Foreword

MARTIN PLOT

In/PARA/form

California Institute of the Arts

Lugar: Valencia; Año: 2014; p. 5 - 7

During the year we shared with the MA Aesthetics and Politics 2013-4 class that is the collective behind this volume, we had the opportunity to discuss several times the heterogeneous ways in which Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, and Jacques Rancière could be said to agree on a general understanding of the political as the egalitarian institution of spaces and times of appearance; spaces and times in which the visible and the invisible, the speakable and the unspeakable, get both disrupted and rearranged, changed and instituted. It is this shared understanding that made two of these authors (Arendt and Rancière) equally mistrust political philosophy, defining it as the "politics of the philosophers" (Rancière)?a "politics" that is not such, since what it rejects is precisely the "way of the polis" (Arendt), the anarchic isonomy (both) that springs from equality and disrupts the rule of those "naturally" used to command in non-egalitarian social relations. This unique, shared way of articulating politics and equality that characterizes Arendt and Rancière´s political thinking, is fundamentally associated to the plural character of the spaces and times of co-perception implied in their positions.