Communities of Dissensus

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Communities of Sense was edited by Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor and Seth McCormick. 2 Here, I am referring primarily to Rancière's critique of Jean-François Lyotard's understanding of the ethical duty of art to bear witness to the unpresentable. For Lyotard's account see, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ and ‘Representation, Presentation, and Unrepresentable’, in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time [1988], trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp.89-107 and pp.119-28. For Rancière's assessment of Lyotard's position see, ‘Lyotard and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: a Counter-reading of Kant’, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), pp.88-105. For a very balanced intervention see, Peter Milne's ‘Sensibility and the Law: On Rancière's Reading of Lyotard, forthcoming in a special issue of Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, ed. Joseph J. Tanke. Although he would reject the idea that the project of ‘inaesthetics’ has much in common with aesthetics as it is traditionally conceived and practised, one could also cite the work of Alain Badiou as part of the turn away from this melancholy view of art as testifying to humankind's ethical-political failures. Both the Handbook of Inaesthetics [1998], trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), and the ‘Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art’, in Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), pp.133-48, are efforts to describe forms of art and analysis that serve as a counter-point to global capitalism. For an analysis of the ways in which Badiou's inaesthetics nevertheless relies upon the tradition of aesthetics from which he seeks to separate it, please see Joseph J. Tanke, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy and Anti-Philosophy of Art’, Philosophy Today, 53:3 (2009), pp.217-30. 3 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible [2000], trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), p.13. 4 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy’, New Left Review, 14 (March/April 2002), p.143. 5 See, Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man [1795], trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications), pp.75-81. Translation modified. 6 Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2009); Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).