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Politics and Aesthetics as Auto-Emancipation - Jacques Rancière’s Identity of Politics and Aesthetics -
Journal of Humanities
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The uniqueness of Jacques Rancière’s thought is that he grasps politics and aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible, and by doing so he locates aesthetics in the foundations of politics. Ancient political philosophy founds politics a distribution of faculties based on human nature. However, Rancière argues the distribution is not the foundation of politics but the object of politics, and encourages us to think about the distribution itself. Distribution is the distribution of place, which is to establish borders regarding what is inside and what is outside, what is seen and what is not seen. That is to say, it is basically the distribution of the sensible, and it is what politics and aesthetics have in common. Aesthetics and politics, both of them are the matter of form of the distribution of the sensible and sensible experience. Rancière’s work on politics is an attempt to show politics is a matter of aesthetics; therefore, his theory of art should be understandable through his political philosophy. This thesis aims at examining Rancière’s theory of art by means of his political thought, and suggesting the limit of his thought.
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