[Reader-list] From Aesthetics to Poltics: Ranciere, Kant and Deleuze by Katharine Wolfe

[Inder Salim]

>From Aesthetics to Politics: Ranci�re, Kant and Deleuze
  by Katharine Wolfe


aesthetics, politics, sense, Ranci�re, Kant, Deleuze

1. Introduction

Jacques Ranci�re's Dis-agreement, as Ranci�re writes in his subsequent
work, The Politics of Aesthetics, explores "the distribution of the
sensible at stake in any politics".[1] How is this phrase 'the
distribution of the sensible' to be understood and why does the
distribution of the sensible bear such a relation to politics?
Dis-agreement tells us that politics first becomes a possibility with
the institution of a community, where a community itself begins with
something in common. This commonality is no shared stock of goods or
shared claim to a territory. Rather, it is a shared partition of the
sensible: community pivots around common modalities of sense. In other
words, the commonality upon which a community is founded is sense, and
politics first becomes a possibility with the institution of common
sense. Hand in hand with the disclosure of shared modalities of
sensing, moreover, comes the delimitation of each modality. The
partition of the sensible thus renders some sounds intelligible
(logos) and others unintelligible (pathos), some capacities visible
and other invisible, and more. Moreover, social positions are
portioned out according to these delimitations, and the partitioning
of the sensible upon which the community is founded ultimately
determines which people are recognizable as part of a shared world and
which are sanctioned in partaking of it. Yet the moment politics
becomes possible is distinct from the moment politics erupts --
politics is a much rarer thing than common sense or the institution of
a community. For Ranci�re, politics is that rare event that occurs
when the confluence between sanctioned dispositions to partake of the
shared world and positions within the partition of the sensible is
ruptured. Politics not only interrupts common sense but also erupts
into the shared sensible world.

As the title suggests, The Politics of Aesthetics argues that the
distribution of the sensible is an aesthetic enterprise, and what is
at stake in any politics is aesthetics. Drawing this correlation
between aesthetics and the distribution of the sensible and,
ultimately, between aesthetics and politics requires a precise
understanding of the term. Aesthetics is not any set of artistic
practices nor is it the general theory that concerns these practices.
Indeed, aesthetics for Ranci�re is not even a theory of sense
experience at large. Rather, if the correlation between politics and
aesthetics is to be exposed, Ranci�re insists aesthetics must be
understood in the terms of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Aesthetics
is "the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to
sense experience."[2] Moreover, Ranci�re claims the relation
aesthetics bears to politics is analogous to the relation Kant's a
priori forms bear to sense experience. Just as these a priori forms
determine the organization of human experience and provide its
conditions, aesthetics comes in various structural systems that serve
both to condition the shared world of our daily experience and to
partition that world and delimit the positions one might occupy within
it. Politics is not reducible to this partitioning of the sensible on
the condition of aesthetic systems, yet it is conditioned by
aesthetics, just as sense experience is conditioned by the a priori,
according to the Critique of Pure Reason, insofar as it requires the
partitions of the sensible as its space of disruption.

In The Politics of Aesthetics, Ranci�re moves quickly on to undertake
a Foucaultian historiography of distinct artistic practices and
systems, illuminating the subject positions they make possible as well
as the political systems with which they are synonymous. Here,
however, I pause to reflect on the significance of Ranci�re's Kantian
interlude. Returning to the insights of Dis-agreement, with Ranci�re's
subsequent insights into the correlation between aesthetics and
politics at hand, I hope to illuminate why and in what manner politics
requires the disruption of aesthetics, understood, in the terms of
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, as the structural system organizing
human sense experience. In addition, I follow up Ranci�re's further
claim that politics likewise requires the inauguration of a distinct
aesthetics that will not replace the partitions of the sensible that
give us a shared sensible world but will erupt from within them. This
distinct aesthetics, I assert, also has its elucidation in Kant's
critical philosophy. However, I shall press that it is Kant's last
critical project, the Critique of Judgment and not the earlier
Critique of Pure Reason, that offers such an aesthetics.

Ranci�re misses this moment in Kant, as he derives his conception of
Kantian aesthetics primarily from the Critique of Pure Reason, a text
concerned first and foremost with the conditions of possibility for
the world as we know it, where it is the later Critique of Judgment
that explores sense beyond the limits of our understanding. The later
might be called real sense, in contrast to the merely conceptually
possible sense of the Critique of Pure Reason. A turn to the Critique
of Judgment and its alternative elucidation of sense aids Ranci�re's
'Politics of Aesthetics' by providing this concept with a
philosophical backbone and support for which his Foucaultian
historiography at times is wanting. The Critique of Judgment
distinguishes between two kinds of aesthetic experiences, experiences
of the beautiful and of the sublime. While both offer insights into
sense beyond the limits of the understanding and its correlated
concepts, I want to argue that Kant's encounter with the sublime is
much richer in its attunement to the interruption of the partitions of
the sensible, or, in Kant's terms, the a priori structures of human
experience, by a distinct aesthetics. Indeed, I shall use Kant's
articulations of the aesthetic experience of the sublime as a foil for
further elucidation of Ranci�re's notion of the partitioning of the
sensible.[3]

In addition to aspiring to better substantiate philosophically the
correlation Ranci�re makes between politics and aesthetics, this turn
to Kant's Critique of Judgment is also polemical. Ranci�re, in his
article "Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula," writes that the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze erects an impasse for politics.[4]
Deleuze places 'imperceptibility' at the heart of a project to give
birth to a new kind of community, a new kind of relationality between
beings in the world. If politics occurs in a forced eruption into the
sensible of that which aesthetic systems, conceived on the model of
the a priori, render insensible through a partaking in and of common
sense, how could imperceptibility be political? Is not the Deleuzian
turn towards imperceptibility a move altogether away from any
partaking in a shared, sensory world? Here, I want to argue that it is
vital to identify Deleuze's notion of the imperceptible, like
Ranci�re's politics, as situated in an engagement with Kantian
aesthetics. The 'imperceptible' is only so from a particular
perspective, that of the Kantian object-form, the condition of
perception in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and the sensus communis
in which it is key. This form is disrupted however, as Deleuze tells
us, by the force of the real itself. The imperceptible is a part of
this force and party to this disruption, functioning aesthetically as
the 'percipiendum', that which must be perceived but cannot be
perceived according to the delimitation of sense experience in the
sensus communis. Indeed, it may be what Deleuze does with Kant's
Critique of Judgment more than Kant's work itself that provides the
philosophical backbone for Ranci�re's 'Politics of Aesthetics' and,
through attention to Deleuze's own Kantian interlude, a political
voice can be discerned in his philosophy in spite of Ranci�re's
reservations. This is the key polemical assertion of this essay.
However, one aspiration of this essay is to inspire further inquiries
into the resonances between the work of Deleuze and Ranci�re despite
Ranci�re's own reservations. Thus I add in passing that insofar as
Deleuze remains first and foremost a philosopher, it may be only
through Ranci�re's own Kantian interlude, revealing the political
implications of aesthetics systems modeled like the Kantian a priori
to which Deleuze, drawing on Kant's later Critique of Judgment, offers
an alternative, that the possibility for a passage to politics from
Deleuze is opened. Rather than illuminating the impasse Deleuze sends
politics hurtling into, Ranci�re may instead point Deleuze's
philosophy towards a political passage.

2. The Perceptible and the Beautiful

In Dis-agreement, Ranci�re employs Aristotle's political philosophy to
illuminate the pivotal role partitions of the sensible play in the
institution of community. Although Ranci�re's primary engagement with
the notion of an aesthetics of politics comes in his The Politics of
Aesthetics, engagement with this notion in Dis-agreement sets the
stage. Here, I employ Kant's articulation of the aesthetic experience
of the beautiful in the Critique of Judgment in order to corroborate
Ranci�re's later claim that any partitioning of the sensible is always
conditioned by a certain aesthetic system. Aristotle's political
community, I want to argue, is instituted according to the rules and
principles of the aesthetic experience of the beautiful, itself
conceived by Kant at least in the early stages of the Critique of
Judgment's development according to the a priori rules and principles
of human understanding.

For Aristotle, the institution of a political community requires first
the existence of a being whose nature is political: the human being.
It is logos � the capacity to reason and to express claims about
justice and injustice through speech � that marks the human as such an
animal by nature. Logos is for Aristotle set apart from pathos � the
capacity to express pain and pleasure. It is here, at the foundation
of the Aristotelian political community, that Ranci�re finds lodged a
partition of the sensible, a distinction "between two modes of access
to sense experience:" logos, rendering sensible a world of justice and
injustice, and pathos, restricting the sensible to the domain of pain
and pleasure.[5] Capacities in not only sensing but expressing what is
sensed are the hinge upon which the institution of a political
community pivots, simultaneous with a delimitation of who will and
will not partake of that community.

Furthermore, it is insofar as logos is a modality of sense revealing a
world of justice and injustice that logos is requisite for entry into
a political community, and thus, Ranci�re pushes, it is precisely the
appearance of such relations that marks this community as political.
What, then, are relations of justice and injustice and how do they
configure the sensible? Aristotle, like Plato, opposes any notion of
justice that would reduce it to a question of profits and losses
weighed against one another, such that what is just is only so from
the perspective of a single profiting party, and what is unjust is in
turn only so from the perspective of a correlative party harmed. This
logic might be called mercantile, whereas the logic of justice, in
contrast, pivots around relations of domination and dominance, ordered
in accordance with each person's nature. One is positioned within the
community so as to give to it that which is properly theirs to give
and, in portion, take from it that which is properly theirs to take.
In relations of justice there is no 'harm' correlated with profit the
inferior party, for example the son, benefits from being ruled over by
his father, the older and wiser of the pair. Thus, coextensive with
the modality of sense experience characteristic of logos is the
sensible emergence of a world composed of proper parts (those with a
capacity for logos, rather than simply pathos) as well as, between
these parts, proper relations (those which accord with the nature of
the parts correlated). When a proper part takes a proper place � a
place proportional to what that part brings to the community, a
relation of justice holds; when either improper parts or improper
relations appear on a shared horizon, injustice.

Ranci�re, however, will question to what extent improper parts and
improper relations can register sensibly at all. Those who can be
taken account of in the political community are always already those
who can be counted, those who make up some recognizable part. It is
not clear that those, to whom is attributed the capacity for pathos
alone, for example, can be 'heard.' This is not to say that their
voices simply do not register audibly but that they register only in
an unrecognizable modality. Their words register much like a buzzing
or humming in the air of which no intelligible sense can be made. The
same will be true of any claim that does not fall in its proper place.
For example, Ranci�re writes that historically the partition of the
sensible was such that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
characteristics of a working day were perceived to have nothing to do
with one another, and it was worker's strikes that forced the
community to perceive the relationship between the two differently.[6]

It is thus that the task of politics becomes one of producing and
forcing into everyday experience a distinct organization of the
sensible, conditioned by a distinct aesthetics. This task demands
reconfiguring the limits of each of our senses, and their relations to
one another. Offering another historical example to support his
claims, Ranci�re writes that the plebeians of Aventine realized this
necessity. In order that their speech, registering as mere background
noise in the current sensory order, would be heard, they spoke in an
overall sensory context mimicking that of their patricians. Just like
their patricians, "they pronounce imprecations and apotheoses; they
delegate one of their number to go and consult their oracles, and they
give themselves representatives by rebaptizing them."[7]

With Ranci�re's rendering of Aristotle's conception of justice as a
partitioning of the sensible, I argue, resonates a Kantian refrain.
Kant's critical philosophy marks out two distinct domains: the
transcendental realm of a priori forms and the empirical realm of
sensible matter (the phenomena). Despite a strict delineation of the
two, Kant critical philosophy works to articulate the process by which
the a priori structures of human subjectivity are mapped onto the
sensible, phenomenal domain. Indeed, it is in this project that Kant's
philosophical project finds much of its normative thrust. The shared
sensory world is configured ethically for Kant only when it takes a
shape expressive of the higher nature of the human being granted to
that being by the transcendental form of human subjectivity.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, as Daniel W. Smith explains, the form
given to the phenomenal through reflection of the transcendental is
what Kant calls the "object = x."[8] This is an empty form that only
receives qualitative specifications when related to a multiplicity of
phenomenal qualia held together through mental operations. White,
thin, and sheet-like bark, dark-black knots, and a thin trunk, for
example, are synthesized together mentally to form the object known as
a birch tree. Moreover, Kant claims it is such a synthesis that allows
the various qualitative impressions had of the birch tree, the sun,
one's own hand, and more to be shared between the various faculties.
It is because of this synthesis that the same qualia present
themselves when, for example, I imagine a birch tree as when I
conceptualize one. Pushing Kant's claim further, it might be posited
that this synthesis is also what allows each of our various senses to
present the same object to us such that when I put my hand to the
white sheet-like bark of the tree, the feel of the bark indicates it
is a birch tree I am touching, just as the visual appearance of its
knots and leaves likewise indicates.

However, the object-form is not itself a transcendental form but
rather an analogue of such a form. What of the transcendental human
subject has the capacity to produce an analogue of itself that
conditions a shared sensory world? The cogito. The cogito for Kant is
a unity prior conditionally to all empirical experience. It is the "I
think" which gives to the human being a subjecthood by which it can
then reach out to the world and make it one's own. Nonetheless, the
cogito is neither individual nor personal. Rather, it is the universal
form of reason in general. Thus, as an analogue of the cogito, the
object-form renders a shared, sensory world not only for one's own
senses and faculties but also for one person and another.

It is in Kant's Critique of Judgmentand not the Critique of Pure
Reason that the question of the communication between the empirical
and the transcendental comes to the fore. By way of analogy, Kant here
further explores the relation between two mental faculties or a priori
formative powers of subjectivity distinguished in the Critique of Pure
Reason: the faculty of cognition, with understanding as its primary
modality, and the faculty of feeling pleasure and pain, with
imagination as its operative expression. Imagination is the mode by
which the subject reaches out to the sensible. In the Critique of Pure
Reason Kant insists that the sensible can only be received in a form
conditioned by the structure of the human understanding. Nonetheless,
in the Critique of Judgment he is struck by the sensible's capacity to
manifest structural organization beyond that which the understanding
can conceptualize in terms of the object form. All structural
organization manifested in the sensible which is beyond the
possibility of understanding is organization manifest in a particular,
empirical phenomenon. The understanding finds structure only in
subsuming the particular under a general concept, never in the
particular itself. Yet the sensible can manifest a regularity without
recognizable specificities; a regularity that can't be referred back
to any concepts the understanding already has. Conceptual matches are
made only on the basis of specific regularities which a concept can be
recognized to repeat itself in. The concept of a straight line, for
example, is matched with any empirical instantiation of the shortest
path between two points. Thus, the regularity cannot be referred back
to concepts and thus to the activity of understanding as its a priori
ground.

The aesthetic experience of the beautiful is one example of the
manifestation of such regularity in the particular. It is, Kant tells
us, a single rose that one finds beautiful, not roses in general, due
to a certain harmony or proportionality that appears to us in it.[9]
Kant here puts an onus on appearance. It is not clear that the
regularity is there in the sensible itself but only that it is there
in the sensible for us. Beyond the limits of the understanding, then,
any apparent reference of empirical phenomena to an a priori ground
both preceding and making it possible is not clearly a necessary fact
but only a subjective need. We cannot presuppose "that every thinking
and cognizing being is subject to the same need as a necessary
condition, and hence that this condition attaches to the object rather
than merely to our selves as subjects."[10] Nonetheless, we can
suppose every human being shares this need, and the aesthetic
comprehension of the beautiful is thus posed to play a key role in the
ethical configuration of the shared world of human experience.

There are two parallels with Aristotle to be drawn from this. First,
it is from this transcendental form, unique to human beings as
creatures of consciousness and reason, that a shared sensory world is
produced, with each of the senses as well as each of the faculties
taking a proper place in this production. This sounds much like
Aristotle's account of the coming to be of the community as rendered
by Ranci�re, a coming to be of a common sensory world. The
similarities suggest that Kant's account of the ethical configuration
of human experience, begun in the Critique of Pure Reason and carried
over into the Critique of Judgment's account of the aesthetic
expression of beauty, can likewise be characterized in Ranci�re's
terms as the very 'distribution of the sensible' at stake for
politics. Kant's positioning and partitioning of the senses and the
faculties will ultimately translate ethically into the positioning and
partitioning of various beings (some of them barely registering on
this continuum of humanity at all) and result, as Ranci�re reminds us,
in such events as the Scythian's "customarily put[ting] out the eyes
of those they reduced to slavery, the better to restrict them to their
tasks as slaves, which was to milk the livestock."[11]

Second, just as Aristotle pushes away from a mercantile logic that
renders justice a question of point of view, the universality of the
cogito as a transcendental form pushes away from an overly empirical
perspective to render within the sensible its higher, ethical
expression. However, it might be thought that to move away from the
empirical with Kant is to move away from the very logic of natural
parts and their proper relations that Aristotle posits as an
alternative. Yet although Ranci�re does indeed emphasize the empirical
nature of Aristotle's rendition of politics, he places, in addition,
an onus on proportionality. What one takes � a place in the community
� is always proportional to that which one brings to it, that is,
certain capacities to make, say, see and do that supposedly belong to
us by nature. Proportionality is the element in Aristotle's rendition
of the political community that gives it harmony, making it not simply
an expression of natural life, as are other associations such as the
family and the village, but rather an almost divine expression of good
life. In other words, proportionality is key in establishing
perfection, in the form of man's proper end, within the empirical
itself.

The Critique of Pure Reason had a strong influence on Kant's later
account of aesthetic comprehension, and this influence figures
strongly in the ethical implications Kant's aesthetics share with
Aristotle's teleological conception of political community. Yet the
Critique of Judgment poses a question not asked in the Critique of
Pure Reason: On what basis is it determined what of the multitudinous
empirical world, full of sensory shocks and vague and diffuse matter,
will count as a part of an object-form? That is, what of the sensible,
empirical world around us will register as perceptible? The Critique
of Pure Reason does insist that what counts is simply that which can
be synthesized, yet just what can be synthesized and how? Kant's
answer, says Smith, is that synthesis occurs by way of a certain
notion of measure.[12] The faculty of understanding operates through
concepts and thus has the capacity to develop conceptual units of
measurement such as a meter or a foot. The faculty of imagination,
however, does not have concepts at its disposal. Thus, there must be a
sensible measure by which to synthesis parts. One might, for example,
"evaluate a tree in relation to the human body" or "evaluate the moon
rising in terms of a coin held at close range."[13]

As Smith notes, there is here a moment of phenomenology in Kant that
opens aesthetic comprehension to a kind of dialogue between the
empirical and the transcendental, rather than simply a communion in
one direction alone. One's choice of a unit of measurement reflects
the object to be measured, just as this unit of measure influences the
account of the object taken. The notion of a sensible unit of measure,
then, offers a distinct notion of proportionality the relation between
the shared, sensory world and one's natural qualities is not entirely
prefigured by one end of the equation. Rather, a bi-directional
exchange occurs. It is this phenomenological moment of attunement to
sensible measure and bi-directional exchange that leads Kant to an
aesthetic encounter with the sublime, and, I claim, installs in the
Critique of Judgment insights into an aesthetics which would erupt in
the form of what Ranci�re calls politics, in contrast to the
aesthetics which such an alternative must disrupt.

3. The Percipiendum and the Sublime

Ranci�re speaks of a people who have no proper place in Aristotle's
political community. As such, there is no part regarded as theirs by
nature to give to or take from a shared world. Politics is the rare
event that occurs when these people nonetheless forcibly partake
(part-take) in that community. Ranci�re designates them by the name
they were given in Ancient Rome � the proletariat, the class of people
regarded as contributing only offspring to the community.[14] The
proletariat is thus a group of people rendered without logos. Here,
Ranci�re follows a line of logic that derives from Aristotle's account
of the slave. This account begins with an acknowledgement that slaves,
just like their masters, exercise moral virtue and understanding;
indeed, they do so just insofar as they obey their masters. Thus, if
slavery is to be upheld as a natural order, there must be something
other than moral virtue and understanding that gives to a master his
natural claim to rule. It is on the basis of this acknowledgement,
then, that Aristotle asks, "How could it be proper for the one to rule
and the other to be ruled unconditionally?"[15] That is, how could
slavery be proper to the political community? It is proper, according
to Aristotle, insofar as a slave is different in kind from his master.
The master has a soul with a deliberative capacity, and this gives him
the natural right of rule. The slave has no such capacity, and
although he can understand the reason of his master (allowing him to
obey his master's orders), has no capacity to reason himself. Thus,
following Aristotle, it is only insofar as the slave obeys his master
that he partakes of logos, and in turn takes a proper place in the
political community a place of subservience.

For Ranci�re, the proletariat are slaves who have ceased to be
subservient. The proletariat, just like the slaves of Athens, are
rendered without any reason of their own, and "doomed to the anonymity
of work and reproduction."[16] However, the proletariat make a claim
to freedom. In this, they step wholly outside of the political
community's partitioning of the sensible insofar as they denounce
subservience. Yet at the same time they lay claim to that which
belongs only to those with a part in the political community. The
proletariat's claim to freedom, then, is a political event. It should
be noted that Aristotle, too, contemplated the relation of such people
to the political community. Ranci�re's proletariat is Aristotle's
'ordinary men,' those people whom are neither wealthy oligarchs nor
noble aristocracy. Against Plato, Aristotle argues that the place of
these people in the political community is ensured precisely insofar
as these people do have freedom, and thus where the oligarchs
contribute wealth to the community and the nobles virtue, ordinary men
contribute freedom. Ranci�re's interest, then, is in showing that
Aristotle's ordinary men just are the slaves whose capacity for
equality he previously denied. Ranci�re presses two questions: What
precisely is it that freedom brings to the community? And what makes
freedom proper to the people? Beginning with the latter question,
Ranci�re insists that there is nothing 'proper' about freedom at all;
it is a historical contingency. Freedom is nothing other than the
disobedience of the slaves and/or the abolition of slavery. Moreover,
freedom is not the only property that is historically contingent. In
slavery's illumination as a historical rather than natural condition,
so, too, is illuminated the contingency of the aristocracy. The
aristocracy is no more virtuous by nature and thus destined to rule
over others than the oligarchs are naturally wealthy. The system of
natural propriety upon which Aristotle orders the political community
is thus thoroughly disrupted by the proletarian claim to freedom.

Yet despite its impropriety, Ranci�re insists that freedom still
contributes to the institution of a political community and a shared
sensible world. A claim to freedom is not the same as either a claim
to wealth or nobility. The later assert particular qualities as proper
to s/he who lays the claim, and thus identify something contributed to
the community which in turn validates a proportional partaking in
accordance with the principles of Aristotelian justice. A claim to
freedom, alternatively, is a partaking immediately, without any
justification by way of a proportional, contributing quality. For the
proletariat to partake of freedom is for the proletariat to claim it
is, by nature, just like both the nobles and the oligarchs, despite
historical conditions that leave them with nothing to give. Aristotle
attempts to correct the teeter-totter-like imbalance of a mercantile
logic in which one party profits only at another's expense by means of
a logic of justice in which one takes a part in society always in
proportion to one's own natural properties. The proletariat's claim to
freedom upsets this balance by insisting on the artifice of that upon
which it is grounded � a strict correlation between one's social
position and one's natural capacities.

I apply this conclusion to refute that of Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason. The structure of the sensible, empirical world has a way of
reverberating from its own conditions, that is, from those structures
of human subjectivity Kant speaks of as a priori. Although Kant's a
priori structures are intended to mark out universal structures of all
human experience, and to show that these structures are simply those
which are necessary in order to understand and draw together the
elements of sensory experience, Ranci�re's account of the historical
construction of the sensible hints that Kant's a priori structures are
already too historically embedded to be universal. On the other hand,
however, Ranci�re's attention to the eruption of voices, of sights, of
people, and more, unsanctioned by any historical partitioning of the
sensible � in other words, Ranci�re's insistence that politics can and
does happen � may not be unlike Kant's encounter with a distinct
aesthetics via the sublime in Critique of Judgment. Both Ranci�re's
account of politics and Kant's attention to the sublime in the
Critique of Judgment illuminate a power of sensible expression over
and above any sensus communis, yet they do so without disavowing
altogether a shared sensory world. Both illuminate a capacity for
sense and its eruption that holds regardless of historically
contingent and qualitatively determinable properties, such as a
recognizable capacity for logos as lodged within the very push towards
a shared, sensory world. In Ranci�re words, "It is through the
existence of this part of those who have no part, of this nothing that
is all, that the community exists as a political community � that is,
as divided by a fundamental dispute� to do with the counting of the
community's parts."[17]

Perception's requisite of a sensible unit of measure, encountered in
the aesthetic comprehension of the beautiful, sets up a path to the
sublime. This two-way relation between the mental faculty of
imagination and the sensible world opens sense experience to constant
variation as new units of measure emerge. Thus the constancy of a
shared sensory world is called into question. In a sensible world of
constant variation, what could be constantly the same not only
everywhere and for everyone but even for our own senses and faculties?
Here, the sublime comes crashing in. The sublime is a mode of
aesthetic comprehension occurring precisely when one experiences the
harmonious relation between one's various faculties and senses being
overturned. Indeed, an experience of the variation of a sensible
measure is only a minor form of such loss. It can happen not only that
sensible units of measure vary in accordance with the phenomena but,
moreover, that for a particular phenomenon there is no commensurable
measure. Further still, insofar as it is a sensible unit of measure
that is necessary for the synthesis of empirical parts in accordance
with an object-form, an experience of the sublime is one in which
there is no synthesis. The parts cannot be counted, and a form cannot
be produced.

Without an object-form, there can be no sensus communis; no shared
sensory ground that renders the object encountered the same for all of
the senses and all mental faculties. Here emerges a serious problem
for the Kantian system. While the cogito remains its own kind of
sensus communis, a form of reason universalizable across all human
life, it loses the analogue by which it would reach expression in the
ethical organization of sensory experience, putting each sense and
faculty in its proper place. In the sensible measure, then, Smith
writes that Kant discovers the foundation of the sensus communis at
the same time that he also discovers the fragility of this
foundation.[18] This discovery is well articulated using Ranci�re's
terminology: At the very foundation of common sense, there is a part
played by that which cannot be counted, and it is in an aesthetic
encounter with this part that politics occurs. Given that for Ranci�re
this part is played by living, breathing people, is it crucial to
highlight a correlation between formation and recognition embedded in
Kant's philosophy all along. For the transcendental form of the cogito
to express itself in the empirical world and give to this world its
higher expression through form requires that this world can be
rendered perceptible in accordance with that analogue of the cogito,
the object-form. That is, the formation of the sensible world is
always conditioned by recognition. Just as, on Ranci�re's account, in
order to take part in the common world, one's words must be recognized
by others as intelligible sounds rather than mere noise, so too for an
object to take form, it is necessary that one can imagine and conceive
as well as see and smell the same birth tree.

Drawing on this correlation in Kant, it becomes evident that in order
for the proletariat � the part of those who have no part � to not
simply disrupt the sensible world but to partake of it. There must be
a capacity for sense without recognition. Something in the Kantian
sublime speaks to this. At the moment when the faculty of imagination
is confronted with its fragility in the face of the world, the
faculties are forced to stretch beyond themselves. It is this higher
power that Kant speaks of as the Ideas, and where previously the
faculties operated in the name of the cogito, the "I think," they
hereby come to operate in the name of the cogitandum: that which ought
be thought.

If one is to follow Ranci�re's politics in a philosophical key and
pose the question not only of what politics is but of what being is so
that politics may come about, would one find that it is only the
movement in being from the cogito to the cogitandum that allows for
politics? First, it should be borne in mind that it is the faculty of
imagination, in its requirement for a sensible rather than a
conceptual measure that encounters the sublime. This allows Kant to
conceive of the cogitandum as a higher power of transcendental reason
that comes into full force in a moment when the faculties more closely
tethered to the sensible are revealed as too frail to communicate with
the transcendental. The sublime shows a faculty of the mind surpassing
every standard of sense insofar as it reveals that "all the might of
the imagination[is] still inadequate to reason's ideas."[19] In other
words, a measure equal to the world can always be conceived, although
not always imagined. Kant's philosophy remains in the end convinced
that there will always be an a priori form which makes the sensible
possible. Conceived along these Kantian lines, then, the cogitandum
does not open being to the possibility of politics but rather operates
to elide the political event.

Yet to invoke Smith's insights once more, to posit something that can
be thought but not imagined is to encounter a moment of discord
between the faculties.[20] This moment of discord would be a moment of
experience outside the dominion of common sense. Moreover � and this
is key � its discovery by way of a sensible measure entails that this
moment is sensible nonetheless. Uncovered here is a kind of
sensibility distinct from that which partitions the world so as to
render one sensible only within one's proper place, a sensibility
without recognition. To follow this insight further, I turn to
Deleuze. In Deleuze's rendition of this moment, the cogitandum appears
when the faculty of understanding, pushing imagination to always find
a measure, pushes imagination to its very limit and, at this limit,
the imagination pushes back, leading the understanding itself to
acquire a distinct power. Here, discord is understood as itself a kind
of communication and, moreover, is revealed to be lodged within an
orientation towards common sense.[21] Finally, whereas previously
common sense was the goal and the end of communion between the senses
and faculties, the end here is the generation of a higher form of each
of these. For Kant's movement from the cogito to the cogitandum,
Deleuze offers a like movement from the sensible to the sentiendum,
from the perceptible to the percipiendum, and more.

Here, I stress the last of these. The movement from the perceptible to
the percipiendum is a movement from that which is only perceptible on
the condition of the object-form, and its correlated sensus communis,
to that which, as Deleuze insists, must be perceived, i.e. to that
which "cannot but be perceived."[22] Note that Deleuze translates
Kant's ought to a must. In this, he gives to the percipiendum an
imperative force resonant with Ranci�re's politics. The percipiendum
is that which forcibly erupts; it cannot but be perceived, whatever
the community's will. This imperative power comes from a force of life
unrecognizable according to the partitions of the sensible, and what
is generated is a sense of that which is insensible and imperceptible
in the community. Contrary to Ranci�re's denunciation of Deleuze's
philosophy on the whole and his theory of 'imperceptibility' in
particular, I argue that is just what Deleuze has captured and
illustrated under this heading and that forces us to perceive
precisely that which is unrecognizable � the part of those who have no
part.[23] The import of this argument is not just to establish that
Ranci�re's criticisms miss the political potential in Deleuze's work,
but also give Ranci�re's 'Politics of Aesthetics' a philosophical
backbone that holds up against those critics who ask how the
imperceptible and the insensible can be or become perceptible and
sensible.

4. From the Imperceptible to Politics

If Deleuze's inversion of Kant offers to Ranci�re's politics, first,
its affirmation as a potential within being as such and, second, an
amplification of its claim to a crucial correlation between aesthetics
and politics, what is to be done with Ranci�re's critique of Deleuze?
Where Ranci�re's aesthetics of politics leads him ultimately to
Deleuze, Deleuze, according to Ranci�re, leads politics ultimately to
an impasse. There are several facets to Ranci�re's critique. However,
Deleuze's notion of the imperceptible and its situation at the
foundation of what Deleuze describes as a new kind of relationality, I
argue, is the key. Ranci�re, I submit, has missed the force of this
notion. The imperceptible is only so from the perspective of the
sensus communis, and this perspective, despite Kant's efforts, may in
the end be simply too empirical for politics or ethics. In other
words, it is from an all too empirical perspective that the eruptive
force of the imperceptible, a living force and perhaps the force of a
certain people, is missed in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and even
in certain stages of his Critique of Judgment. Deleuze offers the
notion of the 'imperceptible' or the percepiendum as a means to
illuminates Kant's empiricism, its costs, as well as an alternative.
Moreover, this Deleuzian move illuminates a distinct aesthetics that
may well be much like what Ranci�re conceives of as politics.

It is in "Deleuze, Bartleby, and the Literary Formula" that Ranci�re
concludes Deleuze's philosophy erects an impasse for politics. There
are two interlocking tenets to this conclusion. The first of these
derives from the value Deleuze assigns to the powers of being and the
possibilities they entail for living, expressed and exemplified
through the literary figure of Melville's 'Bartleby.' The second
derives from a certain metaphysics in which these possibilities are
inscribed, expressed in the image offered by Deleuze of the world as
"a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value
in itself but also in relation to others."[24] Both tenets converge in
drawing heavily on the Deleuzian notion of the imperceptible.

For Deleuze, as described in his "Bartleby; Or, the Formula," the
story of Bartleby is the story of the direct effects had upon the life
of the protagonist when he develops a peculiar habit. Bartleby is a
clerk in an attorney's office. The habit he develops is that of
responding, when asked by the attorney to perform a particular task,
"I would prefer not to." What are these effects and what in the nature
of this utterance produces them? Deleuze begins with the second
question, remarking on the indeterminacy of Bartleby's expression:
that it ends with "not to" leaves open the object of the renunciation.
Without an object specified, Deleuze stresses that it is not only that
which Bartleby does not prefer that remains indeterminate but, insofar
as the specificity of the one requires that of the other, that which
he prefers as well. With both Bartleby's preferences and
non-preferences indeterminate, the two themselves becomes almost
indistinguishable from one another. This effect is multiplied by the
indeterminacy of the statement not only with regard to its object but
also with regard to affirmation and negation. To prefer not to is to
neither refuse a particular task nor to accept it. In the end, then,
the effect of the formula is to produce a state of suspension, a state
in which it is indeterminate what will and will not be done. Bartleby
only expresses preference, thus never affirming concretely what he
will or will not do and, on top of this, never affirms concretely what
it is that he does and does not prefer, rendering what might be
expected of him still further indeterminate.

In a regime of the sensible partitioned such that one is to make, say,
see, and do in accordance with predetermined properties and
correlative proper places, such indeterminacy may have noteworthy
effects. Indeed, it is of import that Bartleby repeats this phrase in
his workplace and in response to the tasks demanded of him by his
employer. As Deleuze notes, to refuse his required task would
transport Bartleby from one social position to another, from employee
to derelict. Yet by first leaving indeterminate his preferences and,
second, insisting on nonetheless only preferring, he escapes social
positioning.

However, on Ranci�re's account of politics such an effect may be no
effect at all. An effect marks a change in the state of the world, and
Bartleby, through this formula, mightn't change a thing. Rather, he
may only cast his lot in with that of those cast, in the partitioning
off of the sensible, into an almost unbearable state, one in which
these people cease to register within the community. At its best,
however, such an effect interrupts the operations of these partitions,
much as, to find an analogy in the work of Kant, an aesthetic
encounter with the sublime interruptions the organization of the
faculties and senses. Here, Ranci�re's offers this summary: "The
formula erodes the attorney's reasonable organization of work and
life. It shatters not just the hierarchies of a world but also what
supports them: the connections between causes and effects we expect
from that world, between the behaviors and motives we attribute to
them and the means we have to modify them."[25]

Yet to interrupt the functioning of the regime of common sense is not
yet to render sensible a missing part, the part of those who cannot be
recognized in such partitions. If there is any hope for politics in
Bartleby's formula, this formula must not only have the potential to
disrupt the sensible order but must also have the potential to found a
distinct kind of sense. Ranci�re finds Deleuze hopeful regarding the
prospects of just such a founding. Indeed, as Ranci�re will emphasize,
Deleuze posits Bartleby's formula as precisely the seed from which
Melville's story develops. In so doing, he instantiates a commitment
to the view that from this formula, a formula disrupting the
partitions of the sensible and rendering Bartleby unlocatable within
them, a new expression of the sensible � a new literature -- can
indeed emerge.

Such a view requires philosophical interrogation, as Deleuze is well
aware. Looking to explain how a sensible expression, and, indeed, an
aesthetic object such as a story can be generated from a formula that,
if only in its first effect, disrupts the sensible, Deleuze turns to
the radical empiricism of William James. It is in this engagement with
James that Deleuze offers the image of the world by which Ranci�re is
so intrigued, the world as "a wall of loose, uncemented stones."[26]
However, where Deleuze finds in this image of radical empiricism the
support for a new kind of literature and a new form of relationality,
Ranci�re finds a metaphysics that is the impasse into which Deleuze
sends any hope of politics hurtling.

Ranci�re's The Politics of Aesthetics highlights the long-standing
accounts of aesthetic production, such as Aristotle's, that have taken
the properties of various subjects, predetermined by nature, to be the
causal and formative force from which any narrative, that is, any
ordering of the sensible, can unfold. This incites a political
question: By what power might a narrative unfold in the absence of a
subject with determinate capacities? In the history of literary
theory, this question has been answered is several ways, yet all are,
for Ranci�re, versions of one and the same contention: There is a
causal power within matter itself and thus no heteronymous power, such
as that of predetermined subjects' forms, is necessary to generate
works of art. Introduced here is a kind of individuation distinct from
that offered by either by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or by
Aristotle. Whereas for both of these philosophers, a faculty of the
soul and an a priori power of the subject, respectively, give to
matter its sensible form, here, individuations are immanent within
matter itself. Ranci�re draws on Flaubert's Saint Anthony to exemplify
these new individuations. An individuation can now be "a drop of
water, a shell, a strand of hair." Moreover, these individuations are
immediately felt. Their impact is to render us "stopped short, eyes
fixed� heart open."[27]

Yet this conception of matter, for Ranci�re, leading to the
inauguration of a distinct metaphysics as well as a distinct aesthetic
regime, does not facilitate any politics. Indeed, Ranci�re's
employment of Flaubert bears Deleuze in mind. Deleuze, in A Thousand
Plateaus, speaks of like individuations as 'imperceptible.' These
individuations are of matter in its own genetic self-expression, and
hold the key to a kind of relationality William James' speaks of as a
radical empiricism. Sticking closely to the frame of aesthetic theory,
Ranci�re will address this as an answer to a persisting problem. While
such individuations, as Flaubert characterizes them, may be felt and
are thus in some form sensible, it remains unclear what such
individuations could contribute to the production of a work of art.
Ranci�re asks what "can string a necklace from those 'pearls' that
Saint Anthony supplied loose?" such that a new kind of literature,
inseparable from a new kind of community, might come about.[28] Here,
many versions of aesthetics will, in the end, remain Aristotelian. A
harmony vested in natural properties of the soul will be subtly
reinstated in order to hold the pieces together or, in other words, to
create a political community.

Deleuze's efforts by way of the notion of radical empiricism, then,
are rare and, moreover, bear political community in mind, as Ranci�re
is quick to acknowledge. In the potential to string the pearls
together without recourse to Aristotelian proportionality lies "the
promise of a people to come," as Ranci�re writes.[29] Bartleby's
formula sets the stage for this by upsetting a metaphysics
partitioning the sensible through an external and static law of
natural properties and proper relations and, moreover, positing in its
place the immanent power of the sensible to express itself. Bartleby's
formula just is a series of imperceptible individuations. In this,
Ranci�re sees all bodies rendered equal, the site of the same genetic
power. This is a rendering in which the proletariat, understood via
the sensus communis, or the distribution of the sensible, as the part
that has no part, are granted something in common with others.

However, this equality in and of itself is not sufficient for the
entry into the community of a people that is missing in its current
form. Here, Ranci�re insists that it is crucial to not simply
substitute one metaphysics for another � a metaphysics that finds in
matter its own genetic force for a metaphysics of static and
predetermined forms that render sensible passive matter � but to bring
these two worlds together. Indeed, in focusing on the character of
Bartleby in his engagement with Melville's story, Ranci�re again notes
that such a concern seems evident in Deleuze. Bartleby is the site at
which the genetic power of matter in itself can enter into combat with
a world that is structured in elision of such power. Bartleby, writes
Ranci�re, is the figure who "make[s] the power of 'the other world'
effective as the power that destroys this world."[30]

According to Deleuze, it is from these ashes that arises the new kind
of relationality indicative of James' radical empiricism. Whereas a
traditional empiricism understands the empirical as the domain of
discrete parts, at the heart of James' philosophy is the contention
that relations are not derivations of a mental operation upon the raw
data of sense experience, as Kant asserts by way of his account of
syntheses. Rather, relations are themselves immediately sensed.
Indeed, they are only sensed. Brian Massumi captures this insight in
James: "relationality� registers materially in the activity of the
body before it registers consciously" and thus "we do not run because
we are afraid, but we are afraid because we run."[31] Immediately
sensed relations, then, are of a world wherein, to follow the terms
Ranci�re takes from Flaubert, the pearls not only individuate
themselves but string themselves together.

Indeed, the pearls only individuate themselves in this very
relationality. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is helpful here. He
offers as exemplary the phenomenon of two contrasting colors appearing
side by side, each intensifying each other and generating their value
in this, such that, as Claudel writes,"a certain blue of the sea is so
blue that only blood would be more red."[32] Deleuze himself offers
just the image Ranci�re employs to crystallize his reservations about
the political potential in Deleuze's philosophy; the image of a wall
composed of 'loose, uncemented stones.' Such an image emphasizes the
import of interrelations to the being of the phenomena, yet these
interrelations do not form a whole fusing parts into a proper and
immutable place. Rather, they form a whole world of individuations
existing only in relation with others.

Yet Ranci�re is not satisfied. He asks, "Why does the image of the
whole in motion� have to be the image of a wall?"[33] Is not a wall
rather the kind of thing that would "bar the road� of the people to
come"? For Ranci�re, the fact that Deleuze's account of literature
ends with this wall gives cause to ask once more after the very mode
of existence his sojourn in Melville's text began with the mode of
existence exemplified in the character of Bartleby and his formula.
Where before, Ranci�re, following Deleuze, emphasized Bartleby's
indiscernibility, here he puts the onus on what can aptly be called
Bartleby's imperceptiblity. Bartleby is not only a character who,
through his formula, escapes location within the partitions of the
sensible which would assign to him a proper place and, accordingly,
proper tasks. In addition, he is a character who literally goes
unperceived.

On his very first day at work for the attorney, Bartleby is given as
his workspace an enclave within the office of the attorney himself. On
one side of this enclave are the doors leading out of the office, on
another a window that looks out only onto the wall of another
building, and, finally, on the other is a high-rising screen. In such
a situation, then, Bartleby both does not see the attorney and goes
unseen by him. Moreover, when Bartleby utters his formula, it is
generally followed, as Deleuze writes, by a retreat "behind his
partition."[34] It is in this situation that Bartleby, for Ranci�re,
is rendered imperceptible and unperceiving in the shared world. In the
end, Ranci�re cannot find in this imperceptiblity that which would be
sensible without being re-cognized according to a priori forms;
Ranci�re cannot find any suggestion of a new sensible world Deleuze
would give to a missing people. Ranci�re concludes, "The strength of
every strong thought is� its ability to arrange its aporia itself, the
point where it can no longer pass. And that is indeed what Deleuze
does�. clears the way of Deleuzianism and sends it into the wall."[35]

Thus, to respond to Ranci�re's critique, it is crucial to investigate
the notion of imperceptibility in Deleuze. The individuations which
characterize his distinct metaphysics are indeed given this name.
However, to be imperceptible is, for Deleuze, a very different thing
from not being available perceptually. Just as, for James,
relationality is only immediately felt rather than always already
conceptualized, so too for Deleuze are these imperceptible
individuations only sensed and perceived. Moreover, they are always
and only sensible in relation to others. Each pushes against another,
and it is through this discordant communication with one another that
each forces itself sensibly upon us. It should be noted that such
discord is only possible, as the brief moment of phenomenology in Kant
suggests, on the condition that the communication conditional to sense
experience is bi-directional, and thus there is no faculty that acts
without itself being acted upon. In other words, the sensing subject
and not just the sensible must be organized like Deleuze's wall.
Deleuze's imperceptible, then, is a force that registers within the
common world its outside, that which can only be perceived, by way of
bi-directional communication. Hence, the imperceptible for Deleuze
just is the percipiendum, that of the perceptible that presents itself
when our perception and the sensus communis, both among our faculties
and senses and at the heart of political community, are pushed to
their limit. Deleuze's notion of the imperceptible, then, crystallizes
and further illuminates a moment in Kant's Critique of Judgment that
turns the aesthetics of the Critique of Pure Reason on its head. This
moment, I propose, may well open it to politics as Ranci�re
understands it.

What's more, Deleuze seeks in the percipiendum a model for a kind of
communication and an example of a certain sensible force that goes
unperceived from an all too empirical perspective, whether a
perspective that, a l� Aristotle, develops a metaphysics that
naturalizes historically contingent parts and properties or, a l�
Kant, develops a theory of transcendental subjectivity according to a
logic that is itself founded on a particular historical organization
of the sensible. Drawing on the work of Duns Scotus, Deleuze gives to
the imperceptible individuations that compose his wall the name of
'haeccities.' Haec is the Greek term for 'this,' and to speak of
haeccities is to speak of the "thisness" of being. The onus on a kind
of indeterminacy in the term is key, for haeccities are
non-qualitative properties. Qualities are too empirical in the
traditional sense, too distinct and concrete in and of themselves, to
capture the discordant force that marks the always-relational
individuation of a haeccity.

Duns Scotus comes to the notion of 'haeccities' in asking how it is
that we not only distinguish one kind of thing from another, such as a
human from an animal, but also distinguish instantiations of the same
kind of thing, one's child, for example, as an instantiation of a more
general human being. The fact that things can share natures and yet
remain distinct requires that a real property other than a thing's
nature be in force in its being. It is in asking first after what
cannot be instantiated, that is, divided into several things each of
which remains the thing itself, that Scotus's notion of haecceities
begins to develop, for it is here that the real property in being
preventing the perfect collapse of two human beings into one general
form might be witnessed.[36] There is something in the property of
temperature or of pressure, for example, just as there is in an
individual human being, which is absolutely incompatible with division
into several parts each of which is an instance of the thing itself.
While we may be able to divide these properties into parts, this
cannot be done without changing the nature of the thing. For example,
if we take away half the heat of a pot of water at 100 degrees
centigrade, we will no longer have a pot of boiling water. There is a
real property that exists in this state of the water that is not
divisible such that each of the parts it separates into remains an
instance of itself.

That there is a real property in being indivisible without a change in
kind suggests that something very like James' notion of relationality
is at play in the real properties of being Scotus names 'haeccities.'
Moreover, these properties, although not empirical in a traditional
sense, are not strictly transcendental, they figure in the sensible,
corporeal domain. Here it is Spinoza whom Deleuze turns to in order to
further stress the point. A body, for Spinoza, is not first and
foremost a distinct extension of matter but rather a set of
orientations in movement and rest. For example, take a soap bubble. As
Manuel De Landa tells us, the constituent molecules of this bubble
"are constrained energetically to 'seek' the point at which surface
tension is minimized."[37] In Spinoza's terms, this is a pattern of
movement and rest that grows from within the collective molecules and
through their energy, and it is this pattern that generates the soup
bubble's extensive, empirical form.

In addition, a number of empirical shapes and forms might be generated
from one intensive pattern. Again, Manuel De Landa is helpful: "if
instead of molecules of soap we have the atomic components of an
ordinary salt crystal, the form that emerges from minimizing energy�
is a cube."[38] Thus one can be sure that it is not the extensive
parts, even if approached on a scale smaller than that of the soap
bubble or salt cube itself � the scale of soap or salt molecules --
that are the force of behind its self-organization. Rather,
organizational force derives from the relation that holds between the
parts before they are even broken down into distinct parts. Spinoza
again corroborates Deleuze's conclusion. For Spinoza, relations of
movement and rest are only one of two halves to any body. The other he
will call the body's affectivity. Affectivity is what gives to these
relations their force to communicate with other such relations in the
world, for affectivity is indissoluble from an expenditure outward,
bringing the body into contact with these others, in an effort to
endure, to preserve the particular relations of movement and rest that
give to it its own being.

What, then, is a force of self-organization that develops only through
exchange and communication with the non-self? Here, it is helpful to
think of Duns Scotus' insight, that there is in the world a real
property indivisible without a change in nature, but in reverse. The
force of affectivity is a force allowing intensities differing in
nature to nonetheless be condensed into a whole which itself differs
in nature from each of these intensities. Thus, the body's effort to
endure always takes the form of a forcible communion between
incommensurables, producing new intensities and reconfiguring the old.
What Spinoza calls 'affectivity,' always tethered to relations of
movement and rest, is then precisely the capacity which Deleuze finds
holding forth the promise of a people to come, the promise of a new
kind of community and, indissolubly, a new kind of sense.

Deleuze's concern in developing the notion of the 'imperceptible,'
then, is with illuminating this world of communication without common
sense, a world in which the sensible is constituted through the
holding together of that which differs in kind. Haeccities, the loose
stones in Deleuze's wall, are indeed imperceptible, yet only from a
traditional empirical perspective that reduces the perceptible to
discrete and extended matter, matter, that is, without intensity or
affectivity. This empirical account of the perceptible has the
object-form, and thus, in turn, the transcendental cogito, as its
condition. It is this form that renders the sensible the same despite
divisions between the senses, the faculties, perspectives, and more,
and thus institutes what Ranci�re will speak of as community. A wall
of "loose, uncemented stones," in contrast, is a whole world outside
this domain insofar as to divide these stones from their relations is
to alter their nature. This world is the world of the percipiendum,
that which must be perceived. Just as yellow and blue vanish from
sight upon reaching a critical point of proximity with one another,
changing in nature to produce green, relations of critical proximity
produce every discrete element available to perception.
'Imperceptible' individuations constitute the perceived, and the
perceived here forces itself upon our body just like a color so bright
one cannot turn one's eyes from it. Moreover, there is a further
implication to Deleuze's Kantian inversion. Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason posits the "I think" as the control centre responsible for the
organization of sense experience in which each faculty and sensory
apparatus has a proper function, and develops a conception of the a
priori and of aesthetics accordingly. It is precisely the functioning
of such a control center productive of a proper and harmonious
organization of senses, faculties, and parts that radical empiricism,
indissoluble from the percipiendum, renders difficult.

Ranci�re's attention to an aesthetics of politics may surprise us. Yet
aesthetics has long been a field of inquiry that looks to sense
experience to ask after value. Aesthetics asks how value is expressed
sensibly and how we know when value is present.[39] Ranci�re is
clearly responding to Foucault's analysis of the modern invention of
the disciplines, distinguishing aesthetic value from ethics, social
and political values from the evaluation of sense experience, and
more, when he posits aesthetics both at what is at stake in politics
and at what erupts anew when politics happens. The intentions of this
paper, centered around Ranci�re's call for a Politics of Aesthetics,
have been twofold. First, it has aimed to demonstrate how Kant's
critical philosophy, particularly as developed in the Critique of Pure
Reason, corroborates Ranci�re's analysis of the distribution of the
sensible. Simultaneously, however, it argues that Kant's Critique of
Judgment, approached through a Deleuzian lens, opens to a distinctly
political aesthetics as defined by Ranci�re. Second, it argues that an
eye to the role Kant's Critique of Judgment plays in Deleuze's
formulation of the notion of the 'imperceptible,' key to Deleuze's own
call for politics in A Thousand Plateaus, can not only reconcile
Deleuze's philosophy with Ranci�re's politics but can, in fact, render
Ranci�re's call for a 'Politics of Aesthetics' both more convincing,
urgent, and important.

ABSTRACT

What does politics have to do with aesthetics? Surely, both politics
and aesthetics are concerned with imagining, envisioning, and even
creating, yet aren't the kinds of things these fields of inquiry
imagine, envision and create greatly disparate? Jacques Ranci�re
argues that what is at stake in politics, just as it is in aesthetics,
is the distribution of the sensible, and that politics happens not
only through the disruption of a certain aesthetic organization of
sense experience but through the eruption of a distinct aesthetics.
Here I elaborate the Kantian foundation for Ranci�re's conception of
the kind of aesthetics that politics must disrupt, drawn primarily
from the Critique of Pure Reason. Yet I also look to Kant's Critique
of Judgment to pave the way for the kind of aesthetics Ranci�re
understands as synonymous with the political event. With this gesture,
my intention is, first, to provide further support for Ranci�re's call
for a distinct aesthetics by elaborating upon how such a distinct
aesthetics may be both possible and realizable. Yet my intention is
also polemical. Ranci�re is highly critical of the political potential
to be found in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, namely due to the
onus placed on the project of 'becoming-imperceptible,' a notion
which, Ranci�re claims, leads politics to a dead end. Is not the
Deleuzian turn towards imperceptibility a move altogether away from
any aesthetics? Here, I argue that it is vital to identify Deleuze's
notion of the imperceptible, like Ranci�re's politics, as situated in
an engagement with Kantian aesthetics. It is only through attention to
Deleuze's reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that it becomes
evident that the 'imperceptible' for Deleuze is also the
'percipiendum': that which must be perceived but cannot be perceived
according to the delimitation of sense experience in the sensus
communis. Through attention to Deleuze's own Kantian interlude, then,
a political voice can be discerned in his philosophy in spite of
Ranci�re's reservations. If we care about Ranci�re's 'Politics of
Aesthetics,' we should care about this.



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