Democratic Aesthetics, Aesthetic Democracy

Abstract

AbstractThis essay reviews four new books, each of which assesses the prospects of contemporary democracy in the face of wide-ranging crises—from the legacies of settler colonialism to the resurgence of right-wing nationalism—and finds possibilities for democratic renewal in aesthetic orientations and practices. Taken together, Jason Frank’s The Democratic Sublime (2021), Andrés Fabián Henao Castro’s Antigone in the Americas (2021), Michael Steinberg’s The Afterlife of Moses (2022), and Elisabeth Anker’s Ugly Freedoms (2022) suggest that the aesthetic turn in democratic theory most closely associated with the work of Jacques Rancière has been decisive. But if democratic theorists now fully embrace the centrality of creativity, performative assembly, and affective attachment and aversion to democratic renewal, they do not fully agree on the more fundamental question of whether democracy is a stable form that has aesthetic features or whether it is constitutively aesthetic—in other words, whether its people comes into being in moments of materialization with no prior referent.If contemporary political theorists . . . have found better prospects for the revitalization of democratic politics in collective performance and creative resistance than in . . . legal and political institutions, this shows how seriously . . . democratic thought has come to take democracy’s aesthetic dimensions.