Aesthetics and Politics in the Composition of Dissensus in Polemical Scenes from the Thought of Jacques Rancière

Abstract

This article undertakes a reading of some of Rancière’s works, highlighting his method of producing a polemical scene and the way in which fictional invention plays an important role in his critical experimentation. In the scene, images, documents, narratives, existences, and objects are articulated and juxtaposed not in order to be explained, codified or represented, but to give rise to arrangements that allow for other forms of political appearance. Such appearance is not reduced to visibility but implies a rupture with the predictability of consensual rationality, creating a dissident narrative. Appearing is another way of thinking and performing a distribution and organization of bodies and capacities, questioning the already marked and distributed positions. The article highlights how the polemic scene performs a dismantling of predictable explanations, displacing consensus and offering an anti-hierarchical imaginary in which multiple times, spaces and existences coexist.