ABSTRACT
The political domain purports to be that of the rational organization of collective life by governing laws, whereas the sensible has a physical and affective character that is resolutely subjective. The political tends to orient the sensible, to control it, submit it to the point of eradicating sensibility, though it may also ignore it. The refusal to consider a portion of the population as political individuals is ordered by the hierarchizing distinction of the sensible and the intelligible, of emotion and reason, and more radically still of sound and speech, and a fortiori writing. Critiquing the way the sensible has been commandeered by political power, the latter controlling, training, disciplining, correcting, orienting but also hierarchizing the former, was one of the major themes of philosophical but also cinematographic and more broadly artistic reflection in the 1960s.
