Opening Intervals: A Confrontation between Rancière and Deleuze on the Politics of Art

Abstract

All of the texts Rancière devotes to Deleuze concentrate on the latter’s conception of art in order to develop a different way of reading works and a different idea of the relationship between art and politics. In this article I propose to analyse the gap between Rancière and Deleuze by way of three examples, three sites of divergence in their approaches: their respective readings of Proust, Melville’s Bartleby, and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. In my analysis I will emphasise the notion of interval and use it to frame their divergent conceptions of art and its political function.