagery
in relationship to the ethos of the community. It establishes a distribution
of images – without, however, identifying ‘art’ in the singular – that
rigorously distinguishes between artistic simulacra and the ‘true arts’
used to educate the citizenry concerning their role in the communal body.
The representative regime is an artistic system of Aristotelian heritage
that liberates imitation from the constraints of ethical utility and isolates
a normatively autonomous domain with its own rules for fabrication
and criteria of evaluation. The aesthetic regime of art puts this entire
system of norms into question by abolishing the dichotomous structure
of mime-sis in the name of a contradictory identification between logos
and pathos. It thereby provokes a transformation in the distribution of
the sensible established by the representative regime, which leads from

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 xvi Editor’s Introduction

the primacy of fiction to the primacy of language, from the hierarchical

organization of genres to the equality of represented subjects, from the
principle of appropriate discourse to the indifference of style with regard
to subject matter, and from the ideal of speech as act and performance
to the model of writing.
Rancière has forcefully argued that the emergence of literature in
the nineteenth century as distinct from les belles-lettres was a central
catalyst in the development of the aesthetic regime of art. By rejecting
the representative regime’s poetics of mime-sis, modern literature
contributed to a general reconfiguration of the sensible order linked
to the contradiction inherent in what Rancière calls literarity, i.e. the
status of a written word that freely circulates outside any system of
legitimation. On the one hand, literarity is a necessary condition for the
appearance of modern literature as such and its emancipation from
the representative regime of art. However, it simultaneously acts as the
contradictory limit at which the specificity of literature itself disappears
due to the fact that it no longer has any clearly identifiable characteristics
that would distinguish it from any other mode of discourse. This partially
explains the other major form of writing that has been in constant
struggle with democratic literarity throughout the modern age: the idea
of a ‘true writing’ that would incorporate language in such a way as
to exclude the free-floating, disembodied discourse of literarity. The
‘positive contradiction’ between these two forms of writing, as well
as the paradox that defines the unique discursive status of literature
as such, has given rise to numerous and varied responses through
the course of time. In other words, this contradiction has played a
productive role in the emergence of modern literature, and it has
also been decisive in setting the stage for later developments in the
aesthetic regime of art. To take one example among many, Rancière has
recently argued in La Fable cinématographique (2001) that a positive
contradiction – between elements of the representative and aesthetic
regimes of art – is also operative in film. On the one hand, the very
invention of film materially realized the properly aesthetic definition of
art, first elaborated in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, as
a union of conscious and unconscious processes. On the other hand,
however, film is an art of fiction that bestows a new youth on the genres,
codes, and conventions of representation that democratic literarity had
put into question.

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 Editor’s Introduction xvii

In his critical genealogy of art and politics, Rancière has also dealt
extensively with the emergence of history as a unique discipline (Les
Noms de l’histoire, 1992) and, more recently, with psychoanalysis
(L’Inconscient esthétique, 2000), photography, and contemporary art
(Le Destin des images, 2003). Behind the intricate analyses present in
each of these studies, a central argument is discernible: the historical
conditions of possibility for the appearance of these practices are to
be found in the contradictory relationship between elements of the
representative and aesthetic regimes of art. Thus continuing to work in
the intervals between politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and historiography,
Jacques Rancière will undoubtedly leave his own indelible mark on one
of his privileged objects of study: the distribution of the sensible.

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