Abstract

“Where did this unexpected mobility of epistemological arrangements come from…? What event, what law, do these mutations obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way…?” The recent wave of interest in the work of Jacques Rancière in North America can likely be traced back to the unique status he gives to the category of the aesthetic in its relation to the political. Coming after the exhaustion of debates surrounding the notion of “aesthetic ideology,”1 and expressing dissatisfaction with familiar arguments about the aestheticization of politics, Rancière’s oeuvre seems to offer the promise of a..