Rancière’s Aesthetic Revolution and Its Modernist Residues

Abstract

According to Jacques Rancière, the modernist narrative – with its veneration of radical breaks, experimentation and immediacy – misconstrues the meaning of the aesthetic revolution introduced by Kant (and already foreshadowed in the pioneering work of Giambattista Vico), subsequently developed by Schiller and successfully put to practice by – among others – the great French novelists Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola. Rancière’s vocal anti-modernism ought not to blind us to certain modernist traits hidden in his own aesthetics, which are at odds with its general outlook and thus lead to potential incongruities. I argue that Rancière’s wholesale rejection of experimentation and of the urge to break conventions that play any role in the “aesthetic regime of art” is implicitly at odds with his conception of the “distribution/partition of the sensible” that aesthetic art instantiates.