ABSTRACT
Jacques Ranciere’s more work has been on how and why politics is an aesthetic matter. This underlying thesis has led him to argue against any real rupture between modernism and postmodernism because what underlies both is the same “aesthetic regime of art” that defines, presents, and criticizes art according to the same statements and conditions of possibility. For Ranciere, politics is “a matter of appearance, a matter of constituting a common stage or acting out common scenes rather than governing common interests”. Ranciere’s work shows that the “distribution of the sensible” is not always the same historically, culturally, and politically. Within aesthetics, he has closely analyzed the ethical, representative, and aesthetic regimes of art. For Ranciere, a regime delimits the conditions of possibility for how representation functions during a particular historical period, that is, a particular “distribution of the sensible” defined by “the relationship between presence and absence, the material and the intelligible, exhibition and signification”.
