Art Between Affect and Indifference in Hegel, Adorno and Rancière

Abstract

What role can aesthetics as the philosophy of autonomous art assign to affect? Since Hegel, artistic autonomy has manifested itself as an indifferent form of appearance that “confronts us like a blessed god.” Is thinking art through affect thus necessarily the introduction of a heteronomy, a hidden economy that subverts the indifferent surface of autonomous appearance? The paper goes in the opposite direction by exploring the affectivity immanent to art’s very indifference. It discusses Hegel’s struggle to distinguish the divine indifference of the ideal artwork from the ironic indifference that indicates the end of art, Adorno’s observation that art is obliged to express suffering but can only do so in a medium that is essentially indifferent to it, and Rancière’s reaffirmation of indifference as the specifically aesthetic power to affect by displacing the coordinates of sensible experience. Hegel and Adorno both affirmed the indifference of art, but also attempted to ground it in some kind of substantiality. For Rancière, on the other hand, indifference is the only substantiality art can have.