Anti-Machiavellian Rancière: Aesthetic Cartography, Sites of Incommensurability and Processes of Experimentation
I argue that Rancière’s philosophy is anti-Machiavellian in the sense that his distinction between police and politics is not an originary division, but rather a gap in the sensible fabric of society. He thus moves from politics as a theory of agency to an aesthetic cartography of situations. It is...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Universidad de los Andes
2016-01-01
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| Series: | Revista de Estudios Sociales |
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| Online Access: | http://res.uniandes.edu.co/view.php/1057/index.php?id=1057 |
| Summary: | I argue that Rancière’s philosophy is anti-Machiavellian in the sense that his distinction between police and politics is not an originary division, but rather a gap in the sensible fabric of society. He thus moves from politics as a theory of agency to an aesthetic cartography of situations. It is a question of mapping the emergence of a political problem within a singular situation, and the ethics of such mapping is the insistence on the irreducible contingency of an existential choice of the problem. I will elaborate some new concepts (“sites of incommensurability,” “experimentation,” “fragmentation of social space”) and specify how the three logics of identification, dis-identification, and over-identification are three ways of constructing and dealing with situated problems. |
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| ISSN: | 0123-885X 1900-5180 |