The work of Jacques Rancière brings equality to the forefront of radical political thought. Rancière insists that emancipatory politics and political subjectivation involve supposing – and pursuing – the equality of the intelligences of anybody and everybody. This egalitarian supposition interrupts the modes of stratification that organize and police social life. Thus politics is not the seizure of state or institutional power; it is a set of practices and discourses based on the supposition that equality invents, in ways that may be transitory, social relations of solidarity and reciprocity that both contest how the parts of society are counted and affirm how the part of those who have no part come to give an account of themselves, to combat a wrong, to speak and act as political agents, as subjects and not others. Given that it introduces new ways of speaking, acting, and delimiting place, politics is integrally aesthetic. But there is also, according to Rancière, a politics of aesthetics. If egalitarian politics is an activity of political subjectivation, and if egalitarian politics – in its discourses and practices – is heterogeneous to apparatuses of policing, then the micropolitics of aesthetics takes place in and situates social spaces in the interstices of policing and politics.
This disjunction between the politics of equality and the micropolitics of aesthetics allows us to trace the dynamics of social change in everyday life since the emergence of the aesthetic regime of art while acknowledging the difficult and transitory character of political subjectivation. And yet, given that Rancière demonstrates that there is the same supposition of equality at the basis of Descartes’s good sense and Kant’s aesthetic sensus communis, we must admit that the strict distinction between the politics of equality and the micropolitics of aesthetics that has oriented this study is artificial to a degree. Though such a distinction is useful for situating the conceptual and discursive decisions made in egalitarian moments of philosophy, it would be difficult, in recounting a historical scene of egalitarian struggle, to demarcate where aesthetics ends and politics begins.
The significance of the imbrication of politics and aesthetics is especially pressing in the case of writing. An author such as Rancière writes about politics, but writing isn’t an expressly political act in the sense he defines it, as a collective practice of political subjectivation. Yet the ‘errant democrat’ that is writing is nonetheless political as a kind of aesthetics. Furthermore, philosophical or theoretical writing – insofar as it concerns concepts and arguments rather than percepts and affects – isn’t exactly an aesthetics, though ‘a theoretical discourse is always simultaneously an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the facts it is arguing about’, which is precisely why it is simultaneously political (Rancière, 2004b, 65). In Short Voyages to the Land of the People, Rancière reflects upon his intellectual formation during the reinvention of Marxism in the 1960s through the work of Althusser, who insisted upon paying attention ‘to the simple gestures that are so natural that we neglect to reflect upon them – seeing, hearing, reading, [and] writing’ (1990, 118). Though he later concludes that Althusser silences the voices and forestalls the political agency of those who are not politicized through the detour of the science of philosophy, Rancière has remained attentive to those simple gestures of reading and writing, seeing and hearing, discovering in the ‘babbling’ of workers’ archives a lesson of equality. Beginning with the marginalized voices of those workers who had taken themselves as philosophers, ‘poets or knights, priests or dandies’, Rancière has pursued the consequences of the supposition of equality to contest the assumptions that partition, through opposing science to ideology, truth to appearances, speech to noise, those who think and those who work (Rancière, 1983, 200).
We have approached the work of Rancière by situating it within the historical fiction of the philosophy of equality. I call it a historical fiction for two reasons. First, we know that Rancière’s method was developed through a critique of Marxism and sociology and a project of conceptualizing a radical account of political subjectivation that he comes to call the politics of equality. Rather than recount Rancière’s intellectual formation, I have reinscribed his work within a history of the philosophy of equality that includes Descartes, the existentialism of Beauvoir and Sartre, and the aesthetics of Kant, Schiller, and Benjamin. This history, too, is a type of fiction. The philosophers we have considered do not foreground their work as a philosophy or politics of equality. Nonetheless equality is a fundamental supposition that situates – positively, negatively, or ambiguously – their respective projects of metaphysics, ontology, ethics, or aesthetics.
In Part I, I argued that Rancière’s account of the subject of equality is indebted to both Cartesian egalitarianism and existentialism. Those thinkers that I have defined as Cartesian egalitarians – Poullain de la Barre, Jacotot, and Beauvoir – politicize the fundamental supposition of Descartes’s philosophy: that ‘good sense’ or reason is equally distributed to all human beings. While Descartes introduces this supposition in order to disentangle the threads that tie together philosophy, habit, and prejudice, he limits the egalitarianism of his philosophical meditations to metaphysical and epistemological problems. Later, these Cartesian egalitarians politicize the supposition of good sense to criticize how philosophy can be used to reinforce the social prejudices and practices that subjugate certain parts of society. For these Cartesian egalitarians, the supposition of equality demonstrates a wrong that is committed against these parts of society that have no part. As Poullain argues, in a passage that Beauvoir paraphrases as an epigraph to The Second Sex, the historical and intellectual record shows that:
Women were judged in former times as they are today and with as little reason, so whatever men say about them should be suspect as they are both judges and defendants. Even if the charges brought against them are backed by the opinions of a thousand authors, the entire brief should be taken as a chronicle of prejudice and error. (1673, 76)
While Poullain embraces the metaphysics of Descartes, he stages Descartes’s dualism as an argument that demonstrates how patriarchal prejudices and practices wrong women: that the mind has no sex and that intellectual capacities are equally distributed to all human beings shows that the exclusion of women from intellectual pursuits is a wrong, while the claims that give a sex to virtue confuse the powers of thought and capacities of the body. Likewise, Beauvoir politicizes the individualist ethics of Sartre’s existentialism. While both Sartre and Beauvoir maintain that freedom is the basis of all human activity, Beauvoir contends that not all types of free activity – that is, not all free projects – are equivalent; an egalitarian sense of freedom requires that one act in such a way so as to work toward the freedom of others. A philosophical account of freedom must remain attentive to social perceptions and social relations, including the ways that in relations of oppression, domination, or exploitation, some human beings – such as women, the colonized, or African Americans – are forced to assume their freedom as others rather than subjects. In a word, the dynamic of political subjectivation must remain attentive to l’expérience vécue: the socially lived experience of giving an account of oneself within a historically concrete situation.
Rancière argues that Descartes’s ego sum, ego existo is the prototype of egalitarian political subjectivation. This collective practice – a nos sumus, nos existimus – produces new modes of experience, speaking, acting, or place (Rancière, 1995, 35–6/59). These new modes of experience, which are invented through the supposition of equality, are interruptive and transformative. The dynamic of political subjectivation is heterogeneous to techniques of policing. And while politics is rare and transitory, political practices nevertheless transform a given distribution of the sensible – even in its policed forms – toward new, egalitarian possibilities: both ‘new inscriptions of equality within freedom and a new sphere of visibility for further demonstrations’ (1995, 42/67tm).
In Chapter 2, I argued that Rancière’s account of political subjectivation is indebted to the work of Sartre. Both maintain that the dynamic of subjectivation begins with the disidentification of self-politicizing subjects from the policing of the roles, occupations, and identities that structure the practico-inert world. And both maintain that politics interrupts these practico-inert structures of policing. This does not mean that politics is a movement divorced from historical contexts. Instead, politics is defined by the reciprocal play of practice and discourse, of a logic or rationality and of modes of acting, all of which are historically situated – that is to say, historically contingent. Where Sartre and Rancière differ is the definition of the logic and praxis of politics. For Sartre, radical politics becomes a force when political agents come to freely totalize their practices and oppose their tactics and strategies against sedimented and practico-inert forms of exploitation and domination. While Rancière’s radical egalitarianism also contests and interrupts forms of exploitation and domination, he argues that Sartre’s emphasis on the stabilization of political struggle through the pledge, organization, and totalization hyperinstrumentalizes political freedom. According to Rancière, by the time of the pledge, politics is already over. Therefore he argues that the political subjectivation through dissensus takes equality as both its means and its ends: egalitarian relations must structure the means – the discourses (logics) and the practices of equality – and the ends of politics, however temporary and transitory they may be.
In Part II, I proposed and defended the hypothesis that Rancière’s politics of aesthetics names a network of micropolitical practices that transform relations between words, things, and affects; these practices and the discourses introduce new sensible forms of visibility, intelligibility, and place. This hypothesis is situated by Rancière’s politics of equality. Politics, he insists, is both heterogeneous to policing and, given that moments of politics are singular events, rare. I have proposed that the politics of literature or the politics of aesthetics are forms of micropolitical contestation in order to account for the emancipatory social and political transformations of everyday life that have taken place since the emergence of the aesthetic regime of art. Moreover, I have maintained that considering aesthetics as micropolitics casts in stark relief Rancière’s differences with Badiou, Greenberg, and Benjamin.
As we have seen, Rancière argues that art is political by virtue of being art. Art, he contends, is not a transhistorical form of cultural production. Instead, it names a singular domain of production and experience that emerges with the collapse of the representative regime of the arts, which is governed by a series of mimetic norms that maintain – by establishing a parallel between the values of social hierarchies and those of artistic hierarchies – the boundaries between the fine arts (and the genres of the fine arts) and the lesser arts, as well as the forms of technical and moral proficiency adequate to each fine art or genre. The representative regime is a form of policing the arts to reinforce both artistic and social hierarchies. The aesthetic regime of art erodes these mimetic norms, not by critiquing representation tout court (à la Greenberg), but rather by challenging the practico-inert forms of representing the various parts of society. Art, as a singular domain, interrupts and reinscibes the relations between words, things, affects, and values. Like Benjamin, Rancière avers that art is imbricated in social life; the aesthetic revolution and literarization transform the coordinates of everyday life, subverting and reinscribing the ‘conventional distinctions between genres, between writer and poet, between scholar and populizer … even the distinction between author and reader’ (Benjamin, 1934a, 772). Nevertheless, Rancière contends that the aesthetic revolution can neither be sufficiently explained by reference to technological change nor subsumed under the teleology of messianism. Finally, both Badiou and Rancière hold that artistic novelty breaks with the established forms and visibilities of a given distribution of the sensible. However, for Rancière, Badiou’s monumental and evental idea of art cannot account for micropolitical change. If there is a modernist aspect to Badiou’s inaesthetics, it is his contempt for all art that is not monumental. What Badiou calls culture is similar to what Greenberg calls kitsch. But, where Badiou posits inaesthetics or affirmationism as a universal ‘proletarian aristocratism’ available to all, Greenberg asserts that the modernist avant-garde is tasked with preserving living culture against bourgeois philistinism and proletarian kitsch. For Greenberg, only the avant-garde artist has the social consciousness to match his or her leisure; the bourgeois has leisure but bourgeois values, while the proletarian lacks the leisure to cultivate an aesthetic experience divorced from kitsch. For Rancière, Greenberg’s modernism is politically and aesthetically stultifying.
Given that Rancière’s politics and aesthetics remain open to revision and reconsideration, I would like to conclude by addressing how his recent book Aisthesis at once confirms and challenges several of the claims that I have made here. The framework of Aisthesis is familiar. Rancière argues that, over the last two hundred years, the practices and discourses of art within the aesthetic regime have worked to produce a ‘sensible fabric of experience’ that weaves together artistic novelty and life (Rancière, 2011a, x). Rancière situates aesthetics between three different forms of policing what is proper to art: the ethical regime of images, the representative regime of the arts, and modernism. As we have seen, Rancière’s aesthetics and Greenberg’s modernism are both premised on the critique of mimesis, though they draw radically different consequences from the collapse of the mimetic norms that govern the representative regime. For Greenberg, each art is autonomous insofar as it interrogates its own unique and opaque medium – any remaining use of representation or figuration within the work is residual and accidental. On Greenberg’s account, the history of painting since Manet has been governed by the task of interrogating the flatness and two-dimensionality of the painting surface, which required gradually divesting painting of characteristics of the other arts, such as sculptural modelling and literary or narrative techniques.
For Rancière, by contrast, art is aesthetic and political insofar as it interrupts, subverts, and gradually erodes the mimetic norms that governed the representative regime of the arts. The mimetic norms of the representative regime produce the fiction of a social body divided between great men who act and shape history and those anonymous masses who are relegated to the prosaic life of meeting needs and producing useful things. The norms of the representative regime establish a fiction of causality whereby the acts and deeds of the characters of an artwork impart the proper moral lessons to an audience. The representative order, Rancière writes, defines
discourse as a body with well-articulated parts, the poem as plot, and a plot as an order of actions. This order clearly situated the poem – and the artistic productions for which it functioned as a norm – on a hierarchical model: a well-ordered body where the upper part commands the lower, [elevating] the privilege of action, that is to say of the free man, capable of acting according to ends, over the repetitive lives of men without quality. (Rancière, 2011a, xiv)
Both Greenberg and Rancière contest the priority of plot and the order of actions that structure mimetic effects. However, on Greenberg’s account, the priority of plot and the order of actions defines the literary confusion that perverts and distorts other, non-literary arts, when they suppress the opacity of their respective media in order to imitate literary techniques (Greenberg, 1940, 26). According to Rancière, by contrast, literature emerges with the collapse of the mimetic norms through which plot and the order of actions establish social and artistic fictions that distinguish between two types of humanity: those whose occupation is to act and pursue grand designs, and those whose lot in life it is to do an occupation that meets their individual needs (Rancière, 2011a, 46). Through literature and aesthetics emerge those words, bodies, places, and affects that had been relegated, in the ethical regime of images and the representative regime of the arts, to a world of prosaic life that remained below the threshold of great art and the deeds of great men. Rancière’s point, however, is not that the representative regime cannot accommodate all the new subjects who had not yet been represented according to its mimetic norms. More specifically, he argues that aesthetics and literature name new practices and discourses of relating the worlds of art, the arts, and non-art, of relating words, bodies, places, and affects.
Given that it introduces new relations between art and non-art, affect and intelligibility, aesthetics is political. Rancière argues that the aesthetic regime opens a singular experience of art that is unbound from social and political hierarchies and practico-inert modes of valuation. But it is crucial to underline that there is no one politics of aesthetics. The aesthetic regime includes several sometimes paradoxical politics that relate art and social life: among them, Rancière discusses symptomological metapolitics, a politics of resistant form, and a politics of emancipated spectators in which artistic practices and discourses suppose the intellectual and aesthetic equality of anybody and everybody. If Aisthesis constitutes a significant departure from Rancière’s previous works on aesthetics, it is because he advances what I will refer to as a politics of life to situate the ‘history of the paradoxical links between the aesthetic paradigm and political community’ (Rancière, 2011a, xiv).
Admittedly, Rancière has consistently argued in his work on aesthetics that the aesthetic regime of art includes artistic practices and discourses that have sought to revolutionize the relation between art and life as a form of politics. Benjamin, for example, argues that early twentieth-century historical avant-gardes had sought to produce new artistic forms as emancipatory forms of everyday life. In Benjamin’s phrasing, to demand that art becomes life is to demand that art revolutionizes socially lived experience – new, emancipatory forms of art would dispense with prior artistic hierarchies and political forms of domination and oppression. In other words, the significance of emancipatory art is situated between regimes of art and the heterogeneity of the politics of equality and policing. This is the type of phrasing that situates Rancière’s interpretation of Schiller’s micropolitics in Aesthetics and Its Discontents. In Aisthesis, however, Rancière’s politics of life is political solely by virtue of being neither the representative regime of the art nor the ethical regime of images. In each of the scenes that constitute the history of the aesthetic regime, Rancière underlines how aisthesis interrupts or upsets the ways that these other regimes of art assign a form of social causality to art. Both Plato’s ethical regime of images and Aristotle’s representative regime of the arts provide an account for what an art does and how it affects – interferes with or reinforces the structures of – the political community. In the Republic, Plato avers that the arts of the pleasure-giving muse incite both a rebellion in the soul and a rebellion in the city; these arts arouse the desires against reason and the freedom of the demos against the proper order of the city. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that the proper use of the arts can reinforce the order of the city; indeed, the effects of catharsis are predicated on a moral universe in which virtue begets eudaimonia. Both regimes work to police the arts and the relation between the arts and society. In the representative regime, as we have seen, the fiction of plot and the order of actions produce a sensibility that eulogizes the historical efficacy of great men who act while inculcating, like an orator, the morality of the wills of the members of the audience.
The aesthetic regime of art abolishes these attempts to establish a direct social causality of art. Instead, the aesthetic regime articulates the figure of activity that is inactivity, freed from teleology and effectivity. This aesthetic indifference of activity and inactivity, Rancière writes,
means two things: first, it is the rupture of all specific relations between a sensible form and the expression of an exact meaning; but it is also the rupture of every specific link between a sensible presence and a public that would be its public, the sensible milieu that would nourish it, or its natural addressee. (2011a, 18)
The aesthetic regime dismisses the social causalities that bind a sensible form to a univocal meaning and interrupts assumptions about the relationships – such as: the spectator is by definition a passive participant – between art and addressee. Moreover, as Rancière had established already in The Philosopher and His Poor, the Kantian aesthetic sensus communis undermines the distinction between a humanity who has the leisure to cultivate the capacity for taste and aesthetic judgement and those who do not, that is, those who work and live a life of utility. Aesthetic equality, first, names that sensible experience through which anyone and everyone can disidentify with everyday interests and exigencies, ‘where one does nothing’ (Rancière, 2011a, 46). But this equality also makes possible a distribution of the sensible whereby anything can be art, where no situation or subject is preferable, whereby ‘anyone can grab a pen, taste any kind of pleasure, or nourish any ambition whatsoever’ (2011a, 51).
Again, much of this account of aesthetics has been anticipated in Rancière’s other works. In Aisthesis, though, life is treated as a metonymy for the micropolitics of aesthetics that binds the various aesthetic scenes together. Whereas life, in other works, is defined as socially lived experience, much as it is by Sartre, Beauvoir, or Fanon, in Aisthesis aesthetic discourses and practices are socially valuable insofar as they exhibit the singular events of life: Wincklemann ‘inaugurates the age during which artists were busy unleashing the sensible potential hidden in inexpressiveness, indifference or immobility’ (2011a, 9); Stendhal’s Red and Black is emblematic of the literary revolution that substitutes for the revolutions of state power the ‘pure nonsense of life, the obstinate will that wants nothing’ (52); the pages of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass ‘must be considered like the detached leaves of any tree whatsoever, emanations of universal anonymous life’ (71); while James Agee’s account of destitute sharecroppers inventories each of those parts of ‘an existence that is entirely actual, inevitable and unrepeatable’ (250).
Despite Rancière’s attention to the detailed contexts of each aesthetic scene, his descriptions and interpretations return, again and again, to life. This metonymic device makes visible a politics phrased in quasi-vitalist terms – as Donna V. Jones phrases it, in terms of a ‘cultural vitalism’ that ‘urges a return to raw, unverbalized lived experience through a bracketing of the sedimented categories and schema by which we reflect on and “deaden” it’ (Jones, 2010, 4). Rancière’s analyses in Aisthesis come to resemble those of contemporary vitalists such as Deleuze and Agamben, who contend that a life manifests a singular haecceity that is antecedent to any particular subjectivity or objectivity to which a life gives rise. Deleuze points to an incident found in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend to illustrate the meaning of a life: at the liminal and singular point between life and death even a disreputable man elicits a sense of ‘eagerness, respect, even love’ from his caretakers (Deleuze, 1995, 28). For Deleuze, a life is an immanent moment of beatitude beyond good and evil. On Agamben’s account, Deleuze articulates a concept of bare life, which is both subjected to apparatuses of power/knowledge – including, he later adds, language itself (‘perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses’) (Agamben, 2006, 14) – and the cipher of resistance to these apparatuses, a ‘pure potentiality that preserves without acting’ (Agamben, 1996, 234).
I do not think that Aisthesis commits Rancière to a vitalist ontology. His work persistently resists prioritizing ontology to establish philosophical categories and concepts. Instead, Rancière’s work tests the supposition of equality against a number of systems in order to evaluate whether or not they offer new discursive and practical possibilities for thinking emancipation. Moreover, Rancière’s aesthetics is not Deleuzian (see 1998b, 146–64; 1998c; 2010b, 169–83). Rancière’s account of the politics of life, then, constitutes an attempt to appropriate the term from contemporary vitalism: Deleuze’s Christ-like figures – Riderhood (the disreputable man, as Agamben points out, of Our Mutual Friend), Bartleby, etc. – around whom crystallize the affective haecceities of art, or Agamben’s treatment of bare life as a singular resistance that renders inoperative the apparatuses of capture that foreclose upon the pure potentiality of the Open. To ‘do nothing’, to put aside the exigencies and interests of the practico-inert in order to pursue the errancy of autodidactic freedom, for Rancière, is neither exceptional nor messianic – it is to pursue the possibilities and passions of everyday life within the aesthetic regime of art (Rancière, 2011a, 51). Nonetheless, given that he contends that aisthesis ‘loses its simplicity in the aesthetic age’ insofar as it is unbound from the mimetic norms that attached meanings to affects, Rancière could have emphasized, like Beauvoir, Sartre, or Fanon, the socially mediated character of lived experience (2011a, 119). From their standpoint, Deleuze’s immanent vital force would be an appeal to a transcendent value that precedes the social mediation of human practices. This is, in fact, Rancière’s critique of Deleuze found in ‘The Monument and Its Confidences’ (2010b, 180). This is clearly not the case with Rancière’s aesthetics, which despite the repeated reference to life, remains sensitive to its historical contexts.
I have addressed the problem of vitalism and the politics of life because I am interested in how Rancière’s discourse in Aisthesis – the act of writing a particular historical narrative that, he notes, could be otherwise (2011a, xiii) – is simultaneously an aesthetic form and political intervention, and ‘a sensible reconfiguration of the facts it is arguing about’ (Rancière, 2004b, 65). Peter Gratton worries that the quasi-vitalism of Aisthesis works to depoliticize the aesthetic scenes found therein:
Rancière privileges the clown, the prisoner awaiting execution, the de-gendered dancer, and so on, all in the name of an inactivity that is but another name for the pure vital force of living, while calling for an indifference to differences that for the author would only be hierarchical and power driven. Indeed they are and have been, but isolating non-hierarchical moments in some sort of eidos of pure inactivity in these descriptions becomes a phenomenological epoché that has to bracket so much away from given [social] contexts. (2014)
The ‘de-gendered dancer’ in question is Loïe Fuller. Rancière recounts how a New York court, using a terminology of the representative regime, denied the copyright for a composition in dance on the grounds that it is a series of graceful gestures rather than dramatic composition. He contraposes a passage from the court’s decision with a description from Mallarmé, who writes that
the dancer is not a woman dancing, for these juxtaposed reasons: that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form: knife, goblet, flower, etc., and that she is not dancing, but suggesting through the miracle of bends and leaps a kind of corporeal writing. (quoted in Rancière, 2011a, 103)
On Rancière’s account, Mallarmé offers a description of an aesthetic experience of art that challenges the boundaries between art and non-art and the representative separation of the arts. He writes that
Fuller’s dance is not only an art, but an illustration of a new paradigm of art: it is not a dance anymore, but the performance of an unknown art, or rather a new idea of art: a writing of forms determining the very space of its manifestation. (Rancière, 2011a, 103)
Nonetheless, the aesthetic context does not exhaust the politics of aesthetics. While Mallarmé offers an interpretation that differs from the logic of the representative regime of the arts, it remains within those discourses, including literary discourses, that – as Beauvoir would say – explicitly ‘other’ women and women’s bodies through idealization (Beauvoir, 1949, 214–74/1: 311–95). Thus determining the politics of art by reference to its relation to the representative regime of the arts or the ethical regime of images produces an incomplete account of the ways that art is politicized within socially lived experience. The micropolitics of aesthetics not only challenges and disrupts the other regimes of identifying art, it also interrupts the practico-inert structures of the apparatuses of policing a given distribution of the sensible. While the politics of equality is heterogeneous to policing, the micropolitics of aesthetics works in the intervals of heterogeneity. Aesthetics is constituted by practices and discourses that introduce new forms of visibility, intelligibility, and place.
The micropolitics of aesthetics, I have argued, traverses a polemical common world of various regimes of arts, apparatuses of policing, and dissensual claims to equality. In Aisthesis, Rancière’s politics of life affirms the teeming pluralities of Whitmanian cultural democracy. Each of the scenes that constitute the history of Aisthesis repeatedly affirm that life is something, isn’t it? and at points illustrate delight in the emancipation of words, bodies, affects, and places. But this narrative risks, to paraphrase Rancière’s critique of Deleuze, returning political and artistic invention to one and the same sensible experience (see Rancière, 2010b, 182). We must insist, then, that these affirmations of life exhaust neither politics nor aesthetics. The micropolitics of aesthetics can also invent, beginning with the supposition of aesthetic and intellectual equality, forms of making visible and intelligible those forms of injustice, oppression, and exploitation that mar the world we tenuously have in common.
To conclude with but one example: Rancière points, in The Emancipated Spectator, to a photograph that shows a pile of stones ‘harmoniously integrated into an idyllic landscape of hills covered with olive trees, a landscape similar to that photographed by Victor Bérard to display the permanence of the Mediterranean of Ulysses’ voyages’ (2009a, 103; the photograph is reproduced on 104). This photograph, however, is part of a series assembled by Sophie Ristelhueber collected under the title ‘WB’ (West Bank), and it captures, from a bird’s-eye view, an Israeli roadblock constructed on a Palestinian road. According to Rancière, Ristelhueber’s photographs do not oppose the appearance of idyll to the reality of conflict, but rather play on discordances and indeterminations that require the attention of the spectator to make sense of the image – the affects of the juxtaposition of idyllic landscape and the discursive context interrupt a univocal social causality between aesthetics and politics. There is a moment of indetermination, of ‘doing nothing’ perhaps, but it is left to the spectator who, like all of us, shares in the intellectual and aesthetic equality of anyone and everyone, to decide what is to be done. If aesthetics does anything, it invents new and more egalitarian ways to visualize and verbalize the travails and frustrations, the joys and hopes, and the sense of justice and injustice that guide dissensus.