Letteratura e politica in Jacques Rancière

This dissertation attempts to outline the characteristics of Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics. The first chapter reconstructs the first part of Rancière’s intellectual journey from his break with Louis Althusser, through the symbolic event of May 1968 and Rancière’s archival works. It is in fact the polemic with Althusser that marks some of the constants of Rancière’s thought, first and foremost his aversion to the claim of a privilege of knowledge occupied by those who hold knowledge. This results in a devaluation of the intellectual and the party mediation in political struggles and the exaltation of time devoted to leisure and of the aesthetic experience as a transformative experience. Following this direction, in the 1980s, the critique of Pierre Bourdieu is carried out in continuity with the critique of Althusser. The dissertation then focuses on Rancière’s work on articles and literary texts written by a group of workers during the July Monarchy. It is here that the role of writing in Rancière's thought is outlined: in La parole ouvrière and, particularly, in La nuit des prolétaires, Rancière shows how the workers’ writings represent a way out of socially imposed working-class identity. Here, moreover, Rancière elaborates an attempt at historical narrative based on the adherence to the object, a narrative which seeks to eliminate the superior position of exegetical discourse and the progressive linearity of events. In the second chapter, the dissertation focuses on the knot that binds aesthetics and politics, which Rancière conceives of in terms of separation and change. The term “politics” designates the practices of equality in inequality, that is, the practices that lead to the creation of new political subjects by modifying the existing status quo, which Rancière refers to as “police”. Politics represents the manifestation of a surplus, the emergence of a new political subject. The politics proper to aesthetics is not conceived from the engagement of artists and writers - Rancière rather fits into the strand of criticism of so-called engaged art - but would consist in operating variations within what he calls the “distribution of the sensible”, the shared sensible scene. Here I discuss the three “regimes of art” – the ethical, the representative and the aesthetic - that Rancière uses polemically against the concepts of Modernity and Avant-garde. Rancière argues against the idea of a one-way progressive history that, by solely highlighting decisions of rupture and anticipation in artistic productions, overshadows the heterogeneous temporalities of what, from Romanticism onward, we call art. The third chapter shows how the question of the politics of literature is articulated from the concept of fiction. Rancière’s perspective on literary history involves considerations of what and how is represented within literature, resonating with the work of Auerbach. Beginning with the collapse of normative poetics, Rancière shows how the anonymous life, the ordinary instant, emerges in literature. The analysis carried out in the dissertation brings out the problematic nature of this narrative of literature, which, focusing mainly on the tension between the representative regime and the aesthetic regime of art, presents modern literary change as a mere epiphenomenon.