Anti-Machiavellian Rancière: Aesthetic Cartography, Sites of Incommensurability and Processes of Experimentation

Abstract

I argue that Ranciere’s philosophy is anti-Machiavellian in the sense that his distinction between police and politics is not an originary division, but rather a gap in the sensible fabric of society. He thus moves from politics as a theory of agency to an aesthetic cartography of situations. It is a question of mapping the emergence of a political problem within a singular situation, and the ethics of such mapping is the insistence on the irreducible contingency of an existential choice of the problem. I will elaborate some new concepts (“sites of incommensurability,” “experimentation,” “fragmentation of social space”) and specify how the three logics of identification, dis-identification, and over-identification are three ways of constructing and dealing with situated problems.