Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière

Abstract

GAVIN ARNALL: You argue in The Politics of Aesthetics that “it is within the mimetic regime that the old stands in contrast with the new.” This makes us think of the surrealist practice of invoking the outmoded, a practice overlooked by many theorists of the avant-garde who characterize the avant-garde as inclined toward rupture, the future, and the new. Do you see this romantic gesture of invoking the outmoded and utilizing it in a new way as a practice in accord with the aesthetic regime? Does this practice, in other words, participate in constructing what you call “the newness of the tradition?” JACQUES RANCIERE: Yes, I think so. The aesthetic regime means a rupture with what came before, the mimetic regime. The latter was ruled by an idea of the historical evolution that created a gap between the ancients and the moderns. On the one hand, the ancients were supposed to provide models. But, at the same time, they were the primitives, and it was no longer possible to do the same thing as they had done. One had to study Sophocles or Aeschylus, but it was not imaginable to perform their plays because they were at odds with modern refinement. I think one of the markers of the move toward the aesthetic regime is the project to present on stage the plays of Greek dramatists. Even the concept of the classics is linked with the aesthetic regime, which leaves open the possibility of reusing, recycling, and reinventing the ancient forms. I think it is quite an important point. You mention surrealism as a way of reusing existing forms,