The Aesthetic Regime of Politics

MARTIN PLOT

Azimuth. Philosophical Coordinates between Modern and Contemporary Age

Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura

Lugar: Roma; Año: 2013 vol. 1 p. 137 - 149

2282-4863

French philosopher Claude Lefort offered an interpretation, at once historical and philosophical, of the three forms of society he analyzed, all of them chronologically ? but fundamentally genealogically ? articulated out of Christological, European premodernity. In this paper I show why the Lefortian regimes should be seen along the lines of the Rancièrian aesthetic regimes, that is, as sets of visibilities and invisibilities, of different generative principles superimposed and competing with each other at any given historical time. The Lefortian gesture ? similarly to the Foucaultian one ? turns the appearance of new dispositifs and discursive formations into the institution of some sort of episteme; into a symbolic rupture, as Lefort would put it; into the inauguration of a form of society that would render obsolete the previously dominant dispositifs and discursive formations. At the same time, his model implied that the newly instituted articulations and regularities would seem to occupy the totality of the thinkable and to a large extent completely determine the universe of the unthinkable; to absolutely affirm the realm of the possible and to successfully monopolize the delineation of the impossible. The gesture is (for Lefort) strangely un-phenomenological and structural, and, thus, relatively unable to capture the dynamic of sedimentation and reactivation that keeps the past in the present and associates the future with the pregnancy of the past. In effect, the Lefortian gesture identifies with precision the appearance of new practices and vocabularies, new institutions and regularities; it captures, we can say, the emergence of a new social and political grammar. Sadly, what the gesture also does is engage in a sort of voluntary ignorance of the survival of vocabularies and practices previously instituted, of grammars that remain in tension with, and lying in wait for, the one that has recently emerged.