Politics and Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière and Louis-Gabriel Gauny

Abstract

This paper argues that much of Jacques Rancière’s redefinition of emancipation owes a lot to one key character from his archival research on nineteenth-century worker-poets, Louis-Gabriel Gauny, the self-proclaimed plebeian philosopher. This is especially the case in regard to Rancière’s understanding of subjectivation forming a double of the self and a double of social reality as worlds within worlds. The paper puts forward that Gauny’s form of emancipation is valid today as an aesthetic revolution that reveals Rancière’s practices of equality to be an emancipatory way of life. In doing so, it will engage with Gauny’s connection with the contemporary precariat.