ABSTRACT
The putatively natural inequalities of social hierarchy are sustained by an equality of intelligence that sanctions their construction and challenges it intermittently. The problem of grace as presentness is strictly analogous to the Kantian problem of freedom. The consequence of this constellation of influence and interpretation is an ongoing absorption of Fried's work into a kind of dialectical pragmatics that is part-Hegelian, part-Wittgensteinian, and uniquely Friedian. The rejection of modernism in such terms is more explicit in the concluding scene of Aisthesis, devoted to James Agee and Walker Evans's 1945 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. A student of Louis Althusser's in the 1960s, Ranciere came into his own in the 1970s in a rejection of his mentor's claims to epistemic privilege in the pursuit of Marxist science. The political function of art requires this discrepancy, the one borne from the fortuitousness of a double encounter between different knowledges, between artist and subject and artist and spectator.
