Continental Philosophy

Book Review of Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics : with reflections on Rancière’s art-politics in lieu of the Deleuzian/Guattarian perspective. By Joseph Nechvatal

Jacques Rancière is interesting to me in that he is a critic of defined disciplines/specializations in favor of a ground of aesthetic pleasure brought about through a non-identification with one’s identity (and/or condition) – even while he stresses a refusal of containment/confinement that is simultaneously escapist but possibly emancipatory in its transformational suggestivity. In other words, he believes in the powers of the imagination.

In his book The Politics of Aesthetics Rancière comes right out and declares as much already in the forward when he states that he is concerned here with “aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of subjectivity”. (p. 9) So, first off, how can “new modes of sense perception” be created which can potentially help remove the subject out of his/her glib indolence? We will here examine that. Then I will compare and contrast some of Rancière’s approach to art and politics with that of the philosophic rhizomatic theory (1) of Gilles Deleuze ) and Félix Guattari ), which, at a general level, supports such an interdisciplinarian connectivist approach – as their rhizomatic theory encouraged non-linear and non-restrictive interdisciplinary thinking-doing.

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