Politics after Aesthetics: Disagreeing with Rancie reDavid FerrisMore than anyone else in the late twentieth century, Jacques Rancie re hasundertaken a redefinition of the relation of the aesthetic to politics. This redefinition occurs against the long history through which politics has turned to the aesthetic as either a support or an ideological antagonism, a history that has condemned the aesthetic to a representative role whether in the positive sense intended by Schiller in his Aesthetic Education or in the negative sense so crucial to how the aesthetic has social and political meaning in Adornos Aesthetic Theory.1Rather than reassert sucha role one more time, Rancie re undertakes a redefinition of the aesthetic that not only challenges the representational categories into which it has been placed butalso redefines the aesthetic in terms of political existence. This does not mean thatpolitics is conflated with the aesthetic, as if one could be simply identified as theother. Such identification disregards the specificity of the aesthetic and also thespecificity of politics. The question Rancie re confronts is then how to think their relation without recourse to the history that has overdetermined the relation of politics and aesthetics.In a remark from his Politics of Literature, Rancie re insists on a specific link between the aesthetic and politics: “politics of literature” means that literature“does” politics as literature that there is a specific link between politics as adefiniteway of doing and literature as a definite practice of writing.2There is no ambiguity here and certainly not the kind that allows for the easy substitution of politics and literature so present in contemporary critical discourse. Rancie re is clear: politics is adefinite way of doing and literature is a definite practice of writing. Although this remark distinguishes politics and writing as belonging to different spheres, Rancie rewill still speak of a specific link through which literature becomes known in terms of politics. Yet, ifthis link is to avoid rehearsing yet again the history that not only gives us politics and aesthetics but gives them to us within a way of thinking that remainssteadfastly representational, what other link can be specified? In short, how can politics and aesthetics still be thought without recourse to the authenticity implied by any mode of representation, whether positive or negative? Another way of posing this question is to ask whether the pairing of politics and aesthetics can be thoughtotherwise in an age when politics still continues to determine what is significant and what is not?parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online q 2009 Taylor the second is the process of equality initiated by those who have no visibility in the former distribution. Here, the assertion of equality should not be confused with politics; politics only occurs in the antagonism between this assertion and how the sensible has been distributed by the police. As a result, equality cannot be recognized as the object or issue of politics, nor can it, as a principle, be restricted to politics. All equality does is togive politics reality in the form of specific cases . what makes an action political is not its object or the place where it is carried out, butsolely its form, the form in which the confirmation of equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute, of a community existing solely through being divided.9The specificity of the act that defines Rancie res understanding of politics removes theory as well as any other general principle from a role in determining politics as the appearance of one meaning or another. Already here, the tendency to appeal to politics as a source of meaning for either the aesthetic or for the activity of criticism is unsustainable since such a tendency demands that there is something political in itself that can be referred to and used as a measure for judgment. If even the principle through which politics is expressed cannot belong to politics then what Rancie re has given as politics is also something that has built into the impossibility of agreement. In this case, Rancie res sense of politics can only be based on, as heFerris 40Downloaded By: University of Colorado, Boulder campus At: 23:41 22 October 2009admits, the recognition of presuppositions that ought to be discerned in the practicesthat put them to work.10Presuppositions, as enablingprinciples, are not in themselves political until they have been put to work. It is this notion of work that iscrucial to Rancie re and, here, work is another name for configuration. From thiswork, there arises the sense of politics as a definite way of doing referred to in the passage from Politics and Literature cited at the beginning of this article. When thespecificity of this way of doing takes place in an act of speakingor makingvisible that is carried out by those who have been given n