Egalitarian Moments

Aesthetics, Inaesthetics and the Platonic Regime of Art

In Chapter 3, we examined Rancière’s concept of the aesthetic regime of art and the reasons he opposes this aesthetics to Benjamin’s messianic modernity and Greenberg’s modernist sociologization of art. Moreover, we saw that Rancière opposes the aesthetic regime of art to the representative regime of the arts; indeed, he maintains that the aesthetic regime emerges with the collapse of the mimetic norms governing the representative regime. Nonetheless, this account of his aesthetics remains incomplete until we consider the distinction he draws between aesthetics and what he calls, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents and The Politics of Aesthetics, the ethical regime of images (Rancière, 2004a, 26–8, 64–5; 2004b, 20–1).

The paradigm for the ethical regime of images is established in Book X of Plato’s Republic. Rancière argues that for Plato – as for this ethical regime – there is no specific domain of art, only the arts of doing or making. These arts are evaluated according to how they affect the community. Plato evaluates the craft of poets as he evaluates the function of every other part of the community. Recall, from the Introduction, Rancière’s discussion of Plato’s archipolitics. In Plato’s republic, the ‘image of justice is the division of labor’ (Rancière, 1983, 25). Having a part in the city is defined by practising one’s occupation and no other: ‘it is right for someone who is by nature a cobbler to practice cobblery and nothing else, for the carpenter to practice carpentry, and the same for the others is a sort of image of justice’ (443c). This division governs not only artisans, but the separation between artisans, warriors, and philosophers. Conversely, injustice is defined as ‘a meddling and doing of another’s work, a rebellion by some part against the whole soul [or, analogously, the whole city] in order to rule it inappropriately’ (444b).

Plato’s justice valorizes ways of doing or making that reinforce the hierarchical structure of the division of labour and the order of the city. He admits ‘hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people’, but he banishes the poets of ‘the pleasure-giving Muse’ for waging a double rebellion against the city (607a). There are two arguments to banish, if we may use an anachronism for a moment, artists. First, the poet or painter is an artisan who does not observe the division of labour. Every other part of the community has an occupation with a specific goal: philosophers who deliberate, warriors who defend the city, and artisans who produce objects by imitating models or forms. By contrast, the artist produces appearances or imitations that are ‘simulacra of arts’ (Rancière, 2004a, 64). As Jean-Philippe Deranty notes, Plato judges images according to their ‘ontological veracity … the truthfulness with which they accurately represent an ideal model’ (Deranty, 2010b, 120). The images produced by artists do not imitate the ideal form of a thing; instead they imitate a craft which itself is modelled on the knowledge of forms. Thus artists produce imitations of imitations, doubly removed from knowledge. Like a carpenter, a painter can produce furniture, but the painter can also make all plants, all animals, the earth, the heavens, the gods, and Hades (596c); using meter, rhythm, and harmony, the poets deceive their audience into believing that they ‘know all crafts, all human affairs concerned with virtue and vice, and all about the gods as well’ (598d). The poet, in this sense, is the double of the philosopher who deliberates upon all human occupations and affairs, virtue and vice, and the nature of the gods. However, for Plato, the philosopher legislates and deliberates using reason and knowledge. By contrast, the poet, whose speech is doubly removed from knowledge, persuades people with images that appeal to their desires; he ‘arouses, nourishes, and strengthens [the] part of the soul [that is inferior to reason] and so destroys the rational one, in just the way that someone destroys the better sort of citizens when he strengthens the vicious ones and surrenders the city to them’ (605b). Hence the craft of the painter or poet, that is, the craft of the imitator, Rancière avers, ‘implicates all members of a society by putting in question their very simplicity, i.e. their adherence to their respective functions’ (Rancière, 1983, 17). This is the second reason to banish artists. The poet’s activity, by imitating various other occupations, suggests that all members of the community could do something other than their respective occupations. The poet is, by producing merely the appearances of truth and by appealing to the basest impulses of the people, which are the passions of tyranny and democracy (568b–d), the artisan of injustice.

Plato’s adherence to the ethical regime of images closes the archipolitical circle of the ideal city. Plato’s republic, on Rancière’s account, proscribes both politics and art (Rancière, 2004a, 26). Yet Plato suggests that poetry could ‘return from exile’ when its ‘defenders, who aren’t poets themselves but lovers of poetry … speak in prose on its behalf … to show that it not only gives pleasure but is beneficial both to constitutions and to human life’ (607d). The focus of this chapter is a particular form of art’s ‘return from exile’ that I will call the Platonic regime of art. I will use the phrase ‘Platonic regime of art’ to designate a specific discourse about art that binds novel practices of artistic production (and the production of novelty) to philosophy, truth, and politics that, like the aesthetic regime of art, emerges with the collapse of the representative regime of the arts, but which differs from both the ethical regime of images and the aesthetic regime of art. The Platonic regime of art is different from the ethical regime of images for two reasons. First, whereas Plato evaluates images according to how they affect the community and the city, the philosophers in question – we will look at F. W. J. Schelling and Alain Badiou – consider art to be a specific and autonomous domain that demands fundamental philosophical attention.1 Like Rancière, these thinkers hold that art is both autonomous – activating a domain of practices that cannot be subsumed under other forms of social relations – and heteronomous, meaning that the domain of art always relates to practices outside of its domain. Thus it is a regime of art rather than a regime of images. Second, it would be a misnomer to call this regime an ethical regime of art because (a) these theorists are not necessarily committed to an archipolitics; and (b) when Rancière critiques the ‘ethical turn’ in aesthetics, of which Lyotard’s work is emblematic, he is attacking theories of artistic production that are anti-political, that is, that preempt the possibility of thinking the relation of art and politics by linking art to an ethics of alterity (2004a, 88–132).

Before distinguishing the Platonic regime of art from the aesthetic regime of art, it should also be noted that the partisans of this Platonic regime are distinct from the contemporary, ostensibly anti-Platonic theorists who nevertheless share Plato’s assumptions regarding what Rancière calls, in an analysis of theatre in The Emancipated Spectator, ‘the paradox of the spectator’ (Rancière, 2009a, 2). This paradox occurs because art requires an audience. As Rancière states, ‘There is no art without eyes that see it as art’ (Rancière, 2003, 72). For Rancière, aesthetics is defined by a necessary distance between artistic production and artistic reception. Far from being an abyss into which all artistic intentionality irretrievably falls, this distance is the basis of interpretation. Interpretation, for Rancière, does not involve formulating propositions about intention that are true or false. Instead, the significance of art is always mediated in the relations between the artwork, artists, and audiences. The spectator, on his account, engages in a ‘poetic labour of translation … of putting her experience into words and her words to the test; of translating her intellectual adventures for others and counter-translating the translations of their own adventures which they present to her’ (Rancière, 2009a, 10–11). This does not mean that every interpretation is valid. It means that the social and political significance of the work arises in, and derives its context from, the way it is related to other social practices. As Gabriel Rockhill writes, ‘it is not the work in and of itself that produces political consequences, but the life of the work, with its various strategies and propositions, as it is received, interpreted, circulated, mobilized for various ends, etc.’ (Rockhill, 2011, 49).2 By virtue of this task of translation, counter-translation, and – if we recall a key term of Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster – verification, the work of interpretation undermines the ‘fixity and hierarchy’ of the boundaries of knowledge and ignorance.

Plato begins with the presupposition that activity is knowing and passivity is ignorance. The spectator occupies the wrong side of these dichotomies. She views rather than knows and, as part of an audience, she remains passive rather than intellectually active. These suppositions produce the paradox of the spectator: there is no art without a spectator, but a spectator is always separated from the ‘capacity to know and the power to act’ (Rancière, 2009a, 2). For Plato, theatre is dangerous because the passivity of the audience makes it possible to persuade with pleasure instead of reason. Rancière’s critique of the paradox of the spectator extends beyond Plato’s ethical regime of images. There are ostensibly revolutionary and anti-Platonist theorists who accept the presupposition that activity is knowing and passivity is ignorance. Instead of banishing art from political praxis, theorists such as Bertolt Brecht and Guy Debord attempt to make passive spectators into militants.3 However, in the terms of Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster, their approach to art – and their respective attempts to abolish the passivity of the audience by activating their engagement through the work – is closer to the Master than the emancipator; as Rancière writes, the master interrogates the student (that is, ‘demands speech, that is to say, the manifestation of an intelligence that wasn’t aware of itself’), while the ignorant schoolmaster verifies the student’s attentiveness to thinking critically and interpretatively (Rancière, 1987, 29). Thus Brecht or Debord interrogate their audience, who they presume are caught in the false consciousness of the spectacle, rather than verify their attention.

The Platonic regime of art is premised on a form of egalitarianism that avoids the paradox of the spectator. The fragment now entitled the ‘Älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus’ (hereafter, ‘System Program’) – written sometime between spring 1796 and early 1797 and by turns attributed to Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling (see Shaw, 2010, 56) – articulates two key theses of this Platonic regime of art. First, the author proclaims that the Idea of beauty – with the term Idea ‘taken in its higher, Platonic sense’ – will unify the divisions of philosophy through a ‘supreme act of reason’ that is also an aesthetic act (quoted in Krell, 2005, 24). With this announced system of philosophy the poets return from exile. However, their return subverts the archipolitics that organizes Plato’s republic. This anonymous Platonist then contends, in a second thesis, that by bringing philosophy and poetry into relation, philosophy can cultivate an aesthetic sense while poetry can elaborate a new mythology ‘in service to the ideas’. This new mythology, which emerges from a ‘monotheism of reason and of the heart [and the] polytheism of the imagination and art’, abolishes the hierarchies that not only structure the oppressive, mechanistic apparatus of the state and the superstitions of a hypocritical priesthood but also those reified boundaries that divide the sciences and that separate the truths of philosophy from the common world of the people (quoted in Krell, 2005, 25). With the instantiation of a new mythology,

eternal unity will prevail among us … Only then can we expect the equal formation of all powers [Kräfte], in particular persons as well as in all individuals. No longer will any power [Kraft] be suppressed; universal freedom and equality of spirits [Geister] will then prevail! (quoted in Krell, 2005, 26tm)

With a new mythology comes universal freedom and the equality of spirits. We should keep in mind, moreover, the Kantian resonances – recall Section 3.5 – of the terms Kraft (power, force, capacity) and the double significance of the German term Geist (spirit, mind). The new mythology will realize, according to this passage, the equal formation of all capacities and all minds, that is to say, the equality of intelligences. The author affirms here the legacy of Cartesian good sense and Kantian aesthetic common sense. But we cannot conclude that equality is only the product of the realization of a new mythology. Poetry could not be, as the author writes, the ‘instructress of humanity’ (rather than the instructress of the ignorant) if intellectual and aesthetic equality is not presupposed (quoted in Krell, 2005, 25). In effect, equality must already be supposed for a new mythology to embody those capacities that are already shared.

By analysing this fragment, it is possible to elaborate the basic theses of the Platonic regime of art.4 First, the Platonic regime proposes a universal concept of art. In its initial formulation, in the ‘System Program’, it affirms the supposition of equality as its form of universality. However, other formulations found in the work of Schelling and Badiou affirm the universal intelligibility of art while opposing the Idea of art to the levelling forces of culture and consensus. While it is possible to articulate the Platonic regime in egalitarian terms shared by the aesthetic regime, there are two features that are particular to the Platonic regime that Rancière contests in his critique of Badiou. First, and like the ethical regime of images, the Platonic regime of art tests, as Deranty puts it, the ‘ontological veracity’ of art – in other words, art is judged according to its relation to the Idea. However, the Idea does not describe an ideal model of a thing, as it does in the ethical regime of images. In the Platonic regime the Idea of art designates, as Benjamin Noys phrases it, the formalization of a ‘relation of rupture’ (Noys, 2009, 385) that separates the work (or works) of art from a given state of a situation. When Schelling suggests that the novel, by transforming the fragments of modern life into a unified totality, lays the groundwork for a new mythology, he sets monumental art against fragmentary and mechanistic relations that organize modern society, while for Badiou an artistic event is subtracted from the networks of commodification and consensus that structure what he calls ‘democratic materialism’ (Badiou, 2006b, 1). In sum, the Platonic regime formulates the politics of art in an evental and monumental form.5

At this point, it is worth considering why I think it is worthwhile to complicate Rancière’s outline of the three regimes of art and the arts. On Rancière’s account, this Platonic regime would be one of the metapolitical limits of the politics of aesthetics. When, for instance, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, he analyses the ‘System Program’, he concludes that its project of aesthetic education via new mythology embraces a form of aesthetic metapolitics: it ‘proposes to carry out, in truth and in the sensible order, a task that politics can only ever accomplish in the order of appearance and form’ (Rancière, 2004a, 37). The author of the ‘System Program’ articulates one of the two critical demands that delimit the aesthetic regime of art, that a historically actual art must become life. It is only one type of metapolitics – the other being a politics of resistant form that demands that life must become art.

I think distinguishing the aesthetic regime from the Platonic regime has the following advantages. First, it allows us to think various practices politics of art without overextending the use of the term metapolitics, which for Rancière always betrays a negative connotation. Second, this distinction detotalizes the concept of the aesthetic regime of art. This recasts the politics of art as a space of conflict between various regimes of art, where one does not have a descriptive advantage – instead, the politics of art remains an open and contemporary question.6

Finally, reformulating the politics of art as a field of conflict amplifies the prescriptive aspect of Rancière’s work. By the aesthetic regime of art, he means to describe the historical modes of artistic production that emerge with the collapse of the representative regime of the arts, but there is also a prescriptive and productive dimension to his analyses of art – the archaeology of a number of immanent aesthetic scenes also serves to conceptualize and practise other possible forms of aesthetic emancipation. The prescriptive and the descriptive, he says,

constantly intertwine to constitute the landscape of the possible (the one that describes reconfigures the possibilities of a world, the one that prescribes presupposes a certain state of the world which is itself made of sedimented prescriptions), and the configuration of these landscapes is always, in the last instance, a poem: an expression in the common language of the common resources of thought. (Rancière, 2006a, 477)

While the descriptive and prescriptive elements may intertwine in Rancière’s work, the weight he gives to their respective importance shifts. Though his avowed purpose in Aesthetics and Its Discontents is to ‘clarify’ rather than ‘defend’ what aesthetics means (Rancière, 2004a, 14), in Aisthesis he affirms, against accounts of modernity that see modern art as a separation ‘both from the art of the past and the “aesthetic” forms of prosaic life’, that:

the movement belonging to the aesthetic regime, which supported the dream of artistic novelty and fusion between art and life subsumed under the idea of modernity, tends to erase the specificities of the arts and to blur the boundaries that separate them from each other and from ordinary experience. (Rancière, 2011: xii)

After setting out the stakes of Aisthesis, Rancière traces a counter-history of modernity that illustrated by a number of aesthetic scenes that demonstrate the imbrication of art in politics and social transformation. But this form of the imbrication of art and life is fundamentally different from the monumental form celebrated in the ‘System Program’. As we have seen, Rancière means by the aesthetic regime of art a form of micropolitics of aesthetics that uses misunderstanding and disidentification as forms of introducing social transformation into a given distribution of the sensible. We will, following a suggestion by Rancière, categorize aesthetics as heterotopian (Rancière, 2004b 41; 2010a). And with this categorization in mind, it is possible to glimpse an important distinction between the aesthetic regime and the Platonic regime: beginning from the supposition of aesthetic equality, proponents of the aesthetic regime think the politics of art as heterotopian, while Platonists think the politics of art monumentally. We might even say that practices of the politics of art play out between heterotopia and monumentality, that aesthetic equality and the practices of artistic praxis are delimited by these two possibilities as articulated in the conflict between the Platonic regime and the aesthetic regime of art.

At this point, I should stipulate that it is not my purpose here to undertake an archaeology of the Platonic regime of art.7 I have introduced this concept of the Platonic regime in order to reconsider Rancière’s critique of Badiou’s inaesthetics outside of its contemporary context. To my knowledge, the accounts of the debate between Rancière and Badiou, at least concerning aesthetics, establish (while possibly defending one against the other’s criticisms) how two intellectuals with much in common – both philosophically and biographically – end up talking past each other (see, for example, Shaw 2007, Tanke 2009, Phillips 2010, Rockhill 2010). In this chapter, I would like to show that the central points of contention between Rancière’s aesthetics and Badiou’s inaesthetics also describe the fundamental differences between Schiller, whose On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795; hereafter, Ästhetische Briefe) is ‘one of the first formulations of the politics inherent to the aesthetic regime’ (Rancière, 2004a, 27) and Schelling, whose philosophy of art systematized an avowed though idiosyncratic Platonism. The conflict between the aesthetic regime and the Platonic regime, in both cases, concerns whether the politics of art is monumental or heterotopian, that is, whether it is evental or micropolitical. In this chapter, I will contend that, after the collapse of the representative regime, the Platonic regime of art and the aesthetic regime of art emerge as two possible ways of thinking the relations of philosophy, politics, and art. This does not mean that the last two hundred years of philosophy are marked teleologically by this conflict of aesthetics and Platonism; there is no historical destiny of art, only historically situated practices and discourses, which include, among others, some that are Platonic and others that are aesthetic. Instead, I will suggest that thinking the politics of art after the Platonic regime and after the aesthetic regime requires formulating a paradoxical praxis that maintains the possibility of both a monumental and micropolitical art.

4.2. Between aesthetics and inaesthetics

Badiou and Rancière share a common philosophical horizon. In pedagogical terms, both began as students of Althusser, only to find, after the events of May 1968, Althusser’s work stultifying.8 In philosophical terms, both maintain that a contemporary, radical account of politics requires: (1) a theory of political subjectivation, a practice which is (2), opposed to, and operates beyond the confines of, the allocation of rights and the functions of parliamentarianism within, for Badiou, the order of the state or, for Rancière, policing; which is to say that (3), political subjectivation is evental, breaking with and disrupting apparatuses of oppression and exploitation, rather than ethical – as both view the Lévinasian ethics of the other, which has influenced Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Lyotard, as antipolitical.

Despite these similarities, Badiou and Rancière disagree about what the tasks of politics and artistic praxis are.9 Though Badiou has criticized Rancière’s politics, and Rancière Badiou’s inaesthetics, there has been little substantive debate between the two.10 While Badiou dedicates two chapters of his Metapolitics to differentiating between their respective accounts of political subjectivation, he makes only passing references to Rancière’s aesthetics; in The Century he contends – echoing Foucault’s remarks about Sartre being a man of the nineteenth century trying to think the twentieth – that Rancière’s politics of aesthetics remains ‘steeped in the nineteenth century’ (Badiou, 2005, 214 n.48). Rancière’s rejoinder rightly ignores Badiou’s accusation that his politics remains too democratic – that is, compatible with the logic of parliamentarianism (Badiou, 1998c, 120) or, in Rancière’s terms, no different than policing – and focuses instead on Badiou’s inaesthetics, which Rancière claims is a contemporary and stultifying form of Platonic modernism.11

In this section, I will defend the distinction I have made between the aesthetic regime of art and the Platonic regime of art by outlining Rancière’s critique of Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics. By questioning Rancière’s characterization of Badiou’s inaesthetics as Platonic modernism, I will show that the key points of disagreement between Rancière and Badiou correspond to the tenets that define the differences between aesthetics and Platonism. Badiou’s interpretations of artworks are structured by relating their significance to their ontological veracity or verification, meaning that art is a work of truth or the Idea; and second, that Badiou ultimately thinks the politics of art in evental or monumental terms – that art’s relation to a given state of a situation is a ‘relation of rupture’ (Noys, 2009, 385). When Badiou claims that art is a work of truth, he means that the artistic event is a double form of subtraction: (1) Badiou defines an event as the subtraction of truth from knowledge of a given situation, but (2) the inaesthetic value of art, its ontological veracity – as evidenced in The Century – is determined insofar as art thinks subtraction. The second definitive feature of the Platonic regime is perhaps more controversial in the case of Badiou, who asserts that the truths of art are ‘irreducible’ to the other conditions of philosophy: politics, science and love (1998b, 9; 2005, 152). However, to say that an artistic event is irreducible to politics does not necessarily mean – and again, The Century confirms this point – that artistic events do not have an immanent political import. The account that follows is not concerned with establishing who, between Badiou and Rancière, is telling the truth about art. Instead, we will establish how the opposition between the aesthetic regime of art and the Platonic regime formulates a number of dilemmas concerning art, politics, and aesthetics.

Before evaluating Badiou’s inaesthetics, we will outline his ontology, which he calls a ‘Platonism of the multiple’ (Badiou, 1989, 103). In Being and Event (1988), Badiou defends three claims that have important implications for his inaesthetics: first, that mathematics is ontology; second, that philosophy establishes the concepts – such as the event and the subject – with which it identifies truths; and third, that there are four conditions of philosophy, which themselves are not dependent upon philosophy, that produce truths: politics, science, art, and love. Badiou argues that each event of truth breaks with the state of a situation and reconfigures the co-ordinates of the symbolic order. However, an event takes no object: ‘every truth is without an object’ (Badiou, 1989, 91). Instead, an event induces effects of subjectivation. For each event or truth (as truths are multiple), a subject must make a wager. After deciding in favour of an event, that it has taken place, this subject proceeds in fidelity to this truth, to make sense of it. Finally, while philosophy can think the possibility of the event, there are not philosophical events. Thus, for Badiou, philosophy thinks under the events of its four conditions. While each condition is thought proceeding from an event and from the subject, each is elucidated according to its own logic: the ‘process of a truth’, he claims, ‘thus entirely escapes ontology’ (Badiou, 1988, 355). To be more precise: Badiou means that the wager of the event is heterogeneous to being, though the meaning of the process of truth is bound, in his inaesthetics, to its ontological veracity – that is, the way that art thinks the Idea.

Though Badiou maintains that art thinks the Idea, the truth of art is not immediately ontological. Art is a truth, but not the truth. He specifically opposes his ontology to the ‘poetic ontology’ of Heidegger, which remains committed to ‘the figure of being as endowment and gift, as presence and opening’ evoked by the poem (Badiou, 1988, 9). By contrast, Badiou argues that mathematics – specifically the Zermelo-Fraenkel system of set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC) – is ontology. Badiou does not claim that being itself is mathematical, but he considers set theory the only demonstrative and fully transmissible discourse on ontology not reliant on some privileged location of unconcealment. Set theory founds the being of the pure multiple through a lack in being and the rupture of the matheme – on the void, with the axiom of the void (or empty set) being his name for the only axiom of ZFC that asserts the existence of a multiple: there exists a set such that there does not exist any element which belongs to it. From the existence of an empty set (the void) it is possible to generate an infinite multiple with no predicates other than being multiple from the other axioms of set theory. But the void is not the presence of an absolute One; instead it is the unpresented suture of the multiple to being.

Badiou maintains that set theory, through philosophical intervention, provides an ontology of the pure multiple. To account for the appearance of unity within presentation, he introduces two concepts: ‘the situation’ and ‘the state of the situation’. A situation is the presentation of the multiple (multiples belong to a situation) in its infinite inconsistency, while a state of the situation is the representation of the multiple (multiples are included in a state of the situation) as consistent. So, for example, an infinite multiple in a political situation can be represented as, among other things, individuals, voters, industrial workers, students, or intellectuals. However, while multiples are always both presented and represented, there is no complete correspondence between the situation and the state of the situation, which makes possible the novelty of the event. An event is supernumerary vis-à-vis the situation and its state; it is subtracted from the knowledge that circulates within the state of the situation. The event can only be named and discerned retroactively within a situation, and this is a task of the subject. A subject, for Badiou, is not an everyday occurrence, but the subject of an event. The subject must wager that an event has taken place, as there is no objective truth of an event. Then, in deciding that an event has taken place, the subject must pursue the consequences of the novelty introduced: this is the process of a truth and giving the event a supernumerary name. So, to return to the political example, a radical movement could emerge after an event such as May 1968 in France, dedicated to pursuing the latter’s consequences, which has a universal address and could include the various representations of political actors such as workers, students, intellectuals, immigrants, etc. Yet this movement itself would not be represented within the state of the situation; it can only continue through subjective political engagement.

It may appear, at this point, that there is little place for art in Badiou’s work: his set-theoretical ontology – explicitly opposed to ‘poetic ontology’ – provides the fundamental concepts of his philosophy. But he also holds that production of truths is not internal to philosophy, but takes place within the four conditions. The demarcation between philosophy and its conditions can already be found in his treatment of set theory: the ontological character of mathematics is not internal to working mathematics, but constructed through a philosophical intervention regarding the ontological capacity of mathematics. In terms of art, severing poetry from its apparent ontological task allows for an appraisal of artistic truths immanent to artistic processes themselves. This appraisal of artistic truths is the task of inaesthetics. Badiou defines inaesthetics as:

a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art. (Badiou, 1998b, xiv)

Badiou situates inaesthetics against three schemata that tie together art, philosophy, and the theme of education: didacticism, romanticism, and classicism. Though these are seemingly transhistorical frameworks for considering the relation between art and philosophy, they each have, according to Badiou, a historical and contemporary manifestation.

Plato’s Republic is the first formulation of didacticism. Badiou argues that Plato banishes (nearly all) the arts from the city on the basis of the thesis that ‘art is incapable of truth, or that all truth is external to art’ (1998b, 2). For Plato, art is deceptive not because it imitates things, but because it imitates the effect of truth. By appearing to present the truth immediately, art ‘diverts us from the detour’ of philosophy (1998b, 2). On Badiou’s account, Plato constitutes philosophy as the detour that distances thought from empirical immediacy through dialectical labour. Badiou’s own Platonism of the multiple is premised on the subtraction of thought from the immediacy of the poem – though he maintains, against Plato’s didacticism, that art is a process of truth. Thus while Badiou commends the interruption of the poem by the matheme in Being and Event, he finds Plato’s conceptualization of art wanting. Plato’s didacticism reduces art to ‘the charm of a semblance of truth’ (Badiou, 1998b, 2). From this position, art is either condemned or instrumentalized pedagogically, the latter option leaving art at the mercy of external prescriptions, namely the political norm legislated by philosophy. The effects of art are evaluated only from the basis of the social Good. In Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou argues that Brecht is the exemplar of the twentieth-century didacticism that is Marxism. For Brecht, he claims, militant theatre is constructed from the scientific truth of dialectical materialism. If one understands Stalinism as the jurisdiction of dialectical materialist philosophy over politics, then Brecht practised a ‘Stalinized Platonism’: art is separate from the truth of dialectical materialism, but it educates; in the end, art is the pedagogical tool for the courage of truth, ‘against cowardice in the face of truth’ (1998b, 6).

The didactic relation between philosophy and art is inverted by romanticism, which maintains that ‘art alone is capable of truth’, that art alone embodies the absolute (1998b, 3). Art presents a truth to which philosophy can only point. Badiou’s critique of the romantic schema can be seen as a response to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s thesis that ‘romanticism is the inauguration of the literary absolute’, through which questions of thinking, writing, and sense are modelled on the production of theory as literature or poiesis (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1978, 12). Literature as criticism and criticism as literature circulate as a deconstruction – albeit incomplete – of the subject, the absolute, and the work as the basis of significance. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s archaeology of the literary absolute recovers the work of the romantics in light of the deconstruction of western metaphysics carried out by Heidegger, who is ultimately Badiou’s polemical target.

In Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou criticizes Heidegger for suturing philosophy to poetry, delegating the task of thinking the compossibility of truths to one of philosophy’s conditions, ‘handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure’ (Badiou, 1989, 61). For Heidegger, the thinker, in seeking the originary link between poiesis and Being that was severed by the Platonic intervention of the matheme, can only reiterate the announcement of the destiny of the poetic gods, and shepherd thought towards the saving power of the poem (Badiou, 1998a, 21–32). Badiou argues that Heidegger’s account owes its persuasive power to the way that it ties the poetic destitution of objectivity – carried out during the ‘Age of Poets’ that proceeds from Hölderlin to Celan – to the critique of metaphysics. However, he adds, ‘the fundamental criticism of Heidegger can only be the following one: the Age of Poets is completed, it is also necessary to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition’ (Badiou, 1989, 74). The Age of Poets can be ‘completed’ because this ‘age’ was not immanent to the poets, but a philosophical category engendered by the poetic suture (Badiou, 1992a).

Between ‘didactic banishment’ and ‘romantic glorification’ is a ‘peace treaty of sorts’ that Badiou calls the classical schema (1998b, 3). It is first established by Aristotle, who, according to Badiou, bases the classical schema on two theses: first, art is mimetic, its regime is that of semblance; and second, the purpose of art is neither truth, nor pedagogy, but therapy. The classical schema holds that art’s mimetic effects provide the possibility of catharsis, which Badiou defines – in terms meant to evoke those of psychoanalysis – as ‘the deposition of the passions in a transference onto semblance’ (1998b, 4). Art, constrained to the imaginary relation of transference, is evacuated of the weight of the traumatic encounter with the Real. The price of this ‘relative peace’ between philosophy and art is that the latter becomes what Badiou calls a ‘public service’, a kind of escape mechanism for social pressures.12 Insofar as art serves this purpose, it can be managed and legitimated – or funded – by the state. The contemporary manifestation of the classical schema is psychoanalysis, insofar as it interprets art as the manifestation of desire (whether it is the desire of the artist or spectator). The work of art makes it possible to inscribe the object of desire, the objet petit a, in the Symbolic, thus breaking the impasse of the Real. Though contemporary Lacanians would object to this generalization of psychoanalytic theory, Slavoj Žižek himself has attacked Jacques-Alain Miller’s turn to a ‘psychoanalysis in the city’ that seeks social legitimation through state sanction (Žižek, 2004, 103; cf. Miller, 2003). In such a case, art renders service to psychoanalysis, and the latter likewise renders service to the state.

Having accounted for Marxism, Heideggerian hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis in Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou argues that no new schema was introduced in the twentieth century. The avant-gardes, from Dada to the Situationists, were a hybrid and unstable entanglement of didacticism and romanticism, vacillating between the attempt to exhaust art of its alienated or alienating separation from social life and the attempt to realize the absolute legibility of the autonomous and separate place of art. The former attempt is didactic, while the latter is romantic; yet above all, these ‘partisans of the absoluteness of creative destruction’ were anticlassical (Badiou, 1998b, 8). Nevertheless, the ‘aesthetic voluntarism’ of the avant-gardes could not escape what Badiou calls the recent ‘saturation’ of the attempt to think art and philosophy.

To break with this interpretative saturation, Badiou proposes inaesthetics as a new modality of the relation between art and philosophy. He contrasts inaesthetics with the three previous schemata by reference to the categories of singularity and immanence (see Table 4.1). A relation of art to truth is singular if it cannot be given elsewhere than art and cannot ‘circulate among other registers of work-producing thought’ (Badiou, 1998b, 9). A relation is immanent if truth is ‘internal’ or ‘coextensive’ to art’s effects – in other words, if art is not the instrument of an external truth. For didacticism, the relation between art and truth is singular but not immanent: art has a singular pedagogical role but truth remains external to it. For romanticism, the relation is immanent but not singular – in this case, the truth of philosophy and art is the same: as mentioned above, in crossing the philosophical critique of objectivity (that is, the critique of truth as adequation; see Heidegger, 1961) and the poetic destitution of objectivity, Heidegger sutured philosophy to the truth procedure of art. For the classical schema, there is no relation between art and truth; art is relegated to the imaginary effects of verisimilitude, catharsis, and transference. Furthermore, it is possible to extrapolate from Badiou’s account that the avant-gardes vacillated between the disjunction of absolute immanence and a singular task for art, sometimes resulting in schisms and sectarianism. From this standpoint, Raoul Vaneigem’s condemnation of later Surrealism’s turn to mythology as intolerable and counter to the goals of a revolution of everyday life in his A Cavalier History of Surrealism (1977) would be a fine example of the didactic Marxist/Situationist critique of Surrealist romanticism.

Table 4.1 The relation of art to truth

Relation:

Immanent

~Immanent

Singular

Inaesthetics

Didactic

~Singular

Romantic

Classical

Badiou formulates the method of singular and immanent interpretation of – he would say affirmation of – the relation of art to truth by contrasting inaesthetics to didacticism and romanticism. He affirms, like didacticism, that ‘only art can exhibit truth in the form of semblance’ (1998b, 9), but he maintains, like romanticism, that truth is immanent to art – that is, art thinks the Idea. Nevertheless, he jettisons two features of romanticism: first, its reliance on the thematic of productive genius; and second, its conception of the truth of art as incarnation, in which an artwork descends to the sensible incarnation of the Idea (1998b, 11). Instead, Badiou proposes that discerning the truth of an artistic event requires the concepts of the artistic configuration and the subject-point. An artistic configuration is a sequence of works that proceed from an event; the novelty of the event is registered by configurations which will have taken place insofar as they are unprecedented within previous configurations. A truth is singularized within a configuration, and for each event there are multiple works, or differential subject-points, which delineate the ‘subject’, or ‘theme’, of fidelity to the event. He writes: ‘a truth is an artistic configuration initiated by an event … and unfolded through chance in the form of works that serve as its subject points’ (1998b, 12). Badiou’s account keeps a work from being understood as an absolute object while at the same time it prevents a subject from being understood as a subject of genius. Instead of locating the truth of art in subjects or objects, truth is localized in artistic procedures, which circulate between configurations and differential subject-points, constrained by a post-evental rupture with the state of the situation.

In what follows, I will challenge Badiou’s claim that inaesthetics is the first novel account of the relation between philosophy and art since romanticism. First, I will look at Rancière’s criticisms of what he considers to be Badiou’s Platonic modernism. Then, after locating the impasses of Rancière’s critique, I will argue that Badiou’s inaesthetics is a contemporary form of the Platonic regime of art. As the reader has probably surmised, there are numerous similarities between Badiou’s schemata and Rancière’s regimes of art and the arts. Both Badiou and Rancière are critical of Plato’s Republic (the model of both didacticism and the ethical regime of images) and Aristotle’s Poetics (which delineates the norms of the representative regime of the arts and the classicism that remain influential in psychoanalysis).13 However, in Badiou’s schemata, there is no place for what Rancière has characterized as the aesthetic regime of art.14

Let us be clear about what is at stake in Rancière’s critique of Badiou. Rancière contends that inaesthetics is a form of ‘Platonic modernism’ (Rancière, 2004a, 71), a hybrid of the ethical regime of images and Greenberg’s modernism – but above all, inaesthetics is anti-romantic, a claim borne out by the introductory paragraphs of Badiou’s ‘Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’ (2004; hereafter, ‘Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’). However, this is not a quarrel about who is telling the truth about art. Instead, Rancière’s argument – as it is with Greenberg – is that Badiou’s theoretical decision to separate inaesthetics from ‘aesthetic speculation’ depoliticizes art. In the case of Badiou – to paraphrase a claim of André Breton – art must be monumental or it will not be at all. Hence the final claim of Badiou’s ‘Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’: ‘It is better to do nothing than to work formally toward making visible what the West declares to exist’ (Badiou, 2004, 148). From Rancière’s perspective, then, Badiou precludes the possibility of the micropolitics of aesthetics.

For Rancière, the significance of the micropolitics of art is tied to the collapse of the mimetic norms that governed the representative regime of the arts. These norms not only distinguished what was proper to an art, and policed the lines between the fine arts, but also established parallels between artistic hierarchies and social hierarchies. As we have seen, the aesthetic regime of art, which emerges from the collapse of these mimetic norms, names a double movement of the constant negotiation and identification of: (1) the boundaries between art and non-art, the negotiation of which ruins the hierarchies that stabilized the representative regime; and (2) the exorbitant promises of an aesthetic revolution of the forms of art and forms of life (Rancière, 2004a, 14). The aesthetic regime of art, as formulated by Schiller and others, defines art according to a paradoxical relation of autonomy and heteronomy: ‘all the new, aesthetic definitions of art that affirm its autonomy in one way or another say the same thing, affirm the same paradox: that art is henceforth recognizable by its lack of any distinguishing characteristics – by its indistinction’ (Rancière, 2004a, 66).

Rancière identifies three processes ‘by which Badiou’s modern Platonism confronts the equivocations of art’s homonymy’ (Rancière, 2004a, 86). First, he contends that Badiou, by attempting to purify inaesthetics of ‘aesthetic speculation’, attempts to isolate the specificity and univocity of art at the cost of subtracting artistic truths from ‘the indistiction of the metaphoric universe in which the aesthetic regime ties together forms of art, forms of life and the forms of thinking about art’ (Rancière, 2004a, 86). According to Rancière, it is not possible to formalize the ‘specificity of art’. In his defence, at this point, Badiou could contend that he and Rancière are much closer than Rancière admits. Rancière maintains that art is aesthetic insofar as it disrupts policing by introducing types of – and relations between – speech, visibility, and place. For Badiou, art is also submitted to the principle of novelty, subtracted from the ordinary circulation of meaning. However, whereas Rancière’s micropolitics of aesthetics revolves around the porous boundary of what appears as art and the implications of these demarcations, Badiou emphasizes the monumental character of the artistic event. As Benjamin Noys points out, Badiou’s approach to art after Handbook of Inaesthetics reflects ‘on how the “independent affirmation” of the artwork requires an engagement and rupture with existing conditions … Badiou has increasingly tried to specify how the subtraction from relation might be formed as a relation of rupture’ (Noys, 2009, 384–5).

Therefore, Rancière must be able to identify the way that Badiou’s conceptualization of this paradoxical ‘relation of rupture’ forecloses on the micropolitics of art. For Rancière, it is Badiou’s Platonic modernism that does so, which affirms the autonomy of art while denying its heteronomy. As Rancière writes,

inaesthetics designates the twisted necessity according to which the lines of division that cause the Platonism of truth to conceal itself from aesthetic Platonism [that Rancière locates within romanticism] are made to coincide with those by which modernism seeks to secure ‘art’s specificity’ from slipping into aesthetics’ indistinction. (Rancière, 2004a, 86)

Badiou, as Rancière points out, uncritically accepts the modernist concept of mimesis. As we have seen, for Rancière, the aesthetic regime interrupts and undermines the mimetic norms of the representative regime, but it is not against representation or figuration. The modernist concept of mimesis maintains that art is to be purified, as Badiou acknowledges in The Century, of ‘resemblance, representation, narrative or the natural’ (Badiou, 2005, 132). Badiou’s modernism is also present in the Handbook of Inaesthetics. For example, there he argues that the ‘modern poem’, as it is inscribed in the period between Hölderlin and Celan, is ‘the opposite of a mimesis. In its operation, it exhibits an Idea of which both the object and objectivity represent nothing but pale copies’ (Badiou, 1998b, 21). Poetry thinks the disobjectification that subtracts language from the conventions of its representative functions; it manifests both the ‘difference within language’ and thinks the very ‘flesh of language’ itself (Badiou, 1998b, 32, 20). This flesh of language is difference rather than incarnation; the poem does not bring the Real of language to fruition, but attests to the gap between presence and absence that makes the poetic event possible.

And yet, according to Rancière, Badiou’s modernist assumptions are undermined by his commitment to Platonism. While Badiou adopts both the modernist critique of mimesis, and (as least in Handbook of Inaesthetics) the tenet that the specificity of art is the specificity of an art, he rejects the claim that the irreducible character of a medium defines this specificity. Instead, he holds that the relation of an art to truth or the Idea defines the singularity of an art. Then the inaesthetic autonomy of art – thought in its singularity and immanence – becomes a form of heteronomy. Rancière distinguishes between two concepts of heteronomy. One is aesthetic heteronomy, which erodes the distinction between poetry and prose, literature and life. Mallarmé’s poetics, on this account, deprives

the opposition between the essay in prose and the poem in verse of all discriminatory relevance: Crise de vers is not a text by Mallarmé on poetry; it is a piece of Mallarmean poetry, neither more nor less so than the Sonnet en X, which, for its part, is indissolubly a poem and a statement about poetry. (Rancière, 2004a, 74)

The heteronomy of Badiou’s Platonism amounts, via a ‘rigorously Althusserian logic’, to the subordination of aesthetic sensibility to philosophical truth (Rancière, 2004a, 79). By distinguishing absolutely between art and philosophy, Badiou effects a separation by which ‘it is philosophy that acts as the condition of the poem’s intelligibility’ (Rancière, 2006b, 197). A poem, for example, is not a self-sufficient thinking; it is divided between being an immanent orientation for thought and exhibiting a truth of which it is the task of philosophy to subtract. More generally, Rancière contends that Badiou’s formalizations of art become formulatic, granting a univocal purpose to each art, related to the passage of the Idea in the event. Poetry becomes a source for general maxims of thought; Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, for example, supplies the maxim that nothing takes place but the place and the undecidable dice-throw or wager of the subject in the wake of the event (see, for example, Badiou, 1988, 191–8; 1992b, 87, 122, 202). Furthermore, dance is treated as the askesis (in Foucault’s sense of the term) – though not as an art – through which the body becomes the virtual movement of thought (Badiou, 1998b, 69); theatre interrupts democratic consensus – in his later terms, ‘democratic materialism’ – by making visible and mobilizing the ‘excluded and invisible people who, all of a sudden, by the effect of the theater-idea, embody upon the stage intelligence and force, desire and mastery’ (1998b, 76);15 while, by virtue of the montage of ‘ambient imagery, from the detritus of other arts’ and the indistinction of art and non-art, cinema purifies the impurity of ideas: it turns – ‘for the duration of a passage – the impurity of every idea into an idea in its own right’ (Badiou, 1999, 111; 1998b, 83).

Though Rancière attacks the ‘Althusserian logic’ of Badiou’s inaesthetics, he stops short of critiquing it, as he does Greenberg’s modernism, as a form of anti-egalitarianism. Whereas Greenberg casts the modernist avant-garde as the standard bearer of preserving, from bourgeois philistinism and proletarian kitsch, that which remains of living European culture, Badiou contends that evental, monumental art is an art of ‘proletarian aristocratism’: of universal address and subtracted from consensus, resemblance or imitation (Badiou, 2004, 147). But before we address the political stakes of the disagreement between Badiou and Rancière, it is important to note that Jean-Jacques Lecercle disputes the claim that inaesthetics amounts to an ‘Althusserian logic’ of mastery. While Rancière argues that Badiou’s inaesthetics retrenches the modernist distinctions between genres and disciplines, Lecercle interprets the separation of philosophy and poetry as an affirmation of poetry as logos or thought. On Lecercle’s account, Badiou’s inaesthetics sidesteps ‘the aporia of the contrast between pathos and logos, between auratic or lyrical vaticination and the exclusion of thought from poetry or poetry from thought’ (Lecercle, 2004, 215). Instead, Badiou holds that thinking takes place in the ‘irreducible’ form of art. The paradox, for Lecercle, is that Badiou’s separation of philosophy and art, which places truth on the side of art as thought, undermines philosophical appeals to interpretative mastery:

The general irony of Badiou’s readings of poetry is of course that they are such strong and decisive readings that they leave a lot of space for other readings, as the poem spectacularly exceeds the truth that Badiou’s reading extracts from it. (Lecercle, 2004, 215)

But let us focus on this claim that Badiou posits a ‘poetry of logos’ that thinks through its ‘irreducible’ form as art. Rancière characterizes Schelling’s work in similar terms: for Schelling, it is the ‘identity of logos and pathos,’ of ‘conscious procedure and unconscious production’ that ‘attests to the existence of art’ (Rancière, 2001, 28). While this summary of Schelling’s philosophy of art is accurate, it does not necessarily mean that his thought is aesthetic. If it is the case that the Platonic regime of art also attests to the indistinction or indifference of the Idea and art, thought and affect, by which Rancière characterizes the aesthetic regime, then it is politics that divides these regimes. But first, I will challenge Rancière’s characterization of inaesthetics as a form of Platonic modernism and Badiou’s claim that inaesthetics is an entirely new schema of relating philosophy and art by revisiting a moment when Schiller and Schelling proposed competing views of the relationship between philosophy, politics, and art. This moment has been obscured by Hegel’s account of the historical development of aesthetics.

4.3. Between aesthetic education and the absolute

In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel presents a historical development of a concept of art that, he contends, overcomes the opposition between spirit and nature that forces human beings to ‘live in two worlds which contradict one another’: the world of spiritual life and that of sensuous nature, in which humans are torn between the command of practical reason – the categorical imperative and ‘duty for duty’s sake’ – and their sensuous disposition (Hegel, 1835: 54). It is to the ‘great credit’ of Schiller to have broken through ‘Kantian subjectivity and abstraction of thinking’ by venturing that the artistic production of beauty realizes the totality and reconciliation of spirit and nature:

This unity of universal and particular, freedom and necessity, spirit and nature, which Schiller grasped scientifically as the principle and essence of art and which he laboured unremittingly to call into actual life by art and aesthetic education, has now, as the Idea itself, been made the principle of knowledge and existence, and the Idea has become recognized as that which alone is true and actual. Thereby philosophy has attained, with Schelling, its absolute standpoint; and while art had already begun to assert its proper nature and dignity in relation to the highest interests of mankind, it was now that the concept of art, and the place of art in philosophy was discovered, and art has been accepted, even if in one aspect in a distorted way (which this is not the place to discuss), still in its high and genuine vocation. (Hegel, 1835, 61, 62–3)

Hegel’s summary is deceptively straightforward. He claims that Schiller and Schelling overcome Kant’s abstractions by making the principle and vocation of art the realization of the unity of freedom and nature. However, he adds that this movement of thought anticipates – already at the juncture between 1795 and 1807 – the realization of the ‘Idea itself’ in philosophy as the truly highest vocation. This ‘distortion’, that places art and philosophy in reciprocal relation, has been, on Hegel’s account, now surpassed by philosophy.

From Rancière’s perspective, Hegel liquidates the emancipatory potential of both literature and the aesthetic regime of art – which encompasses both Schiller’s aesthetics and Schelling’s philosophy of art – by relegating it to the past.16 But we should also be skeptical toward the historical continuity of Hegel’s account, whereby Schiller surpasses Kant, Schelling Schiller, and Hegel Schelling. Instead of placing them in a continuum between Kant and Hegel, I will contend that Schiller and Schelling chart two distinct paths in the aftermath of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgement. Therefore, my position challenges Rancière’s categorization of Schelling’s philosophy of art as part of the aesthetic regime (see, for instance, 1998d, 76; 2001, 6, 28; 2004a, 9, 37). This, in turn, undermines both Rancière’s distinction between Schelling’s romantic Platonism and Badiou’s Platonic modernism (2004a, 71–3), and Badiou’s claim that inaesthetics is a new philosophical engagement with art. Though Badiou does not address the work of Schelling, I think he would treat Schelling’s Platonism as romanticism, meaning that Schelling maintains the thesis that art is the immediate sensible presentation of the Idea.17 This would require Badiou to equivocate between immanence and immediacy, since Schelling holds that the Idea of art is immanent but not immediate.

As we have seen (in Section 3.5), in The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière argues that Kant’s aesthetic sensus communis is premised on the capacity for intellectual and sensible equality. The disinterestedness of aesthetic judgement, according to Rancière, is what makes it possible for an individual to suspend her interests and disidentify with her practico-inert exigencies in order to consider how the social relations that govern her everyday life could be otherwise. Aesthetic judgement, in other words, opens the possibility for what Rancière calls misinterpretation, whereby the oppressed borrow terms and practices from dominant discursive forms and redirect them toward emancipatory ends. However, that Rancière supports his claims with Gauny’s and Baudelaire’s ‘commentaries’ on The Critique of the Power of Judgment indicates an implicit acknowledgement of the limits of Kant’s own interest in the political or emancipatory significance of aesthetics. But this implicit acknowledgement does not undermine Rancière’s interpretation. His aim, in The Philosopher and His Poor, is to demonstrate, against Bourdieu, that Kant’s aesthetics carries an emancipatory potential.18

When Rancière revisits the Critique of the Power of Judgment in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, he explicitly addresses the limits of the politics of Kant’s aesthetics. He contends that Kant’s conception of beauty allegorizes the politics of aesthetics. Beauty, for Kant, is subordinated to neither the epistemological structures of the understanding nor the categorical duties of practical reason. Since it concerns the form of an object that is neither cognitive nor practical, aesthetic judgement is a moment of aesthetic ‘autonomy’: this ‘neither…nor…, the unavailability of this form for the faculties of both understanding and desire, enabled the subject, through the free play of those faculties, to experience a new form of autonomy’ (Rancière, 2004a, 91). In political terms, aesthetic judgement, this ‘neither…nor…’, for Rancière, ‘suspends’ the established cognitive or practical significations of a given distribution of the sensible, making possible novelty and social transformation. The keywords of Rancière’s aesthetics (literary misunderstanding, misinterpretation), and even political disagreement, play on this moment of aesthetic suspension by indicating a novel use of words and practices (and new relations between words, practices, and things) unforeseen by established canons of knowledge and practico-inert fields of experience.

But while a concept of ‘fragmentary emancipation’ becomes available with Kant’s aesthetics when common sense is treated as an egalitarian supposition, Rancière stipulates in Aesthetics and Its Discontents that Kant’s concept of common sense – at least within Kant’s system – can also function as a principle of consensus or social mediation, by which it may be possible to ‘unite the elite’s sense of refinement with ordinary people’s natural simplicity’ (Rancière, 2004a, 98).19 Rancière then proceeds to argue that Schiller radicalizes Kant’s account of common sense by emphasizing the dissensual basis of aesthetics.20

4.3.1. Aesthetic emancipation and policing

Rancière’s reading of Schiller highlights how aesthetics becomes a way to think emancipation. But, in delineating an archaeology of the aesthetic regime, Rancière outlines how art becomes a practice of dissensus, but he does not seek to address why the meaning of art becomes a significant problem for philosophy. I think both Schiller and Schelling are motivated by a similar dissatisfaction with Kant’s account of practical reason. More specifically, both find that the formal rigidity of Kant’s categorical imperative results in an excessively narrow and rule-bound concept of freedom. Freedom, from their respective standpoints, ought to be the activity by which a human being cultivates the totality of her faculties, and yet Kant’s view of practical reason as an infinite task of approximating the moral law is but a fragment of this activity. To think artistic production and aesthetic experience, for both Schiller and Schelling, requires a broader concept of freedom: Schiller’s account proposes a concept of aesthetic freedom, while Schelling proposes what we might call an account of absolute freedom. Moreover, both maintain that their respective concepts of freedom cannot be expressed fully in statist political forms. In sum, both Schiller and Schelling hold that philosophical engagement of art entails: first, a critique of Kant’s concept of freedom; and second, a new way of thinking social and political change – as Rancière notes, the politics of art entails a new concept of revolution.

Highlighting the critique of Kant’s concept of freedom reinforces Rancière’s distinction between the significance granted to the disjunction of the ‘neither…nor…’ of aesthetic autonomy by Kant and by Schiller and Schelling. While Kant argues that our judgements concerning the beautiful are neither theoretical (as taste only expresses subjective pleasure or displeasure in relation to the representation of an object, and not the cognition of an object through a concept) nor practical (that is, grounded ‘in the idea of freedom as given a priori by reason’) the applicability of taste is circumscribed to subjective, though universal, validity (1790, 5: 280). Indeed, for Kant, practical reason, rather than aesthetics, is the keystone of the system: he states that ‘the concept of freedom, insofar as its reality is proved by an apodictic law of practical reason, constitutes the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason’ from which all other concepts ‘get stability and objective reality’ (Kant, 1788, 5: 3–4). Kant’s successors, however, are interested in how aesthetics makes possible a concept of freedom or autonomy unbound from the formal rigidity of the categorical imperative, a concept of freedom that is based on the totality of human being, what Schiller calls our ‘sensible-rational nature’ (Schiller, 1795, 69tm). For Schiller, the aesthetic character of an object differs from its physical, logical, or moral determinations because aesthetics relates ‘to the totality of our various functions without being a definite object for any single one of them’ (Schiller, 1795, 141–3n). And, for Schelling, artistic production – as an aesthetic intuition – realizes creatively through the artwork what philosophy intuits in the ideal, namely, the identity of subject and object, freedom and nature, and conscious and unconscious production. Despite their differences, both Schiller and Schelling turn to artistic production and aesthetic experience to think a concept of freedom that encompasses the totality of the ‘sensible-rational nature’ of human being.

Both Schiller and Schelling also politicize art. Schiller’s aesthetics evinces a moment of what Rancière calls the aesthetic revolution. This aesthetic revolution has a double meaning. On the one hand, it is a revolution through which the aesthetic regime of art and the paradoxical aesthetic experience of free play and free appearance suspends the typical oppositions that guide philosophical inquiry, such as freedom and necessity, subject and object, and activity and passivity. On the other hand, it is an aesthetic concept of revolution, which seeks to change the sensible fabric of social relations rather than seizing institutional power. Schiller, Rancière argues, treats philosophical categories and hierarchies that govern them – for example, activity and passivity, form and matter – as political categories.

By suspending the oppositions between form and matter as well as activity and passivity, Schiller’s aesthetics challenges, at a micropolitical level, the basic categories that organize the sensible fabric of social relations. Thus, for Rancière, we cannot establish Schiller’s politics by reference to traditional political categories. According to Lesley Sharpe (1995), debates over Schiller’s politics typically split over whether the Ästhetische Briefe is an engagement or retreat from politics. This approach presupposes that there is a consensus concerning what politics is (for instance, some form of engagement – by individuals or by classes – with apparatuses such as the state, civil society, or public sphere), and then asks if or how Schiller’s work is politically engaged. The answers, from this approach, vary. De Man glibly concludes that Schiller’s popularizing aesthetics is proto-totalitarian (1983, 154–5), Habermas portrays Schiller as a theorist of communicative action (1985, 45–50), Eagleton concludes that he is a discontent bourgeois ideologist (1990, 102–19), for Pugh he is a neo-Platonic pessimist (1996, 363), while Beiser places Schiller within the modern republican tradition of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Ferguson (2005, 123–34). From Rancière’s standpoint, this approach to deciding Schiller’s political intentions is equivalent to establishing whether he supports a better or worse form of policing. But he does not proceed to claim that Schiller outlines a form of the politics of equality; instead, Rancière argues that Schiller presents one of the first formulations of the micropolitics ‘inherent to the aesthetic regime of art’ (Rancière, 2004a, 27): aesthetics is political when it suspends (and subsequently transforms) the philosophical and political categories that organize practico-inert and inegalitarian social relations.

The aesthetic revolution, Rancière contends, is not preoccupied with state power or social domination. Instead, aesthetics offers the possibility of social transformation in the interstices of power and domination. Schiller denounces two interrelated forms of domination: the state and the division of labour, both of which fragment humanity.

Schiller criticizes the state for stifling the full cultivation of the sensible-rational nature of humanity. There are two forms of state power. The natural state, founded on force rather than law, only guarantees the physical subsistence of its subjects. In the natural state, individuals encounter each other as opposing forces that impose mutual limits on each other’s activity. The second form is the moral state or ethical state. At the outset of the Ästhetische Briefe, Schiller argues that aesthetic education, which would cultivate the harmony of each individual’s sensible-rational nature, would prepare humanity for the transition from the natural state – which he initially sees to be ‘at present’ the cause of social ills (Schiller, 1795, 45) – to the moral state founded upon law. However, in Letter XXVII, Schiller contends that the ethical state, given that it is founded on law and duty, concomitantly oppresses the sensible character of humanity. His criticism shifts from a particular form of the state to the state form itself, though such a critique is foreshadowed in Letter VI.21 There, he argues that the ‘crude and clumsy mechanism’ of the state relates to the individuals that comprise it as fragments – identified according to their respective specializations or occupations (Schiller, 1795, 35). We can restate Schiller’s critique in Rancière’s terms: here Schiller is criticizing the policing apparatus of the state, whereby individuals are classified, and their roles and places partitioned, according to their occupations.

In Letter V, Schiller opposes aesthetic education to the politics of the French Revolution, which, at one point, had seemed to topple the foundations of the natural state in order to inaugurate the ‘true freedom’ of moral law. However, the ethical state cannot be sustained, if it imposes its laws from above upon a fragmented humanity, as one imposes form on matter. For the ‘political artist’ or politician, he writes in Letter IV, ‘Man is at once the material on which he works and the goal towards which he strives’ (Schiller, 1795, 19), but Schiller criticizes, in a political allegory, in Letter XIII, the imposition of form upon sensibility as unconditional subordination of sensibility (Schiller, 1795, 85n.). Moreover, as he states in Letter VI, the policing of identifications through the state and the division of labour is doubly stultifying: a human being ‘becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge’, dividing humanity between those who work and those who think, while narrowing these capacities to a particular occupation or a particular branch or knowledge (Schiller, 1795, 35). To this subordination, Schiller opposes the reciprocity of play. Rancière summarizes Schiller’s opposition of the French Revolution – that is, of political revolution as the seizure of political power – to the regulative ideal of the aesthetic state of free play and appearance as the emergence of a different concept of social transformation:

The power of ‘form’ over ‘matter’ is the power of the class of intelligence over the class of sensation, of men of culture over men of nature. If aesthetic ‘play’ and ‘appearance’ found a new community, then this is because they stand for the refutation, within the sensible, of this opposition between intelligent form and sensible matter which, properly speaking, is a difference between two humanities. (Rancière, 2004a, 31)

Though both Schiller and Schelling denounce apparatuses of policing, they politicize art in different ways: one through micropolitics, the other through monumental events. I have introduced this distinction in place of Rancière’s characterization of the politics of aesthetics as metapolitics. On his account, the new mythology proposed in the ‘System Program’ is a form of metapolitics because it envisions the coming of a fully reconciled and organic community. This, he claims, precludes the possibility of dissensus. Given that Schelling comes to privilege the universality of the new mythology over its form of equality, I will readily admit Rancière’s critique. However, he also claims that Schiller’s aesthetics is a form of metapolitics that he opposes to statist revolutions (Rancière, 2004a, 33, 99). At one point, he argues that Schiller’s concept of play ‘becomes the principle of politics or, more exactly, of a metapolitics, which, against the upheavals of state forms, proposes a revolution of the forms of the lived sensory world’ (Rancière, 2004a, 99, my emphasis). By contrast, in Disagreement, metapolitics designates a political philosophy that forecloses on the politics of equality by dismissing it as a superstructure that masks the forces – such as the transformations and contradictions of the forces of economic production – that drive social relations. Neither Schiller nor Schelling propose a politics of art that is metapolitical in that sense. Instead, they oppose artistic production and aesthetic experience to forms of policing. While the politics of art is not the politics of equality, neither is it a form of policing.22 If the politics of equality disrupts and overturns the operations of policing, the politics of art offers modes of introducing new modes of visibility and legibility that are irreducible both to the politics of equality and to the oppressive forms of policing.

4.3.2. Schiller’s aesthetic freedom

Having established their respective critiques of policing, we will now consider Schiller’s and Schelling’s competing accounts of the practices and politics of art. That is, we will consider how both Schiller and Schelling consider artistic practices as part of a critique of Kant’s concept of freedom and as a practice of emancipation.

For Rancière, Schiller’s Ästhetische Briefe is one of the first formulations of the politics of the aesthetic regime of art. Rancière interprets Schiller’s remark that the proposition ‘man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays’ will ‘prove capable of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful, and of the still more difficult art of living’ (1795, 107–9) as an affirmation of the paradoxical specificity of the aesthetic regime (Rancière, 2004a, 28). Play, on Rancière’s account, is an activity that suspends the relations of power and domination that organize the policed world of the practico-inert. Schiller’s proposition, Rancière contends, recognizes both the autonomy and heteronomy of aesthetic suspension. On the one hand, the ‘whole edifice of the art of the beautiful’ refers to the way that aesthetic experience is separated from the tasks and interests of the practico-inert world. On the other hand, play is, as a formative practice (Bildung) of ‘the still more difficult art of living’, a form of practical autonomy that expresses the ‘sensible-rational nature’ of human freedom.

Rancière’s interpretation of the Ästhetische Briefe does not begin with an examination of Schiller’s transcendental deductions of the regulative ideas of beauty and play. Instead, Rancière begins, in media res, with Schiller’s illustration of the aesthetic experience of viewing the statue Juno Ludovisi. This experience, Rancière writes, ‘allegorizes’ a specific mode of the relation of art to politics. Schiller dispenses with the requirements of technical and normative standards that govern the representative regime of the arts. He states that the appearance of ‘idleness and indifferency’ in the portrayal of the gods separates art from all forms of utility; Greek artistic production ‘freed’ the gods, ‘those ever-contented beings from the bonds inseparable from every purpose, every duty, every care, and made idleness and indifferency the enviable portion of divinity – merely a more human name for the freest, most sublime state of being’ (Schiller, 1795, 109). This aesthetic experience demarcates a specific and autonomous space of art separate from practico-inert tasks and interests, where these interests are, in Rancière’s terms, ‘suspended’. At the same time that this aesthetic experience demarcates an autonomous space for art, it is also heterotopic, separate from practico-inert social relations. As Rancière notes, Schiller calls this space – of an aesthetic state or condition (Zustand) – that of ‘appearance’ (Schein). Though Schiller does not use the term in his description of the Juno Ludovisi in Letter XV, this illustration anticipates his definition of the topos of ‘Schein’ in the later letters of the Ästhetische Briefe. There he reiterates the separation of aesthetic appearance from the imperatives of ‘reality’: the necessities of physical subsistence and the duties of the moral law.23 Aesthetic semblance must remain autonomous (see 1795, 195), for it is by means of play with aesthetic semblance that we engage in a practice of ‘aesthetic freedom’ (1795, 143, 145); that is, aesthetic experience gives way to a free disposition that suspends the constraints and categories that divide the sensible world into categories such as intelligible and sensible, or activity and passivity. The aesthetic freedom of play ‘takes under its protection no single one of man’s faculties to the exclusion of others, it favours each and all of them without distinction’; moreover, while enjoying beauty, ‘we are at such a moment master in equal degree of our passive and of our active powers, and we shall with equal ease turn to seriousness or to play, to repose or to movement, to compliance or to resistance, to the discursions of abstract thought or to the direction contemplation of phenomena’ (Schiller, 1795, 151, 153).

For Rancière, ‘free appearance’ designates a specific form of the autonomy of aesthetic experience that is separate from the practico-inert coordinates of the policing of a given distribution of the sensible. Schiller’s discussions of ‘appearance’ are only one half of aesthetic experience. In Letters XI–XV, he proceeds through a transcendental deduction of play as a regulative idea (meaning that the aesthetic state and free appearance are also regulative) that opens the possibility of aesthetic dissensus.

The purpose of Schiller’s transcendental inquiry is to explain how the experience of beauty is possible. The idea of beauty – more specifically, the regulative idea of beauty – must, he argues, be deduced from the ‘sheer potentialities’ of the basic features of the sensible-rational nature of human activity. An idea of beauty, then, will reflect both the basic conflict between the rational drive and the sensible drive of human activity and, because it is a demand of reason (1795, 103), their unity. Technically speaking, Schiller’s deduction begins with two principles that make individuality possible, both of which cannot be grounded upon the other: an individual is both her person (which persists outside of time) and her condition (Zustand, which is situated in time). But given that Schiller places his thought in the lineage of the critical philosophy of Kant and Fichte, I think his transcendental account gets its impetus from describing human activity rather than being. Even his concept of person, which is described as ‘eternal’ is meant to explain the status of moral judgements rather than the metaphysical status of the individual. A moral judgement becomes a moral law when the individual treats one moment of life as a regulative idea, ‘as if it were eternity’, as if, that is, it were a universal law (1795, 83, my emphasis).24

Therefore Schiller’s inquiry focuses on how to explain human activity on the basis of – and through the relationship between – two fundamental drives: the sensuous drive, which aims to give content or reality to individuality through sensation (to express individuality through feeling, affect, and physicality); and the formal drive, which aims to give form to the materiality of the individual’s condition, to bring harmony to the diversity and multiplicity of appearances.25 The sensuous-rational nature of humanity makes two demands: as ‘the first demand is that we should materialize form, i.e. we should externalize and embody it in something particular. The second demand is that we should formalize matter, i.e. we should internalize it and make it our own’ (Beiser, 2005, 139).

The fundamental problem of Schiller’s inquiry is delineating the relationship between the two drives, between reason and feeling. This relationship constitutes a problem, he contends, because reason demands that a complete concept of human nature requires the unity of human faculties, a unity between the formal drive and sensuous drive (1795, 103). In Letter XIII, Schiller develops the basis of his critique of Kant’s concept of freedom. He argues that when a philosopher presumes that the rational drive and sensuous drive are diametrically opposed, when Kant or Fichte posit a primary antagonism between rationality and feeling, the only way to maintain the unity of the human faculties is to subordinate the sensuous drive to the rational. The result, however, is that this unity lacks harmony (1795, 85n.). Kant defines freedom by reference only to an ‘apodictic law of practical reason’ (Kant, 1788, 5: 3–4), while Fichte’s account of practical reason demands that the self should strive through freedom to be absolute, ‘that everything should conform to the self, that all reality should be posited absolutely through the self’, and this demand treats nature and feeling as passive obstacles to be overcome and subsumed by the self’s infinite striving (Fichte, 1794–5, 232; see Beiser, 2005, 144–7, 227–9).

Subordinating feeling and sensation to reason, Schiller argues, does not unify human nature. Instead, treating sensation and reason as competing drives (that is, as activities that are two competing ways of treating a common object) leaves the self divided. Human beings, he argues, are neither exclusively matter or sensibility nor exclusively rationality or spirit (Schiller, 1795, 103). Therefore, his aesthetics aims to account for the drives in their unity and opposition. Schiller holds that the two drives are opposed in aims and objects. The sensuous drive aims to give life and materiality to individuality, while the formal drive aims to give harmony and form to the multiplicity of phenomena. These activities then reciprocally limit each other when the individual cultivates – through culture – their capacities to the same degree. On the one hand, cultivating sensibility preserves the ‘life of sense against the encroachments of Freedom’ (1795, 87). I take this claim to be a critique of both Kant’s concept of freedom, which subordinates the individual’s sensible activity (that is, feelings, desires, affects) to the rational strictures of the categorical imperative and Fichte’s treatment of anything outside of the self’s activity as an obstacle. On the other hand, Schiller holds that the cultivation of reason is necessary for critical and reflective free activity.

After establishing how their activities are mutually limiting, Schiller turns, in Letters XIV and XV, to considering their unity. Since the individual is neither exclusively matter nor exclusively spirit, he states, there must be some activity that expresses a complete idea of human nature. The sensuous drive and the formal drive ought to be unified, ideally speaking, through the play drive [Spieltrieb]. While the object of the sensuous drive is life in its fullest material sense and the object of the formal drive is the form of things and relating these things to reason, the object of the play is living form or beauty (1795, 101). As we have already seen, play is the free act that suspends the mutually reciprocal constraints that arise from the opposition of form and sense: divisions between activity and passivity, freedom and necessity, reality and appearance, knowledge and sensibility.

Rancière treats Schiller’s account of play as a political allegory. Schiller, he argues, undermines the Platonic apparatus of the ethical regime of images. In Plato’s republic, ‘there exists no appearance without a reality that serves to judge it, no gratuity of play compatible with the seriousness of work’ (Rancière, 2004a, 31). By contrast, Schiller’s concepts of free play and free appearance open a space of dissensus that suspends relations of domination and power. Through the dynamics of play and appearance, and a paradoxical interplay of autonomy and heteronomy, aesthetics constitutes a momentary space that disrupts the subordination of appearances to reality and the identification of individuals with their occupations and specializations. For Rancière, Schiller’s Ästhetische Briefe formulates the heterotopian practices of the micropolitics of the aesthetic regime of art.

I will add that, for Schiller, it is the regulative status of play, beauty, and the aesthetic state that makes dissensus over these concepts possible.26 Though, on Schiller’s account, transcendental philosophy can deduce a regulative ideal of beauty, and deduce those a priori conditions that make the experience of beauty possible, it does not provide technical rules for judging art as beautiful. Instead, these ideals demand that we make judgments about beauty by making singular cases universal while admitting that these judgments are not the final word on beauty or the significance of play. These ideals demand that these judgments appeal to anyone and everyone while nonetheless remaining subject to dispute and misunderstanding.27

4.3.3. Schelling on artistic production and practical reason

While Schiller appropriates the regulative structure of practical reason for aesthetic ends, Schelling’s critique of the transcendental idealism of Kant and Fichte subverts the primacy that they accord practical reason by using the regulative structure of the categorical imperative against it. While Schiller adopts the regulative principle for aesthetics in order to make possible dissensus concerning the significance of beauty and play, Schelling contends that practical activity is ultimately limited by the infinite task of approximating the moral law. This infinite task, according to Schelling, is limited to an ideal; all attempts to realize objectively the moral law are forestalled by the very structure of practical reason, which separates willing from objectivity. He then argues that the activity of aesthetic intuition, by contrast, produces in the artwork what philosophy intuits ideally: the identity of subjectivity and objectivity, conscious and unconscious activity, as well as freedom and nature.28 Furthermore, systematically speaking, it unifies the principles of transcendental idealism and nature-philosophy. Aesthetic intuition, then, shows through the artwork the identity of the self’s conscious activity and nature’s unconscious productivity. Schelling’s philosophy of art, in effect, transgresses the boundaries of Schiller’s transcendental philosophy. In the Ästhetische Briefe, Schiller writes, were man

to be at once conscious of his freedom and sensible of his existence, were, at one and the same time, to feel himself matter and come to know himself as mind, then he would in such cases, and in such cases only, have a complete intuition of his human nature, and the object which afforded him this intuition would become for him a symbol of his accomplished destiny and, in consequence … serve him as a presentation (Darstellung) of the infinite. (Schiller, 1795, 95tm)

For Schiller the experience of an absolute artwork that presents the infinite in the finite world is not possible. Instead, this aesthetic experience of beauty is what we would desire, and strive for, ideally in the activity of play. However, for Schelling, aesthetic intuition is that act whereby the infinite idea is produced in sensible form in the artwork.

At this point, we should examine the specific claims set forth in the System of Transcendental Idealism in more detail.29 In this work, Schelling posits the identity of subjectivity and objectivity, and then attempts to explain the genesis of objectivity through the self’s repeated attempts to realize its activity consciously and objectively. In the theoretical section of the System, he argues that representation and objectivity become possible through the self’s striving toward consciousness. So, theoretical philosophy explains, Schelling maintains, the genesis of objectivity and the activity of representation, but not consciousness. The self only becomes conscious through practical reason, as a self who wills but whose will is limited by the wills of others. Through practical reason, the self realizes its activity – as will – consciously though not objectively. Indeed, practical reason is driven by a contradiction between willing (freedom) and the ‘compulsion to represent’ (necessity) that results in the transcendental illusion of freedom (Schelling, 1800, 176tm/3: 409).

Practical reason demands that the self transforms the world according to its will – ‘to transform the object as it is into the object it ought to be’ (1800, 177/3: 559) – but the fundamental distinction between ideal and object treats the self’s activity as a will fundamentally separated from the necessary laws of the natural world. Thus practical reason sunders the identity of subjectivity and objectivity as well as freedom and necessity; that is, the self becomes conscious of itself as willing but not as productive – the feeling of necessity that accompanies objectivity and the self’s real limitations, which can be discovered through transcendental inquiry, remains inaccessible to consciousness and cannot be recovered objectively by the striving of practical activity. In other words, the goal of the system is to show the identity of subjectivity and objectivity, but this identity ‘cannot be evidenced in free action itself, since precisely for the sake of free action … it abolishes itself’ (1800, 213/3: 605). Nevertheless, practical reason is a necessary part of the system because it explains the genesis of consciousness, just as theoretical reason explains the genesis of objectivity and the categories of representation. Theoretical reason explains the necessity that accompanies the self’s productivity, while practical reason deduces the genesis of consciousness as will, but a system of philosophy that proceeds no further than theoretical and practical reason remains incomplete; for it ‘man is forever a broken fragment, for either his action is necessary, and then not free, or free, and then not necessary according to law’ (1800, 216/3: 608).

Aesthetic intuition also begins with the contradiction between freedom and necessity, but resolves this contradiction by producing the artwork. Art realizes, as the product of aesthetic intuition, the identity of subjectivity and objectivity, freedom and necessity, and conscious and unconscious activity. To account for the contradiction between freedom and necessity in aesthetic intuition, Schelling provides what we might now call a phenomenological account of artistic production: according to the ‘testimony of all artists’, artistic activity is driven by both free, conscious intention and by an involuntary and ‘irresistible urge of their own nature’, and this conflict is resolved by the production of the artwork (1800, 222/3: 616). Artistic production, in other words, synthesizes or unites the free, conscious productivity of the self with the unconscious productivity of nature (the Spinozist ‘natura naturans’ that plays a prominent role in Schelling’s nature-philosophy of that time). Though both practical reason and aesthetic intuition mediate the contradiction between freedom and necessity, their activities end in different results. The activity of practical reason separates willing and object, but this separation traps it in the infinite task of attempting – but never realizing – to make the object conform to the will. Aesthetic intuition, by contrast, produces a sensible presentation of the infinite in the artwork.

After showing how aesthetic intuition produces, through the power of the imagination, the unity of opposites such as freedom and nature or subjectivity and objectivity, Schelling defines the ‘absolute’ attributes of the work of art. He differentiates the work of art from two other objects: natural objects and ‘common artifacts’. The artwork demonstrates the same identity of intelligibility and necessity as a natural object, but the former shows conscious intent. The artwork differs from ‘common artifacts’ because the value of the artwork is not derived from any other end; it is neither a means for economic exchange, nor an object for moral or scientific ends (1800, 226–7/3: 622–3). Instead, the work of art is a singular object for three reasons. First, the artwork is a work of beauty, which is the ‘infinite finitely presented;’ it presents the infinity of identity in sensible, finite form. Second, while artistic production proceeds from the feeling of an ‘infinite contradiction’ between freedom and necessity, the completion of the artwork resolves this contradiction. The completion of the artwork, then, is accompanied by the feeling of ‘infinite satisfaction’ rather than a feeling of necessity (1800, 225tm/3: 620).

Finally, the artwork presents its own rule that mediates content and form rather than reflecting an external rule that had guided its creation. More importantly, while the artwork presents its own rule, the meaning of the work is irreducible to the artist’s conscious intention. Indeed, Schelling argues that the meaning of the work is elaborated in relation to its (universal) audience in ways that this audience is not necessarily conscious of. He likens the artwork to Greek mythology:

the mythology of the Greeks, which undeniably contains an infinite meaning and a symbolism for all ideas, arose among a people, and in a fashion, which both make it impossible to suppose any comprehensive forethought in devising it, or in the harmony whereby everything is united into one great whole. (1800, 225/3: 619–20)

This social and mythological aspect of art is not, for Schelling, a thing of the past. In the lectures published as The Philosophy of Art, he claims that the novel ‘should be a mirror of the world, or at least of the age, and thus become a partial mythology’ (1802–5, 232/5: 676). The role of the contemporary artist is to create new materials that open the possibility of a new mythology that would unite the fragmentary parts of society into a singular social life – this new mythology ‘shall be the creation, not of some individual author, but of a new race, personifying, as it were, one single poet’ (1800, 233/3: 629). It is through the idea of the new mythology that Schelling’s Platonic regime of art formulates the politics of art in a monumental and evental form.

While Schelling recognizes the value of art as an end in itself, distinct from the utility that determines the value of commodities or common artifacts, and as a non-fragmentary object around which a social community gathers, the ultimate value of art lies primarily in its relation to philosophy. The artwork is both autonomous end in itself and a symbol of the community insofar as it presents the ideas of philosophy in concrete form. Therefore, Schelling’s Platonism maintains that the ontological veracity of art is established in relation to the Idea – art is art because it presents the Idea in sensible form. Indeed, in The Philosophy of Art, Schelling organizes the significance of the arts according to the way in which they express the absolute, with the highest form of art being Greek tragedy, which enacts or presents (darstellen) a movement that leads from the conflict between freedom and necessity to the restoration of their identity. Thus, Schelling writes, when, in Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus disappears from the eyes of mortals, his sublime acceptance of his destiny – that is, of being punished for an involuntary transgression – brings about the ‘inner reconcilation’ and the restoration of the indifference and identity of freedom and necessity, the transfiguration of freedom itself ‘into the highest identity with necessity’ (1802–5, 258; 255/5: 703–4; 699).

4.4. Monuments and micropolitics

We have now examined both the impasse between Rancière’s aesthetics and Badiou’s inaesthetics and Schiller’s and Schelling’s competing accounts of how artistic production is a free activity that overcomes the formalism of Kant’s practical reason. Having done so, we can now interrogate how the aesthetic regime of art and the Platonic regime of art think the politics of art.

In Part II, I have followed the hypothesis that the politics of the aesthetic regime of art is a micropolitics that operates in the intervals of the heterogeneity of egalitarian politics and policing. At some points I have used textual evidence from Rancière’s work to support this hypothesis, and at others I have argued that thinking artistic practices and discourses in micropolitical forms contributes to understanding Rancière’s criticisms of several major figures in art theory, such as Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg. To conclude this chapter and Part II, I will argue that the differences between Rancière’s aesthetics and Badiou’s inaesthetics are based on their differences over the politics of art. I think that Rancière attacks Badiou’s inaesthetics on political grounds in order to demonstrate that Badiou’s work lacks a micropolitics that could supplement his evental politics. Given that Badiou maintains, even after conceding that an immanent and singular account of art must account for its politics, that ‘Today we know’ art and politics ‘constitute two distinct truth procedures, two heterogeneous confrontations between the thinking invention of forms and the indistinctness of the real,’ it is unsurprising that he does not take Rancière’s objections seriously (Badiou, 2005, 152, my emphasis). We know, Badiou claims, because the politics of the avant-gardes, their ‘splendid and violent ambition’ to destroy art to revolutionize everyday life, their passion for the real, resulted in, first, a merely allegorical commitment to communism and, later, their self-destruction or exhaustion.

To fully appreciate their differences concerning the politics of art, we should situate the impasses of Rancière’s aesthetics and Badiou’s inaesthetics within the conflict between the aesthetic regime of art and the Platonic regime of art. This requires considering aesthetics as a scene instead of a regime; like Badiou’s inaesthetics, it would then describe some works of art rather than a general domain of art. Rancière’s discussions of aesthetics shift between the aesthetic regime of art as a regime – that is, a general dispositif that organizes artistic production – and a scene, which considers aesthetics as a particular staging of practical and discursive relations that introduces new modes of intelligibility, sensibility, or visibility within a given practico-inert social space. Rancière’s recent work suggests that the aesthetic ‘“counter-history” of artistic modernity’ intervenes against a given set of artistic social conventions (Rancière, 2011a, xiii). In this regard, Rancière’s work is more explicitly prescriptive; it exhibits, as Joseph Tanke summarizes, the ‘idea that art and the experiences it occasions can be the proving grounds for the equality of intelligences … that [works] posit the intelligence and agency of their viewers’ (Tanke, 2011, 89). Furthermore, Tanke notes that at points Rancière also criticizes ‘the logic of stultification found in many quarters of contemporary art’ in works by Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades or by Josephine Meckseper, who – for differing reasons – ‘reproduce the model of explication’ (Tanke, 2011, 90).

The Platonic regime maintains that art, to be monumental, must relate to the Idea. Both Schelling and Badiou make recourse to the Idea to name the truth of art, even though they do not define the Idea in the same terms. That monumental art relates to the Idea does not mean that monumentality is a consequence of the Idea. Instead, the Idea names the cut that produces the relation of rupture that breaks with a given state of the situation or – in Rancière’s terms – a given regime of policing. For Schelling, modern social relations reduce humanity to fragmented individuals who relate to one another as a society through mechanistic and formal institutional relations, and the art of a new mythology would signal a relation of rupture with this fragmented state of humanity. This monumental art, which – like Greek tragedy before it – would exhibit the indifference or identity of freedom and necessity, of the self and nature, would call forth a new humanity that, as it is phrased in the ‘System Program’, would realize the equal formation and cultivation of all capacities of intellectual equality. Later, in the System der gesamten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere (1804), Schelling argues that a nation and a national art emerge simultaneously:

Lyrical poetry lives and exists truthfully only in a universally public life. Where all public life collapses into the particulars and dullness of private life, poetry more or less sinks into this same sphere. Epic poetry requires chiefly mythology and is nothing without it. But even mythology is not possible in the particular; it can only be born in the totality of a nation that as such acts simultaneously as identity and individuality. In dramatic poetry, tragedy grounds itself in the public law, in virtue, religion, heroism – in a word – in the holiness of the nation. A nation that is not holy, or which was robbed of its holy relics, cannot have true tragedy … The question of the possibility of a universal content of poesie, just as the question of the objective existence of science and religion, impels us to something higher. Only in the spiritual unity of a people, in a truly public life, can true and generally valid poesie arise – as only in the spiritual and political unity of a people can science and religion find its objectivity. (6: 572–3)

Here Schelling’s politics of a new mythology has lost its radical utopian complexion. He no longer opposes the mechanism of the state to the organic community. Whereas he once opposed the state qua form, he now contends that with truly public sphere, and with a new mythology, emerges the state as organic community. Indeed, in ‘Concerning the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature’, Schelling praises Bavarian paternalism for allowing the cultivation of the firmly established taste and public opinion of a whole people that avoids the pitfalls of the levelling of popular opinion that he associates with the French Revolution and democracy (Schelling, 1807, 355–6/7: 327; 1803, 52–5/5: 258–61).30 Though Schelling thinks the Idea as organic totality, to which Badiou opposes the thematic of subtraction, and despite their opposed political commitments, both think the Idea as a relation of rupture. While for Schelling, a monumental work brings forth, by way of the rupture with the mechanisms structure of modern society, an organic community, Badiou affirms that monumental work subtracts itself from the circulation of commodities and democratic consensus.

After the publication of Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou has formulated an explicitly monumental politics of art, even while paradoxically maintaining the strict separation between the four conditions of philosophy. In the ‘Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’, he demands an art that makes visible that which the powers of capitalism and democratic consensus declare inexistent: ‘monumental construction, projects, the creative force of the weak, [and] the overthrow of established powers’ (2004, 133). In both the ‘Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’ and The Century, Badiou defines the monumental Idea by reference to subtraction. In other words, it is the process of subtraction that instigates the relation of rupture by which monumental art becomes visible.

In The Century, Badiou aims to demonstrate how the radical movements of the twentieth century subjectively thought their political and artistic praxes. He identifies two forms of subjective praxis, both of which maintained a militant fidelity to inventing and inaugurating an alternative to the hegemony of capitalism and Western parliamentarianism. He characterizes one practice as a ‘passion for the real’ (a phrase that he appropriates from Lacan) and the other as a fidelity to subtraction. While Badiou ultimately claims that the political and artistic avant-gardes that sought to realize the passion for the real are exhausted or saturated, he affirms their legacy in opposition to democratic consensus. It is, for Badiou, better to destroy the reified structures of consensus than to accept them, but it is even better to subtract militant fidelity from the established powers of democratic materialism.31 He affirms, in opposition to democratic materialism, the radical legacy of the twentieth century’s avant-gardes while attempting to treat their contradictions by resolving ‘the conflict between formalization and destruction by means of formalization’ (Badiou, 2005, 110). The procedure of those militants committed to the passion for the real, on Badiou’s account, engaged in the task of destroying or purging all forms of semblance in order to actualize the real – the source of horror, enthusiasm and invention that cannot be symbolized by discourse. Thus the avant-gardes, by attempting to destroy all forms of semblance and imitation in order to realize an aesthetic revolution of everyday life, would ‘sacrifice art’ rather than ‘give up on the real’ (Badiou, 2005, 131).

While Badiou holds that the avant-garde sequence of the passion for the real is exhausted or saturated, he argues that there is a competing tendency of militant subjectivity within the twentieth century that still carries prescriptive force today: ‘a subtractive thinking of negativity can overcome the blind imperative of destruction and purification’ (Badiou, 2005, 55). The subtractive orientation, instead of attempting to identify the real itself, attempts to show the minimal difference between the place and the taking-place of the event (note the Mallarmean phrasing) – to show this gap itself as real. Badiou provides the example of Malevich’s painting White on White (1918), which retains, through purification, only the difference between background and form and the ‘null difference’ between white and white. But this painting should not be seen as destructive but subtractive: ‘instead of treating the real as identity, it is treated right away as a gap. The question of the real/semblance relation will not be resolved by a purification that would isolate the real, but by understanding that the gap itself is real’ (Badiou, 2005, 56). Therefore the monumental form of art is not determined by the unique medium of the work, as modernist critics would have it. Badiou explicitly rejects the modernist emphasis on how each art interrogates its unique and opaque medium (Badiou, 2005, 36). Instead, it is the subtractive thinking of the work, the Idea, that constitutes the relation of rupture between the work and a given state of the situation.

In Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Rancière adds to the critique of inaesthetics found in ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-aesthetics’ a final objection against Badiou’s monumentalism. He contends that the ‘Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’ reaffirms the modernist emphasis on the autonomy and specificity of art. However, Rancière writes,

the more one emphasizes art in its specificity, the more one is led to identify that ‘specificity’ with the experience of radical heterogeneity, whose ultimate model is Paul’s disconcerting shock-encounter with God or God’s speaking to Moses in the cloud. As it says in the ‘Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’, ‘The art that is, and the art that is to come, should hang together as solidly as a demonstration, be as surprising as a night-time ambush, and be as elevated as a star’ [see Badiou, 2004, 147]. This formulation is by no means a simple rhetorical approximation. It points in exemplary fashion to the heart of Badiou’s problematic: the double transformation of the revolutionary cut into a Lacanian encounter with the face of the Gorgon and of the Gorgon into the Platonic call of the Idea. To posit an identity between the art which is and that which ought to be, art must be made the pure experience of the imperative dictated by the sudden encounter with the Other. On this point, the assertion proper to inaesthetics of the Idea’s Platonic force joins with the proclamation of the Other’s commandment proper to the aesthetics of the sublime. Each of them isolates art from aesthetics, only to prostrate it before the indistinction of ethics. (Rancière, 2004a, 87tm)

In this passage, it is necessary to separate Rancière’s critique of alterity and his critique of monumentality. The critique of alterity seeks to bind Badiou to Lyotard’s ethics of the sublime. But, in order to link Badiou’s thought to Lyotard’s, Rancière elides between Lyotard’s concept of the Other (which draws on Lévinas) and Lacan. This quiet elision can be seen in the reference to the ‘Lacanian encounter with the face of the Gorgon’. If one wants to use Lacan against Badiou, one should distinguish between the Other and the Real: the Real is the domain of the traumatic encounter, of symbolic deadlocks, while the Other designates the locus of the symbolic order, or the mediation of meaning and the social bond. Lacan’s Other is not the Lévinasian Other. While the latter is the transcendental imperative which calls one to ethical respect, the former is the symbolic fiction par excellence: for Lacan, the Other, strictly speaking, does not exist; it functions only insofar as subjects attribute to it symbolic efficacy.

Badiou has also made it clear that his concept of the event is tied to the subject, and not the Other. To avoid any confusion, or ‘ethical indistinction’, Badiou clarifies his position vis-à-vis Lévinas in the second chapter of his Ethics. For Lévinas, ‘I experience myself ethically as “pledged” to the appearing of the Other, and subordinated in my being to this pledge’ (Badiou, 1993, 19–20). Like Rancière, Badiou finds this phenomenological account ethically ambiguous, and both claim that the ethics of the Other conveniently conforms to consensus and the nullification of politics (Badiou, 1993, 23–5; Rancière, 2004a, 109–17). Badiou explicitly states, time and again, that infinity is not the transcendental power of God, but ‘the banal reality of every situation’ (Badiou, 1993, 25). The event cannot be guaranteed by the Other; it can only be wagered on by a subject.

I think Rancière’s final objection is, if we leave aside the finer points of Lacanian theory, much more straightforward: by separating the conditions of philosophy, and by conceptualizing each as evental, Badiou ends up with a politics and an inaesthetics that are both too narrow. Rancière’s politics of aesthetics describes a series of heterotopian practices that invent social change in the interval between politics and policing, while Badiou concludes that it is better to do nothing than work in the intervals of visibilities, discourses, and places.

Schiller raises a similar criticism against Schelling. Therefore we should neither, like Hegel, treat Schiller’s aesthetics as merely a predecessor to the ‘absolute standpoint’ of Schelling’s philosophy of art, nor, like Rancière, assimilate Schelling’s Platonist principles to the aesthetic regime. In a letter to Goethe, dated 27 March 1801, Schiller expresses a fundamental disagreement with Schelling’s philosophy. He states that some critics have taken up ‘their position on the vague domain of the Absolute’, which leads them to confuse the activity of artistic production with the activity of producing excellent art (in Schiller and Goethe, 1890, 373). Critics like Schelling maintain a philosophy of monumental art that lacks a concept of degree. Art, Schiller continues, can be practised by anyone and everyone, though with varying degrees of success:

Any one who is able to place his own feelings into an object so that this object compels me to pass over into that state of feeling, and, accordingly, works actively upon me, him I call a poet, a maker. But every poet is not on this account – according to rank – an excellent one. (in Schiller and Goethe, 1890, 372)

While the ‘perfect poet … gives expression to the entirety of humanity’, that is, gives expression to both the sensible and formal drives of human nature, this does not mean that the so-called lesser poet who does not is not a poet (in Schiller and Goethe, 1890, 373tm). In other words, by thinking artistic production as an event, Schelling relegates minor works to the domain of insignificance. This objection is, in fact, not entirely insignificant concerning Schelling, who claims, in his Philosophy of Art that from an absolute standpoint ‘it is not too much to assert that until now there have been only two novels’: Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (Schelling, 1802–5, 234/5: 679). Therefore, from Schiller’s standpoint, Schelling’s philosophy of art makes of artistic production an event or monument rather than a form of micropolitics, which means that, by thinking art monumentally, Schelling’s Platonism will miss the molecular social transformations brought about by aesthetics – which also means that when art in general, rather than monumental or evental art, fails to live up to its absolute task of presenting the sensibility of the Idea, it loses its significance for philosophy.

4.5. Heterotopias: One world divides into two

The disagreements between Badiou and Rancière, even concerning art, are political. For Badiou, art must be monumental or it will not be at all. An art that merely makes visible that which already exists within the world of democratic materialism is not monumental; it is merely culture. The Platonism of Badiou and Schelling is of interest for thinking through the problem of the relation of rupture by which art becomes monumental. But, conceptualized in its Platonic form, the idea of monumental art concedes too much to a given hegemonic practico-inert world by dismissing all artistic production that is not monumental as already counted in the ‘recycled obsolescences’ of culture or the levelling forces of the circulation of commodities and readily available pleasures – in a word, as kitsch (Badiou, 2005, 143; 1997, 12). This account neglects the possibility of micropolitical practices. The very practice of the micropolitics of aesthetics aims to invent, in the intervals of politics and the practico-inert, new modes of visibility, intelligibility, and place.

Both Badiou and Rancière contend that politics divides the world into two. For Badiou, one world is divided between being and event, and for Rancière, one world is divided into the two worlds of egalitarian politics and policing (Rancière, 1995, 42/67; 1998e, 36–7). But where Badiou opposes monumental art and kitsch, Rancière proposes a heterotopian micropolitics of aesthetic egalitarianism that takes place in the interval between the heterogeneity of politics and policing. Like politics, this micropolitics begins with a dynamic – or ‘aesthetic effect’ – of disidentification (Rancière, 2009a, 73), which precipitates a political or aesthetic practice that challenges those partitions that organize our ‘polemical common world’ with another, more egalitarian distribution of the sensible. Whereas politics is the heterogeneous interruption of policing by the activation of the supposition of equality, aesthetics works in the interstices of this heterogeneity. Again, there is a continuity between Rancière’s work on workers’ history and his aesthetics. In Proletarian Nights there are numerous references to one world dividing into two. On the one hand, Rancière describes ways that ‘an exceptional group of worker-writers remained awake in order to compose their tracts and treatises, novels and poems, encroaching as they did so into the time allotted for them to rest after one working day of manual labour and [to] prepare for the next’ (Davis, 2010, 52). These workers, then, challenged the presumption that their lives were necessarily divided between days of work and nights of rest. But Rancière also contends that these workers, in formulating their sense of subjectivity – a subjectivation that recognizes a wrong in the way that their world is organized and policed – through writing poetry and metaphysics, laid claim to worlds that were not theirs, worlds of those whose task it is to think, not of those whose task it is to work. Those other worlds, Rancière writes, ‘which supposedly anaesthetize the sufferings of the workers, can actually be the thing that sharpens their awareness of such sufferings’ (Rancière, 1981, 19). For critics such as Eagleton (as we saw in Chapter 3) or Badiou, this aesthetic interpellation would merely reiterate the ideology of consensus. But for Rancière, these workers, split between days of work and nights of autodidactic freedom, make of borrowed words, homonyms, and misunderstandings new forms of dissensus that transform the ways we speak, think, and act. Although, for analytic purposes, we have separated Rancière’s egalitarian politics and his micropolitics of aesthetics, we should not overlook the fact that both emerge from practices of dissensus, suggesting that dynamics of collective political subjectivation could – although not necessarily – begin with the seemingly imperceptible transformations of the aesthetic coordinates of socially lived experience.

There is, nonetheless, no need to choose either Rancière’s aesthetics or Badiou’s inaesthetics, just as there is no need to decide between Schiller and Schelling. Instead, I have argued that: first, both an aesthetic regime of art and a Platonic regime of art become possible with the collapse of the mimetic norms that structure the representative regime of the arts; and, second, the fundamental conflict between aesthetics and Platonism concerns the political scope of art. If Platonism remains persuasive, it is because Badiou and Schelling insist on the monumental and evental character of some works of art. But if I side with Rancière or Schiller, it is because I think it is necessary to think the relation of rupture beginning with concrete micropolitical practices rather than the Idea. Thinking the politics of art after Rancière and Badiou, then, requires beginning at the micropolitical level without excluding the possibility of conceptualizing art monumentally. The politics of art – if art is to be political – inscribes the discourses and practices of art between the intervals of egalitarian politics and policing and the momentary and monumental ruptures that make visible that inexistent space independent of commodification and consensus. From Schiller to Rancière, if art has been linked to the possibility of radical social transformation and the inventive capacities of political subjects, then art is, in effect, sensible imbrication of emancipatory practices of good sense and, as William Wordsworth writes, ‘just sentiments’. To think art politically affirms the possibility of making visible utopian and heterotopian worlds that work to reconfigure and transform – again, in the words of Wordsworth – ‘the very world which is the world / Of all of us’, the only place that ‘We find our happiness, or not at all’.

Notes

1Many of the claims that follow about Schelling are elaborated and defended in more detail in Shaw 2010 and 2014.

2The irony is that Rockhill intends this passage as a criticism of, rather than an elaboration upon, Rancière’s theses on aesthetics.

3Here we will not deliberate over whether Rancière’s interpretations of Brecht and Debord are accurate. We are interested in showing how the Platonic regime of art does not fall into the problem of the paradox of the spectator, which requires first elaborating – in albeit simplified and schematic terms – Rancière’s account of this paradox.

4From this point forward, aside from references to what Rancière calls ‘Platonic modernism’, when I say Platonism or that something is Platonic I’m using the terms technically to mean ‘of the Platonic regime of art’.

5Peter Hallward coins ‘evental’ as an adjectival neologism that translates Badiou’s technical use of the term événementiel. He notes that a more common term like ‘eventful’ invites misleading associations such as plenitude, bustle, or familiarity (Hallward, 2003, xviii).

6I am not, like Rancière, using ‘politics of aesthetics’ as a synonym for ‘the politics of art’. Instead, the politics of art is the locus of the debate between proponents of the aesthetic regime and those of the Platonic regime.

7Nor am I making any claim that the conflict between aesthetics and the Platonic regime exhausts the possible conflicts over relating art, politics, and social transformation. Far from it – one need only consider how Proudhon’s Du principe de l’art et de sa destination social (published in 1865 after Proudhon’s death) fits in this context. It might even be that this conflict is more limited, localized to theorizing or philosophizing about art – that is, the reception of art – rather than artistic production, though the theories of each of the figures in question have made varying degrees of impact in the artworld. It seems inaccurate – or at least over-concerned with disciplinarity – to claim that these debates are merely about philosophy or merely about discourse.

8Both have, moreover, retrospectively related a youthful exuberance for Sartrean existentialism (q.v. Chapter 2).

9Note that I am not using ‘disagreement’ in the technical sense that Rancière gives the term when I describe their debate.

10For Badiou’s critique of Rancière’s, see Metapolitics (1998c, 107–23) and ‘The Lessons of Jacques Rancière: Knowledge and Power after the Storm’ (2006a); for Rancière’s critique of Badiou, see ‘Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-aesthetics’ (2002a), which was published in revised form in Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2004a), and the chapter ‘The Poet at the Philosopher’s: Mallarmé and Badiou’ in The Politics of Literature (2006b, 183–205). Note that the present interpretation is concerned only with Badiou’s theoretical work on art published between Being and Event (1988) and The Century (2005). In Logics of Worlds, Badiou’s discussion of art reverts to something like Plato’s distinction between model and copy, e.g. between the Idea of Horseness and the image of a horse, such that he writes: ‘The drawing must inscribe the intelligible cut, the separate contemplation of the Horse which is presented by all drawn horses’ (2006b, 19).

11Rancière rightly ignores these accusations for the following reasons. Badiou faults Rancière for neglecting ontology, and more specifically an ontology of the political procedures that grounds militant fidelity. Rancière, however, rejects the method whereby one does ontology first and politics later. And for good reasons: if politics is a dissensus over speech, rationality, and social practices how can one understand new claims to equality – who speaks, how they speak or act – if these new claims must be judged by a system that has already established the rationalities of these practices? (See Rancière’s comments criticizing the priority of ontology at 2006a, 476–7; 2011b, 11–16.)

12Terry Eagleton states, in Lacanian terms, ‘We can vicariously gratify our self-destructive drives, at the same time as we can indulge in a certain sadistic pleasure at the prospect of others’ pain. Tragedy is in this sense a gentrified, socially acceptable version of obscene enjoyment’ (2005, 26–7).

13In The Aesthetic Unconscious, Rancière shows how Freud’s approach to art wavers between maintaining the norms of the representative regime and an aesthetics of symptomology (Rancière, 2001, 67, 86).

14As Robert Lehman points out, Badiou also omits the development of modern aesthetics that occurred in Germany between 1735 (with Alexander Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry) and 1790 (with Immanuel Kant’s third Critique) (Lehman, 2010, 172).

15Despite Badiou’s characterization of Brecht as a practitioner of a ‘Stalinized Platonism’, the latter’s influence is patent. In The Century, Badiou praises Brecht as ‘the most universal and most indisputable among those artists who explicitly linked their existence and creativity to so-called communist politics’ (Badiou, 2005, 43).

16See Rancière, 1998d, 73–85. See also A. Ross 2012 for an account of the ways that Rancière critiques and appropriates Hegel’s account of romanticism.

17I am assuming here that Badiou would treat the authors discussed in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s The Literary Absolute as romantics. They note, however, that neither Schelling, nor Hölderlin, nor Hegel ‘can be characterized, rigorously speaking, as romantic’ (1978, 27). Nonetheless, if Badiou held that Schelling is romantic, namely that the Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism maintains that art presents a truth to which philosophy can only point, this would not be idiosyncratic to Badiou. This position is the received view of Schelling’s philosophy of art that I challenge here and, in more detail, in Shaw 2010, especially Chapter 3.

18As Jeremy F. Lane argues, for Bourdieu, ‘Kantian aesthetics enables certain aptitudes and practices that are the preserve of the bourgeoisie to be misrecognized as objective measures of that class’s inherent intellectual and moral worth. Thus Kantian aesthetics formalizes that process whereby “legitimate” aesthetic taste serves to naturalize and reproduce class divisions. The actions of Gauny, or of the other worker-poets featured in [Proletarian Nights], who were all determined to manifest their capacity for disinterested aesthetic contemplation despite their material impoverishment, are thus strictly unthinkable within the Bourdieusian problematic’ (Lane, 2013, 31).

19Rancière cites the following passage from The Critique of the Power of Judgment, where Kant argues that the constitution of lawful sociability ‘wrestled with great difficulties surrounding the difficult task of uniting freedom (and thus also equality) with coercion (more from respect and subjection to duty than from fear): such an age and such a people had first of all to discover the art of reciprocal communication of the ideas of the most educated part with the cruder, the coordination of the breadth and refinement of the former with the natural simplicity and originality of the latter, and in this way to discover that mean between higher culture and contented nature which constitutes the correct standard, not to be given by any universal rule, for taste as a universal human sense’ (1790, 5: 355–6; cf. Rancière, 1983, 208).

20This, in fact, is a reversal of his position on Schiller in The Philosopher and His Poor. There, Rancière writes, ‘Schiller cannot propose any other model [of aesthetic equality] than divine leisure and play for the aesthetic education that must redeem the fragmented society’ (Rancière, 1983, 209).

21In Letter VI, Schiller opposes what he considers to be the virtues of ancient Greek community to modern society. This account wavers between opposing the Greek state to the modern state and opposing the simplicity of Greek community to the complexity of the modern state form.

22By establishing these differences, we avoid Rockill’s conclusion that, for Rancière, ‘aesthetics is, in fact, consubstantial with the police or the given order of beings, discourse and perception, which is … the very opposite of politics’ (Rockhill, 2011, 32).

23Schiller stipulates that there is a difference between aesthetic semblance and logical semblance. Aesthetic semblance is an object of play, while logical semblance dissimulates falsity under the semblance of truth (Schiller, 1795, 193). In Letter XXVII, Schiller writes that while some fear that semblance would overtake reality, reality is a greater threat to semblance, for ‘chained as he is to the material world, man subordinates semblance to ends of his own long before he allows it autonomous existence in the ideal realm of art’ (205).

24When describing moral judgements, which are ‘guaranteed by Personality’, Schiller writes: ‘once the moral feeling says: this shall be, it decides for ever and aye – once you confess truth because it is truth, and practice justice because it is justice, then you have made an individual case into a law for all cases, and treated one moment of your life as if it were eternity’ (1795, 83).

25In Letter XIX, Schiller reiterates that he considers this question to be transcendental rather metaphysical: ‘How far two such opposed tendencies can co-exist in the same being is a problem which may well embarrass the metaphysician, but not the transcendental philosopher. The latter does not pretend to explain how things are possible, but contents himself with determining the kind of knowledge which enables us to understand how experience is possible’ (1795, 133).

26Though Rancière’s aesthetics is not regulative in the Kantian sense, he does adopt Schiller’s phrasing at one point: ‘The set of relations that constitutes the work operates as if it had a different ontological texture from the sensations that make up everyday experience’ (2009a, 67).

27I take Schiller’s acknowledgement, in Letter XVI (rather than XVII, given that the two letters are inconsistent), that our accounts of beauty will vacillate between the concepts of melting beauty and energizing beauty to be an expression of the dissensus generated by its regulative status.

28I use ‘aesthetic intuition’ and ‘artistic production’ as synonyms here, although it seems that, for Schelling, the activity of aesthetic intuition encompasses both artistic production and the capacity of the spectator to recognize the ‘absolute’ value of the artwork.

29Schelling subsequently maintains that the System, despite its subjective ground, establishes the general schematism of his philosophical system of absolute idealism developed between 1801 and 1806 (Schelling, 1802, 224/4: 410).

30Concerning the politics of Schelling’s new mythology, see Shaw, 2010, 135–41 and Shaw, 2014, 533–6 (which addresses Rancière’s interpretation of the ‘System Program’).

31Badiou argues that purification demanded by the passion for the real is marked by destruction, violence, and ‘the realm of suspicion [where] a formal criterion is lacking to distinguish the real from semblance’ (Badiou, 2005, 54). The strength of this destructive passion for purification, including the philosophical theme of authenticity found in Heidegger and Sartre, lies in the fact that ‘many things deserved to be destroyed’ (Badiou, 2005, 56). But the attempt to identify a commitment to actualizing the real is indefinite; there is always a chance that it is a semblance of the real.