(DIS)AGREEMENT OF THE POLITICAL AND THE AESTHETICAL IN PHILOSOPHY OF JACQUES RANCIERE

Abstract

The article analyses Jacques Rancière’s theory of paradoxical interconnection between politics and aesthetics in contemporary culture. Author argues that Rancière’s theory belongs to the trend in modern philosophy, which develops the concept of autonomy of political referring back to Karl Schmitt, while Rancière’s theory of art is based on the concept of autonomy of the aesthetical, and represents politics and aesthetics as two modes of sensuality, or, in terms of Rancière, ‘the distribution of the sensual’. In this context, Rancière understands the connection between aesthetics and politics not in the sense of the ‘aesthetisation of politics’ inherent to the ‘age of the masses’, compromised by great totalitarian projects, but as a special sensual regime, which, according to Rancière, coincides with the regime of democracy as an absolute anomaly of power. Rancière’s thesis that the political, starting from antiquity, is being displaced and depoliticized by the so called post-politics as promise of a tolerant, rational post-ideological consensus and post-democracy, or ‘democracy without demos’, is considered in the context of Rancière’s analysis of contemporary art. As alternative to modern forms of depoliticisation and rational consensus, Rancière proposes the formation of new type of rationality - rationality of disagreement or dissensus, as type of paradoxical rationality that correlates with the paradoxicality of really political action as unpredictable/ impossible. The purpose of modern art, as well as modern politics, is, according to Rancière, to create unpredictable and undecidable aesthetic gap that provides for the effect of new sensibility and consonance in affect or ‘community of equals’ that implements the principle of equality here and now.