Aesthetic Revolution: Schlegel, Malraux, and Rancière with Schiller

Abstract

In his recent works Jacques Rancière has frequently discussed the notion of the “aesthetic revolution,” which was in his view indirectly announced by Friedrich Schiller in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). It purportedly signified the advent of new art or, rather, its new “aesthetic regime” with which Rancière wished to replace in his view the incorrect but solidly established notions of modernism and postmodernism. The article points out some of the interpretations of the “aesthetic revolution” as it can be found in Friedrich Schlegel and in André Malraux and which contain some similarities with Rancière’s designation. The author at the same time points out the significance of the “aesthetic revolution” in plural, with the aid of which we can in his opinion productively explain the plurality of such revolutions in the previous century which exist in the intermediate space between art and politics and between artistic autonomy and heteronomy.