Book Review: Ranciere’s Politics of Aesthetics

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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One Response to “Book Review: Ranciere’s Politics of Aesthetics”

  1. Landscape Agency Says:

    Read your critique of the Politics of Aesthetics and must say that Truth will never be found outside the Art object or the Subject … It is an internal Real, versus anything heterogeneous and rizomatic or originary … I suppose this is
    Rancière’s point, though I think you say/write he
    never quite gets there … The de-centering of the
    subject (and its various iterations, manifestations
    today in theory and praxis) is a huge red herring … Words matter because they are the most prescient form of image … Writing is therefore Truth (when it says the unsayable) … “What cannot be said must not be silenced [...]” J-L Marion … GK … So, J-L Nancy has a new book forthcoming from Fordham on deconstructing Christianity (entitled Dis-Enclosure)
    … ‘Here’ is an Event after Truth … Not that Truth
    is to be found merely in Theology … But one reason theology is the hot subject right now is because it goes where metaphysics could/can not go (i.e., ‘inside/upstream’, or, through the wall/looking glass to the Imaginary Itself) …

    - Landscape Agency

    http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/

    /S/O(MA) – /S/yntactical Operations (Metaphorical Affects)
    GK / LANY – GK / Landscape Agency New York / Etcetera

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