Avello Publishing Journal Vol. 1, No. 1.

2011
Contemporary art - beautiful or sublime?
Kant in Rancire, Lyotard and Deleuze.

Stephen Zepke, University of Vienna.

Recent French aesthetic theory remains fixated on the realm of sensation that
was laid out for art by Kant. We might find this surprising given that art since
the end of the 60s and with Duchamp earlier took a path that rejected
sensation (or at least challenged its privilege) in favor of conceptual and
political practices that mixed art with philosophy, mass-media, information
technology and the rest of the world. Today, there are no expectations that art
should be a specific medium, quite the opposite, and if it is to be considered
'contemporary' it must include a minimum of conceptual / political techniques
and objectives. It is therefore somewhat ironic, given their importance to art
theory today, that the aesthetics of Jacques Rancire, Jean-Franois Lyotard and
Gilles Deleuze remain largely concerned with the legacy of Kant. Both Lyotard
and Deleuze place Kant's experience of the sublime at the base of their
aesthetics and indeed their ontology, while Rancire condemns them for this,
and favors Kant's category of the beautiful. Tracing these differences provides a
Kantian topology of contemporary aesthetics, and reveals some of the deeper
implications these different philosophies of difference have for contemporary
art and aesthetics.
Rancire develops his 'politics of aesthetics' in the wake of Foucault's
historicization of Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic. Following Foucault, Rancire
claims there is an aesthetics at the core of politics that operates 'as the system
of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience' (2004
13). This 'partition of the sensible' determines the conditions of possibility for
what can be seen and said, thereby establishing the rules for belonging to a
given community. Politics is the articulation of a 'disagreement' with these rules
and conditions, it is the emergence of a 'part that has no part' in statements
that manage to force their way in to produce a new and equal 'common' space.
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Directly concerned with the sensible as such, the avant-garde movements of

art into life (postmodern non-art) and life into art (modernist art for art's sake)
converge 'in the same initial kernel' (2009: 34). This 'kernel' is their shared
attempt to 'reframe material and symbolic space' by creating a 'dissensus'
(2009: 24-5). Both of these movements create a 'fissure in the sensible order
by confronting the established framework of perception, thought, and action
with the 'inadmissible'' (2004: 85). As a result, both modern and postmodern
avant-gardes are historical examples of how art produces 'a regime of the
sensible that has become foreign to itself' (2004 23). Rancire's concept of
'dissensus' is based on the Kantian concept of the beautiful, and the 'free-play'
of the faculties it implies. According to Kant the pleasure given by the beautiful
emerges when a sensible experience is undetermined by both the
understanding (the conditions of possible experience) and reason (a universal
idea of 'art', or a personal desire), and so enters into a new relationship with
them. 'It is this neither... nor... that defines the experience of the beautiful as
the experience of a kind of resistance', Rancire argues, a dissensus at once
aesthetic and political because it produces a new regime of the sensible (2010:
173).
Both forms of the artistic avant-garde therefore make a 'distinction
between modes of being' (2009: 29), they distinguish between the given mode
of being and 'a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products' (2004: 22).
An art work is therefore 'political' when it produces a heterogeneous
experience that 'suspends the ordinary connections not only between
appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, activity and
passivity, understanding and sensibility' (2009: 31). We can clearly see Kant in
this last suspended opposition, which occurs in the aesthetic experience of
beauty. A specific form is beautiful when it is produced by a disinterested 'freeplay' of the faculties, but because this judgment is undetermined by a concept
or Idea, it reveals an a priori principle which makes this judgement universal.
Beauty as a reflective judgement of taste is political for Rancire because it is a
singular sensible experience that creates a new, universal partition of the
sensible, or sensus communis. Beauty is at once a singular difference arising as
a 'dissensus' within the realm of the given, but it is also the promise of a new
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equality emerging beyond the current conditions of domination and disparity.

In this sense art's 'beauty' is an eruption of equality in the realm of
the sensible, it is a new sensual 'common', and promises the freedom of a new
and undetermined community. In the realm of contemporary art this has the
remarkable consequence of erasing the current preference for non-art
strategies (what Rancire calls 'autonomous art') over formal modernist
strategies (which Rancire calls 'heteronomous art'). As Rancire puts it;
The aesthetic regime of art institutes the relation between the forms of
identification of art and the forms of political community in such a way as
to challenge in advance every opposition between autonomous art and
heteronomous art, art for art's sake and art in the service of politics,
museum art and street art. [...] Thus there is no conflict between the
purity of art and its politicization (2009: 32).
This eradication of conflict between modern and postmodern aesthetic
strategies, Rancire argues, works both ways. On the one hand, the
concentration on 'pure form' in modernism is not an insistence on material at
the expense of life, but the creation of a radically democratic heteronomous
sensation that becomes 'the constitutive instrument for a new dcor of living'.
On the other, the 'politicization' of art is not achieved by art simply supporting
a political movement, but by bringing art into the everyday so as to achieve 'a
revolution in the very mode of production of material life' (2009: 33). In this
very positive sense, art-into-life is more than simply the angry erasure of art's
heteronomy, just as art for art's sake is more than solipsistic self-reflexivity, as
both draw upon aspects of the other in directly contributing to the construction
of a new sensibility. As a result, both sides of the modern/postmodern
opposition operate through the same 'founding paradox', one Rancire
continually repeats; 'art is art insofar as it is also non-art, or is something other
than art' (2009: 36, see also 2010: 118, 2011: 35). Art is political by first of all
dissenting from the sensible givens that regulate 'life' (ie., by being 'art'
undetermined by life), and then by seeking to create a new 'life' in which this
dissensus disappears (ie., by being 'life' undetermined by the Idea of 'art'). As a
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result, the 'two vanishing points' of Rancire's aesthetic regime art and nonart each imply their opposite, causing the aesthetic regime to constantly
'shuttle between' its constitutive poles (2010: 132). Consequently, there is no
chronology or priority to these positions in aesthetic or political terms, leading
to what in our present context is a surprising conclusion; 'There is no
postmodern rupture. There is a contradiction that is originary and unceasingly
at work' (2009: 36).
Rancire offers Schiller's 'aesthetic state' as the 'first manifesto' of the
aesthetic regime (2004: 24). This aesthetic state marks both the 'fundamental
identity' and the 'dual cancellation' of an active thought and a passive
receptivity of sensible matter in the 'free-play' of the faculties (2004: 24, 27).1
It is this 'play' that makes beautiful art adhere 'to a sensorium different to that
of domination' (2009: 30). In this way, Rancire argues, Schiller 'translates'
Kant's aesthetics into political propositions (2009: 31), because aesthetic play
creates 'the material realization of an unconditional freedom and pure thought
in common forms of life and belief' (2004: 27). These common forms, whether
generated by a heteronomous modernist art or a postmodern art of the
everyday, offer an experience 'which appears as the germ of a new humanity,
of a new form of individual and collective life' (2009 32). Rancire's
understanding of Schiller's 'aesthetic state' is the way he transforms art into
'real' politics, most importantly by by-passing 'representation';
The suspension of power, the neither...nor... specific to the aesthetic
state announces a wholly new revolution: a revolution in the forms of
sensory existence, instead of a simple upheaval of the forms of state;
a revolution that is no mere displacement of powers, but a
neutralization of the very forms by which power is exercised,
overturning other powers and having themselves overturned.
Aesthetic free play or neutralization defines a novel mode of
experience that bears within it a new form of 'sensible' universality
and equality (2009: 99).
Although Rancire's affirmation of Schiller's 'aesthetic state' conveniently
accounts for a modernist heterogeneous sensation and postmodern conceptual
1 Elsewhere Rancire suggests the Kantian concept of the 'aesthetic idea' as a
'representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the
possibility of any definitive thought whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to
it' (2011 41).
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autonomy within the same paradigm or 'regime', it is also confronted by the

eruption in Kant and in recent French aesthetic theory of another aesthetic
state, the sublime. In Lyotard's and Deleuze's affirmation of the sublime the
free play of the faculties is overturned, and the sensus communis is gleefully
and irremediably shattered. In their place emerges difference in itself, a supersensible but nevertheless immanent element that is the vital and virtual
principle of sensation, a sensation-event that is expressed or actualized in an
art work adequate to its sublime dimensions. Rancire will condemn both
Lyotard and Deleuze for their sublime aesthetics, as we will see, and it is
through these various confrontations that it might be possible to begin a
mapping of the aesthetics and politics of the present.
Lyotard's commitment to the radical heterogeneity of Modern art is
immediately obvious in his championing of Barnett Newman. Lyotard argues
that Newman's paintings give an atemporal experience of the 'here and now',
an experience that is sublime because it 'dismantles' consciousness (1991: 90).
Despite its sublimity Lyotard distinguishes Newman's work from Romanticism
because it doesn't seek to represent a 'beyond' and so mourn its passing, but
tries 'to be a visual event in itself' (1991: 83). Lacking Sehnsucht the 'it
happens' of the empirical event represents nothing, because in relation to a
consciousness that might experience it this event is unpresentable. This
unpresentable presence of the painting-event is immanent to the sensible
inasmuch as it embodies the difference between sensibility (the aistheton) and
its comprehension in thought, between the presentation itself and what is
presented, this difference being what Lyotard calls a diffrend.2 This sublime
event of the 'now' characterizes, Lyotard claims, not only Newman's work but
modern avant-garde painting in general (1991: 93). Indeed, Lyotard's
differences with Rancire become clear at this point; 'The current of 'abstract'
painting has its source,' Lyotard claims, 'in the requirement for indirect and all
but ungraspable allusion to the invisible in the visible. The sublime, and not the
beautiful, is the sentiment called forth by these works' (1991: 126).
Lyotard sees this sublime avant-garde as resisting two connected and
2 Lyotard writes, 'a differend [diffrend] would be a case of conflict, between
(at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of
judgment applicable to both arguments' (1988a xi).
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contemporary phenomena, the functionality and imperative for profit of

neoliberal capitalism, and the postmodern eclecticism of the
'transavantgarde'.3 Functionality and surplus operate, according to Lyotard, as
contemporary a priori criteria of our experience of reality, and privilege
innovation through their dependence on a 'technology of time'. The demand for
constant innovation in the production and consumption of experience replace
the 'now' with the contemporary a priori of the 'new', and obscure the sublime
event in the 'transparent' and 'natural' experience of what we now call a
'flexible' transcendental subjectivity (1991: 107). The transavantgarde mixture
of styles 'squanders' the tradition of the avant-garde, Lyotard argues, because
it 'encourages the eclecticism of consumption'. This homogenization of
experience in the general equivalency of capital lacks taste, Lyotard quips,
because it expresses 'the spirit of the supermarket shopper' (1991: 127).
Lyotard echoes Walter Benjamin's famous thesis that painting turned
to abstraction because photography took over the task of representation.
Photography quickly became a 'popular' art, and its technology became
integral to the production of visual commodities. In this sense photography
defines a popular aesthetics of the beautiful because it 'appeals to a taste: a
sort of common sense' uniting a capitalist sensibility and its rational
understanding in a disinterested pleasure (1991: 122). This makes postmodern
art 'realist' in the sense that it upholds the 'communication codes' of society,
the mass-media and associated information technologies, and so conforms to a
consensual and commodified 'beauty' (1984: 74). But unlike Rancire's
understanding of the term, this beauty is no longer 'free' to invent 'a
community of taste to come', and instead attests to the aura-less and
axiomatic 'beauty of understanding'; 'the beauty of Voyager II' (1991: 122).
Modern abstract painting is therefore political in 'presenting that there is
something that is not presentable according to the legitimate construction',
and in doing so it 'reveals that the field of vision simultaneously conceals and
needs the invisible' (1991 125). 'The artwork,' Lyotard writes, 'breaks with
3 The transavantgarde was an art movement championed by Achille Bonito
Oliva in the late 70s that reacted to the previous decade's emphasis on
conceptual and political practices with a return to painting, but one that now
mixed together all manner of historical styles.
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convention, with the commonplace, with the flow' (2001 50), making the
political function of the sublime diffrend the negation of the consensual
aesthetics of the beautiful (1984 77). In this sense Lyotard draws on Adorno's
account of Schnberg's twelve tones, which 'finds all its happiness, all its
beauty in forbidding itself the appearance of the beautiful' (1974: 127). Lyotard
therefore places his sublime aesthetics directly against those of the beautiful;
The analysis of the beautiful allows one to hope for the advent of a
subject as unity of the faculties, and for a legitimation of the
agreement of real objects with the authentic destination of this
subject, in the Idea of nature. A meteor dropped into the work
devoted to
this twofold project, the Analytic of the Sublime, a
mere appendix, seems to put an end to these hopes. Yet what is of
interest in sublime feeling is precisely what detonates this
disappointment (1994: 159-60).
The sublime, Lyotard claims, 'is nothing more than a sensus which is
undetermined, but de jure; it is a sentimental anticipation of the republic' (1988
168). This is a sensus but not a communis, or at least not yet. It is the
aistheton as an irreducible gap through which avant-garde painting 'escapes'
the capitalist aesthetics of the beautiful to explore the sublime and formless
'monsters' of those 'purely negative non-entities' that 'make presentation
suffer' (1991 125). The sublime, Kant says, is a reflexive judgment, and so it
takes us from the particular to the universal. But what, Lyotard asks, is this
universal? This universal is nothing, a void, a radical absence, and aesthetics
and its politics is the sensible manifestation of this universal and
transcendental lack.
Because the feeling of the sublime is an affective paradox, the paradox of
feeling publicly and as a group that something is formless alludes to a
beyond of experience, that feeling constitutes an as-if presentation of
the Idea of civil society and even of cosmopolitical society, and thus an
as-if presentation of the Idea of morality, right where that Idea
nevertheless cannot be presented, within experience. [...] This sign is
progress in its present state, it is as much as can be done' (1988: 196)
So the sublime offers a politics of radical negation, a negation of the universals
that govern the present 'reality' of capitalist consensus, whether these are
social 'communication codes' or the capitalist a priori of innovation and the
7

'new'. For Kant the infinite and sublime sensation that exceeds presentation by
the imagination is consequently comprehended in an Idea of totality, but
Lyotard will reverse Kant on this point (something Rancire will object to),
arguing that the event not only exceeds any sensus communis, but it also
denies a passage to the transcendental Ideas. For Lyotard, the pain of the
excessive sublime sensation does not lead to the pleasure of knowing the
absolute certainty of the Ideas. In fact its the other way around;
The despair of never being able to present something within reality on
the scale of the Idea then overrides the joy of being nonetheless
called upon to do so. We are more depressed by the abyss that
separates heterogeneous genres of discourse [ie., sensibility and
reason] than excited by the indication of a possible passage from one
to the other (1988: 179).
There is, in other words, no redemption. No redemption because the visual
event of the painting is both absence and presence, a diffrend to which the
avant-garde consistently bears witness; 'The message is the presentation, but
it presents nothing; it is, presence' (1991: 81). There is a partial echo with
Deleuze here, who will also find the irreducible difference between the faculties
to be genetic, and will found his system on this differential genesis. But in
Deleuze the priority Kant gives the Ideas over their sensible actualization will
be retained, and not as in Lyotard reversed. For Lyotard the radical absence
revealed by the sublime event is pure aistheton, sensation in the absence of
the human, or as he sometimes also calls, sensation as and of 'the Thing itself'
(1991: 25). The Thing dwells in the eternal darkness of primary repression, and
its presence means that everyone is eternally 'exiled from the ownership of
yourself' (2004: 113). The Thing is a pure indeterminacy, 'a presence as
unpresentable to the mind', it 'demands a disarming of the mind' (1991: 142,
151). But this exile from oneself is not simply a purely negative 'loss', because
the human a prior is determining sensibility have been exceeded by the
presence of matter 'itself'. As Lyotard explains, 'the aim for the arts, especially
painting and music, can only be that of approaching matter. Which means
approaching presence without recourse to the means of presentation' (1991
139).
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Matter 'itself', as pure intensity without form, Lyotard argues, is

'nuance and timbre', the 'scarcely perceptible differences between sound or
colours', or what 'makes the difference' (1991: 140). This difference is not
conceptually determined as is that structuring musical notation or a colour
wheel but is a 'coloured event', a formless and abstract 'apparition' that is
'bound to its disappearance' (2004: 115). This appearance/disappearance is a
genetic differend; 'It takes place in the world as its initial difference, as the
beginning of its history. It does not belong to this world because it begets it, it
falls from a prehistory, or from an a-history. The paradox is that of performance,
or occurrence' (1991: 82, see also 2004: 109). The occurrence of this
generative difference is, Lyotard believes, what is performed by Modernity. One
of the ways it does so is by continually separate 'cultural activities and that of
artistic work' (1991: 135). In bearing witness to the diffrend modernity
(Lyotard's example here is the work of Barnett Newman) 'is much closer to an
ethics than to any aesthetics or poetics' (1991: 81).
In fact, Lyotard writes, 'the sublime is none other than the sacrificial
announcement of the ethical in the aesthetic field. [...] This heralds the end of
an aesthetics, that of the beautiful, in the name of the final destination of the
mind, which is freedom' (1991: 137). This freedom is in fact very similar to
Kant's, because our true freedom lies in following the ethical categorical
imperative. From the side of the subject, a sublime ethics 'requires one's
freedom from any motivating pathos; ethics allows only that apathetic pathos
accompanying obligation' (1988a 166). Art is ethical, Lyotard believes, because
it obliges us to give way all personal interest, to subside in front of its event, to
be disinterested. This ethical art demands that you 'be answerable to the Law
and you must be unable to answer' (2004: 110). This inability to answer has
'the force of an obligation', an obligation issued by the Thing to listen. In this
sense the art work is 'the silent feeling that signals a differend remains to be
listened to' (1988: 171). As Lyotard tells it; 'I (the viewer) am no more than an
ear open to the sound which comes to it from out of the silence; the painting is
that sound, an accord' (1991: 83). It is a sublime sound, a discordant accord, a
presentation of the unpresentable. It is an ethics of the Other that is a poetics
and a politics, because in the pure atemporality of its event art refuses any
9

universal, any Idea that would presume to understand the aistheton, that would
wrap it within a consensus or a completeness. In this sense, Lyotard argues;
'The same ought to apply for a revolution, and for all great historical upheavals:
they are what is formless and without figure in historical human nature' (1988:
167).
Rancire will accuse Lyotard (and Deleuze) of collapsing politics and
aesthetics into ethics, but it could equally be argued that they make ethics the
ground of any possible aesthetics or politics. Lyotard often evokes passivity as
an aesthetic and political strategy, and also argues that our inadequate
attempts 'to capture the unrepresentable event of apparition' can only produce
an act of 'mourning' (2004: 116). But there is equally in his work a sense in
which this 'passivity' is productive, and productive in a political sense, because
it disqualifies in advance any claims to a subjective or objective coherence or
dominance, let alone ontological consistency. 'Being and beings do not reveal
themselves;' Lyotard writes, 'they present tiny universes with each work' (1989:
191). In other words the work the work qua event comes first, and in
bearing witness to the Thing it gives birth to an infinite multiplicity of others,
each a unique experiment and experience. The work of art, he says, gives birth
to a coloured matter that 'irradiates' a 'chromatic world' (2007: 114).
This ethical necessity of art is also a politics in as much as bearing
witness to the Other evokes the horrors of past attempts to obliterate it,
especially the Holocaust. The continual eruption of the event is therefore a way
of disrupting the amnesia of postmodernity, forcing us to remember the
extermination of the Jews in World War 2. It is certainly no accident that Lyotard
finds a particularly Jewish understanding of the visual arts in Barnett Newman's
work, where the highest law for a sublime art is the Jewish prohibition of
images (an analogy to the sublime Kant was also drawn to). This prohibition, a
prohibition that is as well an obligation, is nothing but the unbridgeable chasm
between sensible and super-sensible worlds, between the human and the
inhuman, between the individual and his or her obliteration in the absolute.
This is the genetic chasm that founds the world, the irreducible diffrend that
demands justice, and that gives to the world its joyful pain, as Nietzsche would
say, the pain of childbirth.
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For Lyotard the sublime is a pure sensory event acting as a sign for
what exceeds any possible thought. This 'radical re-reading' of Kant gives the
avant-garde, Rancire claims, 'the paradoxical duty of bearing witness to an
immemorial dependency of human thought that makes any promise of
emancipation a deception' (2010: 130). Why? Because in Lyotard's version of
the sublime reason's inability to conceive of matter and its events causes it to
break down, powerless, while in Kant imagination's collapse clears the way for
Reason's power (2009: 92). Thus, in Kant, the sublime leads us from the
autonomy of the beautiful experience to a 'superior autonomy', that of reason
and the super-sensible world. 'Lyotard,' Rancire says, 'turns this logic strictly
on its head' (2009: 93). If, Rancire argues, 'the aesthetic condition is
enslavement to the aistheton' (Lyotard quoted by Rancire 2009: 93), then the
avant-garde event can only bear witness to its own paradoxical alterity. As a
result, 'Lyotard makes this passage out of the realm of art the very law of art'
(2009: 127). This is why aesthetics and politics are obliterated in Lyotard by
ethics, because the singularity of the sensation simply 'becomes a submission
to the law of the Other' (2009: 128). This 'overturning' of aesthetics into ethics,
Rancire claims, 'forgets' that modernity is constituted by the two poles of the
aesthetic regime. '[] the times when philosophers such as Lyotard intervened
in contemporary events, or the suggestions they would make for the
improvement of political issues, were considered in government legislation, are
no more' (Wakefield 2010: 10).
Rancire's objections to Lyotard are therefore made strictly from his
own perspective, a fact we should always keep in mind. But they are objections
about the destiny of the avant-garde, and this is what makes them relevant for
contemporary art. Rancire objects to how Lyotard's sublime and avant-garde
event refuses to link art's specificity to a future emancipation, but connects it
instead 'to an immemorial and never-ending catastrophe' (2009: 129). This,
Rancire continues, 'transforms every promise of emancipation into a lie' and
makes 'resistance' an 'endless work of mourning' (2009: 130). Lyotard,
Rancire claims, gives an 'implicit refutation of Schiller's vision' by placing art
and aesthetics on this 'one-way detour' to ethics, and in doing so only succeeds
in 'blocking the originary path from aesthetics to politics' charted by the avant11

garde (2010: 131). Rancire, as we have seen, rejects the 'fantasy' of art's
purity in favor of the tension between art and politics that constitutes his own
aesthetic regime. But Rancire will go beyond a simple rejection of Lyotard's
account of the sublime by including Lyotard's position in his own.
Rancire extends the differential logic of the aesthetic regime to the
'tension' Schiller finds between the beautiful statue's charm and its selfsufficiency (the statue is the Juno Ludovisi). The statue, he claims, both attracts
us and makes us recoil, calms and agitates us. 'There is then,' Rancire argues,
'no rupture between an aesthetics of the beautiful and an aesthetics of the
sublime. Dissensus, i.e. the rupture of a certain agreement between thought
and the sensible, already lies at the core of aesthetic agreement and repose'
(2009: 98). Rancire cannot expect us to take this claim seriously, in as much
as it reduces the difference between sensibility and thought, and the attack on
subjectivity mounted by the sublime, to the relative differences of attraction
and disgust, or of agreement and disagreement, as they are played out within
the a priori of our common linguistic capacity. Rancire can claim for Schiller's
aesthetic state a political significance over and above the promise of social
mediation implied by Kantian common sense, but he can't have it both ways
and also equate this with the sublime. 'Aesthetic common sense, for Schiller, is
a dissensual common sense' (2009: 98) Rancire writes, but this is not the
same as the destruction of all common sense in the sublime that Lyotard, as
well as Deleuze, turn into the very principle of art.
Lyotard's anti-aesthetic, Rancire argues, depends on a primal scene
that grounds both art's autonomy and the promise of human emancipation in
the experience of a 'sensorium of exception' where the active/passive,
subject/object and form/matter oppositions conditioning experience are
negated. Schiller, on the other hand, offers a community to come that doesn't
have to endure the alterity of aesthetic experience in which art becomes 'an
unseparated collective life' (2009 100). The neither...nor... of the aesthetic
regime replaces ethics with politics, it replaces passivity with activity, mourning
with resistance, alterity with intervention. For Rancire the choice is clear;
'Either dissensus is reduced to the conflict between appearance and reality, or
a new consensus is formed for the purpose of transforming the appearance of
12

art into the realities of common life, in other words, of transforming the world
into the product and mirror of human activity' (2009 100).
Rancire argues that Lyotard disconnects artistic modernism from the
'grand narrative' of the emancipation of the proletariat and reconnects it to
that of the extermination of the Jews. The avant-garde thereby moves from
inscribing the contradiction between capitalism and art to mourning the
absence of the Thing (the Holocaust) from the sensible, forcing the subject to
either submit to the violence of the aistheton, or undergo its absence. Lyotard
thereby effaces what Rancire posits as the original link between aesthetic
suspension and political emancipation. Instead of Schiller's 'freedom or death',
Lyotard gives us 'servitude or death', 'a joint suppression of both aesthetics and
politics' in which 'there is nothing to be done except obey the immemorial law
of alienation' (2009: 105). But Rancire overstates the case when he claims
Lyotard effaces the critique of capitalism in bearing witness to the Jews killed in
the Holocaust. Lyotard does privilege heterogeneity as the ethical mechanism
of art, but he does not efface his critique of capitalism in mourning. In fact it is
Rancire's work that has been criticized for its lack of any account of political
economy, and it is true that he does not clearly articulate how artistic
dissensus might effectively engage with the commodification of visual culture
(see Shaviro 2006). There is the suspicion that 'dissensus' could be another
name for capitalist 'innovation', and that its 'resistance' is merely the research
and development arm of commodity production. If this is true then we are right
to consider the more radical aesthetic attacks on capitalism proposed by
Lyotard and Deleuze.
So although Rancire's reading of Lyotard effectively restricts him to
occupying only one side of his own aesthetic regime, it also highlights aspects
of Rancire's regime that from Lyotard's perspective remain problematic. The
first is the way Rancire relativizes any heterogeneity by making it a political
force that emerges from and aims towards the shared sensibility of a common
discursive regime. This last is finally Rancire's basic condition for democracy,
which remains the condition for aesthetics and politics, and what is effaced in
Rancire's view by Lyotard (and as we'll see Deleuze's) turn to ethics. But this
means, it seems, that there is no room for radical exteriority within Rancire's
13

aesthetic politics and its discursive regime. In fact he insists that there is
nothing that is unrepresentable, including the Holocaust (2009: 126). In this
way he posits the dissensual democracy of his aesthetic regime as the best
response to our contemporary demands for a philosophy of immanence. But is
this really the case? It seems to me that from another perspective Lyotard, in a
way very similar to Deleuze, locates an interior outside (the inhuman) as the
genetic difference that insures immanence remains ontologically (rather than
discursively) justified. In this sense the search for 'justice' that Rancire seems
to find offensive in Lyotard's aesthetics (and in Deleuze's, see 2004b 6) is
neither a moral cause, nor does it necessarily replace political activism with
passivity, but instead acts as a stimulant to life in Nietzsche's sense, a
stimulant by which the given produces something new and unknown. This is
the 'justice' by which the 'Figure disappears' in the 'Sahara', according to
Deleuze, the 'justice' of overcoming the human in the sublime (2003: 27).
In this sense the aim of aesthetics and politics in Lyotard and Deleuze
is not to produce a new sensual community, a new political body whose
discursive framework allows it to negotiate relative differences, but instead
aesthetics as politics (or ethics) would introduce an immanent outside, a
difference that was productive inasmuch as it was absolute and it eternally
returned. In this sense it is somewhat surprising that Rancire does not spend
more time reading Lyotard's other aesthetic writings, those which do not insist
on the pre-eminence of painting, and so do not fall so easily into the modernist
side of his aesthetic regime. For example Lyotard's book on Duchamp explores
the event through an ironic and playful 'politics of incommensurables' (1990:
28), introducing nonsensical elements into the 'common sense' of pictorial
practice. As Lyotard remarks, 'The uncommentable thing has nothing mystical
about it: it's simply the incommensurable brought back into commentary',
under the principle that 'nonsense is the most precious treasure' (1990: 11). In
his texts on Duchamp the incommensurable diffrend produces humour and
uncertainty as textual affects, and seems to point directly to a way in which
aesthetic ambiguity, especially in relation to the given, might proliferate into
both poetic and political consequences.
In other words, the aim of politics and aesthetics for Lyotard is not to
14

overcome alienation in a new community, but to orient the community around

alienation as its productive principle. As John Rajchman has perceptively
pointed out, this could lead to an understanding of Lyotard's work as 'an
immanent materialism [...], appealing to experimentation rather than
judgment' (1998: 11). This immanent materialism would be precisely what
Lyotard shares with Deleuze, an ontological commitment to difference 'in itself'
that is rejected by Rancire's more linguistic and hence 'deconstructive'
account. Although we will see that there are clearly also differences between
Lyotard and Deleuze's accounts, they are closer to each other than either are to
Rancire.
Deleuze often acknowledged his debt to Lyotard's 'great book'
Discours, Figure (1971), 'a schizo-book' whose 'importance' was 'that it marks
the first generalized critique of the signifier', and of the structuralist 'canker'
that 'has contaminated art or our comprehension of art' (2002 214 see also
Deleuze and Guattari 1983 243). Lyotard's book (which was the publication of
his PhD, for which Deleuze had been on the examining committee) Deleuze
claims, went beyond the dialectical and representational relation between
signifier and signified to explore 'figure-images' on one hand, and the 'pure
figural' on the other. The first explores the embodiment of designation, its
materialization, and the second elucidates a figural matrix that connects
images to their libidinal production (2002: 214-5). Lyotard's analysis of the
'figural' was especially important for Deleuze, who used it extensively in
analyzing the painting of Francis Bacon. For both Lyotard and Deleuze the
figural emerges as the expression of invisible forces, an expression or
actualization of a super-sensible realm that only appears through the
destruction of the human, all too human. In this sense the experience of the
figural is sublime for both thinkers, and reveals a world of pure sensation that
escapes the a priori relations determining the figurative form. Although
Deleuze's concept via Lyotard of the figural is clearly crucial for an
understanding of his aesthetics, and is the clearest and most extensive
example of their similarities, I will not pursue it here where my focus is on the
sublime.4
4 See Slaughter on the relationship between Deleuze's book on Francis Bacon
and Lyotard's earlier work.
15

Deleuze and Lyotard share an interest in the sublime, but their

understanding of it is not entirely the same. In fact their respective readings of
the sublime reveal both the closeness and distance between their work. Both
thinkers will attempt to integrate the Kantian difference between the faculties
of the super-sensible and the sensible into an ontology of sensation. But while
both began from a monist ontology of immanence, Lyotard will increasingly
utilize the sublime as part of a dualist understanding of the Thing and its
sensible event. In fact, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari offer precisely this
criticism of Lyotard's Discours, Figure, which effectively anticipates their
subsequent differences. After some very positive comments praising Lyotard
and his concept of the 'figural', 'which carries us to the gates of schizophrenia
as a process', Deleuze and Guattari drop a heavy 'but'. But, they write, Lyotard
too often returns this process 'toward shores he has so recently left behind',
back to the discursive structures and spaces in relation to which these
processes can only be secondary 'transgressions' a coded insult referring to
Deleuze's dismissal of Bataille. This is predominantly achieved, they continue,
because 'Lyotard reintroduces lack and absence into desire; maintains desire
under the law of castration, at the risk of restoring the entire signifier along
with the law' (1983: 244).
For Deleuze and Guattari castration is an oppressive 'universal belief'
that brings everyone together under 'one and the same illusion of
consciousness'. Castration separates consciousness and its subjective desires
from the 'inhuman' and unconscious 'great Other' as Lacan calls it.5 Beginning
from castration as an a priori of human consciousness therefore condemns
desire to being a signifier for what can never be named or appear what
Lyotard will later call the Thing. According to Deleuze and Guattari Lyotard does
not manage to escape this logic of lack, and despite the promising
developments in Discours, Figure, he is finally condemned for making the
subject enter desire through castration. This, they finally say, is a 'perverse,
human, all-too-human idea! An idea originating in bad conscience, and not in
the unconscious' (1983: 295). Although Anti-Oedipus is written after Deleuze's
encounter with Kant, it nevertheless encapsulates perhaps in harsher terms
5 For an account of Lyotard's relation to Lacan, see Myers.
16

than I would prefer the basic difference between Deleuze and Lyotard's
concepts of sublime difference. Lyotard, as we have seen, posits the Thing as
absolute and super-sensible, and it is only ever its unpresentable presence that
can be revealed in the visual event or aistheton. This results in an aesthetics of
lack, or absence, and a kind of obligation to this absence that Rancire will
condemn for obscuring aesthetics and politics in ethics. Deleuze, on the other
hand will, like Lyotard, see in the sublime experience the emergence of a
sensation that is beyond human comprehension, but this will not be understood
according to the irreducible dualism of the diffrend and its demand for justice,
but as the inhuman emergence of an Idea, an immanent principle of reason
acting as the real condition of the appearance of a transcendental field or
'individuation'.
Deleuze's reading of Kant begins from the objection that Kant's a priori
principles of the understanding were traced from the psychological structures
of perception, and so failed to discover experience's real and genetic conditions
(1994: 135). Kant's third Critique anticipates these objections 'at least in part',
inasmuch as it 'uncovers the ultimate ground still lacking in the other two
Critiques' (2002: 61). The ground it discovers is the faculties' 'free agreement,
indeterminate and unconditional', meaning that 'with the Critique of Judgment,
we step into Genesis' (2002: 68-9). But for Deleuze, Kant's most important
discovery in the third Critique is not the 'free play' of the faculties in the
beautiful but the sublime, which, he will argue, is the way experience goes
beyond its conditions of possibility and transcendental empiricism discovers
difference as its real and genetic condition. In the sublime the genetic
conditions of experience emerge in themselves, as the difference between the
faculties, a difference Deleuze raises to a higher power that overcomes the
very possibility of common sense. What Deleuze calls 'real experience' is the
repetition of the difference between the super-sensible and the sensible, its
eternal return in an open and multiplying series of faculties and the
experiences that exceed them.
Deleuze's reading of the third Critique begins from what he calls the
'formidable difficulty' of understanding the 'mysterious' harmony of the
faculties in common sense (1984: 22). This harmony requires the
17

presupposition of aesthetic common sense, but, Deleuze says, this is an

unsatisfactory solution (2002: 60) because, 'the Critique in general demands a
principle of this accord, of the genesis of common sense' (1984: 22-3). The
Analytic of the Sublime gives this 'genetic principle' (2002: 70) that
demonstrates, for Kant, how reason secures the free indeterminate accord of
the imagination and the understanding in the beautiful. Deleuze however,
reading Kant very literally on this point, will find in the sublime a
transcendental genetic principle of discord or difference that will overcome
common sense and its human, all too human sensibility.
The sublime, as Kant remarks, is beyond all comparison great (1987
25), so it cannot be a measurable object of the senses. As a result, the
sublime presents the imagination with an experience that is formless, and this
forces it to confront its own limit. Imagination has no limit when it is
apprehending successive parts because as long as it has established a unit of
measure it can apprehend successive parts to infinity. But imagination does
reach its limit when it attempts to simultaneously reproduce this infinity of
parts, which it cannot synthesize into a single experience. Here Deleuze follows
Kant's account of the aesthetic synthesis, which determines a unit of measure.
An aesthetic synthesis is made up from subjective judgments Kant claims,
because its unit of measure is always our body. But in the face of the
'absolutely great' this aesthetic synthesis breaks down, forcing us to turn to the
Ideas, which can think the infinity of the 'absolutely great' even if the
imagination cannot apprehend it. Here, the sublime gives rise to 'a feeling of a
super-sensible faculty within us' (Kant; 1987 25), and reveals the supersensible substrate underlying intuition. Nature is sublime in the phenomena
that convey an Idea of their infinity, and in this we get, Kant tells us 'infinity
comprehended' (1987 26). Here we comprehend an Idea of Nature that is
super-sensible and that underlies both Nature and our own faculty of reason.
Rancire will condemn Deleuze's 'sublime aesthetics' for the same
reason he rejects Lyotard's, for obliterating the tension between art and politics
in an 'ethical turn'. Rancire offers, in this respect, a very perceptive reading of
Deleuze's work that begins with the observation, which I think we can take as
being correct, that for Deleuze 'Art is politics' (2010: 172). The art work is,
18

according to Deleuze, a raw sensation torn from the cliches and banalities of
the world in such a way as to allow this genetic difference to become
productive. This sensation is in no way representational, and it opens onto
inasmuch as it is part of a 'molecular world, in-determined, un-individualized,
before representation, before the principle of reason'. As we have seen, it
opens onto chaos. This, Rancire claims, is a world of indeterminacy in relation
to concepts, but 'the discovery of fraternity' in political terms (2004a 150). In
Deleuze however, this 'fraternity' is not of humans, but as in Lyotard of the
inhuman. Deleuze's figures for this inhumanity vary greatly, a variety perhaps
expressed by the series in A Thousand Plateaus of becoming-woman-girlanimal-molecular-indiscernible. As in Lyotard, it is the sublime gap between the
human world and the sensation that both expresses and constructs any future
community or 'people to come'. On this account Deleuze's aesthetics, like
Lyotard's, clearly fits into the 'modernist' side of Rancire's schema, where art's
politics are 'marked by the paradox of 'artistic' resistance. Art promises a
people in two contradictory ways: it does so insofar as it is art and insofar as it
is not art' (2010: 177). Art announces a 'people to come' through a sublime
break, an art work/break acting as the transcendental object of a political
community, the inhuman and immanent excess directing a process of
individuation in which the organism is overcome, and a new world is born.
For Rancire the problem is that this both affirms art in the highest
terms, and implies its disappearance. This, Rancire claims, is the 'ethical
confusion' by which art and politics vanish through their union. What results
from this is not liberation, but 'a humanity referred to the vanity of any
fraternal dream' (2010: 183). For Rancire the point is not to obliterate the
difference between art and politics 'but to maintain the very tension by which a
politics of art and a poetics of politics tend towards each other, but cannot
meet up without suppressing themselves (2010: 183). Obviously then, the
'modernist contradiction' Rancire finds at work in Deleuze and Lyotard is only
a contradiction from his perspective, where a constant circulation of politics
and art defines both of them. Rancire has very little interest in the supersensible, and inasmuch as modernist art poses the super-sensible as an
ethical/political alternative to the ruling sensible regime, it must, on Rancire's
19

account be reconciled with its opposite (the sensible everyday) to avoid

becoming totalitarian. Deleuze, like Lyotard, refuses this kind of reconciliation,
and insists on the sublime sensation as the eruption of an inhuman art in the
human. As such, transcendental difference emerges in and as real experience,
and obliterates any common sense or sensible 'regime'. In other words, the
people to come announced by art is never, for Deleuze, a sensus communis, it
is the actualization of a transcendental difference by which human being
becomes (something else). Rancire is therefore not wrong to claim that for
Deleuze the art work is 'not simply the promise of a people but its reality'
(2010: 179), inasmuch as the real is the third form of time for Deleuze, the real
is the future. For Deleuze art gives the sensation in which the future erupts in
the present as an aesthetic event, a tear in the fabric of things sweeping aside
all subjective givens, and all human communities, in an experience strictly coextensive with what Deleuze and Guattari call a 'becoming-Universe' (1994:
169). At this point it is meaningless to speak about 'communities' united by
what they have in 'common', as here everything is taking place on the entirely
material level of singular 'multiplicities' in which the particular and the Universe
have become indiscernible. In this sense then, Deleuze uses the sublime to
achieve Kant's original ambitions for the aesthetic as the bridge between the
sensible and reason, between the empirical particular and the transcendental
Idea.
Nevertheless, for Rancire Deleuze's concept of art has to pay a steep
price; 'the reintroduction of a kind of transcendence in the thought of
immanence' (2010: 180). Rancire accurately locates this transcendence as
being the sublime, 'the excessive power of an aisthesis, which is to say, in
essence, the power of an ontological difference between two orders of reality'
(2010: 180). Rancire also understands and points out how Deleuze's account
differs from Kant's because 'the suprasensible element encountered in the
experience of the sublime is not the intelligible; it is the pure sensible, the
inhuman power of life. Immanence must be turned into a form of
transcendence' (2010: 181). Similarly, in Kant the sublime moves us from the
aesthetic to the moral realm, while in Deleuze this difference is 'reinvested' in
the practice of art and aesthetic experience. As Rancire argues in a discussion
20

of Deleuze's reading of literature, Deleuze 'tears' the 'logic of sensation' from

Romanticism and 'establishes it in another territory' closer to pragmatism or
English empiricism. (2004a 157). Art in this sense is the experience of the
super-sensible sensible, 'an experience of the heteronomy of Life with respect
to the human' (2010: 181).
Once more Rancire is helpful in distinguishing Deleuze from Lyotard,
who, he says, 'drew diametrically opposite consequences from the same
premises' (2010: 181). Lyotard is like Deleuze in making art a sublime discord
between the mind and an inhuman and excessive power. They both invert
Kant's analysis by transforming the difference between the faculties of
imagination and reason into an experience of the sensible's transcendence with
respect to itself, and make this experience the principle of artistic practice. But,
Rancire argues, for Deleuze art is a deterritorializing force working against the
Law and calling for a people to come, while for Lyotard art separates the mind
from itself and testifies to its irremediable alienation from the Other. This is a
useful description of the difference between Deleuze and Lyotard's use of the
sublime, which shares a commitment to its inhuman difference, but differs
when it comes to understanding how this difference is actualized. While for
both the transcendental difference is genetic, in Lyotard it can only give rise to
an acknowledgement of the impossibility of ever experiencing heterogeneity,
to the presence of this impossibility in experience, while in Deleuze
transcendental difference produces a real experience that is understood as an
actual but nevertheless asubjective individuation directly expressing and
constructing a virtual Idea. Rancire will finally say that Lyotard's conclusions
are assuredly less appealing [than Deleuze's]. I fear, however, that
they are more logical, that the transcendence instituted at the heart
of Immanence, in fact, signifies the submission of art to a law of
heteronomy which undermines every form of transmission of the
vibration of colour and of the embrace of forms to the vibrations and
to the embraces of a fraternal
humanity (2010: 182).
Considering Rancire's earlier condemnation of Lyotard this conclusion is both
surprising and definitive. For Rancire, Deleuze's dubious achievement of
fulfilling 'the destiny of aesthetics by suspending the entire power of the work
21

of art from the pure sensible' is not only 'anti-logical' inasmuch as it affirms
the 'incoherent modern work' (2004b 13), but also rejects discursive difference
or 'dissensus' upon which Rancire's own system is based. Rancire sees very
clearly that in Deleuze's (and in Lyotard's) account of sublime difference the
sensation obliterates the 'communication' of disagreement, and the
'community' it produces. This is why the inhumanity of Deleuze's aesthetics
worries him so much, because it is this aspect of the sublime that removes the
beautiful and precisely the beautiful as the undetermined difference
constitutive of a democratic discursive regime from the realm of art. As
Rancire puts it, here 'Nothing else is formed except the identity of the infinite
power of difference and the indifference of the Infinite. And the question
remains: how can one make a difference in the political community with this
indifference?' (2004a 163). The argument is very similar to that Rancire aims
at Lyotard; when the difference between aesthetics and politics disappears in
the ethical necessity, or 'justice' of a sublime disruption of the human,
aesthetics can get no further than a continual re-enactment of the art-works
hysterical de-figuration of the human, and 'the interminable postponement or
deferral of the promised fraternity' (2004b 5 and 2004a 162). Rancire finds
such pointless absolutism distasteful, he prefers the constant discursive
negotiations of contemporary art over a 'beautiful' sensus communis to the
violent absolutism of the modernist sublime.

Conclusion
One might say at this point that Rancire was quite entitled to his opinion, and
leave it at that. No doubt one could say the same of Deleuze and Lyotard,
whether one wanted to choose one over the other or not. Certainly it is in
Rancire's favour that he elucidates the terms of this choice very clearly. But
he does so, it must be said, through a final moment of bad conscience, the very
same one as that offered by another of Deleuze and Lyotard's colleagues in the
philosophy department at Paris VIII, Alain Badiou. According to this (in)famous
reading of Deleuze, and here Rancire parrots it exactly, 'justice' for Deleuze is
'conceived on the Platonic model' whereby the virtual Ideas remain
transcendent in relation to the material field of immanence they determine
22

(2004a 163). As a result, and it is a searing indictment; 'We do not go on, from
the multitudinous incantation of Being, toward any political justice. Literature
opens no passage to a Deleuzean politics' (2004a 164). In fact, Rancire
implies, because of this residual Platonic transcendence there is no Deleuzian
politics.
What is interesting about this conclusion is that although it emerges
from Rancire's mutually exclusive opposition of ethics and politics, it seems to
imply a deeper opposition, also mutually exclusive, between ontology and
politics. It is as if what really attracts Rancire to Kant's concept of the beautiful
is that it remains undetermined by absolute Ideas, or, in other words, by
ontological assumptions. Instead there are only the discursive regimes
constituting empirical reality (the a prioris of the understanding), and the
'beautiful' aesthetic statements capable of disagreeing with them. This
effectively removes ontological commitments from the field of both aesthetics
and politics, just as it disqualifies any 'ontological' understanding of the
aesthetic realm of discursive engagement.
We are presented with a choice then, between an ontological
understanding of Kant's aesthetics and a political one. Both Deleuze and
Lyotard will use the concept of the sublime to re-orient aesthetics towards the
ontological eruption (sensation) of an absolute difference between the human
and the inhuman, or, in other words, between the sensible and the supersensible. For Lyotard this difference will forever return through the impossibility
of ever breaching it, while in Deleuze it will forever return in privileged
moments capable of living it. For both these 'eternal returns of difference' will
be art. For Rancire on the other hand such returns are not only impossible,
they are a denial of politics. But here politics is no longer understood in the
extreme ontological terms of the other two thinkers, where politics is nothing
else but the ethical obligation of art (and philosophy) to produce inhuman
transformation, but is instead seen as a discursive process negotiating the
given conditions of existence. The production of aesthetic 'dissensus' in this
sense negotiates what is seeable and sayable, but does not challenge the
transcendental and still-human conditions of seeing and saying as such.
Deleuze and Lyotard will sweep such a prioris away in the pure heterogeneity of
23

an event.
From this we can see why contemporary artists and activists are
attracted to Rancire's work. They share a set of assumptions and aims, and
although Rancire's insistence on the political value of modernist painting, and
his commitment to the avant-gardes and the 'beautiful' sound odd in the
context of contemporary art, his affirmation of aesthetic production
undetermined by conceptual or ethical/ontological conditions of possibility, and
art's consequent ability to intervene within the public sphere appeals directly to
the current enthusiasm for politically engaged artistic practice. Similarly,
Rancire's discussion of contemporary art works and artists seems to repay in
kind his uptake by the contemporary art world. In this respect his work feels far
more 'current' than that of Deleuze and Lyotard with their archaic affirmations
of painting, and in Deleuze and Guattari's case their rejection of Conceptual art
(1994 198).
But, and it is a winsome 'but' to end, Lyotard and Deleuze both offer
an aesthetic philosophy that has a grandeur and level of commitment Rancire
can't (and admittedly doesn't want to) match. They both trump 'dissensus' with
the 'inhuman', raising the stakes of political commitment to sublime heights. If
we are less interested today in how art might achieve such radical
disintegrations of the human, both Lyotard and Deleuze vividly return us to this
primal scene of overcoming. It is, as Rancire says, a matter of choice, perhaps
even a matter of aesthetics. Rancire, Lyotard and Deleuze have all been
beneficiaries at various times of the fashion mentality that drives the art world,
but this is not an excuse to take Rancire's suggestion lightly. We must not
succumb, as Lyotard has already remarked and it is as true in art as it is in
theory to the taste of the supermarket shopper. We must choose then, but we
must do so with a commitment that reflects that of our theorist of choice, for
this is the only way no matter who we choose that our choice might make a
difference.

24

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