ranciereproject 20091116

2009

2│RancièreJacques

以美學與政治之名

2│

「以美學與政治之名」洪席耶訪台活動講稿

What Aesthetics meansJacques Rancière

Politics, democracy and the presentJacques Rancière

The Politics of FictionJacques Rancière

Politics of the imageJacques Rancière

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洪席耶訪台活動簡介

洪席耶簡介

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2│2│3│目錄│

《獲解放的觀眾》研讀報告

黃建宏│國立台北藝術大學美術學系

《電影寓言》導讀

孫松榮│台南藝術大學音像管理研究所

《美學及其不滿》導讀

楊凱麟│國立中山大學哲學研究所

政治的起點與歧見 (La Mésentente)

的理性：《歧見：政治與哲學》

導讀

劉紀蕙│國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

關於「錯誤」(le tort; the wrong)、

政治與治安(politics and police)、

元政治 ( a r c h i - p o l i t i c s )、p a r a -

politics、後設政治(meta-politics)的

概念釐清，以及關於虛無時代政

治的看法

薛熙平│國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

現況之名(民): 導讀〈民主，抑

或，共識〉(Démocratie ou consensus)陳克倫│國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

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「當代法國哲學的遍歷」洪席耶作品研讀會文章

《對民主的憎惡》(La haine de la

democratie ; Hared of Democracy)林淑芬│國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

美學無意識

楊明敏│台灣精神分析學會

《歷史之名》(Le noms de l’histoire)

導讀

楊淳嫻│國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

洪席耶的《感性分享：美學與政治》

楊成瀚│國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

Jacques R ancière’s Le Par tage du

sensible: esthétique et politique


第1、4、5章關秀惠│國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

《影像的宿命》研讀報告

黃建宏│國立台北藝術大學美術學系

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RancièreJacques


4│

4│5│洪席耶簡介│

歷經二年的籌畫與等待，我們終於邀請到當前法國最重要哲學家賈克‧洪席耶（Jacques Rancière）來台，進行為期二週（11/15-11/27）的講座活動，分別於國立中山大學哲學

所、國立交通大學社文所、中央研究院文哲所及國立台北藝術大學美術學院發表四場演講。

2009年洪席耶訪台活動包括二部份：

一、「當代法國哲學的遍歷」洪席耶作品研讀會

10月31日與11月1日於交大台北校區舉行。包括林淑芬、孫松榮、陳克倫、黃建宏、楊明

敏、楊凱麟、楊淳嫻、楊成瀚、劉紀蕙、薛熙平、關秀惠等多校學者及博士生參與作品導

讀，深入且廣泛地分析與討論洪席耶九本重要著作，對於洪席耶思想的認識奠立了相當的基

礎，有助於在他訪台期間從事深入的對話與討論。

二、「以美學與政治之名」系列講座

洪席耶將著重分析近十年的美學及政治論述，並對其關鍵轉折與發展從事批判思考。講題為：

1.「何謂美學？」（What Aesthetic means?）《11/16(13:00-18:00)中山哲研所》

2.「政治、民主與現前」（Politics , democracy and the present）《11/19(13:00-18:00)交大社文所》

「與洪席耶面對面：洪席耶作品與思想座談會」《11/20(10:00~12:30)交大社文所》

3.「虛構之政治」（The Politics of fiction）《11/23中研院文哲所》

4.「當代藝術與影像政治」（Contemporary art and the politics of images）《11/26(13:30~13:30)北藝大

美術學院》

此外，《歧見》、《歷史之名》、《感性分享》、《美學無意識》、《獲解放觀眾》等洪席

耶著作亦將在多位學者的努力下於近期陸續中譯出版。



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法國哲學家，巴黎第八大學哲學榮譽教授。

前任巴黎第八大學哲學系系主任，早年即與阿圖塞（Louis Althusser, 1918-1990）合著

《讀資本論》（Lire le Capital, 1965）。八○年代先後以「哲學教育」、「歷史性」及

「詩學提問」的研究著稱，九○年代初開始整理其自身的理論系統，專注於美學－

政治的研究上，提出「歧論」（Mésentente）。

隨後在德希達（Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004）創立的國際哲學研討會裡主持美學講

座，主講「藝術表現的美學制域」（Régime esthétique des arts），提出「感性分享」

（Partage du sensible）的概念，引發美學界討論；他的論述主要涉及文學、電影與

政治等哲學思考，論及概念思考、書寫形式與藝術表現如何在十八、十九世紀之

後產生深刻的連結，並在今天展現出我們所看到的多樣互動（《美學中的不適》

（Malaise dans l'esthétique, 2004）））。

賈克·洪席耶Jacques Rancière

6│6│7│洪席耶簡介│

在二十一世紀離開學院之後，除了整理先前的美學講座內容之外，更接續感性分享

的論述，對於當代民主提出批判（《民主之恨》（La Haine de la démocratie, 2005）），

《影像的宿命》（Le Destin des images, 2003）與《獲解放的觀眾》（Le Spectateur

émancipé, 2008）則提擘挈領地論述了攝影、電影與當代藝術影像的美學－政治，在歐

美已譽為當代美學重要的思想家之一。曾同讓-呂克‧南希（Jean-Luc Nancy, 1940-）

受邀在法國國家文化電台主講『哲學接龍』，定期於美國紐約州立大學及康乃爾大

學講授法國文學哲思，並於德國、西班牙客座與演講。

│Bibliographie │

1965, Lire le Capital (et Louis Althusser), PUF

1975, La Leçon d'Althusser, Gallimard,Idées

1983, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, Fayard

1984, L'Empire du sociologue, Paris : Editions la Découverte

1985, Louis-Gabriel Gauny : le philosophe plébéien(édition de Jacques Rancière), Presses universitaires de Vincennes

1986, Le philosophe et ses pauvres, Paris : Flammarion

1987, Le maître ignorant : cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle, Paris : Fayard

1990, Courts voyages au pays du peuple, Paris : Editions du Seuil

1992, Les noms de l'histoire : essai de poétique du savoir, Paris : Editions du Seuil

1992, La politique des poètes : pourquoi des poètes en temps de détresse?(et Alain Badiou), Paris : A. Michel

1995, La mésentente : politique et philosophie, Paris : Galilée

1996, Mallarmé : la politique de la sirène, Paris : Hachette Littératures

1997, La nuit des prolétaires: archives du rêve ouvrier, Paris : Hachette

1998, La chair des mots : politiques de l'écriture, Paris : Galilée

1998, La parole muette : essai sur les contradictions de la littérature, Paris : Hachette littératures

2000, Le partage du sensible : esthétique et politique, Paris : Fabrique: Diffusion Les Belles Lettres

2001, L'inconscient esthétique, Paris : Galilée

2001, La Fable cinématographique, Paris : Editions du Seuil

2003, Les scènes du peuple : Les révoltes logiques, 1975-1985, Lyon : Horlieu

2003, Le destin des images, Paris : Fabrique éditions

2004, Aux bords du politique, Paris : Gallimard

2004, Malaise dans l'esthétique, Paris : Galilée

2005, L'Espace des mots : de Mallarmé à Broodthaers, Nantes : Musée des Beaux-Arts

2005, Chroniques des temps consensuels, Paris : Editions du Seuil

2005, La haine de la démocratie, Paris : Fabrique

2006, Mallarmé : la politique de la sirène, Paris : Hachette Littératures

2007, Politique de la littérature, Paris : Galilée

2008, Le Spectateur émancipé, Paris : Fabrique

2009, Démocratie, dans quel état?(avec Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kristin Ross et Slavoj Zizek), Paris : Fabrique

2009, Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués, Editions Amsterdam

2009, Moments politiques - Interventions 1977-2009, La Fabrique

RancièreJacques


9│洪席耶訪台活動介紹│

「以美學與政治之名」洪席耶訪台活動講稿



10│

What Aesthetics meansJacques Rancière

「以美學與政治之名：洪席耶2009訪台講座」講稿

(draft)

I’d like to present my conception of what aesthetics means. It will appear that this idea

involves a certain idea of the relationships between aesthetics and politics. This idea stands

in opposition to a trend of anti-aesthetic thought which is has been dominant during the last

decades. This critique of the aesthetic tradition has two contradictory aspects. On the one hand

it takes on the character of a dismissal of the “modernist’ tradition. At the beginning of the 80’s

the affirmation of a “postmodern turn” , breaking with the idea of the autonomy of art and the

belief in a subversive power of autonomous art was summed up in a collection of essays edited

by Hal Foster with the title The Anti-Aesthetic. The dismissal of the modernist ideal led to wider

criticism of the whole aesthetic tradition initiated by Kant and his followers. The absolutization of

art and of aesthetic judgment was denounced both from a sociological and a philosophical point

of view. Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction: a critique of social judgment denounced the Kantian

idea of the “disinterestedness” of aesthetic judgment. According to him, each class has the taste

that is determined by its ethos. The disinterested judgment on the beautiful is the philosophical

illusion blanketing the reality of the “distinguished “taste of those who possess the “cultural”

capital that allows them to imagine that their taste is above class distinctions. This exception still

proves the rule that the judgments of taste are in fact incorporated social judgments expressing a

socially determined ethos. On the philosophical side, the criticism of “aesthetic speculation” was

mostly held by analytic philosophers. In a book called Farewell to Aesthetics, a French-speaking

philosopher Jean-Marie Schaeffer opposed the concrete analysis of artistic practices and aesthetic

attitudes to the vagaries of the speculative aesthetic tradition emblematized by Schelling and

Hegel. This denunciation of the “aesthetic absolutization” is attuned to the denunciation of the

artistic avant-gardes voiced notably by the German thinker Boris Groys. This critique accuses the

avant-garde ideal of identification of art and life of having paved the way for totalitarianism.

On the one hand there is that denunciation of “aesthetic absolutization” in the name of the

10│10│11「何謂美學？」What Aesthetic means?

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concrete reality of artistic, social and political practice. But, on the other hand, some philosophers

accuse “aesthetics” for having taken the edge off the radicalism of artistic events. In his Handbook of

Inaesthetics Alain Badiou dismisses , in the name of the Platonic Idea of which artworks are events,

a type of aesthetics which subordinates their truth to an (anti-)philosophy that is caught up in

romantic celebrations of the poem’s sensuous truth. Jean-François Lyotard takes a different path

to make a similar point: he contrasts the aesthetic tradition of reconciliation of art and life, based

on the Kantian Analytic of the Beautiful, with the concept of the Sublime which expresses for him

the true signification of Modern Art which is to bear witness to the gap between the Intelligible

and the Sensible. In the wake of this reframing of Modernism, he makes the obedience to the

“Unrepresentable” the present task of Art against all forms of postmodern mixture of artistic

traditions. His emphasis on the “Unrepresentable” is attuned to a vision of Modernity which turns

the progressive vision of History upside down. The latter envisioned a future of emancipation

and revolution, implementing the potentials of modernity. The thinking of the Unrepresentable

is in keeping with a vision of Modern History making the Nazi extermination of the Jews the

achievement of Modernist ideals, in the place of the emancipatory revolution.

Those forms of criticism make it visible that “aesthetics” is much more than the philosophy

or science of art. It is a matrix of perceptions and discourses which involves a regime of thinking

along with a vision of society and history. The idea that aesthetics designates a form of experience

and a regime of interpretation is at the core of my own thinking about aesthetics. But I take a view

of this which stands in contrast with them. All those critiques denounce this intertwinement of

art practices and forms of interpretation as a symptom of a confusion and they want to sort it out.

Therefore, they set out to distinguish the reasons of theory, the practices of art and the affects

of sensibility. I take the opposite view. For me , the confusion they denounce, in the name of a

thought that puts each thing in its proper element, is in fact the very knot by which thoughts,

practices and affects are instituted and assigned a territory or a ‘specific’ object. If ‘aesthetics’ is the

name of a confusion, this ‘confusion’ is nonetheless one that permits us to identify what pertains

to art, i.e. its objects, modes of experience and forms of thought – the very things we profess to be

isolating by denouncing aesthetics. The will to severe art practice from aesthetic discourse amounts

to make art vanish. Art does not exist as a self- evident practice in the name of which one could

denounce aesthetic usurpation. Art exists insofar as it is framed within regimes of identification

which allow us to give a specificity to its practices and to link them to distinct modes of perception

and affection and patterns of intelligibility.



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I proposed to distinguish, within the western tradition, three great regimes. I called the

first one “ethical regime of the images” because , in that regime, the products of artistic practice

are not subsumed under the concept of art but are held to be images. The judgement about them

thus depends upon two interrelated questions: are those images true to their originals? What

effect do they produce on the ways of being, the behaviour and the morality of those who perceive

them? Plato condemns the poems of Homer because they represent quarrelsome and luxurious

gods who don’t suit the true idea of divinity and cannot, for that reason, train good citizens. The

Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan who here held to be parts of the artistic patrimony of

Humankind because, for them, they were just idols, images of faked gods, while the true God does

not allow men to make images of him.

I called the second regime “representative regime” because this regime isolates, among the

multiplicities of “arts “– in the sense of “technical skills” a particular domain which is that of the arts

of imitation. It sets those apart from the ethical legislation about their truth and their moral effects.

Instead it submits them to rules of verisimilitude and inner consistence. Aristotle thus opposes

the causal logic of the actions in tragedy to the empirical succession of facts that are recounted in

history. But this inner consistence takes on its cogency within a set of stable relationships between

artistic inventions and the sensibility of their public. The classical order of mimesis had become,

in 18th century Europe, such a system in which the artistic rules were said to be grounded in the

knowledge of human nature which determined the emotions of the spectators. Thereby artistic

invention was in keeping with a hierarchical ordering of the world. This ordering determined what

could or could not be represented and the forms of representation that were suitable for high

and low subject matters. It opposed the noble genres of tragedy and history painting to the base

genres of comedy and genre painting and it left on its margins forms of art that did not get into this

mould, like the novel, characterized by mixed characters, situations and language.

I called “aesthetic regime of art” a third regime born from the collapse of those rules of

correspondence between subjects, forms of representation and modes of expression. In this

regime, the hierarchy of subjects and genres is shattered down. All subjects are equivalent and any

form can be adapted to any subject. This aesthetic upheaval is approximately contemporary to the

French Revolution and can be emblematized by a comment made by Hegel when he describes

in his Lessons on Aesthetics two Spanish paintings by Murillo which represent ragged beggar

boys. Such paintings were previously despised as “vulgar” genre paintings. But Hegel praises the

insouciance of the beggar boys and their idleness which makes them, he says, similar to the Gods



of Olympus represented by Greek sculptors. Hegel can dismiss the opposition of high and low

because he has seen the paintings in the new space of the museum, a neutralized space where

the works of art have been torn apart from the destinations and from the hierarchies to which

they obeyed when they adorned the palaces of the princes or illustrated the dogmas of Religion.

Aesthetics is the form of perception and thinking which suits this new regime characterized by the

tension between two facts: on the one hand, Art exists as such as a sphere of experience separated

from the others, embodied by specific places as the museum is. On the other hand , no border any

longer separates the objects worth of being artistic from the others. Aesthetics is the thinking of

this original contradiction when Art becomes autonomous as a sphere of experience, yet erases the

borders which separated artistic object from prosaic objects and forms of life.

That tension rests itself on a deeper tension, linked with the rupture of the representative

ordering. The latter was grounded by the presupposition of a natural harmony between the poiesis

producing the works and the aisthesis – meaning the sensible milieu within which they were

perceived and produced specific affects. The rules of artistic production were predicated on this

natural harmony with the rules determining the forms of perception and emotion of a refined

public. The mimetic ordering is in tatters when this harmony is lost. That rupture is at the core

of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. There is no need to oppose the rupture of the sublime to the

harmony of the beautiful. The rupture of the representative harmony is already at work in the

Analytic of the Beautiful. The Beautiful, says Kant, is appreciated without a concept. This means

that there is no correspondence between the implementation of artistic rules and ideas and the

appreciation of a form, no harmony between artistic production and aesthetic reception. Kant

makes the point when he contrasts “free beauty” with “adherent beauty” : the idea of the beautiful

is independent from criteria defining the perfection of a work or the adaptation of an edifice to its

function. The form which is appreciated by aesthetic experience is not the same as the form that

an artist imposes on matter. Even more it is the opposite since the latter supposes a hierarchical

relation between the concept and the sensible which is given a form by it , while the aesthetic

experience supposes the free play of the intellectual and the sensible faculties. The aesthetic

experience does not only ignore the hierarchies of genres and subject matters. It also ignores what

seems to be at the core of artistic practice: the will to impose a form to a matter and to produce a

definite effect on the sensibility of the beholder. The aesthetic experience, that Kant elaborates at

the time of the French Revolution, seems thus to define a very particular and paradoxical form of

freedom and equality.



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We can spell out this paradox out of the seemingly trivial example that Kant gives when it

comes to define the “disinterestedness” of aesthetic judgement. If I want to judge on the form of

a palace, I must discard the usual objections predicated on the good or the agreeable. I must not

judge the form in relation to its function as both a place to live and a symbol of social distinction.

Nor must I take into account the fact that the palace has been built by the sweat of the poor

people to serve the vanity of the nobles. If I discard all those “social” issues, I can pronounce a

free judgement about the beauty of the form , so that this judgement is not only the voicing of my

individual taste but can be attributed to everybody. Further on in the Critique of Judgement Kant

shows how this power of “universality without concept” opens up the possibility of a new form of

community or a new “commonsense” which bridges the gap heretofore existing between the futile

refinements of culture and the wilderness of nature. For him the creation of this commonsense is a

necessity if one wants to hold the revolutionary promise of a new political order based on freedom

and equality.

I mentioned earlier Bourdieu’s diagnosis, making the “disinterestedness” of aesthetic

judgement and the promise of a new commonsense the aesthetic illusion based on the “denegation”

of the social reality”. But the argument might well be overturned so that the Kantian “denegation”

of the social appear more subversive than the “social criticism” of aesthetics. Bourdieu’s critique

contrasts the aesthetic equality with the reality of the distribution of the forms of taste dependent on

the hierarchy of social classes. Such a criticism in fact is in keeping with the tradition of the ethical

regime allotting to each class the ways of being , feeling and thinking suiting its condition. This

tradition has received its philosophical formulation in Plato’s Republic; in that Republic everyone

has to do its “own business” in the same way as each part of the soul performs its proper task which

consists in ruling or being ruled. In the modern times, this maxim has nurtured, by the ruling

classes, the obsessive anxiety about the risk that low people get perverted by the appropriation of

tastes and aspirations which are not suitable to their condition. That conception of the community

as a stable structure where groups are characterized by their place, their occupation and the way of

being suitable to that place and that function is what I call the Police order. Police for me does not

designate the part of the state apparatus dedicated to repression. Instead it designates this ordering

of the community where each part has to stick to its place, function and identity. This ordering of

the places and identities also entails a distribution of the visible , the audible and the thinkable

where there is a clear-cut separation between the real and the fiction, the visible and the invisible,

and finally the possible and the impossible. The logic of politics, by contrast , is defined by the

introduction of a supplementary element, an element which is not included in the count of parts,



places and identities. Political action blurs over the distribution of places and identities and also

the setting of the visible, the audible and the possible. It makes those who were entrapped in the

obscure life of the needs visible as speaking and thinking beings; It makes what was only perceived

as the noise of obscure life audible as speech. This is what I called the part of those who have no

part. It is on that basis that I proposed to rethink the notion of democracy: the “people” which is

the subject of democracy embodies this supplement; it enacts a capacity of anyone, a capacity of

the “incompetents” which comes in addition to all the entitlements based on the possession of a

specific quality: birth, wealth , science or others. Now what Kant’s “aesthetic” analysis of the palace

proposes is a “supplement” of the same sort. There are, he says, two criteria which usually serve to

judge edifices of this sort: the intellectual criterion of the good and the sensuous criterion of the

agreeable. Those two criteria involve three hierarchical relations: The intellectual criterion opposes

knowledge to ignorance; the sensuous criterion opposes the refined senses and tastes to the senses

and tastes of the multitude; finally the intellectual criterion is opposed to, the sensuous one. But

the Kantian analysis brings to the fore a third element: the aesthetic judgement obeys neither the

intellectual nor the sensuous criterion. It is a supplement to the count, a “free “, non hierarchical

play of the faculties. This supplement neutralizes the three hierarchical oppositions and defines a

new capacity which is a capacity of anyone at all.

There is a capacity to enjoy the appearance and play with the appearance, which belongs to

anyone at all: such is the lesson that another thinker, Schiller, draws from Kant’s Critique and on

which he elaborates in his Lessons on the Aesthetic Education of Man . This book was written a few

years after Kant’s books, during the French Revolution and bears the mark of a disappointment

about the promise of a free state. As he views of it, the French Revolution failed because it wanted

to erase by the means of law and the State power forms of inequality and servitude which are

embedded in the depths of sensible experience. This is why he elaborates on a new promise of

freedom and equality predicated on the meaning of aesthetic experience. He transforms the

Kantian “free play” of the faculties into what he calls a ” play drive” which breaks away from the

opposition between the active “formal drive” and the passive” sensuous drive”. “Man, he says, is

only human when he plays” . The play drive is the capacity to play with appearance as such. This

capacity erases the traditional hierarchy of form and matter, activity and passivity, means and

ends – all “intellectual” oppositions which are at the same time social oppositions separating two

species among Humankind. This capacity is equally shared by the art lover in front of the statues

of antique gods and by the savage when he first sets out to adorn himself. Aesthetic experience

defines a potential of shared humanity that lends itself to further development and creates the basis



16│

for a form of sensible community exceeding the community determined by law and state power.

Schiller’s analysis brings to the fore an important point in opposition to most of the

discourses about modernity and artistic autonomy. What is made autonomous by the aesthetic

regime of art is not the work of art or the power of the artist. It is a specific mode of experience.

The aesthetic experience is the framework within which the forms of art are perceived and

thought. But it reaches far beyond matters of art. It involves the multiple ways of experiencing

a sensible world , which is no more limited to the world of needs and utility , nor structured by

the hierarchies of the good and the agreeable. It frames a world of possible experience which blurs

over the police distribution of the bodies and of the forms of perception, feeling and thinking

“suitable” to their condition. This blurring is at the core of the historical forms of individual and

collective emancipation of those who were ensnared in one sensible world alone, the utilitarian

world of labour and needs. Social emancipation rests on a form of aesthetic subversion, it rests

on the appropriation by the members of the “low classes” of forms of experience, perception and

language that are not suitable to their condition, meaning to the condition of the “subaltern”. This

is how we can find an echo of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful in a text written 50 years later by a

joiner to describe his day at work as he is laying the floor of an opulent house, for the profit of the

owner and of his boss. I quote from the text:

Believing himself at home, he loves the arrangement of a room so long as he has not finished

laying the floor. If the window opens out onto a garden or commands a view of a picturesque

horizon, he stops his arms a moment and glides in imagination towards the spacious view to enjoy

it better than the possessors of the neighbouring residences. [1]

The text does not deal with art. Nevertheless he deals with what is at the heart of the

Kantian analysis: the capacity of a “disinterested’ look at a space which is the space of labour

and property. It turns out that this “disinterestedness” is not the detachment of the aesthete,

indifferent to social reality. Instead it means a split in the heart of social reality, the dissociation

between the work of the hands which is determined by the social constraint and the work of

the look which emancipates itself and even appropriates the form of mastery embodied by the

perspective gaze. That dissociation undoes the police distribution of the ways of feeling adapted

to the place, function and identity of the worker. It shapes a new worker’s body, which is no more

adapted to that distribution. This text does not speak about art or about politics. It speaks about

what constitutes the common basis of aesthetic experience and political action: what I call the



distribution of the sensible: the distribution of the visible, the sayable and the thinkable by means

of which are linked in a community, the distribution of the capacities and incapacities that are

allotted to those who are at this or that place in the community. It is not mistakenly thus that this

text appears in a revolutionary worker’s newspaper during the French Revolution of 1848. The

possibility of a collective voice of the workers is dependent upon the “aesthetic” dissociation

of a certain worker’s identity, the identity that suited their subaltern condition. The point for

those workers was not to know about the causes of the exploitation of the workers. It was to

create for themselves a new body, a body destined to something else than exploitation. What

made the creation of a body destined to collective struggle possible was the possibility of a free ,

“disinterested” look at the very place of their exploitation.

Such is the paradoxical link of aesthetic indifference and political commitment. This

paradox is not a thing of the past. I’d like to illustrate it with an artistic and political experience

which is being implemented to-day by a group of artists in one of the poorest suburbs of Paris,

one of those suburbs mostly inhabitants by migrant workers and marked by all forms of social

destitution and racial tension where violent riots burst out four years ago. But the way the project

tackles the problem seems paradoxical. Much of what we read or hear about the “crisis” of the

suburbs deals with the loss of the “social bond” provoked by mass individualism and the necessity

to weave it back together again. But the project understands this in a very peculiar way since it

proposes to create in that wretched suburb a place that would be “extremely useless, fragile and

non productive”[2]. This place was to be discussed with whoever wanted to discuss it among the

inhabitants and put under of the protection of the community. But it would be dedicated to a

specific end: solitude, which meant that it would be conceived and implemented as a place that

could be occupied only by one person at a time for the sake of lonely contemplation or meditation.

For what is precluded by normal life in those suburbs is the possibility of being alone, thereby the

possibility of a community based on freedom instead of necessity. This is why the project was

called I and us. We can easily translate those terms into their philosophical equivalent, namely the

Kantian universality of the aesthetic judgement. What is at issue is a rupture within the normal

distribution of forms of sensible experience with the capacities and incapacities that they entail. In

a film associated with the project, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood were invited to choose a

sentence which was printed on the tee-shirt with which they faced the camera. I wish to focus on

one of those phrases with which a woman tells in her own way what the project is trying to do: “I

want an empty world that I can fill”.



18│

“To fill an empty word”: the formula can resonate in many ways indeed. It can recall us

the Kantian formula of the universality of the aesthetic judgement which can be attributed to

anybody because it has no content . It can also evoke to French ears the last verse of the refrain of

the International which reads in French “Nous ne sommes rien. Soyons tout” (“We are nothing.

We must be everything”). A French reader can also hear in the formula an echo of the most well-

known of French literary characters, Madame Bovary whose misfortune is caused by her attempt

to experiment in real life the truth of a few words she has read in books, such as “ bliss”, “ecstasy”

and “passion”. But it may also evoke the purpose of the writer of the novel, Gustave Flaubert ,

who wanted to write a book on nothing, a book that would stand by the sole virtue of its writing.

Because of that purpose, he was held to be the champion of “art for art’s sake” . It happened

however that, from the very beginning, the story of the woman who wants to live what words tell

was denounced as the triumph of democracy in literature. As a matter of fact, the autonomisation

of “pure literature” went hand in hand with the consideration of the aesthetic upheaval that was

implied by the desire of a peasant’s daughter to bring art in her life.

I believe that the analysis of what aesthetics means urges us to grasp the network of relations

that links all those formulas. In order to so , we must discard all the stale and flimsy oppositions

between aesthetic distinction and social reality, art for art’s sake and committed art , high culture

and popular culture, etc, etc. Inherent to the “aesthetic subversion” is the rupture of any direct

relation between the forms of artistic production and the effect that they may bring about by

the spectators or readers. Inherent is also the tension between the autonomisation of aesthetic

experience and the erasing of the frontier separating the objects that are worth or not worth going

into art and the publics able or unable to appreciate them.

If we want to understand that fundamental tension, we must question a number of concepts

that obtain in the reflection on the history of art practice. This is certainly the case with the

concepts of modernism and post-modernism. Artistic modernism, in the western tradition, has

been mainly defined as a rupture with representative art. But the concept of representative art has

been given a narrow sense. It has been equated with pictorial figuration. On that basis, one has

mounted the paradigm of a modern anti-representative revolution discarding the task of telling

stories or representing to concentrate on the systematic investigation of the specific materials and

instruments of each art. According to that story, Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian initiated

pictorial modernity by discarding figuration. Schönberg initiated musical modernity by dismissing

the expressive tradition in favour of the dodecaphonic language. Mallarmé opposed the common



language of the tribe with the intransitive language of the poem, etc. From this point on, some

authors equated modernity with that autonomisation of art and of each art in particular, with

respect to the other arts and to the language of communication and the images of commercial

culture; some others tried to link that autonomisation of art with social and political emancipation:

they opposed artistic autonomy to the aestheticization of everyday life and commodity culture.

Or they linked the concentration of art on its own material with Marxist materialism. That is how

Clement Greenberg’s modernism, in the 1940’s or structuralist theory, in the 1960’s attempted to

draw a parallelism between artistic autonomy and emancipatory politics. With the ebb of the flow,

in the 1980’s , the analysis was turned upside down ; Malevich white and black squares were no

more forerunners of social Revolution but testimonies of an art of the Unrepresentable heralding

the disaster of the Nazi holocaust. But as soon as the 1960’s pop art , new realism and the various

forms of artistic activism had ruined those identifications by reviving other modernisms: the

modernism of Dadaist performance and derision, the surrealist modernism of the détournement

of prosaic objects and popular images, the dialectical modernism of political photo-montages, etc.

There is no need to interpret those revivals as the signs of a post-modern rupture, bidding farewell

to the modernist separation of high art and popular culture. The reason is that the latter was a

retrospective invention. It was a late and biased reinterpretation of the forms of artistic innovation

of historical modernism dating back to the late 19th century or the early 20th century. As a matter

of fact, those forms did not oppose artistic autonomy to non artistic life . Instead they sought to

invent forms of art in tune with the new forms of aesthetic experience. They did not isolate the

distinct materiality of each art. Instead they wanted to import new artistic possibilities from other

arts. The experiments of Kandinsky and Schönberg were in tune with the project of a new form

of art establishing analogies between all senses. Malevich, Rodtchenko and El Lissitzky were in

search of pure forms to reconstruct the forms of sensible experience and everyday life. This is why

, during the Soviet Revolution, those pure forms inspired architectural projects or political and

commercial posters aiming at the identification between the forms of art and the forms of common

life. And the “pure” poetry of Mallarmé was intended to take part in a new symbolic economy of

the community. That’s why the poet set out to import musical effects and choreographic forms in

the conception and in the very typography of the poems.

Late modernism has mounted an inconsistent fable about the autonomy of art and its

political signification. It did so as a consequence of the simplistic idea that equated representation

with the figurative production of resemblance. But the representative regime was not defined

by the mere production of resemblance. It was defined by the framework which submitted that



20│

production to a whole network of rules, aimed at defining what could be represented and the forms

of representation suitable to the subjects which were represented. That’s why the aesthetic regime

cannot be thought of as the emancipation from resemblance. Instead it is the emancipation of

resemblance. Significantly modernism in the western world did not start with abstract painting; it

started with the rehabilitation of genre painting and the descriptive luxuriance of so-called realistic

novels. Now the main point is that the aesthetic regime of art does not affirm the autonomy of art

as such. That “autonomy” is in fact the result of the dissociation between artistic production and

artistic reception. The aesthetic regime affirms the autonomy of aesthetic experience in its very

distance from the implementation of the will of the artist. The autonomy of aesthetic experience

thus is the autonomy of a form of experience whose very status is contradictory.

In order to grasp that contradiction, it may prove useful to backtrack to the analysis of

aesthetic experience proposed by Schiller in his Letters . On the one hand the aesthetic experience

is the experience of a form of suspension – or neutralization. The “free play” in front of the “free

appearance” is a form of experience at odds with the ordinary forms of sensible experience which

are forms of subordination. Interestingly Schiller describes it as a moment of “inactivity” , or a

moment of equivalence of activity and passivity. This inactivity is emblematized by the sculpture

of an antique goddess whose head is represented free from any care or any will. In the passage of

his Lessons I mentioned earlier, Hegel makes exactly the same statement about the beggar boys

painted by Murillo: they are free from any care or concern. Like the goddess, they do nothing. In a

similar way the joiner “stops his arms for a while”. This “doing nothing”, this moment of suspension

can be thought of as the core of aesthetic experience. On the one hand, this experience of freedom

and equality can be linked with the new status of the works of art in the times of the museum, the

public concerts and the widespread diffusion of books and magazines. On the other hand, it is

possible to emphasize the link between aesthetic suspension and political empowerment. On this

basis, it is possible to connect aesthetic autonomy with artistic autonomy and predicate on that

connection a vision of a free community to come. The “aesthetic education” of Man thus appears

to be an education to the enjoyment of aesthetic and artistic autonomy, viewed of as a preliminary

condition of social freedom and equality . But things can be put the other way around. The free

appearance of the Greek goddess bears witness to a form of art which was not separated from

life, a form of art which ignored the distinction between public life and everyday life, along with

the distinctions between art, politics and religion. The “aesthetic education” of Man may thus

be interpreted as a concrete program of transformation of collective life , aimed at reviving the

indistinction or un-separateness of art and life. The romantic heirs of Kant and Schiller took that



path: they opposed the life of the aesthetic community to the dead community of state and law.

The same idea nurtured the Marxist program of a “human” revolution overcoming the limits of

political revolution. It inspired the program of the futurist and constructivist avant-garde at the

time of the Soviet Revolution: that art create no more works of art but forms of a new collective

life.

This means that there is not one but at least two “modernisms”. Both attempted to cope with

the original paradox of the aesthetic regime, that is the dissociation between the reasons of art and

the reasons of aesthetic experience. There is an “activist modernism” that erases the disjunction

by making art no more an activity of production of works of art but a process of transformation

of the forms of life. There is , on the opposite side, a modernism which erases the disjunction by

transferring the emancipatory power of the aesthetic experience to the works of art themselves.

This tension, however, cannot be equated with en opposition between art for art’s sake and

engaged art. Instead each of those strategies has to import something from the other. The analyses

of the Frankfurt School have become a hallmark of what I called late modernism, championing

the autonomy of art. But they don’t value the autonomy of artworks as such. Instead they value

the form of experience which is incorporated in them. It is the way this form opposes the forms

of experience of alienated life. But, since the latter are forms of fake reconciliation which adorn the

reality of alienated labour, the forms of art have to bear witness to alienation. They must make the

impossibility that those works close upon themselves perceptible. The search for appearance and

harmony must produce works which show that appearance and harmony are impossible, that are

bitten by the suffering of social alienation. If the work of Schönberg is emblematic for Adorno, it is

because, to denounce the suffering of rationalized and mechanized life, it invents a system which

is still more rationalized and mechanized than that life. Therefore Adorno criticizes Schönberg’s

Moses and Aaron, because there is too much harmony between the text and the musical score. The

“autonomous work” is always made of sediments of social experience. What is “political” in the end

is not the autonomy of the work but its failure to achieve it.

Conversely the artists who advocate the transformation of works of art into forms of life

cannot be satisfied with the mere disappearance of artistic practice in social life. Functional art ,

in the service of the new life, has to make it perceptible that it is functional art in the service of the

new life. Hence the excessively oblique lines of the Lenine tribune imagined by El Lissitzky or of

the posters and photographs made by Rodtchenko. Those oblique lines overcome the demands

of their “social” function, so as to imitate the run up of the new life. If artistic modernity means



22│

something, it means both the tension between those two modernisms and the inner tension

inherent in each of them. That tension was not a static opposition; instead it opened up a field of

multiple forms of artistic production and aesthetic experience. That’s why it is not so easy to single

out a new paradigm that would distinctly characterize a “postmodern” form of art. The installations,

performances, video-installations and video-performances of contemporary art still set to work the

tension between the production of works and the production of experimental situations as they

invent dispositifs aimed at changing the forms of perception, affect and interpretation.

A thinking of aesthetics is , in my view, a thinking which tries to spell out the logic of those

tensions and the way they generate forms of perception, modes of interpretation and programs

of life. Aesthetics does not exist as a theory of art. It exists as a form of experience, a mode of

visibility and a regime of interpretation. The aesthetic experience reaches far beyond the sphere

of art. What is at issue is the configuration of the sensible landscape in which a community is

framed, a configuration of what it is possible to see and feel, of the ways in which it is possible

to speak and think about it. It is a distribution of the possible which also is a distribution of the

capacity that these or those have to take part in this distribution of the possible. That issue is at

the core of the Kantian idea of the universality of the aesthetic judgement. It is also at the core of

the examples I have proposed to illustrate it: who has the possibility to stop his arms to claim the

property of the perspective? Who has the right to solitude? Who is entitled to hold grab on empty

words and fill them? Aesthetic “issues are issues about the configuration of a common world. The

reflection on these “aesthetic” issues requires, I think, a form of “aesthetic discourse which is not a

speciality within philosophy, but, on the contrary, crosses the frontiers of specific disciplines such

as philosophy, art history, literary theory or sociology of culture - , etc. in order to think about the

forms of distribution of the sensible from which the possible forms of our perceptions originate

along with the modes of production of knowledge and the modes of configuration of a common

world .



[1]Gabriel Gauny, “ Le Travail à la tâche » , in Le Philosophe plébéien , p.45-46

[2]http://www.evensfoundation.be/downloads/CAMPEMENTURBAIN(anglais).pdf



24│

Politics, democracy and the presentJacques Rancière


( draft)

The title I proposed for this presentation may seem very loose and uncompromising. I’ll try

to show however that it deals with highly controversial issues. In a first step, it may seem easy to

outline what the debate is about: it is about how we define democracy and we assess the relevance

of the concept of democracy in the thinking of politics to-day. But it soon turns out that the first

controversial point is about the “to-day” itself. How do we determine what the present is? How do

we conceive of the “time” or the “history” to which this present belongs? A lot of people willingly

describe politics as a way of dealing with the problems of a community. But politics starts earlier:

it starts with the determination of what those problems are. It starts with the description of that

community and of the situation that gives rise to those problems. It is first and foremost a way

of drawing the map of what is given and what is possible. It is a way of describing a present, the

history to which it belongs and the future that it can generate. So the issue about democracy and

the issue about the present are strictly interwoven. Therefore my talk will focus on the very issue of

“time”: how do we determine the situation that is “given” to us and the temporal sequence to which

it belongs? What ideas of time are implied in our ways of staging the present of politics? What kind

of politics do those ideas produce?

I’ll start with a simple question: how do we determine the transformations the intellectual

landscape has gone through since the times of the turbulent sixties? As well known, the dominant

answer has been formulated in terms of time. It has been encapsulated in a short word “end” and

even less than a word, a prefix: post. What we are supposed to have lived is the end of a certain

historical period: many things are said to have gone to their end: not only the division of the

world between a capitalist bloc and a communist bloc , but also a vision of the world organized

by class conflict; not only class conflict but politics thought of as a practice of division. Not only

a lot of revolutionary hopes or illusions, but utopias and ideologies in general, or, in the most

comprehensive formulation, “grand narratives” and beliefs about the destiny of the humankind.

Not only a period of history, but “history” itself understood as the time of a promise to be

completed.

24│24│25「政治、民主與現前」Politics, democracy and the present


As for the prefix “post”, it is intended to designate not only the time after the end but

the way of being of those who live in this time “after the end” , those who grapple with it , both

interiorising and denying it , since “post” means two opposite things : not only what comes when

a time is over, but also what continues the time that is over, what makes as though it were not over,

etc.

Such is the mainstream story about the evolution that has made the present we are living

in. It amounts to a very simple plot: there is a “before” and an” after”. The time before is a time

with a number of determinations (oppositions, struggles, beliefs, hope, etc). Those determinations

were conflictual, which means that they implied a future, that is a new balance of forces and

possibly a new configuration of the common world. The time after is the time which results from

the exhaustion of all those determinations. Oppositions have been levelled, conflicts have been

settled, beliefs and hopes have been either integrated or definitely lost. The point I want to make

is: that mainstream story in terms of “end” and “post” is itself a weapon intended to impose a

certain view of “our time”, a certain view of the present. The statement about the end is in fact part

of the conception of history that it claims to dismiss. Narrations of time are in fact prescriptions.

Statements about the separation of historical periods and more generally statements about the

partitions of time are statements about the impossible: they say: time is over, which means

“we can no more”. Now we cannot usually is a euphemism which means : you cannot. And “you

can no more” ultimately means: you cannot at all, which in the end means: you must not. The

statement about the end formulates a prohibition. I’ll go back over the use of time partitions as

forms of interdiction later on. At the moment I only want to bring out my own statement about

the sequence of time designated by the notions of the end and the post. It reads as follows: the

discourse about the end, the post, etc, is only a particular phrasing of the configuration of the

world prescribed to-day by the dominant powers. Roughly speaking it is part of the intellectual

counter-revolution which is the proper name for the evolution we have gone through during the

last decades.

This is my first point: the main trend of this period is not characterized, as the opinion

goes, by the erasing of the old structures and ideologies. The grand narrative of Modernity has not

been dismissed. Instead its elements have been recycled to construct a new grand narrative. What

happened is not a process of vanishing of powers, struggles and beliefs heading towards some sort

of levelling of the old oppositions, some sort of medium state of things and thoughts. It is an active

attempt at configuring an order of domination able to dismiss any resistance or any alternative



26│

by imposing itself as self-evident and inescapable. Now my second point is : this intellectual

counter-revolution has found the bulk of its descriptive and argumentative stuff in the recycling

of descriptions , narratives and arguments that were associated with critical and revolutionary

thinking and above all with the Marxist tradition. The dominant narrative about the contemporary

world proclaims the global triumph of world capitalism and global liberal democracy over

Marxism. This narrative has to brush aside at least two disturbing facts: the first one, that will be

out of the scope of my talk to-day, is the fact that one of the most prosperous capitalist powers to-

day is led by a communist party; the second which I wish to address is that the discourse of the

intellectual counterrevolution built its hegemony by incorporating descriptions and narratives,

arguments and beliefs borrowed from the critical tradition and from the Marxist discourse in

particular . The concepts and procedures that defined the “critical tradition” have not vanished at

all, that they still work, be it in the very discourse of those who make fun of it. But they do it in a

way that implies an entire reversal of their supposed ends and orientations. This reversal comprises

four major themes that I will examine in order. Of course those four themes are linked together,

but their order determines a dynamic progression, a dynamics of intellectual counter-revolution,

the articulations of which are worth detailed examination. Those four arguments deal with first

the economic necessity, next the dematerialisation of social relations, third the fetishism of the

commodity, and finally the mechanism of ideology.

First point: economic necessity, or more precisely, the equation between economic

necessity and historical necessity. Once upon a time, this equation was equated itself with so-

called Marxist “determinism” to which the mainstream discourse opposed the freedom of people

freely exchanging their products in the free market or making free contracts about the use of

their work force. Now with the interweaving of all markets in the global economy, this “freedom”

is clearly viewed by its champions themselves as the freedom to submit to the necessity of the

global market. What was yesterday the historical necessity of the evolution leading to socialism

becomes to-day the historical necessity of the evolution leading to the triumph of the global

market. Not surprisingly that displacement has been advocated by a lot of formerly Marxist,

socialist or progressive sociologists and economists who turned their faith in the historical

achievement of revolution into a faith in the historical achievement of Reform. What Reform

means, since the times of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, is the reconstruction not only of

work relationships but also of all kinds of social relationships in accordance with the logic of the

global free market. All forms of destruction of the welfare State, social security, labour laws, etc.

are justified by the necessity of adapting local economies and local legislation to the constraint of



this inescapable historical evolution. Thereby all forms of resistance to those attempts are deemed

reactionary attitudes of parts of the population still clinging to the past , afraid of the historical

evolution that will destroy their status and privileges , and consequently standing in the way of

progress. In 19th century, Marx denounced those artisans, petty-bourgeois and ideologues who

fought against the development of capitalist forms which threatened them with Death, thereby

preparing the socialist future. In the same way any struggle against the logic of “Reform” has

increasingly been denounced as the backward resistance of egoist workers eager to defend their

privileges. In France when big strikes burst out in 1995 against the conservative government which

set out to reform the system of pensions, the left-wing intelligentsia supported the government

and chastised those backward strikers, because they egoistically sacrificed the future to the short-

sighted defence of their privileges. From that time on each social movement has more or less been

accused of egoism and backwardness by that progressive intelligentsia.

Now this recycling of the logic of historical necessity has taken on a more philosophical

turn with the recycling of one of the main theses of the Communist Manifesto: the thesis of the

dissolution of all solid structures and traditional forms of relationships. “All that is solid melts

into the air”, the well-known sentence of the Communist Manifesto has become the slogan of the

numerous versions of Post-modern manifestos that have blossomed at the beginning of the eighties

to describe how everything, from the conditions of work to the strokes of military forces became

more and more immaterial, liquid or ethereal . The most accomplished form of this narrative can

be found in the work of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk who made himself both the thinker

and the historian of the becoming-aerial of our world. What defines modernity, in his view, is the

joint vanishing of poverty and reality. In his book Foams he describes the process of modernity as

a process of “anti-gravitation”. “Anti-gravitation” first refers to the technical inventions that allow

men to conquer space and fly in the air. But, in a more general way, it tells us that life has lost much

of its “gravity” – which means both its weight of poverty, pain or toughness and its weight of reality.

In his view our “affluent society” is definitely released from “the definitions of reality formulated

by the ontology of poverty” , yet we still cling to those formulas and phrase the lack of misery

and the lack of gravity in the language of misery and gravity. We experience exactly the contrary of

the process described by Marx: instead of projecting into an ideal sky the inverted reality of their

earthly misery, our contemporaries project into an illusory solid reality the inverted image of that

process of escape.

On the one hand, this reversal of the Marxist schema is only its rephrasing, since it still



28│

describes us an objective and inescapable process of development of the productive forces and

still explains us how this inescapable process appears in an inverted form to those who look

at it. This sketching of a “lightened” world ranges among a lot of half-melancholic, half-cynical

descriptions of a social world turned into the global reign of a petty-bourgeoisie of narcissistic

individuals. But, at this point, the progressive view of history as a process suppressing the old

determinations , oppositions and hierarchies meets up with the alternative view of the historical

process: the thinking of history as decadence leading from a world structured by the relation of

high and low to a world here all differences have been flattened . The post-Marxist denunciation

of the “false misery” thus meets up with another denunciation: the Nietzschean denunciation

of the “last man”, the denunciation of a “socialist” aggregation of little men, hating both wealth

and poverty, dismissing all that is too high and remote – love, creation, desire and stars - , a cattle

without shepherd, rubbing against one another to feel warm and enjoy a life of meanness devoted

to the religion of an unique virtue: health. Therefore the denunciation of the “false misery” turns

into the denunciation of those “little men”- which means the poor - who steal for the base needs

of healthcare the wealth produced by the creative men – which means the Rich. Recently Peter

Sloterdijk launched a campaign inviting the Rich to rebel against the robbery of the poor by

refusing to pay taxes. This is how in the end Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher shake their hands

through the mediation of Friedrich Nietzsche.

This combination of the discourse of historical progress and of the discourse of decadence

is also at the heart of the third aspect I mentioned: the recycling and the reversal of the critique

of commodity culture and the spectacle. In a sense the discourse about the reign of consumption

and the spectacle that obtains everywhere to-day is the continuation of the critical discourse

of the 60’s, denouncing the mythologies of the commodity, the fallacies of consumer’s society

and the empire of the spectacle. But, forty years ago, that criticism was supposed to unmask the

machineries of domination and provide the anti-capitalist fighters with new weapons. It has slowly

turned to exactly the contrary: a form of nihilist knowledge of the reign of the commodity and

the spectacle, of the equivalence of anything with anything and of anything with its image. That

nihilist wisdom features the entire mankind as a population of idiots fascinated by the spectacle

of TV reality shows and merry consumers overfilling all bins with the refuse of their frenetic

consumption. It pictures the law of domination as a force that permeates any will to do anything

against it. Ultimately the logic of the denunciation is entirely overturned. It was aimed at showing

how the capitalist machine cheated those who were submitted to its power. Now it tells us that the

empire of the capitalist machine is only the product of the frantic desire of those individuals to



consume still more commodities, spectacles and forms of self-enjoyment. The guilt of the system

has become the guilt of the individuals that are subjected to it. Capitalism is thus said to be nothing

more than the reign of mass individualism or democratic individualism.

Now this criticism has taken a step further, to persuade us that those narcissistic consumers

of commodities, spectacles and all forms of self-enjoyment were responsible not only for the reign

of Capitalism but also for the totalitarian destruction of any political and social community and

ultimately of the symbolic order structuring any human community . This is another interesting

case of reversal of the old oppositions. Fifty years ago the dominant discourse in the western world

counter-posed the democratic freedom of the individuals to collective totalitarianism. In 1989

the collapse of the Soviet system was hailed in the Western World as the end of “totalitarianism”

and the triumph of democracy, viewed as human rights +free market+ free individual choice. But

what happened was quite different : in the following years more and more furious intellectual

campaigns trumpeted the disaster that was made to democracies by an enemy called democracy

and more precisely by the disastrous democratic connection between “human rights “ and “ free

individual choice”. A lot of sociologists, political philosophers and moralists began to explain us

that democracy and the rights of Man, as Marx had proved it, were merely the rights of the egoistic

bourgeois individual. This reappropriation supposed the same twist turning the discourse of

progress into a discourse of decadence. In Marx’s original text, this meant that “formal democracy”

was the historical form of domination of the Bourgeoisie, a form under which the Bourgeoisie

was preparing the conditions of its own destruction, thereby a state of “real democracy” in which

liberty and equality would no more be political appearances but would be enjoyed in the reality

of material life. The new readers of Marx rewrote the story: “democracy” was no more for them

the transitory form of the Bourgeois domination; it was the reality of Modern society as the reign

of decadence born from the triumph of the “mass individual”. And the rights of Man were said to

be the rights of the consumers to any kind of consumption – a right that pushed them to overstep

all the limits to their thirst for consumption, thereby to destroy all the traditional institutions

and forms of authority, imposing a limit to the power of the market, such as family, school or

religion. This is, they said, what democracy means in fact: the power of the individual consumer

who cares for nothing but the satisfaction of his or her needs and desires, the equality between

the seller and the buyer of any commodity. Therefore they concluded that what the democratic

individual wants is the triumph of the market in all the spheres of life , hence the destruction of all

forms of traditional authority and transmission that constitute a symbolic order. When the twin

towers were destroyed, a well-known French philosopher, psychoanalyst and professor of Roman



30│

Law, Pierre Legendre, explained in a leading French news paper that the attack was the return of

the repressed in Western civilization, the castigation for the western overthrow of the symbolic

order, an overthrow emblematized by same-sex marriage. Two years after, a French linguist and

philosopher, Jean-Claude Milner gave a more radical turn to that interpretation in a book entitled

The Criminal Tendencies of Democratic Europe. The crime that he imputed to “democratic Europe”

was quite simply the extermination of the European Jews. As the Jewish people is the people

faithful to the law of kinship and transmission, it stood up as the only obstacle to the democratic

desire of unlimitedness. That’s why democracy, he said, had to exterminate the Jews and was the

only beneficiary of the genocide.

In such a way the criticism of the market, consumer’s society and the spectacle ends up

denouncing the so-called democratic individual, whose thirst for consumption is blamed for all

the evils in the contemporary world. The conclusion is that state powers and economic powers had

better make their decisions without consulting those irresponsible individuals. But that’s not the

whole picture. According to that logic, the most dangerous democratic consumers are first those

who have the less money to consume, second those who rebel against the empire of exploitation

and consumption. The intertwinement of the two aspects was put forward, when violent riots

burst out three years ago in the poor suburbs of Paris populated mostly by families coming from

Maghreb and from Black Africa. The rioters destroyed a number of buildings that were symbols of

the forms of domination they were enduring, from shops to schools. Therefore the spokespersons

of French “left” intelligentsia explained that the desire of the young rebels was just to eliminate all

what stood before themselves and the objects of their desires that were quite simply the images

of consumer’s society ideal goods that they saw on TV. So the inhabitants of the poorest suburbs

turned out to embody the narcissism and hedonism of consumer’s society. This criticism is not

only testimony to the kind of racism which permeates a certain form of so-called “universalist”

thinking to-day. It is part of a wider trend of thought for which all the disasters of the present

come from the poor: I mentioned the denunciation of the workers clinging to their privileges and

the little men robbing the creative agents of social wealth. We can also think of the more and more

violent ecological campaigns that target those backward populations polluting the planet because

they ignore intelligent consuming, clean energy and birth control.

This recycling of the former themes of social contestation ends up quite logically

denouncing all form of revolt as a contribution to the logic of domination. This is how the anti-

capitalist students’ movements of the 60’s and more specifically the French movements of 68 were



accused, in retrospect, to have paved the way for the triumph of the market. Through their criticism

of authority and authoritarian institutions, so the argument goes, they allowed our societies to

become free aggregations of unbound molecules, whirling in the void, deprived of any affiliation,

entirely available to the empire of the market. Not only did those movements provide the capitalist

market with the consumers that he needed. They also provided Capitalism with the tools for

overcoming its crisis. A very influential book written by two French sociologists explained that

the anti-authoritarian movement of 68 had given to Capitalism in a time of crisis new thoughts

and new weapons allowing for its rejuvenation. The book was called The New Spirit of Capitalism

.Their argument is that the movement of May 68 developed what they call an artistic criticism of

Capitalism, claiming for authenticity, autonomy and creativity, at the expense of the claims of “social

criticism” struggling against misery, social inequality and bourgeois egoism. Now their claims

for autonomy and creativity paved the way for new forms of management, based on individual

initiative, collective creativity and overall flexibility. This alleged takeover came as supplementary

evidence that those who rebel against a system are unwilling accomplices of this system, cheated

by the mechanism of ideological inversion. In the Marxist tradition, the opposite of ideology is

science, which enlightens the ways of the social machine and the future toward which it is heading.

Now what if this future is the triumph of the global market?

So it turns out that the so-called end of the grand narrative is much more a remix of its

elements and a reversal of its functioning, that ends up proposing two alternative versions of

the same narrative: either the “optimistic “and “progressive” narrative mixing Marxist historical

necessity with the economical faith in the providence that makes evil serve the triumph of Good;

or the pessimistic and reactionary narrative of democratic Humankind destroying itself in his

frantic thirst for consumption. Both versions come to the same conclusion, which reads as an

inversion of the slogan of the new American president: Change; No we can’t; which means of

course: no, you can’t. You can’t for two reasons: first because you can’t oppose the historical

necessity that will draw the good from the evil; next, because your will to change will add up to the

disastrous reign of democratic individualism leading humankind toward its self-destruction.

I tried to sketch out briefly the mechanism of this reversal of Marxism and the critical

tradition that incorporate them into the logic of domination. I tried to show the intertwinement

of two temporal plots that is at the core of this reversal. From this point on, the question is: what

idea of time can take distance from this scenario? There is a first way of tackling the issue that

has been mostly used by radical thinking to-day. It consists in using one of the plots against the



32│

other. On the one hand, there is the attempt to ground a new radicalism in the revival of the

progressive plot. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt set out to disentangle the Marxian theme

of the “dematerialisation” of production and of social relations from the plot of decadence with

which authors like Sloterdijk had entangled it. They reconnected it with the progressive plot which

is at the core of Marxist faith: the plot which sees the future of communist freedom and “real”

democracy already present in the forms of capitalist domination. What capitalism mostly produces

to-day, instead of goods available to private appropriation is the network of human communication

where production, consumption and exchange are no more separated but match up in the same

collective process. So the content of capitalist production is said to break through the capitalist

form. It increasingly turns out to be the same as the communist power of cooperative immaterial

labour. But this equation can be put the other way round: the communism which is already

present in the forms of capitalist production is the communism of Capitalism. In his book Good

bye Mr Socialism Antonio Negri cites the statement made by another theorist that the financial

institution, notably with the institution of pension funds, is the only institution able to-day to give

us the measure of accumulated and unified labour so that the capitalist institution can be said to

embody the reality of collective labour: a communism of the Capital that should be turned into

a communism of the multitudes. But the condition for this turns out again to be that no archaic

workers’ movement clinging to outmoded forms of “fordist” production and struggle stand in the

way of the communist promise encapsulated in the reign of financial Capitalism.

A similar problem is raised by the opposite attempt at playing one temporal plot against the

other: it sets out to rephrase the discourse of decadence as a discourse prompting the decision of

a radical break away from the present. This rephrasing can be illustrated with a book written by a

group of French activists with the title The coming Insurrection. That book received an unexpected

publicity from the fact that his redactors were arrested by the French police after an act of

sabotage on a railway track and accused of terrorist action. But I am only dealing now with the

argumentation of the book that can be summed up by its first page which reads as follows:

“Whatever angle you look at it from, there's no escape from the present. That's not the

least of its virtues. For those who want absolutely to have hope, it knocks down every support.

Those who claim to have solutions are proven wrong almost immediately. It's understood that now

everything can only go from bad to worse. "There's no future for the future" is the wisdom behind

an era that for all its appearances of extreme normalcy has come to have about the consciousness

level of the first punks.



The sphere of political representation is closed. From left to right, it's the same nothingness

acting by turns either as the big shots or the virgins, the same sales shelf heads, changing up their

discourse according to the latest dispatches from the information service. Those who still vote

give one the impression that their only intention is to knock out the polling booths by voting as a

pure act of protest. And we've started to understand that in fact it’s only against the vote itself that

people go on voting. Nothing we've seen can come up to the heights of the present situation; not

by far. By its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more 'grown up' than all those squabbling

amongst themselves to govern it do.”

The redactors of the text have taken up the discourse of those who denounce the collapse

of our civilization and give this collapse the name “democracy”. There is no escape from a present

which a present of “nothingness” or a present of “democratic anaesthesia” , no future for the future,

no hope. This “nothingness” appears to be the very condition of another future, for a salute arising

from the very absence of hope or future. This is why they affirm, for instance, that those who still

vote unwittingly vote against the vote and that the best form of resistance that can be opposed to

the existing order of domination is silence: such affirmations resonate as anticipated derision of

the democratic street protests that reacted against electoral fraud in Iran. All protests of that kind

must appear illusory in order that the nothingness be recognized and that the revolutionary break

appear as the only way out of nothingness. According to that logic, the possible can happen only

out of the absolute impossibility of any possibility, it can only happen as the time which comes

after the end. The question thus arises: who is capable to handle this possibility? Once it has been

proved that our world is a world of narcissistic individuals, what remains to be done but call for a

radical change, a call which sounds like the heideggerian prophecy calling to the reversal on the

verge of the abyss. Only a god can save us, said Heidegger. Who can play the part of this god? Who

can enact the possibility of the impossible?

Those two examples show us that the way out of the intellectual counter-revolution must

be a way out of its “time”: I mean a way out of the temporality that it frames that is a temporality

of the “impossible”. Now my point is that that temporality of the impossible is predicated itself

on the tradition that makes the impossible the condition of the possible. Making the impossible

the condition of the possible, this is done in two ways: in the progressive plot, domination and

inequality create the conditions of liberation and equality: for instance, the schoolmaster exerts his

authority to transmit his pupils the knowledge that will make them his equals; capitalism creates



34│

the riches and the forms of cooperative labour that will make the overthrow of capitalism possible,

etc. In the negative plot, the absolute dispossession and the loss of all social bonds lead to the

absolute disaster which is the condition of liberation. The two plots are attested by the Marxist

tradition: on the one hand, there is the thesis that the development of the capitalist productive

forces must explode the capitalist relations of production; on the other hand, there is the statement

that the proletariat is the class produced by the decomposition of society, the class of those who

have nothing to loose except their chains. The Marxian tradition has incorporated those two plots.

But they must be traced back to their origins: on the one hand there is the optimist theory of the

invisible hand that makes the particular vices of greed serve the common good; on the one hand

there is the counter-revolutionary analysis of modern democracy and French Revolution as the

dissolution of the traditional bonds that constitute a society. The Marxist tradition incorporated

those two plots and connected them by constructing a scheme of historical progress and historical

education giving to the disinherited both the material conditions of their future wealth and the

awareness of their present misery. The intellectual counterrevolution rearranged the connection

so as to favour either the “optimist” plot by making the invisible hand of the free market inherit

the promise of global happiness or the pessimist one by describing our present as the misery of an

excess of riches. The attempts at breaking with the intellectual counterrevolution are still caught

in the same emplotment of time. I think it is important to rethink the tradition of emancipation

by subtracting it to the “time of the impossible”. This rethinking entails the reaffirmation of three

basic principles: first, the impossible does not create the possible; the possible alone creates the

possible; next, inequality does not create the conditions of equality; equality alone creates the

conditions of equality; finally, there are always several times in one time, the time of the possible is

not the outcome of the time of the impossible; it is its inner division.

I wish to illustrate briefly those three statements out of my own research about the history

of workers’ emancipation in 19th century France. When I first started working on the emergence

of modern forms of workers’ struggle, I was struck by the opposition of two logics. One is the

logic of the Marxist Critique of Democracy and the Rights of Man I recalled earlier. That critique

spells out the gap between the formal declaration that makes all Men born “free and equal” and

the reality of the forms of inequality, domination and exploitation. Marx interpreted this gap as

evidence of a process of dissimulation: in his view, the French Revolutionaries had put on the togas

of Greek and Roman free citizens to achieve the Bourgeois Revolution. And the formal equality

of the citizen was a mask hiding the reality of the domination of the Bourgeois Man. The French

workers who, at the same time, were organizing strikes or other movements of protest noticed the



same gap: all French Men were supposed to be equal, but only a tiny minority of wealthy people

could vote; they were supposed to be free, but the workers could not create associations to discuss

and defend their interests. But they interpreted the gap differently: not as an opposition between

reality and appearance but as a distance between two realities. The declaration of freedom and

equality inscribed in the texts was a reality. That reality had a very narrow field of effectiveness

indeed . Nevertheless it opened a possibility. It was up to them to grab hold of that possibility to

widen the field of effectiveness of equality. This is what they did, not only by stopping work but by

constructing their strikes or other forms of action as a demonstration of equality in three respects

: first the demonstration that their claims were rightful , which means that they could discuss

issues of work as equal intelligent beings and not only as one part opposed to another; next, the

demonstration that they could act publicly as equal men and citizens in spite of the “illegality”

of their action and the force of the means of repression ; and finally, the demonstration that , in

the same way that they could leave the workshops of their masters, they could open their own

workshops and prove their ability to organize production by themselves.

Only the possible creates the possible. It creates it as it constructs a demonstration of

capacity. This is the second point I announced: achievements of equality are not simply rights or

shares won in the battle against the enemy; they are achievements of an equal capacity. Equality is

not the goal targeted by those are unequal, it is the development of its won power or the capacity

of producing effects on its own. The core of social emancipation is intellectual emancipation.

Intellectual emancipation is the principle that the French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot opposed to the

dominant pedagogical discourse: that discourse started from the reality of inequality and proposed

“instruction” as the means of reducing inequality, of making the unequal less unequal or more

equal. This is the paradigm of the school teacher who sets out to exert his authority in order to give

the pupils the knowledge that will make them equal; this was also the paradigm of the progressive

instruction of the people, stating that the ignorant masses had first to be instructed in order to

become able to act as citizens. Jacotot put the whole story upside down: he showed that the so-

called progressive reduction of inequality is the way of reproducing indefinitely the distance that

one pretends to abolish. In order to replace ignorance by the adequate knowledge, the master must

always run one step ahead of the ignorant and confirm the ignorance he is supposed to dismiss.

That’s why he said that it was not a question of instructing the people to make them capable of

equality. What was needed was only to announce that they could emancipate by themselves by

endorsing the presupposition of the equality of any intelligence with any other intelligence and by

acting in order to verify the reality of that power, which is the power of anyone at all. For it must



36│

be clear that the point is not only to say “I can” or “we can”. The point is to equate this affirmation

with the affirmation of a capacity which does not belong to any specific individual, group of class, a

capacity which belongs to anyone and everyone.

There is no passage from inequality to equality. There is a passage from inequality to

inequality or a passage from equality to equality. This means that there is a struggle to tip the

balance of the two logics. The emancipatory process is the self-development of the sphere of

reality of the possible framed by the enactment of the capacity of anyone and everyone. This idea

stands in clear opposition to the strategic views of emancipation, based on the distinction between

the ends and the means. If equality is not a goal but a point of departure, this also means that the

“means” of equality can only be the forms of affirmation of equality.

Those two principles entail a third one, concerning time. The time of emancipation is

constructed both within the time of domination and against it. Time is not only the succession of

hours, days and events. Time is an order of subordination that has to be split up from the inside.

When Plato sets out to construct its Republic, starting with the four artisans of the primitive city,

he makes a statement which appears trivial: he says that artisans cannot leave their workplace

because “work does not wait”. As a matter of facts, there are many times when no work waits for

the artisans. So the statement is in reality a prescription: they must have no time to do anything

other than their work. They must live in the time of those who have no time. Being a worker is

an occupation that entails that you have no time to be elsewhere than the place you are geared

for occupying. – which means that you have no time to chat on the agora , make decisions in

the assembly or look at shadows in the theatre. This is what I call a distribution of the sensible: a

relation between a way of doing and a way of being, between being in a specific space and time,

performing specific activities and being endowed with capacities of seeing, saying and doing that

“fit” those activities. The distribution of the sensible turns the empirical fact that those who work

to earn their livings have their time devoured by work into a symbolic prescription embodied in

the very texture of the sensible world.

The condition of emancipation thus is the splitting of this “time”. Splitting the time of

domination, this means separating the material necessity from the symbolic prescription. It is

a question of affirming that those who “have not” the time have the time that “they have not”.

But the point is that one can refute the prescription only by refuting the necessity: that refusal

is enacted in the collective action of stopping work though one needs it for earning one’s livings.



But the possibility of this collective interruption of the time of necessity presupposes a less visible

and more radical splitting of the time. The very core of the distribution of the sensible that makes

the symbolic and the material coincide is the division of Night and Day. The division has it that

those who work all the day long must sleep during the night to restore their force and go back to

work heartedly the day after. This is why the core of workers’ emancipation was the intellectual

decision and the physical attempt to break this circle, to put off as long as possible the entry into

sleep and use this time for reading, writing and discussing, for composing workers’ pamphlets

and newspapers but also poetry, that is, in both cases, a linguistic performance that broke away

from the ways of saying geared to the identity of the worker who knows that “work does not wait”

. This is what I called a dissensus: a rupture in the very distribution of the sensible in which the

categories of domination are embodied. That’s why I called the book that I dedicated to workers’

emancipation “The Night of the Proletarians”. In a sense the whole issue of emancipation was

encapsulated in that quasi imperceptible interruption of the normal round of work and repose,

allowing those workers to both prepare for the future and live in the present the suspension of

the hierarchy subordinating those dedicated to manual labour to those dedicated to the task of

thinking. Only at this cost was it possible to oppose an alternative present to the present framed by

the law of domination. An alternative present is the opening of an alternative time, a time in which

those who have no time take the time that they have not, a time in which more generally those

who “cannot” can.

This intertwinement of time and capacity in the creation of a specific present and a specific

temporality is crucial for any thinking of emancipation. It is that linkage which is lost, I think,

when one identifies the forces of the communist future with the forces created by the “communism

of capitalism”. Therefore the theory of Antonio Negri oscillates between a classical thinking

making the power of the multitudes the result of the accumulation of capitalist wealth and a view

which predicates this power on the capacity of secession or “exodus” of the living productive

forces that are composed by the forces of protest as well as by those of creative work. The same

linkage is lost if one thinks of the creation of new collective forces as the radical surge born from

the very experience of the disaster. The writers of The Coming Insurrection oppose the reigning

nothingness with the autonomisation of new “communes”. But the capacities that are enacted by

those communes are not very different from those that they had discarded as forms of complicity

with the existing order of domination. As for me, I proposed to predicate an idea of emancipatory

politics on the three principles I tried to bring out very briefly: the inversion that makes equality

a point of departure and not a goal; the deduction from equality to equality or from the possible



38│

to the possible; the idea of a dissensus and the thinking of the splitting of time. I proposed to

reframe on this basis the idea of democracy by reviving the original scandal spelled out in the

very name of the demos: the power of the demos as the competence of the “incompetents” who

have no qualification for exerting power: the competence of anyone, or more accurately the

competence implemented in the verification of the equality of anyone with everyone . This power

is at the same time the condition that makes any political power thinkable and the “competence”

which is continuously denied by the exercise of power. This is why it must create its own sphere

of effectiveness through operations of dissensus that reframe the landscape of the common and

impose the presence of another time in the time of domination. Such an idea of democracy

opposes the two mainstream ideas of democracy, which make it either a form of government or a

state of society. As I mentioned earlier there was a time when the two ideas seemed to coincide. But

during the last two decades we have seen the scepticism about that harmony increase. The same

governments that sent troops to establish democracy in foreign countries were more and more

concerned with limiting the “excess” of democracy in their own country. And the intellectuals

who were used to praise the virtues of democracy against totalitarian evil have been keener and

keener on denouncing the democratic evil meaning the reign of consumption and the loss of

all transcendent values. This is what is often called the “crisis” of democracy. In my view there is

no crisis. Both phenomena only testify to both the reinforcement of state powers and capitalist

oligarchy and the intensification of the greed for inequality among the intellectual elites. This

situation can be the opportunity to put to the fore an entirely different concept of democracy as

the collective power born from the collectivisation of all the ruptures operated by the affirmation

of the capacity of anyone and everyone, an autonomous power dedicated to the deepening of

all those ruptures and the widening of the field of effectiveness of that capacity. There is a strong

debate indeed whether it is appropriate to use a notion that can be given to very different things

and appropriated by opposite forces. One can discuss whether we hear in the word the sound of

the protests in the streets of Teheran or the sound of the bombs in Iraqi or Afghan villages. But

the issue at stake is whether we agree or not with the idea of the capacity of those who are under

the bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan and the capacity of those who are purchased by the police in

the streets of Iranian towns to handle their own destiny. The point is that a great number of those

who acclaim the Iranian protesters are keen on thinking that the best that the Iraqis or Afghans

can hope, is democracy imported by foreign troops, and a gret number of those who denounce

the bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan are keen on thinking that the democratic protests in Iran

are the fact of a small westernized elite and that the Iranian grassroots have the president that

suits them. This is what is really at issue in the debate. All political names are controversial names:



democracy, people, nation, community, communism, etc. Politics is about the appropriation of

names. The real issue at stake is whether we predicate politics on the presupposition of Equality

or on the presupposition of Inequality. It is whether we determine the present state of the world

as the global and inescapable result of a historical destiny or as a present made of several presents.

It is whether we think of the future as the accomplishment of that historical destiny, as a radical

jump into another time or as the world made possible by the present constructed to-day by the

multiple forms of achievement of equality or the multiple disruptions of the oligarchic order. I

have evoked the thinker of intellectual emancipation, Joseph Jacotot. He said: equality is not a

truth, it is an “opinion”. To say that it is an “opinion” does not amount to saying: just an idea in

mind. It means the choice of a presupposition against another. And it means the decision to verify

the presupposition, to experiment what can be done on its basis. As for me I made the hypothesis

that one could construct an idea of politics as a verification of the capacity of anyone and everyone.

I have no decisive argument against those who may oppose me that politics is only the exercise

of power or the struggle for power except that, if it is so, politics too can be thought a superfluous

world to designate power and conflicts of power. I have no lesson to give as to the necessity of

choosing a presupposition instead of another. What I tried to do is just to propose some clues for

understanding the issues at stake in the choice.



40│

The Politics of FictionJacques Rancière


(draft)

The title I gave to this talk is obviously a bit too ambitious. I am not going to tell what the

politics of fiction consists in .I will tackle the issue from a restricted angle, which is the discussion

on the signification of realistic description in modern novel. In 1968 Roland Barthes published

his canonical article The Reality Effect. This text starts by focusing on a detail picked up in a

canonical example of French literature, Flaubert’s short story A simple heart published in 1877.

As he describes the living room of the house where her character lives, the writer tells us that “An

old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons”. The question

immediately arises: why mention this barometer? Obviously he is of no use to follow the plot;

it tells nothing about the main character of the story. Nor does the pyramidal heap of boxes and

cartons make us see anything determinate. It is clear however that those useless details can not

be merely imputed to the lack of discernment of a particular writer. The point is not about a

superfluous element in a description: it is about description itself. The superfluous barometer

points to a wider problem or a paradox. In European literature, the 19th century appears as the

great age of the novel, the moment of its greater artistic achievements and of its deeper significance

as a form of interpretation of social and historical experience. But, on the other hand, this great

age of the novel appears to be the time when the narrative logic is more and more thwarted by an

excess of description which stands in the way of the plot. Balzac’s descriptions of each piece of

furniture in provincial parlours are the best known case of this excess. But the same accusation

has been voiced by 20th century writers against their elders. In the Surrealist Manifesto, André

Breton opposes the absolute rights of poetic imagination to the plainness of realistic description.

He illustrates his criticism by discarding Dostoyevsky’s description of the wallpaper and

furniture of the usurer’s room in Crime and Punishment with a few words: “He is wasting his

time, for I refuse to go into his room”. In his prologue to Bioy Casares’ novel The Invention of

Morel, Borges opposes the true work of the writer which is the invention of an ingenious plot to

the burdensome commitment of the great French novelists to everyday reality. Even in Marcel

Proust who is not held to be a “naturalist” novelist, he finds too many pages and chapters that are,

40│40│41「虛構之政治」The Politics of Fiction


he says, “unacceptable as inventions” and that we have to accept as we do with “the insipid and

idle everyday”. The question I will address is the following: how can we interpret this coincidence

between the triumph of the novel and this invasion of the prosaic and idle everyday? How are we

understand that the great age of fiction coincide with a rupture in the narrative logic?

Roland Barthes’s text appears to offer an account for this paradox. The critique of the

“reality effect” is in keeping with the denunciation of realism in the name of both the free

deployment of fiction and the perfection of the plot. It is predicated on the modernist idea of the

work of art as the autonomous development of its own inner necessity, dismissing the old logic of

resemblance and referentiality. This modernist idea of the work of art connects with the method

of the structural analysis which envisions the work as a machine in which each piece has a definite

place and function. In this respect the barometer is clearly superfluous. But if the structuralist

method is coherent, it must account for this “superfluity”. It has to prove that the superfluous is

not superfluous, that literary works which do not obey the structuralist principle of economy are

nevertheless accountable for a structural analysis. The superfluous must be given a place and a

status in the structure. Now the status that Barthes gives it is the typical status that the modernist

presupposition can give to what is in excess: the status of the survivor. Barthes offers two reasons

for the realistic excess. First it follows a tradition that dates back to Antiquity, the tradition of the

“epidictic” discourse in which the object of the description matters less than the deployment of

brilliant images and metaphors , showing the virtuosity of the author for the sole sake of aesthetic

pleasure. Second, it has a function of attestation. If an element is somewhere though there is

no reason for its being-there, this means precisely that its being-there is unconditional, that it is

there simply because it is there. So the useless detail says: I am the real, the real which is useless,

meaningless, the real which proves its reality out of the very fact that it is useless and meaningless.

This attestation of the real appears to backtrack on an opposition that structured the

logic of representation. Since Aristotle it had been taken for granted that poetic fiction consists

in constructing a plot of verisimilitude, a logical concatenation of actions as they might have

happened. Aristotle opposed that logic of fiction to history that just told facts as they happen,

one after the other. From that point of view, the reality-effect breaks away from the causal logic

of representation. But it does it by implementing a half-way strategy: it takes up the ‘realistic”

principle of history by clinging to the real as real, and it makes it a new kind of verisimilitude

opposed to the classical one. Now, Barthes says, this new type of verisimilitude became the nucleus

of a fetishism of the real, characteristic of media culture and illustrated by photography, news



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reports, tourism devoted to monuments and historical places, etc. All this stuff, Barthes concludes,

“tells us that the Real is supposed to be self-sufficient, that it is strong enough to deny any idea of

a fiction, that its enunciation does not need to be integrated in a structure and that the having-

been-here of things is a sufficient condition for them being told”. That which is fascinating in this

sentence is indeed the way it lends itself to an overturning that will happen ten years after when

Barthes will make the “having-been-here” of things the punctum which is the truth of photography

and repudiates the pointless informative content of the studium. Now this overturning has been

made possible precisely by the very construction of a simple opposition between the fictional

structure and the absolute singularity of the mere “having-been here”. I think that a closer

consideration of the “pyramid of boxes and cartons” on the old piano might have provided the

analysis with a third term that could have disrupted the too simple opposition between the

functional rationality of the narrative structure and the absolute singularity. I’ll try to show that

the “idle everyday” of the realistic novel is the place and time of a bifurcation of times more radical

than the bifurcation of paths and narrative lines cherished by Borges, and that the focussing on the

reality effect misses the real disruption that is at the heart of aesthetic fiction. It misses it because

the “modernist” idea of the structure is still in keeping with the representative logic that it pretends

to challenge, so that it also misses the political issue involved in the “realistic” excess.

The point is in fact that the opposition of the “structure” to the “idle” or “pointless”

notations of the “real re-enacts a much older criticism of realistic fiction that had been already

made by many critics, and mostly reactionary critics. Flaubert’s descriptions on which Barthes’s

analysis focuses are a very significant case in point. At the very time of his writing , a number of

critics already targeted the enumeration of details, the rage of description that filled his novels and

characterized more widely contemporary literature. For instance his contemporary, the catholic

writer and literary critic Barbey d’Aurevilly, denounced his “infinite, eternal, atomistic, blinding

“practice of description. As he put it

“there is no book there; there is not this thing , this creation , this work of art constituted by a

book with an organized development(..) He goes without a plan, pushing ahead, without a preconceived

overview, not being aware that life, under the diversity and the apparent disorder of its vagaries has its

logical and inflexible laws (…) it is a loitering among the insignificant, the vulgar and the abject for the

sole pleasure of the walking”.



This criticism is clearly predicated on a certain idea of fiction. It is predicated on the

Aristotelian or representative idea of fiction. According to that idea, a work of art is a definite

kind of structure: it is an organic totality, possessing all the constituent parts necessary for life and

nothing more; it must look like a living body endowed with all the required limbs, assembled in the

unity of a form, under the commandment of a head that sets the limbs into motion . The “realistic

“novel falls short of this requirement. For Barbey the point is not only that there are some details,

which contribute nothing to the working of the fictional structure and only play the part of the real

affirming “I am the real”. The point is that the parts are not subordinated to the whole; the limbs

don’t obey the head. The new realistic novel is a monster. It belongs to a new fictional cosmology

in which the functional concatenation of ideas and actions, of causes and effects no longer works.

In the boxes of the new novelist, all things are lumped together. The artist has become a worker.

He carries his sentences ahead, Barbey says, just as a roadman carries his stones ahead in a

wheelbarrow. The comparison shows that this new fictional cosmology is a new social cosmology

as well. Another critic of the same time made the point about the political signification of that way

of writing: This is democracy, he said: democracy in literature or literature as democracy. The

“insignificance” of the details is tantamount to their perfect equality. They are equally important or

equally pointless. The reason why they are so is that they concern people whose life is insignificant.

Those people clutter up the space, leaving no room for the selection of interesting characters and

the harmonious development of a plot. It is exactly the opposite of the traditional novel, the novel

of the monarchical and aristocratic times, which benefited from the space created by a clearly

stratified social hierarchy: in this space, I quote

‘The characters embodying all the refinements of birth, education and the heart left no room for

secondary figures, still less for material objects. This exquisite society saw ordinary people only through

the doors of its carriages and the countryside only through the windows of its palaces. This left wide and

fertile scope for the analysis of the finest sentiments, which are always more complicated and harder to

decipher in the souls of the elite than amongst the lower classes.’

The reactionary critic bluntly tells us the social basis of the representative poetics: the

structural relation of the parts to the whole rested on a partition between the souls of the elite

and those of the lower classes. When this partition vanishes, fiction gets overfilled with the

insignificant events and sensations of all those common people who either were not counted

within the representative logic or were counted at their (lower) place and represented in the

(lower) genres fitting their condition. This is what the rupture of the logic of verisimilitude means.



44│

Barthes referred that logic to the old Aristotelian opposition between poetry and history indeed

, but he forgot that this formal poetic distinction was also a political one. Poetry was defined as

a concatenation of actions, opposed to the mere historical succession of facts . But “action” is not

the mere fact of doing something. Action is a sphere of existence. Concatenations of actions could

only concern individuals who lived in the sphere of action, who were capable of conceiving great

designs and of risking them in the confrontation with other great designs and with the strokes of

Fortune. They could not concern people who were bogged down in the condition of bare life,

devoted to the sole task of its infinite reproduction. Verisimilitude is not only about what effect can

be expected from a cause; it is also about what can be expected from an individual living in this or

that situation, what kind of perception, feeling and behaviour can be attributed to him or her.

In other terms, the question of fiction contains two questions which impact on each

other. Fiction designates a certain arrangement of events. But fiction also designates the relation

of a referential world to alternative worlds. This is not a question of relation between the real and

the imaginary. This is a question of a distribution of capacities of sensory experience, of what

individuals can live, what they can experience and how far their feelings, gestures and behaviours

are worth telling to other individuals. This is the case with the short story Barthes is referring to,

namely Flaubert’s A simple heart. The barometer is not here to attest that the real is the real. The

question is not about the real , it is about life , about the moment when “bare life” - life normally

devoted to look , day after day, whether the whether will be fine or bad - takes on the temporality

of a chain of sensuous events that are worth telling. The idle barometer expresses a still unheard-

of poetics of life, evincing the capacity of anybody, for instance Flaubert’s old servant, to turn the

routine of the everyday into the depth of passion. And in Flaubert’s story the same passionate

feeling can be devoted indifferently to a lover, a master, a kid and eventually a parrot. The reality

effect is an equality effect. But equality does not simply mean the equivalence of all the objects and

feelings described by the novelist .It is not the case that all sensations are equivalent. It is the case

that any sensation can produce for any woman belonging to the “lower classes” the vertiginous

acceleration making her able to experience the abysses of passion.

This is what the superfluous barometer is about. And this is what the reactionary

contemporaries of Flaubert have in mind when they equate the excess of description with the

invasion of “democracy”. The point is not that there are too many things. The point is that there

are two many possibilities given to anybody to use anything as an object of passion. This is the

frightening signification of literary “democracy” anybody can feel anything. The object of this



passion does not matter. Felicité, the servant in A simple heart is a perfect servant. But she no longer

serves as one must do, according to both the logic of poetic verisimilitude and the duty of a good

servant. She does it too lovingly; she does it with an intensity of feeling and passion that exceeds

by far the intensity of her mistress’s feelings. This intensity is not only useless, it is dangerous.

Some years before A Simple Heart Flaubert’s colleagues and friends, the Goncourt Brothers had

published the story of another servant, Germinie Lacerteux. Germinie too is fanatically devoted

to her mistress. But in the course of the novel it appears that the passion that makes her a perfect

servant also makes her a woman able of anything to serve her own passions and her own sexual

desires up to the last degree of degradation.

So the angelic Felicité and the monstrous Germinie are two sisters; both belong to the

dangerous family of those daughters of peasants who prove able to feel every violent desire or

every ideal aspiration as well. It is this new capacity of anyone to live alternative lifes which forbids

the right subordination of the parts to the whole. There is no book, says Barbey, but only pictures,

nailed together. The aristocratic deployment of the action is blocked by the democratic clutter of

images. But what happens is much more a double loss with respect to the representative logic. Just

as the action has lost its former structure of a concatenation of causes and effects, the image has

lost its old functions of conveying the emotional quality of the action or displaying pleasant views

during its pauses. Action and perception, narration and image have become one and the same

fabric of sensory micro-events. The critics denounce them as “images “that obstruct the straight

way of the plot. But “image” is an ambiguous term. As a matter of fact, the so-called images don’t

give us so much to see. [ Burke had already given the reason for this: violent emotions and passions

are best conveyed by words than by visual representation, because words do not really make what

they describe visible. This is the case indeed for the still-unheard form of violence which consists

in the capacity of anyone to experience any kind of feeling – either sublime or abject. ]Images are

not descriptions of the visible. They are operators producing differences of intensity. Now those

differences of intensity evince a re-distribution of the sensory capacities, or ,to put it as Plato did ,

of the hierarchy between golden souls and iron souls. The democracy of the realistic novel is the

music of the equal capacity of anyone to experience any kind of life. The “image” is not added to

the narration, it has become the music of equality in which the very opposition between action

and image vanishes.

This is, I think, the real issue at stake in the so-called reality effect. Barthes’s analysis does

not take into account this political issue because, in my view, the idea of structure which sustains



46│

his investigation of the status of the ‘real” in literature is still in keeping with the idea of structure

entailed in the representative logic: the structure as a functional arrangement of causes and

effects that subordinates the parts to the whole. Structural analysis, for him, has to account for

“the entire surface of the narrative fabric” and assign every narrative unit a place in the structure.

Therefore the “structuralist” analyst comes up against the same scandal as the champions of the

representative poetics: descriptive notations that fulfil no function and thereby “increase the cost

of narrative information”. He equates it with the tautological affirmation of the real as the real. But

I think that the criticism of the reactionary champions of the old verisimilitude felt more accurately

what was at stake: the invasion of “democracy” they said: a new “stubborn” social reality bursting

out any good structure of the plot, any right concatenation of actions. This is the point: Barthes

analyzes the “reality effect” from the “modernist” point of view , equating literary modernity, and

its political import, with a purification of the plot-structure, brushing aside the parasitic images

of “the real”. But literature as the modern configuration of the art of writing is just the contrary:

it is the suppression of the boundaries delineating the space of this purity. What is at stake in this

“excess” is not the opposition of the singular to the structure. It is the conflict of two distributions

of the sensible.

Nineteenth Century critics drew a straight line from democracy viewed of as the

Tocquevillian “equality of conditions “to the realistic proliferation of superfluous details. But

the link between political democracy and literary democracy is much more complicated. And it

is this complexity which is reflected in the tensions of fiction. The tension between “action” and

“description” does not only oppose modern literature to the old poetic rules. It also dwells in

the very heart of modern literary fiction. The issue of the “descriptive excess” points to this inner

tension. I’ll try to show it by going back over one of the criticisms I mentioned at the beginning:

André Breton’s criticism of Dostoyevsky’ description of the usurer’s room. I quote first his

quotation, then his comment:

“The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls, geraniums

and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by the setting sun… The

furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with a huge bent wooden back, an oval table

in front of the sofa, a dressing-table with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along

the walls and two or three half-penny prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in

their hands—that was all.”



I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying itself with such matters,

even fleetingly. It may be argued that this school-boy description has its place, and that at this

juncture of the book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is wasting his

time, for I refuse to go into his room”.

But the refusal to go into the room misses the crucial question: what does “his room”

mean or “whose room “it is? And this is what Dostoyevsky’s description is about. In fact he

describes two rooms in one. Significantly André Breton has skipped in his quotation two sentences

that construct this duality. So let me read over the whole passage:

“The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on the walls, geraniums and

muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly lighted up at that moment by the setting sun. “So the sun

will shine like this then too!” flashed as it were by chance through Raskolnikov’s mind, and with a

rapid glance he scanned everything in the room, trying as far as possible to notice and remember

its arrangement. But there was nothing special in the room. The furniture, all very old and of yellow

wood, consisted of a sofa with a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a dressing-table

with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows, chairs along the walls and two or three half-penny

prints in yellow frames, representing German damsels with birds in their hands—that was all.”

Dostoyevsky himself tells us that the description is pointless. But he also tells us why it is

so: because the inventory of the furniture does not play the role Raskolnikov assigns it. He scans

the room in order to map the scene of the murder he is planning. But there is “nothing special”

in the room, nothing that is worth including in the scheme of the planned murder. What remains

thus is “another” room, the room he had first perceived, an “impressionist” room which is made

of patches of colour: yellow paper, muslin curtains and the shining of a sunset, producing a flash

in his mind: “So the sun will shine like this then too!”. The latter notation is somehow absurd: how

can he can know whether the day of the murder will be sunny or not? Precisely it is not a matter

of knowing. The room of the murder, the room in which it will take place is not the room he is

looking at knowingly as a criminal methodically planning his act. It is the room of a hallucination.

As a matter of fact the murder will take on the form of a hallucination provoked by an access of

fever.

So it is not the case that the description clutters up the way of the action. Instead it splits it

up . The apparent banality of the description evinces a duality of the room which in turn evinces a



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division at the very heart of the action. As is well- known, Raskolnikov has planned his murder out

of a rational theory about society: poor talented people, as he is, can use extraordinary means to

get out of their misery and allow society to benefit from their capacity. He has a model, Napoleon,

the son of an obscure plebeian family who became the Emperor of the French and the master

of Europe. So he rationalizes his murder according to a strategic rationality of ends and means.

But the rationalization of the act does not result in a capacity of making a rational decision and

implementing it in cold-blood. On the contrary, he can do it only as an access of fever. The so-

called “superfluity” of the description is the staging of this inner division. The new literary plot,

the plot of the democratic times separates action from itself. The failure of the strategic model

characterizes at once the structure of the realistic novel and the behaviour of his characters. The

ruin of the aristocratic/representational paradigm also entails the ruin of a certain idea of fiction,

which means a certain pattern of linkage between thinking, feeling and doing.

I wish to illustrate this point by commenting on a strange episode of a novel which stages an

elder brother of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel. Julien Sorel, the main character

of Red and Black is a son of the French Revolution, an admirer of Napoleon who uses all means to

leave his low condition. In such a way the reader of the novel who follows the events of his personal

life is also introduced to the interplay of the relations of power that make up the post-revolutionary

society. This is why Erich Auerbach, in his book Mimesis, makes that novel an important step in

the progress of the representation of reality in western literature. It initiates modern realism which

implies that man is involved in a political, economic and social reality in permanent evolution. But

in order to emphasize this idea of “realism”, Auerbach must forget the oddities of the plot. At the

end of the novel, Julien is in jail and expects a death sentence for having shot his former lover who

had denounced him to the father of his second lover. The latter and a friend are moving heaven and

earth in order to save Julien’s life. But he tells them not to pester him with “these details of real life”.

He wants to live only the life of the imagination. So he spends his days doing nothing, walking on

the terrace of the prison and smoking cigars. I quote an extract of the passage

“In fact, he said to himself, it seems that my destiny is to die dreaming. A nonentity like myself, who

is sure to be forgotten in a fortnight’s time, would be a real sucker, you have to admit, to get all theatrical.

It’s strange all the same that I’ve only understood the art of enjoying life since seeing the end so

close at hand”.



There is no more here any “description” that stops the course of the action. Julien decides

to live only the life of imagination but there is no image that expresses this life of imagination. That

which blocks action is the division in the very heart of “life”. In prison Julien has discovered the

“art of enjoying life” . This late “discovery” does not only contradict the character of the ambitious

young man . It also contradicts the science with which the novelist had constructed his novel as a

travel across the networks of social relationships and social intrigues. All along the narration, Julien

has calculated all his attitudes and the novelist has added to this calculations the explanations

arising from his own science of social relations and individual psychology. The course of the plot

has coincided with the development of those intrigues. But at the last moment the plot divorces

from the logic of the intrigues. The gunshot is the first act of the hero that has not been decided

out of a calculation. Instead it bids farewell to all calculations and sets the hero in a space and time

which has no more anything to do with the space and time of ambitions and expectations, a space

and time devoted to doing nothing but “enjoying life”.

In order to understand the issue at stake in this blissful “doing nothing” that puts an end

to the career of the ambitious plebeian, I propose to connect it with another “doing nothing”

formulated in a very different text, a German philosophical text. Two years before the publication

of Stendhal’s novel, Hegel commented, in his Lessons on aesthetics, upon two paintings by Murillo

representing beggar boys in the street of Seville. One of them shows a mother picking lice out of

the head of a boy while he quietly munches his bread. Another one shows two ragged boys eating

grapes and melon. The attention the philosopher pays to those “genre paintings” representing the

everyday life of low people illustrates the upheaval of the hierarchical logic of the representative

regime. But Hegel is not satisfied with merely affirming that all subject-matters are equivalent.

Instead he makes a strong connection between the quality of Murillo’s painting and the activity of

those little beggars, an activity which consists in doing nothing and taking care of nothing. They

show, he says, an absolute lack of concern with the external reality, an inner freedom amidst this

external reality which is exactly what is demanded by the concept of the Ideal in Art. As they squat

on the ground, they enjoy a form of blissfulness that makes them almost like the Olympic Gods.

So , in the prose of Hegel, the paintings of the beggar boys that a prince had purchased in

the representative age as picturesque illustrations of the ways of being of the low people come to

express the new aesthetic equality , the capacity of “doing nothing” and caring for nothing , the

capacity of idleness which belongs to the Olympic Gods. As he described them, Hegel probably

had in mind Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in which Schiller comments upon



50│

the “ever-contented” divinities of Olympus, that the Greek sculptors had represented “freed from

the bonds inseparable from every purpose, every duty, every care” . Schiller describes an antique

statue , the Juno Ludovisi . It says that she “ reposes and dwells in itself , a creation completely self-

contained and , as if existing beyond space, never yielding nor resisting; here is no force to contend

with force , no frailty where temporality might break in”. The beggar boys are given by Hegel this

“idleness” of the divinity which neither yields nor resists. But it is also the same “idleness” that

Stendhal’s character discovers : the state in which “no force contends with force” while all his

career , all the career of the plebeian who wants to make his way in society, had been a question of

force contending with force.

But if the careless young beggars and the ambitious plebeian can be offered the same

enjoyment of the “Olympian” idleness, it is because the idleness that Schiller and Hegel attributed

to the Olympic Gods was itself a plebeian invention, a mark of a plebeian form of aesthetic

upheaval. The state in which there is neither yielding nor resistance, in which no force contends

with force, has a name. In French it is called “reverie”. At the end of his life a son of artisan, a

writer who was a major inspiration for Schiller and Kant and for Stendhal as well, namely Jean-

Jacques Rousseau, wrote his “Reveries of a solitary walker”. One of those reveries is devoted to

describing the course of the idle days he spent in a little island in Switzerland after having being

condemned by the Parliament in France and threatened by the mob in Switzerland. This island, he

says, was like a prison where he would have liked to spend the rest of his life. His time there was

devoted partly to collecting plants, partly to doing nothing, spending hours lying on one’s back in

a small boat drifting on the lake, just enjoying the mere feeling of existing , without any care , or ,

in other words, the farniente. The farniente of the reverie is no laziness. Laziness is the vice of the

bad worker. Idleness is the virtue of those who have not to care for work. I remind you of Borges’s

criticism about the “idle everyday” invading literature with Balzac, Flaubert or Proust. But this

“idleness” is not the superfluity that has perniciously invaded literature. Instead it is the upheaval

in the distribution of social temporalities that has made literature possible. In the old distribution

of the sensible, there was no “idle everyday” for the plebeian; the everyday meant either work or

laziness. We can put it in other terms: the traditional distribution of the sensible opposed the realm

of aristocratic action to the realm of plebeian fabrication. The “doing nothing” of the plebeian

is the upheaval of the opposition between acting and making. Anybody can enjoy the idle state

of reverie. This new equality frames a new sphere of aesthetic experience (in spite of Bourdieu,

Kant’s “disinterestedness” owes much more to the plebeian reverie than to aristocratic detachment.

It also frames a new regime of identification of art). One of the main aspects of this regime is



the disruption of the old structures of narrative performance. The so-called “reality effect”, the

focussing on the “pointless” or “idle” everyday, first means this disruption, this splitting in the heart

of the narrative performance. Words are in excess because of this excess that is constituted by the

entrance of the sons of artisans and peasants into a new sensible world which is the realm of wild

passion and the realm of idleness as well.

This aesthetic disruption is at the heart of literature and of the politics of literature. It

also separates aesthetic democracy and notably literary democracy from political democracy.

This is what is witnessed by the oddities of Stendhal’s novel. For the plebeian – and for the plot

which tells his rise and fall- equality appears to be split up from the very beginning. On the one

hand equality is the right adjustment of his capacity to a position that is refused to the plebeian.

It is an end that he wants to conquer by opposing force to force and using an appropriate set of

means. But, on the other hand, equality is a new modality of sensible experience that he can enjoy

immediately, on one condition: bidding farewell to the play of opposite forces, or the play of ends

and means. Eventually Julien Sorel withdraws himself from all the schemes he had plotted in order

to conquer a place in society. He turns his prison into the island that was Rousseau’s metaphoric

prison, a place for enjoying the pure feeling of existence. The woman he has tried to murder will

soon visit him in prison, and they will fall in love again; he will revive with her the only happy

moments of his past life: moments devoted to the equal enjoyment of existence as such or, in

other terms, to sharing sensuous equality. Again this is not only a question of fictional characters.

It is a question of fictional structure. The moment of perfect blissfulness of the character is the

moment when the logic of the plot, identifying the causal concatenation of narrative actions with

the interplay of social intrigues, collapses. As the fictional structure of the concatenation of ends

and means or causes and effects tends to identify with the struggle of social forces, it is bitten by

a force of inertia. In Red and Black, the force of inertia is the force of the plebeian reverie or the

plebeian enjoyment of sensible equality which parts from all forms of plebeian struggle against

social hierarchies. But the splitting of the logic of action is not specific to one novel. [The same

happens in Stendhal’s other great novel The Charterhouse of Parma in which the hero is no more a

son of artisan but a young aristocrat.] The split in the heart of the action concerns by and large the

aesthetic plot, the construction of fictional plots within the aesthetic logic. It is no coincidence, I

think, that the first author who brought on the stage the failure of strategy was also the thinker of

the aesthetic state, Schiller, when he featured, in the trilogy of Wallenstein, the strange character

of a general, the archetype of the man of action and decision, unable to act until the science of

the astrologist tells the good occasion and ultimately forced to act in the worst situation. After



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him the plot of the powerless omnipotent strategist took on a multiplicity of figures. In the 1830’s,

Balzac imagined an association of thirteen intriguers knowing all the secrets and pulling all the

strings of the social machine. Those intriguers end up failing in all their endeavours. Balzac gives

us a strange reason for their failure. As he puts it: “since they could do everything in society, they

did not care for being something within it “. Thirty years after Balzac, Tolstoï set up on the wider

stage of history the failure of the strategic – or the Napoleonic – model of action. Generals think

they are achieving their great designs by ranging their troops on the battlefield according to their

strategy. But the success or the failure depends on random chances on the spot; it depends on a

multiplicity of interwoven little causes that no strategist can master. That’s why the best general,

Kutuzov, takes a nap when the staff discusses about strategy. Ten years after, Emile Zola’s twenty

books cycle purported to offer the scientific account of the rise of a plebeian family identified with

the rise of modern democratic society and modern neurosis. But, in the last book of the cycle, the

whole scientific edifice shatters down : the records of the scientist demonstrating how the laws of

heredity determined this evolution are burnt and they are replaced on the shelves by the clothes of

a baby , the incestuous child of the scientist symbolizing the stubborn triumph of life, pursuing no

end at all.

So the realistic excess has nothing to do with the exhibition of the Bourgeois display of

riches and confidence in the reign of Bourgeoisie that some authors have detected in it. What is

at its heart is much more the trouble introduced when the excess of passion and the emptiness of

reverie are appropriated by the souls of the lower classes. This is also why it does not offer much

to the opposite interpretation which gives him credit for its progressive sense of the historical

movement. According to Auerbach realistic novel makes individual destinies coincide with the

knowing representation of modern social and political forces. I think it is quite the contrary: it

evinces the impossibility of the coincidence, the disjunction between knowing and acting, doing

and being. The literary ways of equality divorce from its political ways.

But, on the other hand, the broken plots of literature make us perceive the disjunction

at the heart of the global schemas of historical evolution and revolutionary politics. When the

young Marx opposes the “human revolution “to the “merely political” revolution, he is in keeping

with the discovery of a “sensuous” equality that goes beyond the transformation of governmental

institutions. But when he predicates revolutionary action on the existence of a class of men entirely

dispossessed of their humanity, he parts with the forms of emancipation of those workers who

affirm their capacity of enjoying here and now a world of sensible equality. Political decision



appeared to be bitten by aesthetic equality, by the plebeian capacity of “doing nothing”. This is

why Marx set out to annihilate this “doing nothing” by the affirmation of a radical dispossession

or a radical nothingness, the nothingness of the class having nothing to loose but its chains. And

he gave the power of getting out of this nothingness to science. But the answer of the science

of the social structure to the demands of revolutionary action proved as problematic as the

science of Wallenstein’s astrologist. Revolution was supposed to happen as the handling of social

contradiction predicated on the knowledge of the concatenation of causes and effects that structure

exploitation and domination. But the process through which knowledge gets to the point where

it can determine the action postpones indefinitely this point. The time when scientific socialism

tied up the communist future with the intrinsic development of the productive forces is also the

time that broke away from the theories assigning a goal to life and giving science the task to know

this goal and to determine the means of reaching it. “Life wants nothing”, such is the nihilist secret

that bites from the inside the optimistic scientist narratives of late European 19th century. Marxist

science indeed knew how to cope with this secret. It translated it in the terms of a strategy of ends

and means and of the expectation of the right time. It explained that the march toward socialism

could not anticipate the development of the economic and social process, that it could not impose

its desires to the course of things. But, beneath the idea of scientific adaptation to the movement

of life, there was the deeper feeling that this movement leads nowhere and that the will to change

life does not rely on any objective process. This is why scientific rigor had to reverse itself, to affirm

itself as the mere necessity of the violent break that imposes a direction to the endless movement

of productive life. Revolution had to be either indefinitely postponed or to be enacted as a sleight

of hand, just like Julien Sorel’s gunshot. The straight line of action thought of as the consequence

of a knowing will was broken.

I am not willing to elaborate on this aspect. I will just draw from my analysis some

conclusions concerning the idea of artistic modernity. I tried to set up the opposition if two

ideas of what modernity means. The structuralist analysis of the “reality effect” epitomized by

Barthes’s text entailed an idea of artistic modernity as a strategy of subtraction, dismissing the

realistic excess of things along with the constraint of resemblance. Abstract painting became the

emblem of that idea. I think that this analysis falls off target. The heart of the problem in realism

was not the excess of things but the break in the logic of action, the self-contradiction of the causal

logic. Neither the artistic nor the political response to that self-contradiction could be found

in a strategy of subtraction. Instead the response was given by another idea of modernity, as a

strategy of addition. That strategy aimed at exceeding the realistic excess, which meant bringing to



54│

completion the self-cancellation of the causal logic. What that completion entailed was a form of

coexistence of sensory experiences absorbing both the excess of plebeian passion and the excess of

plebeian reverie, a form of universal connection of experiences released from any plot of causality.

This can be illustrated, I think, by a film which is a landmark in the history of revolutionary art in

general, and Soviet art in particular, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a movie camera . What strikes us in

the accelerated montage of a multiplicity of short episodes is the equivalence of all the movements.

The assembly line in the factory and the wipe given by a shoe-shiner in the street, the work of the

miner and the doing of nails in a beauty parlour are represented as equivalent manifestations of

energy that the film connects with one another just as the employees of the telephone exchange

keep connecting still new interlocutors by constantly plugging and unplugging. As we know, this

work obeys an apparently simple motto: no plot, only reality. But we must not be mistaken about

the opposition. This does not mean that art has to represent reality and only reality. This means: no

art, no representation of reality. Cinema is not an art representing reality to viewers . It is a form

of action connecting all forms of action: the action of washing hair, the action of extracting coal,

the action of filming, cutting and pasting , the action of viewing, etc.. This universal connection of

movements frames a new sensorium in which the distinction between reality and representation

has vanished along with the distinction between art and life . Everything is action: there is no “doing

nothing”; yet , at the same time, action is relieved of its dependency upon ends, wills and strategies.

Man with a Movie Camera is a symphony of movements which are all equal, no matter the end they

pursue: production, consumption, play or simulacrum. The connection of the movements relieves

them not only of their loneliness but also of their dependency on specific wills. The machines

of socialist industry and the tricks of the magicians express the same eurhythmy of life. Cinema

frames thereby a form of communism which escapes the dilemmas of communist strategies by

overturning the nihilistic secret of the aimlessness of life. It offers the utopia of a world that is

spontaneously communist by constructing a common sensorium in which the oriented movement

of socialist construction is attuned to the deployment of all those movements in which life

expresses nothing but its equal intensity.

It can be said that is the privilege of the art of movement. But cinema achieves a dream that

it did not invent: it is in line with the whitmanian attempt to write a book which is not a book,

but the voice absorbing the innumerable multiplicity of voices and forms of experience, in line

with the attempt by cubist, futurist and “cubo-futurists” to break up the surface of the canvas into

numerous enough facets to express all the intensities of modern life , whether it be that of the

machines or that of popular dancing. This is, I think, what Modernism historically meant: the



construction of a sensorium of radical equality, making art and life the same thing, to the extent

that it made all experiences equivalent and connected any of them with all of them. We know what

happened to this historical dream: it was dismissed twice: it was first repressed by the demand

for “socialist realism”, which did not only mean the demand that art serve the cause of the Soviet

power but that realism forget its own contradiction which is much more uneasy . It was dismissed

a second time when western Marxists decided to draw up the balance sheet of the first dismissal

and chose the easier way to achieve it , which was to forget what Modernism had meant and to

reinvent Modernity as the conquest of artistic autonomy. Structuralism and the conceptualization

of the “reality effect” are offshoots of this reinvention. I think it may be fruitful to-day to revisit the

whole story.



56│

Politics of the imageJacques Rancière


(draft)

What is meant by the expression: politics of the image? Not surprisingly, I will bring up

the subject by looking at an image ( image 1): this image is part of an installation made by the

Canadian artist Ian Wallace. The subject-matter is obviously political: it is a protest against the

destruction of forests in British Columbia, known as the Clayoqot Protest. However, a series of 3m

long and 1.80 m wide photographs laminated on wood panels on the walls of a gallery can hardly

be considered a record of a political action destined to either information or political propaganda.

So the format of the work already points to a politics of the image which is something different

from an “image of politics” or even an “image for politics”. More important are the two rectangles

of paint that cut through the photograph, as usual in the works of Ian Wallace. Those two abstract

strips don’t only obliterate a group of protesters. They also seem to tell us: don’t be mistaken: this

is not the protest; this is “just an image”. But that is not the whole thing. Those black and white

rectangles bear a double and contradictory relation to the “image of the protest”: on the one hand,

their presence on the surface of the photograph is analogous to the presence of the protesters: they

are intruders on this surface, just as the protesters are in this solitary place where only the loggers

paid by the company are allowed to stay. But, on the other hand, their intrusion points to a politics

which consists in dismissing the images. Obviously they are reminiscent of those strips of colour

by which in the 1910’s some artists, like Mondrian, Kandinsky or Malevich, set out to replace the

old resemblances of painting. They point to a politics that denounces the image as illusion and

complacency and calls the individuals to free themselves from their power in order to access to the

purity of form, the knowledge of the reality or the active transformation of the world.

What this image tells us about the “politics of the image” can be, at this point, spelled

out as follows: a political image is composed of two images, more precisely it sets up a tension

between two forms of visual presentation, or two “visibilities”. The point is what part is plaid by

each of those forms. The most common way of interpreting the relation is to equate the tension

with a contradiction and the contradiction of the visibilities with the opposition of appearance

56│56│57「當代藝術與影像政治」Politics of the image


and reality. That interpretation provides the basis for a politics of the image that can be defined

as a pedagogical politics. According to that view, of the image, a political image is an image that

makes the reality concealed by the image or the reality that the viewer is unable or unwilling to

see appear on the surface of the image. Thereby the artistic work which consists in combining two

representations – in equalizing them in a sense – rests on a political practice that differentiates

those two representations and organizes them into a hierarchy: there is an image which stands as

the false “reality” – or real appearance – at which people look, and another which stands as the

hidden reality that is seen only by those who search beyond the appearances.

Let us look for instance at this image. It is part of the well-known series of photomontages

Bringing War Home composed at the end of the 60’s and the beginning of the 70’s by Martha

Rosler( image 2). This one(image) is called Balloons, a title that sets up a clash between the

balloons hanging near the window-door of this cosy apartment and the bullets that have killed the

Vietnamese child carried by his father. As a matter of fact, we don’t see those bullets. Nevertheless

they play the part of the reality while the “real” balloons on the contrary appear here as symbols

of a way of life dedicated to sheer appearance. The dead child appears as the reality hidden by the

elegant apartment – which does not only mean the reality of suffering people that the happy life of

a wealthy American family prevents to see but also the reality of imperialism that makes this happy

American life possible. If the image of the dead child were not pasted on the image of the wealthy

home, it would only be a visual representation of pain, symmetrical to the representation of

happiness provided by the apartment and the balloons. It would only call well-to-do people to care

about the misery of the world. But the fact of pasting the former on the latter makes it no more a

representation of the horrors of war but the symbol of the invisible – which means the intelligible

– mechanism of imperialism. The clash of two visibilities is made efficient because one of them,

at the same time, plays the part of the invisible. This duplicity can be epitomized by this image (

image 3) in which the physical opening of the curtains that the unconcerned housewife is cleaning

makes visible the intelligible presence of the imperialist war behind the window.

This reminds us the well-known Brechtian slogan: learn how to see instead of simply

looking. Now there are two points that blur the apparent simplicity of the opposition. The first

is that, in order to “see” this mechanism instead of “looking at the appearance”, the viewer must

be attracted by the image. But what attracts him or her is the confusion of appearance and reality:

think of the famous sequence , at the beginning of Godard’s Pierrot le fou when the characters of

a society party take on the stereotyped intonations of advertising messages to praise the comfort



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of their underwear or the speed of their car. ( projection) The sequence is intended to make

us aware of the way in which subjective expression is alienated by the language of commodity

culture so as to show us the reality of the capitalist machine behind the seductive appearances of

the commodity. But it makes us enjoy just the contrary; the pleasure of the surrealist encounters

produced by the identification of the forms of personal expression with the impersonal language of

the commodity.

The second point is that , in order to be convinced by the demonstration, the viewer must

already know the intelligible message present on the visible image; he or she must be convinced

that what is represented by the sequence is not only some naïve individuals but capitalist

alienation. In the same way the viewer must already know that what is represented on Martha

Rosler’s images is not only the horrors of war and men’s madness in general but the mechanism of

imperialism. He/She must know that under the appearances of commodity culture , there is the

reality of capitalist domination but also that that domination is to be destroyed by the struggle of

the oppressed people. At this price, a double effect is produced. On the one hand the viewer enjoys

the aesthetic effect produced by the encounter of the heterogeneous elements. On the other hand

he enjoys the fact of knowing that, behind that aesthetic indistinction, there is the ontological

difference of reality to appearance and the political reality of class struggle. The evidence of this

logical connection in turn rests on the evidence of a clear division of the world into antagonistic

forces and on the faith in the coming victory of one camp over of the other.

A question thus arises: what happens when the evidence of the intelligible connection and

the horizon of a promised victory get loosened or lost? Let us look at some installations made by

the German artist Josephine Meckseper. Her work seems in keeping with the political tradition

of combining two images in order to make the viewers aware of the reality of the mechanism that

underpins the production of images. Such is the principle of her installations: they consist in little

display cases where she puts together things which apparently are at odds with one another: here,

for instance( image 4), fashion items beside a book on a group of urban guerilleros who wanted

to bring home the anti-imperialist war; or here (image 5) these bottles of perfume on which the

brand name has been replaced by a well-known slogan of May 68 in France : Ne travaillez jamais(

Never work).The structure of the combination is apparently the same: the clash of apparently

heterogeneous elements must lead the viewer to perceive their actual connection, that is the

truth of the capitalist mechanism behind the shimmering appearance. Now the demonstration

has apparently been overturned: the anti-imperialist protest now appears as the appearance



behind which stands the reality of the display of the appearances, the display of the commodities.

The happy” reality of the display of the commodities has absorbed the anti-imperialist rebellion,

making the rebel attitude appear as a phenomenon of youth fashion, and turning its slogans into

trendy brand names. The display is the truth of the protest, as appears in this photograph of an

anti-war protest in Washington (image 6) . In other terms the truth behind the appearances is that

there is no truth behind the appearances. Or again: there is no “image of the real” different from

the “image of the appearance”. The law of the intelligible world is the law of equivalence between

appearance and truth. In such a way the effect of the denunciation is lost along with the pleasure of

the confusion. The identity of the contraries produces no pleasure, nor does the knowledge of the

identity result in any promise of liberation.

This melancholic identity of image and reality, truth and appearance has been encapsulated

in one word – the word “spectacle”. What the word coined by Guy Debord means is that the whole

reality within which we live is the reality of an inverted world where the forces of human practice

have been captured and turned against that practice. “In the inverted world, Debord says, the

true is a moment of the false”. This is the formula of modern Platonism, or Marxist Platonism.

According to this Platonism, the contemplation of the truth of the appearance is still part of the

appearance. The truth of the appearance is the process of separation that overturns human action

into its dead product. If it is so , it makes no sense to construct any “political image” as the image

of reality denouncing the mirages of the appearance. The critical montage of images pretended

to make an iconoclastic use of the images. The image – as visual form- was intended to denounce

the reign of the image – as dissimulation of reality. But the critique of the spectacle annuls that

pretension. All images are equivalent. None of them is endowed with the power of revealing the lie

of another image. At the same time as Martha Rosler made his series “Bringing War Home, Guy

Debord made the film The Society of the Spectacle out of his own book. In the film the inversion of

life was embodied by the images of the rulers as well as by the images of commodities, ads, movie

stars, top- models, etc. In all those images, one could read the power of the capitalist machine of

dispossession. All represented the same reality: the unacceptable reality of our life turned by our

enemies into dead images, in front of us, away from us. The only thing to do then was to oppose

the activity of life to the passivity of the image. But Debord did it in a strange way. What would

have seemed most logical would have been to dismiss the images. It would have been the politics of

the dark screen. But instead of it, Debord set up a strange dispositif, a strange connection between

image, action and words.



60│

The singularity of this dispositif appears best in the excerpts of westerns or war movies

incorporated in The Society of the Spectacle (projection). When we first see John Wayne or Errol

Flynn, two icons of Hollywood and two far-rightist Americans, charging with their swords drawn,

we may think that it is a parodic denunciation of imperialism and of its glorification in Hollywood

films. It is in that way that some commentators understand the practice of “détournement”. But it

is not at all the case. What Debord wants is not that we laugh at those proud Yankees charging

at the Indians and become aware of the complicity of John Ford’s or Raoul Walsh’s movies with

imperialist domination. What he wants is that we take back the heroism of their charge and that we

turn that represented charge into a real charge against the “society of the spectacle”.

So action appears as the only adequate response to the falsehood of the images and to the

very guilt of being a passive consumer of images. Yet the spectator is still presented with images.

This stream of equivalent images is necessary to give its power to the only remaining difference, I

mean the difference made by the voice of the commentator. The voice tells us that there is nothing

to do but to oppose activity to passivity; but it tells us at the same time that we will never act since

we are consumers of images. So the “inversion of the inversion” remains the reserved knowledge of

those who know why and how we are all guilty consumers of images. Since the reign of the image

is posed as the very reality of our world, the opposition between the virtue of activity and the evil

of the image is taken over by the voice, by the authority of the voice denouncing the idolatry of the

consumers of images. The opposition between appearance and reality is replaced by the splitting of

reality, contrasting the fallacy of the image of reality to the word which tells the in-imaginable Real.

Iconoclasm is thus taken at its word: the authority of the voice turns out to be the real

content of the critique of the images. Only words can tell the truth on the lie of the images. The

“iconoclastic pedagogy” is turned into a politics of the unrepresentable which sees idolatry in

the very practice of visual representation. The concept of the Unrepresentable has been put at

the core of the discussion on the issue: how can art deal with the issues of violence, destruction

and genocide which marked 20th century history? The debate culminated with the issue of the

representation of the Nazi Genocide of the European Jews. I would like to illustrate this point

with a polemic that was launched some years ago about an exhibition in Paris called “Mémoires

des camps”( Memories of the camps) . The exhibition showed, among other testimonies, four

photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommandos from the inside of a gas chamber in

Auschwitz. Those photographs showed a group of nude women taken to the gas chamber and the

incineration of the corpses in the open field (images 7 and 8 ).The catalogue included a long essay



written by George Didi-Huberman who commented those images with the title: “Four pieces of

film snatched from Hell”. This essay provoked two very violent responses in the journal Les Temps

Modernes .One of the responses pursued the classic argument: what was unacceptable in those

photographs and in the comment is that they were too real. Those images which conveyed into

the present the horror of Auschwitz made it capture our gaze and forbid any critical distance. But

the other essay, written by the philosopher Gerard Wajcman, used the opposite argument: those

images and the comment were unbearable because they lied: they were not “snatched from Hell”,

they did not convey anything of the reality of the genocide. They were not images of the Shoah

for three reasons. The first reason was factual: they did not show the extermination of the Jews in

the gas chamber, only what happened before and after. The second was philosophical: The Real

cannot be entirely absorbed in the visible. There is a resistant part of the Real, that we can name

the Unrepresentable. The third reason was an affirmation about the nature of the Event: there

is at the very core of the Shoah something that cannot be represented in images out of its very

nature. As Wajcman puts it “The gas chambers are an event that constitute a kind of aporia, a real

which cannot be split but breaks through the image . This real calls the image into question and

endangers any thinking about the images” .

What this affirmation builds up is a radical break between the visual image and the oral

testimony. The four images and the comment on them are blamed because those who took the

pictures and he who comments them viewed them as tangible evidence of the genocide. But,

for Wajcman this tangible evidence is a lie. A photograph is “an image of reality”. It is a double

produced for social circulation. As such it can but deny the uniqueness of the Real and erase the

horror of the Extermination. What is opposed to the fallacy of the Image is the word of the witness.

Now the question is: what allows Wajcman to endow the word of the witness with the quality of

the” so-called” uniqueness of the real”. It cannot be the content of the testimony. The testimony

also is a kind of “double”, of representation of an absent event. The difference between the four

images and the word of the witness is that the four images are the result of a decision: the members

of the Sonderkommandos who took the pictures at the risk of their life wanted to produce visual

evidence. The true witness, the witness endowed with the “unique truth of the real” is the witness

who does not want to witness, who does it though he does not want.

This can be documented with an episode of the film that Wajcman opposes to all visual

and archival evidence, namely Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. As is well known, Lanzmann refused

to consider any archive whatsoever and he built his film out of the testimonies of a few survivors.



62│

Now let us look at the way the testimony is dealt with in one of the most famous episodes of the

film: the testimony of the former barber of Treblinka, Abraham Bomba, relating how he cut the

hair of the women when they entered the gas chamber ( projection). In a sense it is the same case

with the narration of the barber as with the images of the nude women and the burnt corpses:

it tells us what happened before and what happened after the gassing, not what happened in the

gas chamber. What makes the difference is, first, that the barber speaks. But it is not what he says

which matters. On the contrary the decisive moment is obviously the moment when he refuses

to go on. What makes his witness “true” is first this silence. It is the fact that he does not want to

speak, that he cannot speak. Thereby it bears witness to the event as an unspeakable event. And it

is, second, the fact that he resumes his speech, that he speaks though he is unwilling and unable to

speak, that he speaks under the command of another voice or a voice of the Other. The privilege of

the witness rests on a double inability: he cannot resist the horror of the reminiscence; nor can he

resist the voice who tells him to tell what he cannot tell. The critique of the image comes down to

the affirmation of the sovereign authority of the Voice commanding obedience.

Now this privilege itself can be implemented only because the refusal and the obedience are

given a visible figure. The critique of the idolatrous image plays a double game: on the one hand,

the privilege of the voice over the visible representation is showed through the suspension of the

voice. But when the voice stops the narration, that which acts and witnesses to the event is the face

of the barber, it is the emotion and the tears on his face . As Wajcman puts it , “ in order to make gas

chambers , Lanzmann films people and words, witnesses in the present act of remembering, on

whose face memories come like on a screen , and in whose eyes the horror that they went through

can be perceived”. In such a way, the tears of the barber appear in turn as visible evidence of what

those eyes have seen , they appear as visible evidence of what happened in the gas chamber.

So the argument of the unrepresentable plays a double game: it plays on the filming of the

voice whose truth is opposed to the lie of the image. And it plays on the suspension of the voice

which gives back to the face of the witness the power of showing the trauma of the event. This

double play urges us to question the simplistic opposition between the word and the image. The

image is not the visible as opposed to the invisible of the voice. And it is not a mere duplication

of reality. An image is a construction. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the

audible, between what is shown and what is not shown, what is told and what is not told. An

image never is a mere duplication of the reality that has been in front of the photographer or

the film-maker. It is always an alteration that takes place in a chain of elements which alter it in



turn. And the voice is not the opposite of the image , it is always the voice of a body that tries to

translate one sensory event into another sensory event, to make us “see” what it tells. There are

images in language too: there are figures of rhetoric or poetics that substitute a word for another in

order to convey the sensory quality of an event better than could be done by the “proper” words.

Conversely there are figures of rhetoric and poetic in the visible. The tears of the barber may be the

mark of his emotion. But as soon as the camera shoots them and the shot is connected with other

shots by the montage, they can no more appear as the sheer presence of the event: the face is here

in the place of the words that were in the place of the visual representation of the event. It is here

within a dispositif commanded by a camera and by a voice off. The tears of the barber turn out to

be a figure, the element of a dispositif aimed at giving us a figurative equivalence of what happened

in the gas chamber.

So we must dismiss the biased opposition between the word and the image if we are

willing to understand how images are artistically constructed and work politically. We must take

the analysis of the images away from the atmosphere of trial in which it has so often be drowned.

The theory of the “unrepresentable” has drowned it in the religious quarrel against idolatry. The

critique of the spectacle has identified it with the platonic denunciation of the appearance and of

the passivity of the spectator. We must question those identifications of the use of images with

idolatry , ignorance or passivity , if we want to have a fresh look at what images are, what they do

and what effects they produce . For this purpose I’d like to examine a contemporary practice of the

construction of images made by a political artist. I will examine the case of an artist who dealt, like

Lanzmann but in a different way, with the horrors of the past century , like Lanzmann does , but in

a very different way . The Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar dedicated several installations to the genocide

in Rwanda. None of his pieces however showed a single visual document on the massacres. Even

more, one of his installations, entitled Real Pictures, was made of black boxes. Each box contained

one image of a massacred Tutsi, but the image was invisible . What was visible was the text written

on the box that described its concealed content (images 9 and 10) . So these installations may seem

to implement a politics of the Unrepresentable. But if works quite differently: in fact the words

are taken as visual elements. So, what is at stake is not overturning the privilege of the visual over

the verbal or of the verbal over the visual. It is much more a matter of disturbing the usual way in

which words and visual forms are connected to each other in the dominant system of information.

It is often said that this system submerges us with too many images in general and too many

images of horror in particular, so that we are anesthetized by their profusion. This view is widely



64│

accepted because it confirms the traditional view that the “evil” with images is that they are “too

many” and that those too many images inescapably invade the fascinated gaze and the weak brain

of the spectators. But it is highly questionable: as a matter of fact the Media do not drown us under

a torrent of images taken from the wars, violence or distress that make the present of our planet.

On the contrary they reduce the number of them, they duly select them and order the way they are

staged. They eliminate in them everything that exceeds the simple redundancy of their meaning.

What we see, above all, in TV news is the face of those who comment the images, who tell us

what they are about and what must be thought about them. Horror is not made commonplace

because there are too many images of horror. We do not see too many suffering bodies. But we see

too many bodies without a name, too many bodies who do not return the gaze we direct at them,

which are spoken about to us without being given the chance to speak to us. We are presented

with people who have no name, no individual story, people who are just showed, told about, as

anonymous victims. The dominant information system separates those who are speaking beings

able to master the flood of information from those who are anonymous suffering bodies.

So what is at stake in the false quarrel about the images is a matter of count. This is why the

black boxes covered with words by Alfredo Jaar can be called “real pictures”: they give a name and

a personal history to those whose massacre has been neglected because they concerned people

who were given no name, no individual story. If the words take the place of the visual documents, it

is because those documents would still be photographs of anonymous victims of mass slaughters.

Their presentation would still be in keeping with what made them victims of the slaughter. So

the point is not to oppose the words to the visual representation, but to overturn the mainstream

distribution of the verbal and the visual in which the verbal is the privilege of the few and the visual

the lot of the multitude. What is visible in the “real pictures” is that the million of victims of the

mass slaughter is a million of individuals, each of which had a name and an individual story. The

words are not “substituted“ for the images. They are images too: not only visual representations,

but also forms of redistribution of the relations between the verbal and the visual. Just like rhetoric

and poetic figures substitute a word for another, they substitute an image for another, words for

visual representations or visual representations for words. Now this redistribution of the relations

between the verbal and the visual is also a redistribution of the relations between the unique and

the multiple, the few and the multitudes. One of the most classic poetic figures is the metonym

that gives us the effect for the cause or a part for the whole. As such, it can become a highly “political”

figure, since politics is about switching the places and redistributing the count of the bodies. This

is what Alfredo Jaar made in the installation called The Eyes of Gutete Emerita. The installation



is centred around one image: the image of the eyes of a woman who has seen the massacre of

her family: the effect for the cause, but also two eyes for a million living bodies that have been

slaughtered (image 11). Now for all that they have seen, they do not tell us what Gutete Emerita

thinks and feels. We feel the intensity of the spectacle on those eyes. But we cannot see her pain.

They are the eyes of a person, endowed with the same power that belongs to any of us, but also

the same power of which her dead brothers and sisters have been deprived: namely, the power to

speak or to be silent, the power to make his or her feelings visible or invisible. So the metonym that

puts the seer in the place of the spectacle of the slaughter is also a redistribution of the count of the

individual and the multiple. This is why, before seeing those eyes in a quad-light box , the visitors

had to look at a text that shared the same visual frame and told them the story of those eyes, the

name and the history of Gutete Emerita (image 12) .

It turns out thus that the question of the politics of the images must be displaced. The

question is not whether one must or must not show the horrors endured by the victims of

violence. It is about the very construction of the victim as part of a certain distribution of the

visible. An “image” is part of a dispositif of visibility which frames the status of the bodies that

are represented, the kind of attention that those bodies deserve, the space and time that must be

dedicated to their presentation, and so on. So the point is what kind of attention is provoked by

one dispositif or by another. An image is an element in a chain that weaves a sense of reality, or a

common sense: a “common sense” is a community of sensible data: things that are supposed to be

given to the eyes of everybody, modes of perception of these things, significations that are given

to them. So a commonsense is a form of being together, relying on a certain community between

things and words. The Information system is a commonsense of this sort: a space-time dispositif

that frames common givens, common ways of looking at them and of making sense of them. The

point is not to denounce the reality hidden behind this frame.

Nor is it to contrast the making of images with real action in real life. We know that that

opposition has been recently revived. Some artists have drawn from the shortcomings of the

artistic détournement of the images the conclusion that the task of political artists was to create

no more forms and images but forms of social relationships. Relational aesthetics has opposed

this production of relationships to the production of works and images. Activist artists have

affirmed that art had to leave the places of art and intervene within the social tissue or infiltrate the

networks of domination. But the seemingly clear opposition of image and real action poses two

problems is much more complex that it seems: first, the actions outside have to be made visible



66│

inside as “images of action”. Let us look for instance at these images that are part of an artistic work

performed by the Cuban artist René Francisco some years ago. He had employed a grant from an

artistic foundation in order to make an inquiry in the poor suburbs of Havana and he had decided

with some fellow artists to act against that situation of misery by refurbishing the house of a poor

old woman. So the work consisted of a screen made of gaze on which was printed the image of

the old woman looking at the “real” screen where a video tape showed us the artists working as

masons, plumbers or painters (images 13,14, 15) . The opposition of action and image ends up

cumulating several forms of presence: let us look at these images of an installation made by French

artist Matthieu Laurette. He decided to take at face value the promises of the food companies:

“satisfied or your money back “ by systematically buying those products and expressing his

“dissatisfaction” in order to be reimbursed and he also used the solicitations of the TV to promote

his subversion. As a result, some years ago, we could see in the Paris “Space for contemporary Art”

this installation, made of three elements: a wax sculpture of himself pushing an overfilled trolley,

a wall of TV monitors showing him as he explained his strategy on TV and huge photographs of

international newspapers accounting for his case (images 16,17, 18) . The reality of the effect was

anticipated in the monumentalization of his icon and of his action. There is a clear trend in some

forms of “activist” art to-day to play on the reality of the occupation of a space of exhibition to

prove the reality of a subversion of the social order. It tries to cumulate the evidences of sculptural

presence, action in the “real world” and rhetorical demonstration.

The point is that the opposition of reality to image might still be in keeping with the

dominant idea of reality. The dominant consensus is “iconoclast” in its own way. It pretends

to draw a clear-cut line separating reality from image. For consensus does not merely mean an

agreement between persons or groups. This agreement presupposes a specific distribution of the

visible and the thinkable. Consensus frames a reality that is supposed to be one and the same for

everybody. Consensus says that we may have conflicting interests, aspirations and values, but that

we are obliged nonetheless to agree that the given is given and that we have to look at it and to

name it just “as it is “. This agreement draws a clear-cut separation between what is given and what

is not, what is in and what is out, what is real and what is fictional or ideological. Art and politics

begin when this monopoly of “reality” is questioned, when there is a dispute on what is given, on

the name that can be given to it and the sense that can be made of it. This is what I call a dissensus.

Just as consensus does not merely mean agreement, dissensus does not merely mean conflict.

Dissensus questions the dominant monopoly of reality, it builds other “realities” or other forms of

“commonsense” , which means other settings of time and space, other communities of words and



things, of perceptions and meanings.

Creating forms of dissensus is the work of fiction. The word is contentious indeed and we

need to redefine it. Making fiction does not mean telling stories. It means constructing another

sense of reality, another set of connections between spaces and times, between words and visual

forms, between spoken words and written words, between a here and an elsewhere, a now and a then,

etc. More importantly, it means subverting the regimes of visibility and of intelligibility within

which bodies are framed and capabilities and inabilities are attributed to them .This is notably the

case for the separation between fiction and documentary. This formal distinction is also a political

one as it tends to divide humanity in two parts. Jean-Luc Godard derisively said in For ever Mozart

that fiction was for the Israelis and documentary for the Palestinians. This is a way to say that those

who are put in the situation of the victims are also refused the capacity to live up to the dignity

of fiction. They are confined within “reality” and reality is said to be the object of a documentary

look at a painful reality. In contrast, a number of artists – Palestinians, Lebanese but also Israelis

– set out to build modes of visibility and forms of narration which blur over the distinction. The

Lebanese Atlas Group created fake archives to tell us about the war in Lebanon; the Palestinian

film-maker Elia Suleiman created manga-like characters to show the everyday reality of the Israeli

check-points; the Israeli film-maker Ari Folman used the resources of animated film to restage

the slaughters of Sabra and Chatila. I would like to focus on an interesting case, which is a recent

film made by two Lebanese artists, Khalil Joreige and Joanna Hadjithomas. This film belongs to

a wider project that deals with what these artists call “latent images”. In a number of works that

use several media they set out to address the usual issue about the images of violence in an

inverted way. Instead of asking how violence, war and destruction can be represented by images,

they have addressed the issue: what are the effects of war, violence and destruction on images. For

instance they have made a work based on the postcards of the monuments and hotels of Beirut

which were still on sale after the buildings had been destroyed; they invented a fictional artist

who methodically does to the images what has be done to the buildings. They have made another

piece based on films that could not be processed during the war because of the lack of technical

means and whose images had become almost invisible. I would like to focus on one of their most

recent works, a film which raises the question of what a political fiction may mean. The film is

called Je veux voir ( I want to see) . It takes on the form of a travel in which a Lebanese performer

Rabih Mroué accompanies a French cinema star Catherine Deneuve in the devastated sites of

South Lebanon. The fiction does not consist in a story but in the transformation of the status of

the bodies that are filmed. The two actors are transformed in two animals or two nerve centres that

grasp differently the same spectacle. The opposition of critical art between reality and appearance



68│

is substituted by a tension between forms of sensible apprehension which construct a different

reality. The French actress who comes to “see” perceives the ruins caused by the war. She perceives

them, but she has difficulty walking amidst them. The Lebanese performer moves easily amidst the

ruins, but he can no more grasp them visually. For him the ruins are a chaos, a space where he can

no longer find his bearings. So the film contrasts the obviousness of the destruction of buildings

with the more complex disappearance of a world of experience. This process culminates in the

sequence I would like now. (Projection)

What the two travellers see as they pass by, is a process of subtraction from the visible. The

ruins of a whole neighbourhood, which has been destroyed for urban renovation, are brought

onto the seashore where they come back to their basic elements: iron which is to be recycled and

blocks of concrete which are to be drowned. When the process is over, what has been a space of

life vanishes. It has become only perceptible as a “pictorial” difference, a red colour contrasting the

blue of the sea. The conflicts about reality and appearance vanish in a surrealist ballet where the

excavators have become monstrous insects, caterpillars animating a gigantic metaphor by means

of which towns are thrown back to their elements and those elements to the movement of the sea

that erases all traces. In that way, the spectacle of the destruction that makes the effects of the war

invisible and the process of artistic creation of the visible become each a metaphor of the other.

This mirroring process may appear to be far from the usual expectations about the politics

of the images. Perhaps we can address the issue in a reverse way by questioning those expectations.

Artists and critics are forever telling us that the politics of art has to be entirely renewed to be in

keeping with the time of globalisation, post-fordism, computerization and digitalization. They tell

us that everything has changed, but they still cling to the old patterns of relationships between

modes of perception, forms of affect and capacities of mobilization. Instead this film takes a reverse

way: he sets to work a visual strategy that is not pre-empted by a given political discourse but, on

the contrary, suggests the possibility of a politics that would be re-invented from the investigation

of the multiple ways of perceiving spectacles, to set up one’s body in a place and to go over a space.

I am not willing to elaborate on this point: I’ll confine myself to underline the shift that

such works may mean in the idea of a politics of the images. I think that they point to a “non-

pedagogical” politics of the images. I mean two things when I speak of a “non-pedagogical” politics.

I mean firstly a politics which is not predicated on the opposition of image and reality or activity

and passivity, a politics which does not set out to give knowledge to the ignorant or active energy



to the passive viewer. What it proposes instead is a reconfiguration of the forms of the visible

and the trajectories in space and time that set up the capacities and incapacities of the bodies.

It proposes it to spectators who are not supposed to be more ignorant or more passive than the

artist himself or herself. This is the second point: it is a reframing of a common space that an active

spectator proposes to other active spectators. In other terms, it is a politics that does not anticipate

its effect. I’d like to illustrate the powers and limits of that politics by looking at some images made

by the Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa. He devoted three films to the life and death of a shanty

town, populated by immigrants from Cape Verde and drug addicts in the suburbs of Lisboa. The

first film Ossos still clung to the usual forms of cinematographic fiction. The following ones, shot

with a DV camera, directly dealt with the life of some of the inhabitants, as the shanty town was

being destroyed and the inhabitants rehoused. But it does not for all that take on the form that

is expected of a documentary. Nor does it take on the mode of representation expected from a

politically committed artist. Pedro Costa shows us nothing about the “social” reasons for the

existence of the shantytown and for its destruction. Even more disturbingly, he seems to ignore the

warning not to “aestheticize” misery. On the contrary he never misses an opportunity to transform

the living spaces of these miserable people into objects of art. A plastic water bottle, a knife, a glass,

a few objects left on a deal table in a squatted apartment: there you have, with a light that strokes

the set, the occasion for a beautiful still life. As night descends on this space without electricity,

two small candles placed on the same table give to the miserable conversation or the needle

sessions with the allure of a chiaroscuro from the Dutch Golden Age. The motion of excavators is

a chance to show, along with the crumbling buildings, sculptural bases made of concrete and large

walls with contrasting colours—blue, pink, yellow, or green. So he does what seems most reluctant

to a politically committed audience: a beautifully coloured, slow-paced and “formal” film. But

this choice in turn questions the old representational and hierarchical logic which still underpins

so many projects of political art: I mean the logic that urges the artists to adapt the form of the

representation to the subject represented. In fact his films implement a multilayered politics of

the images that I would like to explore by looking at one fragment of the third film of the trilogy,

Colossal Youth a film dedicated to a former mason, an immigrant from Cape Verde named Ventura.

Let us look at an excerpt of the film which makes us move from the shanty town to a museum and

back. (projection)

At first sight the episode may appear an illustration of a well-known poem in which Brecht

asks who built Thebes, with its seven gates, and other architectural splendours. Ventura would

represent all those people who have constructed buildings, at great danger to their health and lives,



70│

which they themselves have no right to enjoy. But the relationship of Pedro Costa’s art to the art

displayed on the walls of the museum exceeds the simple demonstration of the exploitation of

workers for the sake of the pleasures of the aesthete, much as Ventura’s figure exceeds that of the

worker robbed of the fruit of his labour. The relationships of reciprocity and non-reciprocity are

tied into a much more complex knot. To begin with, the museum is not the place of artistic wealth

opposed to the penury of the worker. The coloured arabesques of Rubens’s Flight to Egypt show no

obvious superiority over the shot of the window with four bottles in the poor lodgings of the two

workers. The painting’s golden frame strikes us a stingier delimitation of space than the window of

the house, a way of cancelling out everything that surrounds it, of rendering uninteresting all that

is beyond it—the vibrations of light in the space, the contrasting colours of the walls, the sounds

from outside. The museum is this place where art is locked up within this frame that yields neither

transparency nor reciprocity. If it excludes the worker who built it, it is because it excludes all that

lives from displacements and exchanges: light, forms, and colours in their movement, the sound of

the world, as well as the experience of the workers who’ve come from distant islands. In contrast

the “formal” practice of Pedro Costa shooting the four bottles , making us hear Ventura tell as an

epic the story of his travel to Portugal and confronting his unpredictable reactions , is designed

to give back to those who live there something of the richness of experience that belongs to

everybody. Pedro Costa does not film the “misery of the world.” He films its wealth, the wealth that

anyone at all can become master of: that of catching the splendour of a reflection of light, but also

that of being able to speak in a way that is commensurate with one’s fate. And he wants to return

what can be extracted of sensible wealth—the power of speech, or of vision—from the life and

décor of these precarious existences back to them, about making it available to them, like a song

they can enjoy, like a love letter whose words and sentences they can borrow for their own love

lives.

This leads me to the sequence of the love letter that Ventura teaches to his illiterate fellow

and that he repeats all along the film as his performance, the artistic performance of the poor man,

the performance that he wants to share with his fellow, because it is the performance of an art of

sharing, of an art that does not split itself off from life, from the experience of displaced people

or of their means of mitigating absence and coming closer to their loved one. Now this letter was

written by Pedro Costa by mixing two sources: letters by immigrant workers, and a letter written

by a “true” author, the French poet Robert Desnos, a letter sent from a Nazi camp, a way-stop

on the road to Terezin, and death. So the art of the poor and that of great poets are captured in the

same fabric: an art of life and of sharing, an art of travel and of communication made for those for



whom to live is to travel, in order to sell their work force to build houses and museums for other

people, and also to bring their experience, their music, their way of living and loving, of reading on

walls and of listening to the song of humans and birds. Now this art is staged inside the “formal”

film as its impossible dream. Or the “formal film” is made as the substitute for this lost art of

sharing that could be shared by anybody.

So the “politics of the images” appears as a multilayered one. At a first level it means the

disruption of the dispositif which makes modes of representation fit the situations and populations

that they represent. At a second level, it subverts the normal relationships between the décor of

the art institution and the décor of poor life: not only the normal hierarchy between those two

spaces but also the usual way of subverting it. It does not oppose the reality of poor life to the

richness of artistic appearance. It opposes appearance to appearance, reality to reality and richness

to richness. In that way it may seem to take up an old “critique of the image”: that which opposes

an art embedded in life to the dead art of the museum. But this “critique of the separation” – in

situationnist terms – is questioned in turn. Pedro Costa does not follow those artists who boast

on leaving art and the production of images to do real social or political work in the poor suburbs,

as illustrated by the work of René Francisco that I mentioned earlier. Pedro Costa does not play

the mason or the plumber. He does not want to escape the fact that the film remains a film, a

projection of coloured shadows on a screen. It remains an exercise of the look, the work of a

spectator of the world reframing in new figures the experience of those who travel between several

worlds and presenting it to other spectators. But we should not be too keen on opposing theses

exercises to efficient political activity. Political action is not only efficient action. Its own efficiency

consists in reconfiguring the visibility of the common world and in reasserting the capability

of any of those who live in it. This reconfiguration is made through actions that are often hardly

visible and seemingly inefficient. The film maker makes a film whose effect is predicated on a sense

community that either has been lost or does not still exist. But the efficiency of political action

too is the efficiency of words, actions and attitudes that take their sense in a world that is not the

“actual’ world, the consensual world. This is why these exercises of the look are not irrelevant in

this respect. They may remind us that looking, being a spectator is an activity too. They may also

remind us that we never move on to the real as to another side of the words and the images. We

always move from a configuration of the sensible to another. We always try to put a non existing

world into that which exists. There are many ways to do it. There is none that offers us the certainty

of the success.



72│



「當代法國哲學的遍歷」洪席耶作品研讀會文章



74│

《獲解放的觀眾》研讀報告

黃建宏, 國立台北藝術大學美術學系

[email protected]

Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé, Paris : Fabrique, 2008

「洪席耶作品研討會：當代法國哲學的遍歷」發表

版權所有 ©黃建宏

《獲解放的觀眾》為近四年來（2004-2008）研究的集結，這

些研究是Rancière遍歷法國、德國、巴西、葡萄牙、美國、維

也納、比利時、瑞士、丹麥、瑞典各個城市所進行的發表，

與隨後多次的增定修改而成。其中除了〈獲解放觀眾〉和

〈思想性影像〉分別在Art Forum雜誌和手拍球畫廊演講中發

表過（2007）。主要對於現實進行較直接的引述，並以智識

平等的問題重新看待解放的可能性。本書由〈獲解放觀眾〉

（dispositif）、〈批判思維的厄運〉（dispositif）、〈政治藝術

的弔詭〉（image）、〈無法承受的影像〉（dispositif）和〈思

想性影像〉（image）五篇論文構成。我們可以將第一、二篇

與第四篇視為關於「佈署」的討論，而第三與第五篇則是對於

「影像」的構成與內容進行討論，若稍事總結的話，可以說這

本書主要集中討論被動性與主動性的「美學」關係，這個涉及

感性的關係既是現、當代藝術操作上的現象，亦是當今民主政

治的一大難題。　

在第一篇〈獲解放的觀眾〉一文中討論的是對於啟蒙的質疑

和觀眾的主動性問題。「首先就是教育的平權問題，Joseph

Jacotot所倡導的「無知教師」的形式，這個問題的旨趣在於智

識的平等如何在教育的互動中可能？解放思想的可能性在這

事例中不是知識的再現，而是一種權力的『實踐』」。接著

74│74│75《獲解放的觀眾》研讀報告│洪席耶作品導讀│

洪席耶將智識平權的問題帶向「解放思想與觀眾問題之間明確

關係的消失或許是另一個契機。」這樣就構成了這一篇文章的

基調：以斷裂或「差距」視為一種可能性，而不是努力要予以

取消的對象。於是，對洪席耶而言「劇場」就是一種典型的社

群形式。「該社群形式投注在某種臨場的社群想法，對立於再

現距離」。但並非直接地將劇場概念化為社群，而是在與再現

的對質下，一種個體與社群之聯繫的決定便要求著觀眾的主動

性。

相對於布萊希特與亞陶企圖取消演出與觀眾之界線的努力，柏

拉圖對於劇場的批判與紀‧德堡對於影像與奇觀同個人的切

割，對於洪席耶來說都是一種以拒絕取消「差距」的意識形態

作用。釐清過相關的劇場概念後，討論又轉回教師與學生的關

係上，而說到「學習不是為了佔有知的位置，而是為了精進其

翻譯的技藝，為了將其經驗轉化為文字以及驗證其文字。」以

及「觀眾的權力就是每個他或她都有以其自身方法對於所感知

事物進行翻譯的權力，並將其聯繫到獨特的智識歷險，正是這

樣的權力讓他與其他經歷全然不同歷程的人親近在一起。…觀

眾的解放就置身在這種結盟與解離的權力之中，意即我們每人

都作為觀者的解放，身為觀者不是一種令我們從被動轉為主動

的條件，而是我們的自然處境」。

〈政治藝術的弔詭〉一文重新檢討了當代藝術發展裡政治藝術

進行表達的邏輯，這一篇文章同2004年出版《美學中的不適》

中，〈批判藝術的問題與形變〉，但從原本的拼貼問題移轉出

來，面對更為廣泛的政治藝術表達，並更加強調日常生活藝術

之間的交相趨近。

文章一開始即以政治藝術近來所關懷的課題出發，主要在於回

應經濟、國家與意識形態等面向的統治。主要以幾種衝突形式

予以表達：一、一邊將一些紀念性圖徵轉化為媒體性或廣告性

的圖徵，另一邊則沉默地將潛存的紀念物給掩埋；二、一邊以

主流的手法再現次等身份，另一邊則是浮動的認同；一邊參與

著反抗世界化的權力，另一邊以假身份潛伏於國際重要會議



76│

中；一邊在美術館置入大型的環保機器，另一邊則就地取材創

生新的環境；一邊在荒蕪的社區置放美術館的大作，另一邊則

在美術館塞滿觀眾留下的垃圾；一邊付錢給勞工，自掘墳墓般

地展示出資方的暴力，另一邊則親身去大超商當收銀員，以建

立社會關係。（由此可見「將藝術再政治化的用意」）

這些分歧的發展所表達的則是政治與藝術的不確定性。但無論

如何它們卻具有一個共同點，就是企圖達成某種效能：藝術之

所以是政治的，主要表現在三個面向，一是揭露統治的秘辛，

一是讓主流的圖徵發生移轉，另一則是離開原有的專業場域，

轉入社會實踐。然而，這些設定固定因果關係的作法，只是證

明了一個世紀下來，我們仍活在模仿的傳統裡。「藝術的政治

也就突顯出一種奇特的分裂症」。緊接著便著手分析幾種效能

的樣式：一是藝術生產的感性形式與受眾的感性形式之間的連

貫性關係，強調著作者的意志，可稱之為藝術效能的教學樣

式，強調著感性的連續體；另一種質疑著這樣式的另一種樣

式，則赤裸地表達出作者的預設或說「佈署」。因而，藝術效

能所顯示的並非訊息的問題，而是生產訊息的佈署自身即為問

題所在。但盧梭的解決方案僅是提出非再現的藝術，但這仍然

回到了柏拉圖的模仿，只是有了好模仿的差別。洪席耶將之稱

之為「典型－倫理」樣式：「其思維不再是經由身體或再現影

像構成之課程的對象，而是直接地體現為某社群的風俗或生活

模式。」典型－倫理樣式常常被命名為現代性，意即某種變成

為生活模式之藝術的思維。該樣式便是消抹自身之藝術的樣

式，是一種倫理的立即性，它與前者構成了兩極。

這兩極化常常掩蓋了第三種藝術效能的樣式，即專屬於藝術之

美學制域的美學效能，這種效能則是弔詭的，因為它自身就是

關於藝術生產的感性形式與受眾的接收感性形式兩者的分離與

不連續。美學效能就是一種距離的效能或說中和的效能（Torse

analysé par Wickelmann）。這種懸置，成為一種竊逃：一種事不

關己或基進的被動性（參照Schiller）。連結到他對於藝術的美

學制域的定義，意即藝術與生活的結合：「她不再如此」，一

種「異感」或說「異識」（dissensus），「通過它（各個感覺


性制域間的衝突），藝術在美學分離的制域中碰觸到政治」，

「如果美學經驗觸及政治，那是因為它以異識來定義自身，

對立於朝向特定社會目地之藝術生產的模仿式改寫或倫理式改

寫。」

「這（斷連的美學效能）是各種感覺屬性之體制間的鬥爭，藝

術就是在這種美學的分離體制中，遭逢到政治」，洪席耶再次

回返對於政治的強調（見〈政治的十項命題〉），「政治就是

重構的行動，重構著定義共同客體的感性框架」。所以，要有

政治的出現總是必須對於既存的感性分享的搖撼或更動。「如

果美學經驗可以觸動政治，那是因為它就作為異識的經驗，對

立於指向各種社會目的之藝術生產的模仿或倫理的配合」

接著述說工人日記的故事，意即如何不再做自己的解放時刻。

並藉由Campement Urban討論到市郊問題，而提出「孤獨即作

為一種社會關係的形式」。因此，空洞或無用的空間，事實上

可以在既定分配好的填滿的空間裡製造裂縫。所以，政治與藝

術之關係的弔詭就在於它的異識形式。「存在著某種政治美

學，其中政治主體化的活動重新界定可見者、可述者與可以有

所為的主體；也存在著一種美學政治，其中話語流傳、可見性

之展覽與動情生產的新形式，決定出新的能力，與舊有的可能

性的形構決裂；因而有著一種先於藝術家之政治立場之前的藝

術政治，一種對於共通經驗物件進行獨特切組的藝術政治」因

此，洪席耶定義了藝術政治即異質性邏輯的交織，「內在判準

的消失與分裂的消失，定義出一種既不依賴藝術家意向，也不

依賴政治主體化之明確效果的美學民主論」。

洪席耶將這種藝術政治的問題導向「虛構之必要」。「虛構，

不是用來與真實世界對立的想像世界，而是操作異識的創

作」；再說，如果政治就是製造可以賦予匿名者聲音的主體，

我們就可以說藝術政治是三種邏輯的交織，一是美學經驗的形

式，二是虛構的創作，三是後設政治的策略，而這項交織呼應

著再現、倫理與美學三種效能間的編織。接著洪席耶批判道，

但這三種邏輯的整合是批判藝術的傳統，這傳統致力於兩種效



78│

果，一是將感受到的陌生感消融在背後理由的領略中，二是

進一步將這領略轉化為叛逆的力量。這種共識性的領略是洪席

耶所懷疑的。並將這共識的問題連結到全球化的民主問題來討

論。這種共識促成批判意識的消解，並無效地充斥在畫廊與美

術館中。

但還是會出現無法決斷性，這種無法決斷性的佈署，建立著一

種諷喻的關係，連繫著作為批判的諷喻與對於批判的諷喻。於

是，批判在這樣的佈署中朝向自動取消。這種自動取消又發展

出所謂的關係美學，意即直接生產出與世界的聯繫。但這種庸

俗化馬上呈現出另一方面的發展，意即藝術作品的分佈舊社會

關係而言，只不過是「被看見」：要不將日常置入正式場所，

要不公共空間中以奇觀式的藝術創作生產社會關係。「企圖取

代供觀賞之藝術品的『行動流變』與『關係流變』，只是被當

作藝術外於自身的解套示範」




80│

《電影寓言》導讀

孫松榮, 國立台南藝術大學音像管理研究所

[email protected]

Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 2001. 英文版：Film Fables (Talking Images). Berg Publishers; Tra edition, 2006.


紀錄、整理／于昌民

版權所有 ©孫松榮

要瞭解賈克．洪希耶（Jacques Rancière）在2001年出版的《電

影寓言》（La Fable cinématographique, 2001），首先得先回到

「後梅茲」（Post-Metz）時代的法國當代電影理論來釐清與檢

視哲學家電影美學的實質概念。一九八零年代以降，隨著電影

符號學的退位，雷蒙．貝魯（Raymond Bellour）、賈克．歐蒙

（Jacques Aumont）、多明尼克．夏鐸（Dominique Château）等

人致力於在「電影符號學」以外的理論範疇找尋另一種面對影

像的思考方式，以「形體分析」（l'analyse figurale）的概念去思

考跨影像與媒介中「複數影像」的能動性、造形性與創造性，

以及德勒茲的《運動—影像》（L'Image-mouvement, 1983）與

《時間—影像》（L'Image-temps, 1985），即是箇中幾個回返至

影像自身進行概念創造和誘發思考的重要書寫成果。這兩種路

徑讓電影理論有了兩大轉折：一方面，電影理論作為思考影像

的存在與再顯，重新去發掘影像所顯露的造形力量與媒材之間

的同質性、差異性乃至影像的系譜學和分類學之關係。另一方

面，則是影像作為藝術或藝術作為影像中跨影像藝術的流動與

生成力量。在此脈絡下來檢視洪席耶的電影理論便可知悉其重

要性。

在《電影寓言》的開頭當中，洪席耶引用艾普斯坦（ Jean

80│80│81《電影寓言》導讀│洪席耶作品導讀│

Epstein）在《早安電影》（Bonjour Cinéma, 1921）中將電影視

為心靈的機器之論述，加以連結攝影機的機械之眼在電影當

中置入創作者也無能知曉的他者的力量——無意識理念（idée

sans conscience）——，並在亞里斯多德「擬仿」的戲劇邏輯

之下，透過「感性影像」展現出「藝術美學體制」（régime

esthétique des arts）的矛盾張力，並進一步區別出其與「藝術

詩學或再現體制」（régime représentatif des arts）之差異關係。

此外，高達、馬克、羅賽里尼等導演藉由了「矛盾寓言」

（fable contrariée）這樣的概念在此書中被串連起來。「寓言」

（fable），一種重現或「仿擬」生命經驗的藝術形式，能追溯

到亞里斯多德在《詩學》（Poiètikè）中強調將現實重新組構為

因果關係的連結，並賦予敘述的形式、故事（histoire）或「情

節的合理性」（muthos）之安排來感動觀眾。如此一來，電

影「寓言」即架構了洪希耶電影論述的基本意涵與輪廓。值得

強調的是，寓言的矛盾就來自於影像敘事意義其中的停滯、

空白與遊蕩所呈現的穿透力，是使敘事懸宕而讓「純粹感性

影像」得以迸發。此「感性影像」早在電影之前即已存在，

承接浪漫主義精神的十九世紀的寫實主義小說（如福婁拜等

人）早已呈現出敘事中的光影，如洪席耶在《影像命運》（Le

Destin des images, 2003）中引用《包法利夫人》的段落：當艾瑪

在墜入情網那刻，小說家轉而描寫被風吹起的塵埃。在電影

中，那些「感性影像」湧現的時刻包括：如朗（Fritz Lang）的

《M》（M, 1931）當中被追緝的嫌犯和小女孩在大街上的櫥

窗前化身為城市的漫遊者、或在安東尼．曼的西部片中，史都

華（James Stewart）作為西部片英雄的化身與完美的行動者，

但同時又帶入西部片中最終理想—家庭的敗滅，如《西部人》

(Man of the West, 1958)一片中男女主角駕駛的馬車開往不可知

的未來。

擬現藝術（art de mimesis）與感性的純粹力量（aisthèsis）的共

構關係，在《偽君子》（Tartuffe, 1925）中尤其透過表現主義

影子喻象來形塑偽君子「陰暗外形、碩大披風的極黑瘦長」的

形象，然而藉著「去形」（dé-figuration），偽君子所顯露的白



82│

色襯衣當刻便展現出「感性影像」的造形威力，同時也被洪席

耶拿來論述表現主義在此脫下其陰影的外殼，讓位給好萊塢的

敘事邏輯。然而洪席耶在此種形體分析中，錯失了一九四零

年代好萊塢黑色電影對於寓言和「感性影像」的重新塑形之討

論。賈克．杜涅爾（Jacques Tourneur）的《貓人》（Cat people,

1940）中，在敘事邏輯下不可呈現的人物的變形行動，在導演

的轉換下以游泳池的光影晃動與低沉的野獸嘶吼聲形象化出陰

影的可見與不可見、物質與非物質之間所造成的威脅，呈現出

潛在形體的影像力量。

然而在洪席耶書寫高達時，讀者也能發覺在《電影史》

（Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988-1998）中「藝術美學體制」的真正

釋放。藉由跨媒體如繪畫、攝影、音樂、電影、文學和話語

等的重新連結，在抽象造形的藝術形象當中，創立出無限的

閱讀可能性。在異質性中藉由重新脈絡化自治的影像與如同

再現體制當中「符號共同體」（communauté des signes）般強

度的「共屬」（co-appartenance）或「融合共存」（co-présence

fusionnelle），並且藉此詮釋各個面向的詩學：屬於高達個

人、歷史、或作為預言的詩學。洪席耶認為高達像是福婁拜，

在《電影史》當中創造出類似於福婁拜小說當中並置的微型世

界。舉例來說，一張華沙猶太小孩面對納粹士兵舉起雙手的黑

白照片、穆瑙的吸血鬼形象、羅勃．席歐麥（Robert Siodmak）

的黑色電影《旋轉樓梯》（The Spiral Staircase, 1946）裡啞吧

女主角下樓並手持蠟燭的畫面及高達朗讀著傅柯（Michel

Foucault）述說「一個無名的語聲即已經在我之前存有」的話

語的層疊段落，洪希耶以為高達的「影像性」創置方略既展現

了電影同時是位未盡歷史職責的罪人與獲得救贖的新生者之意

義。高達為他《電影史》中那些微型世界接續出萬千種可能關

係與斷裂，並展示出「無意識理念」在當代不一定和攝影機的

機械之眼有關，而是一切都能夠回到銀幕面前，在存在（影像

本身的力量）和再顯投射到介面（inter-face）上，處理影像中

心靈與神秘的向度。

82│82│83《電影寓言》導讀│洪席耶作品導讀│

簡言之，洪席耶的重要性與開展性可以分為兩個方面來總結：

一是電影作為一種不純的藝術命題之下，同時接續了其他古典

藝術的血脈之關係。因此，如何在文字和影像的矛盾關係中探

索電影與其他藝術的共構關係中所蘊含的動能和影像性的交錯

脈動，即是哲學家的重要書寫策略。另一方面，則是洪席耶的

「藝術美學體制」提供了「形體分析」重要的理論脈絡，彰顯

了兩者面對與思辨電影影像的當代思考方略。



84│

《美學及其不滿》導讀

楊凱麟, 國立中山大學哲學研究所

[email protected]

Malaise dans l'esthétique Europe, le romantisme révolutionnaire, numéro 900 - Avril 2004


版權所有 ©楊凱麟

法文書名Malaise dans l'esthétique，或許該譯為《在美學中的不

適》，但法文書名直接地擬仿佛洛依德的《文明及其不滿》

的法譯本標題（Malaise dans la civilisation），而且在英譯及德

譯本裡，也都採用各自語言裡的這個擬仿。所以，在詢問

過Rancière後，我們也用中文裡的擬仿，譯為《美學及其不

滿》。因此，儘管Rancière並不怎麼援引精神分析（除了馬克

思之外，親身歷經法國這麼多浪潮的洗禮，Rancière似乎總是

不太受到「風潮」的影響），我想在一開始便提醒大家留意本

書標題上的這個暗影。

此外，這本書，伴隨著2000年出版的《感性分配》，2001年的

《美學潛意識》與《電影學寓言》，2003年的《影像的命運》

與2008年的《解放的觀眾》，或許共同構成了Rancière從1996

到2001年這六年之間在「國際哲學學院」所開設的美學課程

（課名可參考大綱）。粗略的說，如果不把Rancière的文學論

述算進來，我們應該可以將美學視為96年以後Rancière哲學論

述很重要的一環，而這個論述，毫不意外的，與他較早期的哲

學關懷－政治－，有相當深刻的理論關連，當然，在我今天

的報告裡，我也將更特意的指認Rancière在這種既政治又美學

（或，非政治又非美學）的思想運動中，在某些地方理直氣

壯，在另些地方則隱而不顯的法國當代哲學姿態。

84│84│85《美學及其不滿》導讀│洪席耶作品導讀│

首先，關於書名裡malaise這個詞。「美學」或「審美」不跟愉

悅、激情、崇高或完善結合，卻涉及某種「不爽」、不滿、苦

惱或不適，這到底是怎麼回事？這種在美學中的不爽（注意，

不是「不爽的美學」，而是「美學中的不爽」），涉及的是擺

盪在二種極端間的思想狀態，甚至在某種意義下，這種思想狀

態可能就是思想自身。這二種狀態，冷熱不均，其中之一，是

對世俗生活的影像與使用物的「惡搞」（n'importe quoi）；另

一則是，宣稱要將藝術形式轉化成嶄新生命形式，並對這種美

學革命給出不實與誇大承諾（25）。前一種是醜聞的，後一種

卻是崇高（但卻也不無醜聞）的。似乎在這二極之間，美學總

是被控訴賦予了藝術惡搞的罪名，總是被控訴迷失於哲學的絕

對與社會革命的虛假承諾中。Rancière在導論最後明確指出，

在這種美學的不適中，他所企圖從事的，是將美學視為「藝術

功能的體制」（régime de fonctionnement de l'art, 25-26）與「言

說模組」（matrice de discours, 26）的結合。我們稍後會對此進

一步說明。

在導論中，Rancière以二位當代法國重要哲學家的美學論述

（他們各以一本書為代表）來描繪1990年代之後的美學論述

光譜，這二本書分別是Jean-Marie Schaeffer的《向美學永別》

（Adieu à l'esthétique, 2000）與Alain Badiou的《非美學小冊》(Petit

manuel d'inesthétique, 1998）。

Rancière認為，Schaeffer意圖以大寫藝術的絕對性取代對美學行

為與藝術實踐的研究，由此要避開「知性與感性和解」的假問

題；Badiou反之，透過詩歌（特別是馬拉美的詩）所具有的感

性真理，他以柏拉圖的大寫觀念之名，藝術作品則是其事件，

意圖拒斥一種將真理屈服於已妥協哲學的美學。他們二位都

批評美學中對純粹思想、感性感情（affects sensibles）與藝術實

踐的混淆。Rancière稱此為「美學混淆」，整本《美學及其不

滿》的賭注之一，正在於扭轉Schaeffer與Badiou理論中認為必

需嚴格區辨思想、感性及實踐的這個要求。Rancière認為，這

三者的混淆，或許不須被舉發或批評，相反的，這種混淆正好



86│

是使得這三者得以被建構並因此擁有其對象與論述場域的關

鍵。我再說清楚一點，美學的問題，對Rancière而言，不在於

思想、感性與實踐在此混成一團，恰好相反，這三者的混淆正

是美學奠立的關鍵。我引用一段非常Rancière式的論述：

「如果『美學』具有混淆之名，此『混淆』實際上是讓我

們得以將藝術的客體、經驗模式與思想形式這些我們意圖

將其孤立以便舉發它之物同一化。為了在其特異性中更佳

地識別這些藝術實踐或美學感情而拆解這個關節，這或許

就注定錯過此特異性。」（12）

Si « esthétique » est le nom d'une confusion, cette « confusion

» est en fait ce qui nous permet d'identifier les objets, les modes

d'expérience et les formes de pensée de l'art que nous prétendons

isoler pour la dénoncer. Défaire le nœud pour mieux discerner en

leur singularité les pratiques de l'art ou les affects esthétiques, c'est

peut-être alors se condamner à manquer cette singularité.(12)

這個關鍵的混淆，剛好見証了Rancière美學論述中最重要的概

念之一，「美學體制」（régime esthétique）。其混亂了屬於藝

術之物與屬於日常生活之物，並且建構了藝術的意識生產與

感性經驗的非自主形式之間的關係。在第22頁中，Rancière指

出，美學不是一種關於（主體）「可感性」（sensibilité）的

思想，而是涉及得以去定義藝術物（choses de l'art）的「感性

存有」或「感性自身」（sensorium）的思想[註1]。換言之，

我再引用Rancière的話：「要有藝術，就必須要有一種能同一

於它的凝視（regard）與思想。」（15）在導論中，Rancière

多次強調當代美學中這種通貫並混亂於藝術、凝視與思想，

或思想、感性及實踐之間的特異場域。簡單的說，這三者對

Rancière而言有一種同一性的關係，但這個同一性卻也同時造

成一種新型態的失序與吊詭，美學不再是一種關於「製作方

法」實效判準（critères pragmatiques），而愈來愈是一種如何

「成為可感方法」（manières d'être sensibles, 21）的定義。換言

[註1 ]或者 R a n c i è r e定義為「感性場

域」（milieu sensible, 41n）。


之，Rancière強調，美學到底意味什麼？「意味在藝術的美學

體制中的藝術存有的特性不再由技術的完美判準所給予，而

是由某種感性感知（appréhension sensible）的形式所指定。」

（44）而在此，重點恐怕不是去明白區辨知性與感性，相反

的，是去探尋這個被稱為美學混淆、介於思想、感性與實踐之

間的「美學體制」。

在這個前提下，Rancière開始談美學如何如同政治。

這裡的政治比較不涉及權力的操作或對抗。Rancière指出，

藝術實踐在於「物質與象徵地建構某種時空，某種相對於感

性經驗的尋常形式之懸置（suspens）。」（36）換言之，藝

術如同政治，來自於其所切割的時間與其所摶聚的空間，這

是一種特殊空間的組態（configuration），一種經驗獨特面向

的切割（découpage）。對Rancière而言，如果藝術與政治有

關，那必然地關連到某個特殊化的空間與時間，以及在這個

特異時空中的「感性分配」，而重點是再回到一開始所提出

的「美學混淆」，在這個賦予美學意涵的特殊經驗中，懸置

了介於表像與現實、形式與物質、主動與被動、知性與可感

性等的尋常鏈結，構成了一種感性分配的新形式。換言之，

藝術物由它所從屬的、差異於主宰性感性存有的感性存有

（sensorium différent）所定義，因此藝術如同是政治，但這種

政治總是意味了一種自由遊戲的可能，其作為一種自主的經驗

形式（forme d'expérience autonome），使得藝術觸及了感性的政

治分配，且對Rancière而言，這個特殊的感性經驗如同是嶄新

人性的萌芽（48），而革命，即使或特別是馬克思主義所預言

的、唯物生活的生產模式的革命，都首先必須是關於感性存在

形式的革命。Rancière將此稱為「美學後設政治的特別形式」

（50）。

藝術的這種純粹性（來自於「物質與象徵地建構某種嶄新

時空」）與政治並不衝突。Rancière舉馬拉美的詩為例，一

方面，詩是「異質感性團塊的堅實性」（consistance d'un bloc



88│

sensible hétérogène, 50），在自身上自我封閉，拒斥著日記或報

紙上「千篇一律的墨水流淌」，但另一方面，詩又是一種姿態

的不堅實性（inconsistance d'un geste），會消逝於如慶典般建構

共同空間的行動之中。換言之，藝術的政治性，或「美學後設

政治的特別形式」意味著，「未來的集體生命封閉於藝術作品

的反抗性積體中」，而此生命又被現實化於描繪另類共同空間

的且漸漸消失的運動中（50）。

這種「美學後設政治的特別形式」，無疑地首先是一種由感性

分配所特異地給予的嶄新感性存有，其意味著某種在時間上指

向未來並抗拒現在的特殊時空，可以是抽象畫、詩或小說，這

個被給予的感性存有同時也因未來的逐步到來而注定產生於一

種逐漸自我消逝的運動。換言之，藝術作品的感性存有意味著

一種獨特而不無怪異的存有模式：其一方面因為「物質與象

徵地建構某種嶄新時空」而達成了感性分配，這使得藝術作品

處於席勒所說的「自由表象」（libre apparence）中，具有一種

陌異性（étrangeté, 51）與孤獨（53，別忘了Blanchot在《文學

空間》的第一句話正是，「當我們感受到孤獨這個詞要意味什

麼，似乎我們就學到一些關於藝術的事。」（13）），但另一

方面，藝術作品的孤獨承載著一種慶典般的解放承諾，但這個

承諾的達成同時也消抺了作為被區隔開來的現實的藝術，使其

轉化為生命的形式（53）。

Rancière說，藝術作品所涉及的「自由表象」展現的正是異質

感性的威力，其面對主體時，完全是閑置的（oisive, 51），陌

生於一切意志、手段與目的。藝術作品自我封閉於其自身，亦

即主體的思想、欲望與目的完全無法穿透。而且正是因為這種

陌異性，因為這種徹底的不受使用（indisponibilité），承載了

人類的充份人性與未來的人性。於是，底下這句話似乎完全

地展露了Rancière美學體制的政治性：美學經驗的主體藉由他

所完全不能掌握的藝術作品，被允諾得以掌握一個嶄新世界

（51）。


由美學體制所說明的藝術狀態只存在於一種矛盾力量的拉扯

中，一方面，這是藝術藉由自我抹除（亦即，使藝術不再如同

藝術），以轉化為生命形式的美學革命計畫（一種對「未來

的節慶」的準備，49），另一方面，作品又具有一種抗拒的形

象，這種政治意味的承諾僅以一種負面或消極方式被保留，被

保留在一種區分藝術形式與其他生命形式的差異中；或者說的

再明確一點，藝術作品的異質性正好取消一切承諾。換言之，

藝術作品似乎存在而且僅存在於一種雙重的矛盾中：首先，藝

術作品以感性分配建構或創造了一個特異時空，但這個特異時

空並不屬於現前的生活，而是在時間上指向未來的慶典，其時

間永遠是未來的，但這個由感性分配所給予的美學性未來逐

漸落實成當下生命形式的同時（Rancière將此稱為「形構感受

社群的革命」（révolution comme formation d'une communauté du

sentir），54），藝術作品便不再具有其特異時空性，不再是未

來而是現前。因此藝術作品必然成為一種自我消逝、自我抺除

與自我退穩的存有狀態。但另一方面，藝術作品所具有的「自

由表象」，其所必然被賦予的抗拒形象卻又使得上述的條件必

然只能是消極性的。

Rancière的「美學如同一種政治」操作著一個至為關鍵的程

序：從藝術作品的創造到感受社群的形構，這似乎是一個在

時間向度上必然指向未來的操作，在空間向度上必然得重新

分派的特異場域。當然，作品的必然自我消逝，無疑地來自

Blanchot的啟發。

在Rancière的美學政治或美學體制中，至少有二個概念毫無疑

問地成為理解的關鍵：未來與陌異。前者似乎總是連結到某

種承諾、慶典、革命與社群的建立等等。後者則是抗拒、異

質性、獨特與孤獨。很怪異的，而或許整個Rancière美學的賭

注，他用以豎立其抽象機器的核心動力，正是幾乎是已構成雙

重性（某種孿生狀態，或DNA雙螺旋）的二者（未來與陌異、

承諾與抗拒、慶典與孤獨、社群與異質…）總是互相抵銷、矛

盾、衝突與永不協調的必要的緊張關係。換言之，美學體制或



90│

感性分配成立在二個互相撕扯的概念之中，而也正是在這種必

然的撕扯與不可能的混淆中，正是在對這種撕扯與混淆的永論

述與爭吵中，美學體制（同時作為一種可視性的特殊形式與作

為將藝術同一於如其所是的言說性）如同政治建構而成。

透過到目前為止對藝術的「問題化」，我們或許可以稍稍體會

當代法國哲學的一種奇怪趣味。去述說那不可述說者，去追尋

那一再逃逸者，去觀看那不可視者…；不可述與不可視並不意

味思想就束手無策，但也不意味思想必須將其強制為可述與可

視，換言之，必須剝奪其不可述與不可視的珍貴特質。

因此，連結到藝術創作的孤獨，並不是一種鳥不生蛋的荒寂狀

態，藝術也不是因此成為「我寂寞的要死」的悲慘哭號，相

反的，這種孤獨（如果你感受的到的話）熱鬧的很，快樂的

很，這是一種由此激生（激突）出各式藝術可能的條件。換言

之，用德勒茲的話來說，這種孤獨並不荒蕪，而且剛好相反，

這是一種「極端稠密（peuplé）的孤獨」（DI, 13），其建立在

一種流變的條件下，就是：書寫必須是流變為「非－書寫」

（devenir non écrire）。而作家，流變為「非作家」（devenir

non écrivain）。而正是在這種流變中，孤獨（但卻是「極端稠

密的孤獨」）成為一種必要的狀態。我再強調一次，不管是

Blanchot、德勒茲或Rancière所提及的這種孤獨，都是在一種極

端吊詭狀態下所產生的狀態，或者不如說，正是處在這種我們

所一再想指出的極端吊詭狀態下，創作者先天地是孤獨的，而

且他必然孤獨；因為這種極端吊詭正是孤獨的來源。因為它總

是指向一種「自我棄絕」的永恒動態，它來自不是它之處，

「是」來自於某種「不是」，換言之，來自於一種絕不可能的

運動也是唯一可能的運動，而正是在此，美學如同一種政治。




92│

政治的起點與歧見 (La Mésentente) 的理性：

《歧見：政治與哲學》導讀[註1]

劉紀蕙, 國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

[email protected]

Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente. Politique et philosophie. Paris: Galilée 1995.英文版：Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.


版權所有 ©劉紀蕙

【大綱】

美學與政治

《歧見》

話語與組成份子

人民：錯誤之名

理解／不理解，理性話語情境，以及政治的現代型態

美學與政治

杭席耶持續令我感到興趣的，是他謹慎而敏銳地分析不同時期

的藝術形式、美學理論、歷史敘事、政治哲學，而尖銳地指出

其中某種共享的感受性分配邏輯，擾亂此分配邏輯的政治性之

可能，以及此擾亂秩序卻又進行重新分配，重建秩序，而塑造

了新的共同世界的弔詭。

所謂的共享的感受性分配邏輯，意思是指我們所感受到的事

物，我們的認知模式，或者，事物出現在我們所可感知以及命

名的層次，都被預先分派在此感知體系的範疇與層級中。在這

個感知體系內，事物的可見或是不可見，可說或是不可說，可

[註1]《歧見：政治與

哲學》這本書的中譯

本即將出版。此書的翻

譯是由交通大學社會與

文化研究所幾位老師

與博士班研究生共同完

成：林淑芬副教授，薛

熙平，陳克倫與我本

人。此外，社文所魏德

驥助理教授與博士班研

究生楊淳嫻完成了《歷

史之名：知識的詩學

》的翻譯，博士班研究

生關秀惠與楊成瀚完成

了《感性分享：美學與

政治》的翻譯。在此

過程中，這個翻譯工作

坊相當密集的聚會與討

論，引發不少激辯，也

釐清了許多困難的思考

性問題。我要在此向這

個工作團隊表達我的敬

意與謝意。

92│92│93政治的起點與歧見 (La Mésentente) 的理性：《歧見：政治與哲學》導讀

│洪席耶作品導讀│

被聽到或是不可被聽到，被辨識為相同或是不同，美或是醜，

和諧或是噪音，都是相互關聯，相互定位，而有其內在法則

與邏輯：這就是杭席耶所謂的感受性分配／共享(une aisthesis

partagée)，或是感受性體制 (the regime of the sensible)。「配

享」或是「共有」，partage──share, part, division，同時意味著

在整體之下共同享有，也意味著在此整體之下成為一個部分，

被計算為一個部份，以此部分來參與整體，以及在整體之內處

於被區分、劃分與分配的部分。

藝術參與此感受性的體制，也屬於此感受性的共同世界。因

此，杭席耶會說：現代主義詩人與現代主義的設計在追求簡潔

與流線型的形式時，卻與工程師一樣，都要製造出共同生活

的一種共同的新的質感。[註2]杭席耶也說，從馬拉美、貝倫

斯(Peter Behrens)、拉斯金，到1900到1914年間的維也納分離派

(Secession)，以及包括Aloïs Riegl的有機裝飾與Wilhelm Wörringer

抽象線條的幾位設計大師，這些流線型的簡潔圖像設計的推

進，逐漸成為抽象主義的理論保證：「藝術表達藝術家之意志

──意念，以象徵代表內在的必要性。」[註3]

我們注意到，關於現代主義藝術，杭席耶真正提出的論點是，

無論是詩、舞蹈、設計、繪畫、雕塑，都回應了當時的美學要

求，以創新與突破的前衛姿態，挑戰當時的既成常規，讓尚未

出現的感知模式得以出現，而參予了感知體制重新分配的過

程。但是，這些逐漸浮現的美學要求──現代主義對於藝術自

主性的堅持，以及藝術形式與生命形式的一致，使得藝術作品

在探索自身形式與材質，使其具有自主性與獨特性的同時，卻

提供了唯心主義以及形式表達意志的合理化基礎。按照杭席耶

的說法，以藝術表達藝術家之「意志」，以及以象徵表達「內

在」，這是二十世紀現代主義美學所共有的邏輯。

政治與美學的緊密扣連，使得理解杭席耶的政治思想與他的美

學思想，成為不可分開的工作，而此扣連處，則在於他對於感

受性體系所共享的話語邏輯的論點。

[註2]“Between Mallarmè and Behrens , bet ween the pure poet and the f unctionalist engineer, there therefore exists this singular l ink: the same idea of streamlined forms and the same f unction attributed to these forms – to define a new texture of communal existence.” (Rancière 2007: 97)

[註3]“… guarantors of painting’s evolution into abstractionism: an art that expresses only the volition – the idea – of the artist, b y m e a n s o f s y m b o l s which are signs translating a n i n t e r n a l n e c e s s i t y. (Rancière 2007: 103)



94│

杭席耶的感知體系以及隱藏在可見性體系背後的話語邏輯，

很明顯的是挪用了傅柯的知識型(épistémè) 以及他所說的真

理體制(truth regime)的問題。[註4]這個問題的關鍵在於話語

（logos）之內在秩序或是說話之立基點的問題。無論主體從屬

於或是對抗於話語體系，都無法脫離於其可見與不可見的結

構。杭席耶指出，由感官、感覺與感受而獲得的知覺，是在

話語邏輯中被分配的位置。正如同亞里士多德對於政治性動物

(politikon zoon)的定義：群居住在城邦中的動物，社會性而說

話的動物，才是政治性的動物。杭席耶指出，首先要進入共同

享有的感知體系，政治才成為可能；要學習說話，必須先進

入這個共享的感知體系。正是因為共同享有一套語言，同時也

進入了此套語言所決定的內外高下的層級與排除邏輯。被分

配，被排除，都是同一套邏輯。杭席耶指出：「共同」並不僅

指共同享有的住所，而必然是在一個擁有可能性的空間中處於

具有爭議性的分配/共享的狀態(Rancière 1999: 26, fr. 48; Rancière

2004a: 42)。[註5]杭席耶也指出，所有對話都假定了雙方對於

發言內容的某種理解(entente)，然而，這個「理解」卻是問題

所在。雙方相互理解，預設了理解的一致性與可溝通，但是這

個雙方相互理解的預設本身，便已經忽略了關於話語之意義如

何被計算，已經是在感知體系內被分配的不同位置，不同參與

者會因為其被分配的位置而有不同的理解模式(Rancière 1999:

48-49, fr. 77-78)。

對於杭席耶而言，政治便是干預感覺分配體系之活動，使原本

在感知座標中沒有參與之份的人得以介入。政治轉移配置框架

內被分配的身體位置，使不可見者得以出現，使無法被理解的

無意義噪音成為有意義的話語。[註6]杭席耶強調，政治並不

是透過共識而建立共同的生活型態，也不是透過共識而集結

人群，或是僅在形式上達到平等。杭席耶認為，共識其實是

政治的結束。政治若是被視為建立一群人共同生活的形態，

政治便失去了意義。政治的本質是非共識(dissensus)或是歧見

(mésentente)。此非共識「不是意見或是利益之間的衝突」，

而是「感受性與其自身之間的距離」。[註7]

[註4]杭席耶說明，他

對於感知體系的分配與

共享的概念，是來自於

傅柯對於可見性、可說

與可思之譜系研究，而

杭席耶對於藝術體系的

分析，則是參考了傅柯

的知識型概念知識型的

概念。不過，杭席耶

說，傅柯著重於特定時

期的可見性問題，杭席

耶則強調歷史經驗之跨

越、重複與非時序性。

此外，歷史面向所區分

的可思與未思，以及傅

柯所謂的邊界、封閉與

排除，都停留在此歷

史性的界線。但是，

杭席耶強調他所處理

的是內部的分裂與僭

越。他不要進行譜系

學的研究，而要探究

平等的問題。 Rancière 2 0 0 0 a : “ L i t e r a t u r e , P o l i t i c s , A e s t h e t i c s : Approaches to Democratic Disagreement,” p. 13.

[註5]“The speech that causes polit ics to ex ist is the same that gauges t h e v e r y g a p b e t w e e n speech and the account of it . And the aisthêsis that shows itself in this speech is the very quarrel over the constitution of the aisthêsis, over this partition of the perceptible through which bodies find themselves in community.” (Rancière 1999: 26) “A common world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode…… It is always a polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in a space of possibilities.” (Rancière 2004a: 42)

[註6] " I n o w p ro p o s e t o r e s e r v e t h e t e r m politics for an extremely d e t e r m i n e d a c t i v i t y antagonistic to policing: whatever breaks with the tangible conf igurat ion whereby parties and parts →



我們很清楚政治(la politique)不是治安(police)，政治是擾亂現

有秩序，揭露其中間距的宣稱。然而，為什麼人民的出現，革

命的完成，會導致另一種形態的專政高壓統治？為什麼現代民

主制度的政黨政治，最終也是各種對立意識形態團體的操作

者，或是受到黑金集團的劫標，甚至可能是種族主義或是倫理

共同體的變形而復出？政治的意義到底在何處？杭席耶強調，

正是因為民主政治建立於單一理性以及共識的操作，因此必然

涉及利益的計算與交換。人民總是容易陷入種族或是人口計算

的大海，普羅階級也時常被混淆為捍衛勞工之利益，而人民的

示威更時常可能被錯認為商業性的市集。[註8]杭席耶強調，

政治理性必須脫離利益與共識的綁束，政治性主體必須總是

「暫時性」的，隨時在事件的運動中「出現與消失」。[註9]

如果政治性主體進入了共同陣線，營造共識，召喚與複製新的

共同體主體，那就會是另外一種治安權力秩序的布置起點。

《歧見》

這個能夠具有顛覆壓迫性秩序的政治，其最初的發生與現代版

本的轉型，以及其內在的構成邏輯，便是杭席耶在《歧見》

(La Mésentente) 一書中主要探討的問題。

在《歧見》這本書中，我們看到杭席耶如何檢視不同歷史時期

的不同政治哲學，指出政治哲學如何操作合理化的話語邏輯來

處理政治本身難以思考的問題，以及古典政治型態為何會被現

代政治型態所替換的問題。

全書章節安排：

第一章　政治的起點

第二章錯誤(Le Tort)：政治與治安

第三章歧見之理性

第四章　從元政治（arc h i- p ol i t i q u e)、旁設政治( para-

politique)到後設（méta-politique)

[註7]“ The essence of p o l i t i c s i s d i s s e n s u s . D i s s e n s u s i s n o t t h e confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the manifestation of a distance of the sensible f rom itsel f .” (R ancière 2001)

[註8]杭席耶在“Te n T h e s e s o n P o l i t i c s ”曾經說： “ P o l i t i c a l demonstrations are thus always of the moment and their subjects are always p r o v i s i o n a l . Po l i t i c a l dif ference is always on t h e s h o r e o f i t s o w n disappearance: the people are close to sinking into the sea of the population or of race, the proletariat borders on being confused with workers defending their interests, the space o f a p e o p l e ' s p u b l i c demonstration is always at risk of being confused with the merchant's agora, etc.”

[註9]這是杭席耶反覆

出現的論點，明顯例子

出現於《政治的岸邊》

(The Shore of Politics)。

or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration -- that of the part of those who have no part. This break is manifest in a series of actions that reconfigure the space where parties, parts, or lack of parts have been def ined. Polit ical activity is whatever shifts a body f rom the place assigned to it or changes a place's destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise." Rancière 1999: 29-30.

←



96│

第五章民主，抑或，共識

第六章在其虛無時代的政治

本書論述的展開順序是：

1.從亞里士多德定義屬於政治之話語(logos)開始(l’animal logico-

politique)，揭露話語分裂之點，使政治出現。政治的起點，就

在於原有秩序的中斷。

2.區分政治與治安

3.定義屬於政治理性的歧見邏輯

4.處理「政治哲學」之原理以及如何遮蔽此話語分裂

5.在政治實踐的領域中，「政治哲學」之復返所帶來影響的幾

個思考地標

a.民主之名如何被理解，此民主及其實踐與共識體系之正當化

有何差別

b.以政治終結及其復返之名所進行的實踐意味著什麼

c.以無疆界之人性為名而狂熱以及對於以非人性統治之名表達

哀悼的問題

此處，我只要討論幾個核心的關鍵概念，也就是有關共享的話

語邏輯，共同體組成份子的計算，歧見的不同理解與不同理

性，以及不同理性之簡化而導致的現代政治的轉型。這幾個概

念在本書的第一章與第三章有非常清晰的闡述。

話語與組成份子

杭席耶指出，參與共同體，便是共同享有同樣的話語(logos)。

話語所標記的好壞或是善惡，對於理解此話語的共同體內的主

體而言，是顯而易見的。然而，對於個人來說的好與壞，不見

得是對於共同體來說同樣的好與壞。但是，以有用與否而建立

的正義區分，卻是政治秩序的理性原則之起點。政治正義是決

定公共分配之持份(le partage du commun)的秩序。因此，政治

正義並不是單純地平衡個人利益或是彌補傷害；正義是對於衡



量標準本身的選擇，以及使這個共同體之內的各部份依據此

衡量標準而各取其份。從有用／有害到正義／不正義之分的通

道，便是我們需要理解的話語之理性邏輯。

既然參與此共同話語與共同世界牽涉了共同享有／共處分配的

關係之內，那麼，如何計算什麼人可以屬於此共同體？什麼人

是這個共同體的組成部份(parties)？什麼人並不佔有可以出現

的一部份，就是關鍵的問題。更重要的是，任何關於「組成部

分」的計算，總會牽涉了某種基本的錯誤計算(mécompte)。

然而，政治哲學卻會以城邦的共同利益／善(le bien)之說法，

來掩蓋此基本的錯誤計算。

所謂共同的利益／善，必須由共同體之各份子(les parts)以符

合於共同體各個構成部分(partie)之「價值」(axiaï)的比例，

共同構成。屬於此組成部份者，便會因為此名份而擁有其權

利，也因此而擁有共同的權力。杭席耶以亞里士多德所討論的

雅典城邦的三種名份，也就是：寡頭(les oligoï)的財富，貴族

(aristoï) 的德性或是卓越(arétè)，以及屬於平民(démos)的自

由(liberté) (eleutheria)。分別來看，這三種名份(titres)各別有

其體制(régime)：富人的寡頭政治，菁英的貴族政治，人民的

民主政治。

這個看起來完美的結構，其間卻隱藏著不平衡以及基本的錯

誤計算。以人民為例，人民的自由替共同體帶來了什麼？首

先，平民的自由並不是一個確定的屬性，而純粹是人為的

(facticité)。這些平民因負債而被奴役的狀態被取消，而成

為了自由人，被計算為城邦中的一份子，並自稱為人民(se

nomme peuple)，並且依照人民的共同身份而參與共同事務。但

是，他們所具有的名份，自由，卻不是他們所專有。他們其實

並沒有任何特有的屬性，正如亞里士多德所說，他們是「完全

不享有任何份額」(n'avaient part à rien)的人。這些無區分而沒

有任何明確資格的大眾，卻被認為可以擁有與其他人同樣的自

由，透過同名之詞，認同整個共同體。



98│

人民：錯誤之名

「人民」因此便是一個具有政治性的空洞之名。這個不具有實

質屬性的空名(vide)，杭席耶所說的錯誤／偏差之名(le nom du

tort)。這個錯誤／偏差，中斷了貴族統治的自然秩序，也展現

了一個具有爭議性的位置。任何不擁有任何份額的人──古代

的窮人，第三階級(le tiers état)，現代的無產階級，都是這種實

際上是一無所有，卻又被當作是全體的大眾。但是，正是由於

這些不擁有任何份額之份(part des sans-part)的存在狀態，共同

體才以一種政治性共同體存在，也就是說，具有根本爭議性而

造成分歧的共同體，這種爭議涉及了計算共同體的組成份子。

這個錯誤／偏差之名，中斷了統治者的自然秩序，扭轉了原有

的特定配置，而這的中斷與扭轉便是政治發生之時刻。這的錯

誤，並不是有待彌補的過失，而是不可共量性的引入，打亂了

原先共同體的根基。同時，正因為「人民」之空名，而可以成

為衡量不同現行政治體制之錯誤計算，此空名也使得人民本身

並不具有任何「根基」(arkhè)。

但是，正因為人民是個空名(le nom vide de people)，因此人民

也正是可以被挪用之名，而會陷入統計與計算之可見性模式，

或是等同於種族的起源神話，或是階級之共識，或是借用為商

業操作的籌碼。這就是為甚麼杭席耶會說，政治是罕見的，政

治性主體必須總是暫時性的，必須在事件中出現後便消失。不

然，新的秩序與共識陣營便會開啓了新的治安體制的部署。

理解／不理解，理性話語情境，以及政治的現代型態

還有一個沒有討論到的問題，也就是論證的政治理性的問題，

也就是不同理性的非共識或是歧見(mésentente)。政治所牽涉

的爭議，必然已經涉及了歧見。所謂歧見，並不是不同意見的

衝突，或是不同立場的對峙，而是指雙方都說同一件事，但是

所理解的卻完全不是同一件事，其中涉及了不同話語情境之合

理性 (rationalité) 本身。政治論證的話語情境總是已經暗示了



自己話語的理據與秩序，也就是此話語之秩序如何將對方視

為可算數或是不可算數，可被理解或是完全是噪音。同樣的話

語，卻有不同的秩序與理據，這就是感受性的不同配置，也是

話語的內部誤差(écart)。一個社會的語言有其運行中功能與的

秩序，但是，由於不同的理解，共同世界是便由共同體與非共

同體所構成的整體。這個「我們」與「他們」的場景其實是一

種非關係。歧見的政治性結構，便建立於這種雙重納入與雙重

否認的共同體場景。權利的證明或是正義的宣稱，總是感知分

享的重新配置，也是新世界的打開。話語中總是銘刻了某種美

學結構與治安秩序。因此，「詩學」既是政治性的開啓一個新

世界，又美學部署與重新配置。

杭席耶刻意對比古典政治與現代政治的差異。古典政治所操作

的，是關於意見(doxa)的模糊概念，將人民設置於共同體中決

斷主體位置的表象(apparence)。古典政治堅持平民(démos)以

及其不屬己之屬性的觀念，而因此打開了作為爭議空間的公共

空間。此外，古典政治堅持關於平民既是部分又是全體的錯誤

／偏差計算，以及同時專屬於平民又屬於每一個人的自由。因

此，以一個空名，無法出現者便得以出現。

現代政治首先是在虛擬的感受性共同體之上操作，並且取決

於命令與功能之分配的差別。現代政治堅持重複操作主體化

過程，而創造了情感衝突(dissentiment)的共同體世界。現代

政治關注那些每一次都同時是論證也是世界序曲(ouvertures)

的示威之佈署。打開共同世界的序曲，並不意味著雙方同意

(consensuels)的世界。在我們的宣言中寫下「我們理解他們」

的主體，並不是工人的集合，不是一個集合體，而是一個宣示

理解時，卻展現其差異結構的整套操作，一個相同與不同之關

係結構。現代政治透過複製共同／爭議的世界而存在，而這些

世界可以被簡化為社會活動與秩序的表面。現代政治以爭議

的主體化佈署，不僅是「我們市民」、「我們工人」或是「我

們女人」這一系列的模式所指認的市民、工人或是女人，無法

與任何社會團體同一，就連作為打開此系列的發言主體之「我



100│

們」，與被說出(énoncé)的主體之間的關係（市民、工人、女

人、無產者），都被關係整體與此宣示序列之操作所定義。既

不是所謂的「我們」，或是其所指定的身分，也不是此二者

的並列能夠定義此主體。主體，或者更應該說是政治性的主

體化模式(modes of subjectification)，只有在這一套關係中才會

出現。杭席耶指出，主體化(subjectivization)是指原本在此話語

結構內無法發言者成為可以發言，使不被看見者進入可見性

體系的一系列活動。笛卡兒的「我思故我在」便是此模式的

原型。任何政治主體化的活動也都屬於此公式。「歧見」( la

mésentente)是政治性主體的起點。政治主體化挑戰原本既定的

維持秩序與穩定狀態的治安邏輯(police logic)，召喚出另外一

個共同體，於是一個原本不存在的群體便與原生社群分裂而出

現。現代政治透過複製共同而具有控訴意味的世界而存在，這

些世界被簡化為社會活動與秩序的表面。[註10]我們只看到各

種走在街頭的抗議團體，或是透過議會政治與政黨政治而集結

的利益團體。現代政治在各種主體化的操作之下，得以透過各

種話語餵養自己而壯大。杭席耶說，「我們」只是個結構關係

的代名詞，指向了一個系列的示威運作，以及各種主體形式。

這些政治主體，或是主體化模式，只是在同一與差異的原則之

下而被辨識的「人」的集合體所構成(Rancière 1999: 58-59)。

[註11]

這些共同的世界，這些新秩序的配置，在十九世紀是普羅勞工

的共同體，在當代，則出現了杭席耶所說的倫理共同體的新

秩序。杭席耶說，倫理轉向正是以共識(consensus)強制抹除政

治性的區分線。無論是以統計方式計算人口，或是計算全球

社群之利益與構成分子，都是將政治共同體改變為倫理共同體

(ethical community)，聚集同一種人，而計算每一個人。倫理轉

向的力量，翻轉了昨日引發改變的思想與態度的形式，不僅將

不具有共識的不同部份納入共識的秩序，而更將不同的歧見位

置絕對化。[註12]

[註10]“It is a surplus subject def ined by the manifesting its distancing str ucture, its str ucture of relationship between t h e c o m m o n a n d t h e n o t co m m o n . Mo d er n polit ics ex ists through the multiplication of the common/litigious worlds deductible over the surface of social activ it ies and orders. It exists through t h e s u b j e c t s t h a t t h i s multiplication authorizes, subjects whose count is always supernumerar y.” (Rancière 1999: 58)

[註11]“It is also that the relat ionship of the ' we,' the subject of the utterance that opens the sequence, to the subject announced, whose identity is served upon a variety of forms (citizens, workers, women, proletariants), i s d e f i n e d s o l e l y b y the set of relationships a n d o p e rat i o n s i n t h e demonstrative sequence. Ne i t h er t h e we o r t h e identity assigned to it, nor the apposition of the two defines a subject. There a r e p o l i t i c a l s u b j e c t s o r r a t h e r m o d e s o f subjectif ication only in the set of 'persons,' the complete play of identities and alterities implicated in the demonstration and the worlds--common or s eparate - - w h ere t h es e are defined." (Rancière 1 9 9 9 : 5 9) 杭席耶在

《政治的岸邊》(Of the Shore of Politics)與《民

主的怨恨》(The Hatred of Democracy)，都處理

過此政治性主體以及民

主政治的弔詭問題。

[註 1 2 ] 倫理轉向的

問題，在杭席耶的

近著《美學及其不

滿》( Aesthetics and its discontents)有深入的分

析。



Reference:

Rancière, Jacques. (1995) On the Shores of Politics (Aux bords du

politique, 1990). London, New York: Verso.

Rancière, Jacques. (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (La

Mésentente: Politique et philosophie, Paris: Galilée 1995.) trans. Julie

Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Rancière, Jacques. (2000a) “Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches

to Democratic Disagreement,” interviewed by Solange Guénoun and

James H. Kavanagh, SubStance # 92, 2000.

Rancière, Jacques. (2001) “Ten Theses on Politics.” The Johns Hopkins

University Press. On-line Journal.

Rancière, Jacques. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution

of the Sensible. (Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique, Paris:

La Fabrique, 2000). trans. by Gabriel Rockhill. London & New York:

Continuum, 2004.

Rancière, Jacques. (2005) Hatred of Democracy (La haine de la

démocratie)

Rancière, Jacques. (2007) The Future of the Image (Le Destin des images.

Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), trans. by Gregory Elliott, London & New

York: Verso, 2007. 91

Rancière, Jacque. (2009) “The Ethical Trun of Aesthetics and Politics,”

Aesthetics and its Discontents. (2004) Trans. By Steven Corcoran.

Cambridge: Polity: 2009.



102│

關於「錯誤」( le tor t ; the wrong)、政治與治安（politics and police）、元政治（archi-politics）、para-politics、後設政治（meta-politics）的概念釐清，以及關於虛無時代政治

的看法[註1]

薛熙平, 國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

[email protected]



版權所有 ©薛熙平

【大綱】

I 錯誤，以及政治／治安之別 (第二章) le tort: politique et police (Wrong:

Politics and Police)

II 元政治（archi-politics）、para-politics、後設政治（meta-politics）

(第四章)

III 在其虛無時代的政治 (第六章)　

　

I 錯誤，以及政治／治安之別 (第二章) le tort: politique et

police (Wrong: Politics and Police)

‧tort（錯誤）

錯誤是一種衝突，是在不被算入（不算數）的言說能力，和被

算入（算數）的言說能力（政治能力）之間的衝突。

是兩種「邏輯」的併陳─衝突上演：

1.既有分配聲音/語言（政治）的秩序。

[註1]第二章及第四章

的部分段落乃直接摘錄

林淑芬老師的翻譯，第

六章則參考導讀人自己

的翻譯。

102│102│103關於「錯誤」(le tort; the wrong)、政治與治安（politics and police）、元政治（archi-politics）、para-politics、後設政治（meta-politics）的概念釐清，以及關於虛無時代政治的看法


2.對於這個分配中已然預設的平等的揭露，或展現自己也具有

平等言說的能力。

例子：此乃十九世紀的法國思想家，針對李維（Tite-Live）所

敘述的阿封坦丘（Aventin）上羅馬平民（plébéiens）分裂故事

的重新書寫中，讓我們了解到的事情。從一八二九年開始，巴

隆舍（Pierre-Simon Ballanche）在《巴黎評論》(Revue de Paris)中

發表了一系列題為〈運用於羅馬人民歷史之所有人民歷史的普

遍公式〉（Formule generale de l'histoire de tous les peoples appliqué

a l'histoire du people romain）的文章。

執政官曼尼厄斯前往阿封坦丘試圖平息平民的反叛。

1.平民的模仿（展現平等言說的能力）。他們因而執行了一系

列模擬貴族的言說行動：他們進行詛咒與神化崇拜儀式；他們

派遣之中的一名成員去諮詢屬於他們的神諭；他們藉由再次洗

禮的方式而擁有代表。簡言之，他們讓自己如同有名字的人一

樣地行動。

2.平民的聆聽（對於已預設的平能言說能力的揭露）。這所導

致的結果則是，當曼尼厄斯講述寓言（apoloque）時，平民們

有禮貌地聆聽並表達感激，只為了接下來他們可以要求曼尼厄

思與他們簽訂合約。從平民們能夠理解曼尼厄斯的寓言—那關

於貴族的生命之腦與平民的執行肢幹之間必然的不平等—的那

一刻起，平民們已經且也必然是平等的了。該寓言意謂著一種

感知的不平等分配。而對理解此一分配而言必要的能力，則預

設了一種終結前面那種分配方式的平等分配。而也唯有透過一

種獨特的揭露場景的部署，才足以讓此一平等發揮作用。

分配/共享（partage, share）─錯誤：

一方面是區分、分配、不平等；一方面是共享、共通、平等。

關於錯誤的爭議（litige, dispute）元素：



104│

命名、舞台、展演（例如，我們理解你們：理解你們所謂的不

平等分配，以及透過這個理解而展現與你們的平等）：透過共

享的展示製造一個連結，將原本區分/分離的鴻溝連結起來：

算入沒分者的一份。

‧治安與政治

1.治安（police）：我提議賦予這個分配與正當化的體系另一

個名字。我提議將之稱為「治安」（police）。

2.政治（ la polit ique, polit ics）：然後，我提議將政治（ la

politique）這個名詞保留給與治安相互對立的一種極為特定的

活動，用以打破界定當事人與其份額或沒有份的人的感知分

配：算入沒分者的一份。

政治：治安邏輯與平等邏輯的遭遇。平等不屬於政治本身，它

是一個只能在落實它的實踐中被理解的假設，例如在曼尼厄斯

講述寓言的場景。也就是tort將平等邏輯轉變成政治邏輯的基

本功能。

‧主體化模式、人民

從無法指認到指認（從沒有名字到有名字：命名）、經驗場域

的重新配置（舞台─上台）。

人民（peuple)，乃是最先分化共同體的複數，是主體的第一個

銘刻；一種主體在其中將會成為其他主體化形式得以銘刻其他

「存在者」（existant）、其他政治衝突主體的背景。

所有的主體化都是去身份化(désidentification)。主體是tort的主

體。



II 元政治（archi-politics）、para-politics、後設政治

（meta-politics） (第四章)

‧「政治哲學」

因為民主提出了一種特定的不可共量的弔詭，亦即，沒有份的

人的參與，作為哲學必須解決的問題。

「政治哲學」的開始，源自於此一醜聞的揭露。透過哲學所提

出的政治真理/本質，對民主政治之表象/假象的揭露。真的政

治、真理的政治─政治的真理。

打從一開始，相對於政治，哲學總是「來得太遲」。人民已經

在那兒了，哲學家是後來之人。

透過取消政治來實現政治；透過哲學的實現，「取代」(à la

place)政治來實現政治。

‧元政治：柏拉圖

元政治（Archi-politique）的模型是由柏拉圖所提供的。

首腦、原形、理想城邦、共同體原則的完整實現。柏拉圖以理

想城邦取代了民主的tort與分裂的體制。

或者毋寧說，正是因為他們扮演了他們的角色，沒有從事此一

工作之外的時間與空間（沒有時間參與政治），才得以成為共

同體的成員。（各安其本份）

人民/民主是被煽動的龐然大物（民粹）。



106│

‧ Para-politics I：亞里斯多德（古代版）

Parapolitique 的問題則是在於調和兩個自然的概念與其對立的

邏輯：一者認為最大的善乃在於由最優秀的人進行統治，另

一者則認為從平等的角度觀之，最大的善便是平等（人民統

治）。

正是亞里士多德做到了一件不可能的事情，也就是提議藉由納

入那阻礙此一類型之完全實現的人民（ démos ）達成其實現。

在旁邊，模仿tort的衝突與爭議。

讓政治的特殊性得以出現的人民(démos)，變成了爭奪佔領

「發號施令位置」（postes de ommandement) 的政治衝突，亦

即爭奪城邦權力（arkhaï）的當事人。（選舉）

會在一種特定的模仿，亦即，統治者與被統治位置的輪流更替

中展現。

亞里士多德將此平等的效應與社會身體的不同等邏輯之間的

獨特連結，也就是政治的內涵，轉變成一種體現特定制度位

置的政治（le politique)[註2]。如此一來，兩種邏輯之間的

衝突，便成了爭奪佔領權力（arkhaï）與成為城邦中的有權者

（kurion）的兩造。

‧Para-politics II：霍布斯（現代版）

個人、契約、主權。

我們必須確認的是，政治性（politicité)只是次要的，重要的是

存活的意識，戰勝了每一個人對所有人的戰爭之不受拘束的慾

望。上演另一種對於衝突的轉化：個人間的戰爭與主權契約。

他將論理的層次從權力的「黨派」（parties)轉移到權力中的

個人，且從關於政府的理論轉移到關於權力源頭的理論。政治

[ 註 2 ] 譯註：此處

Rancière使用了陽性的

定冠詞 l e而非之前使

用的la來指稱政治，在

此脈絡中，其所指的

乃是亞里士多德式的

parapolitique。



性因此便僅能透過打從一開始，將屬於個人的自由完全地讓渡

（aliénation)出去而存在。自由無法作為沒有份的人的份額/參

與，或者任何政治主體的空的屬性而存在。它不是全有便是全

無。它只能以兩種形式存在：作為純粹社會個體的財產，或者

在極端讓渡的情況下，作為主權者的主權。

‧後設政治：馬克思

政治的真理，便是其假相（fausseté)的揭露。它是任何命名或

銘刻的政治過程與支撐此政治過程的現實之間的間隙。Tort的

無所不在。

政治作為意識形態（表象），真理政治（後設政治）作為意識

型態批判，社會作為政治所遮掩的真實/真相。

自此，階級的概念與後設政治的意義，便開始無限地擺盪於與

柏拉圖式元政治對稱的「真相」（vrai)政治的基進主義與所有

政治假相的虛無主義之間，此虛無主義亦是所有事物假相的政

治虛無主義。

政治的階級：也許可以在無產者的定義上獲得一個梗概：「一

個不再是（n'est plus) 社會階級的社會階級），《黑格爾法哲

學批判導論》中如是說。

並以對於所有的表象進行批判之名，讓構成政治的tort消失無

蹤。在此一過程的終點，tort經歷了其自身絕對化的勒索，而

被化約為謊言的真理之無限重複，化約成為空洞真理的展現

──「政治的終結」。

因此，從政治的觀點看來，那些被列入人權宣言或法律和憲法

前言、那些由這個或那個制度所具體化或被雕刻在建築的山形

牆上關於平等的條文，並不是被其內容所揭穿的「形式」，或

為了遮掩現實而構作的「表象」。它們是人民出現的確實形



108│

式，是銘刻於共同經驗場域中之最低限度的平等。問題不在於

指控此一既存的平等與其所掩飾的一切之間的差異。問題不

是在於反對表象，相反地，是在於確認表象。在沒有份的部份

的銘刻所在，無論多麼脆弱或稍縱即逝，人民顯現的領域會

被創造出來，統治（kratos）的元素，人民的力量，也就存在

了。問題因此是在於如何延伸此一實現的領域，與極大化此一

力量（puissance)。

有一個記載著人民力量的地方，與諸多駁斥此一力量事實上並

不存在的地方。

重點是以劇場的意義詮釋人民（démos)存在的地方與人民不存

在，而僅有人口、個人、雇傭者與受雇者的地方之間的差距。

政治便是對於此一關係的詮釋。這意謂著將之建造成一個劇

場，發明一種兼具邏輯與戲劇雙重意義的論證，將互不關聯的

東西關聯起來。

III 在其虛無時代的政治 (第六章)

‧共產政權的瓦解，自由民主的共識政體的勝利，人性─人道

主義時代的來臨。

‧族群、種族、宗教戰爭的發生。這個分配/共享的模式主要

有兩種：算入那些沒份者之份的模式和不算入的模式，亦即人

民（démos）模式或族群（ethnos）模式。

‧種族滅絕、違反人性罪（只剩人類呻吟的受害者與毫無人性

的加害者）、人道主義政治（人道救援與維和部隊）。

‧大屠殺：歷史否認（因果關係與可思性）與倫理回應（不可

思與哲學之罪）。

‧倫理是為了使思想憶起其初生的無力而誇大了犯罪的思想內



容的思想。然而透過做為一個大災難的思想的守護者，倫理也

是以其自身的無力打擊一切思想和政治的思想；對於這個災

難，在任何情況下從來沒有任何倫理知道該如何保護我們。

‧在大屠殺（l'holocauste）的駭人（monsturosité）中，根本沒

有什麼在可思之外；也沒有什麼能夠超越結合了殘酷和懦弱的

能力，一旦其受助於現代國家佈署中的一切管道。在民主的人

民被編入族群的人民之處，沒有什麼是這些國家做不到的。

‧「我們都是德國猶太人」。



110│

現況之名(民): 導讀〈民主，抑或，共識〉(Démocratie ou consensus)[註1]

陳克倫, 國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

[email protected]



版權所有 ©陳克倫

[註1]所有論及杭希耶

的內容都出自其作品

《La Mésentente: Politique e t p h i l o s o p i e》(Pa r i s : Ga l i l é e, 1 9 9 5)英譯本

Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1999)並以

fr. 以及eg. 分別標出法

文本與英譯本的頁數，

討論本章節部份譯文為

本人翻譯，若有疏誤應

當由本人負責，與原書

作者無關。

【大綱】

前言

一、民主的勝利 (fr. 135-136; eg. 95-97)

二、真實民主與形式民主以及其悖論的回應 (fr. 136-137; eg 96-97)

三、契據賭注所產生的問題: 何謂人民、民主、政治、共識民主?(fr. 138-143;

eg. 98-102)

四、與布希亞的對話:擬像之真實作為後設治安(meta-police)的佈署(fr. 144-

146; eg. 103-106)

五、意見與科學的等同: 從好處(sophrosunè)到公正(dikaïon) (fr. 146-151; eg.

106-109)

六、共識民主作為法治與專業知識的等同: 節制國家的無能宣言(fr. 151-156;

eg. 109-114)

七、共識民主作為後設政治的虛無主義式實踐(fr. 157-165; eg114-121)

前言

文章的一開始我們再次遭遇一個理解上看似陌生的狀態，杭希

耶指出:「一般而言，這般政治性的牧歌情調(état idyllique du

politique)付予自身共識民主之名」(fr. 135; eg. 95)，什麼是牧歌

或是田園詩般的狀態? 又何以其付予自身共識民主之名呢? 讓

110│110│111現況之名(民): 導讀〈民主，抑或，共識〉(Démocratie ou consensus)


我們稍微往前翻幾頁，在上一章的結尾，杭希耶便為本章的

討論提出這樣的預示:「時至今日，重新回到純粹的政治或者

「政治哲學」的純粹性，只會有一個意義，那就是回復到構成

現代政治的衝突以及哲學與政治的根本衝突。那將是一首理論

田園詩(idylle théorique)，試圖透過哲學決定，賦予共同體必須

實現善的任務；一首政治田園詩(idylle politique)，寄望藉由獲

取人民信任的精英開明治理，實現共善。政治的「哲學」回

歸，與其社會學式的「終結」，乃是同一件事。」(fr. 131; eg.

92-93)[註2]

乍看之下，所謂田園詩或是牧歌情境般的美好與當代政治、甚

至所謂共識民主體制似乎至少在中文意境上難以相關。然而，

倘若稍微細究Idylle這個字的源義，它似乎多少概括了杭希耶

本章節所要討論的問題。Idylle這個字的形態其實並不陌生，

它正來自古希臘文的eidos，eidos一字的多義可論，但在此姑

且將之作為「形象」或是「形式」，在Idylle在古希臘文就是

eidyllion，它指的是一個「小的形象」、「小的形式」或是「小

的圖像」。希臘詩人希奧克利(Theocritus)被認為首創這種「小

情景」的書寫，描寫了牧人之間透過某種外在太平(peaceful)

田園生活的形式，表達複雜的內在情感，並以兩牧人的「對吟

詩」(eclogue)、愛戀仰慕之哀愁的「獨語詩」(monologue)，

以及念悼死者的「哀歌」(elegy or lament)等三種形式呈現，在

拉丁羅馬世界當中，便以拉丁文的司牧者也就是pastor，來表

達這種書寫的文體與敘述內容。或許eidyllion之意所謂的「小」

便是相對於史詩英雄場景(epic)的「浩大」，新批評主義大家

燕卜蓀(William Empson)便將所謂的田園詩對立於史詩的偉大

英雄形象，並只出所謂的田園詩具備一種內轉(inversion)的機

制，將複雜性放置到一種樸素的簡單性當中[註3]。

一個概念的沿革總是幾經波折轉型，如何在此文體學以及字

源學的提點之下理解所謂「政治性的牧歌情調」? 或許我們

至少可以抽取出幾個定義性的參照點，首先，「牧歌性」不

再是某種偉大的形式，相對的它是一種「小的」形式，然

[註2]此處參照中譯者

林淑芬教授的譯文，本

文徵得同意暫為借用於

此，筆者特別申明:中

譯本出版前，譯者保

有譯文以及理解的修改

權。

[註3]詳見: W i l l i a m Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Direction, 1974): 22-53; 140-142; 185-186; 249-250



112│

而，其次，這樣的「小」形式不僅在表達某種單純的個體性

(individuality)，而是它將個體複雜的情感內轉在一個簡單的形

式上。每一個簡單的小形式都可以在其內部轉化其複雜性。到

目前為止，這是對此概念純粹形式上的了解，這是說，此形式

生成的機制可以遭到各種挪用，在此考量之下，我們或許可以

再進一步貼進杭希耶的討論: 什麼是理論的田園詩? 什麼是政

治的田園詩? 我們必須考量文體或是形式以及生成此形式的權

力，如何在當代政治體制當中交織? 換言之，理論作為知識以

及政治作為權力，如何形塑一種牧歌的形式?

這個在進入我的導讀前岔開來談的問題，正好標示了兩位當

代思想家在許多交集當中的其中之一，杭希耶被認為是受影

響且某個程度上承繼了傅柯的思想，然而，司牧權力(pastoral

power)的問題，正是晚期傅柯思想的一個論題，他在1977-1978

的法蘭西學院講座〈安全、領土、人口〉(“Security, Territory,

Population”)當中，便指出: 司牧作為權力運作的概念遠離了

古希臘的思想方式，它基本上是在希伯來-基督文化當中形成

的，此希伯來-基督文化的權力觀念不再如同希臘思維一般作

為在地領域的觀念，而是作為在流動領域當中管理利益之多樣

性的權力，這個利益也就是牲口-人民(flock-people)的既整體又

個體的安全，傅柯概要地定義司牧權力，並指出:「我認為司

牧權力就是整體地被其利益所定義，它唯一存在的理由(raison

d’être)就是產生好處(doing good)且為了產生好處。事實上，司

牧權力的根本目的就是牲口的安全 (salut)。在這個意義下，

我們能夠說我們所談的肯定離傳統上所謂主權的目的並不遠，

這就是說，一個國家的安全必須是權力運作的最高法律 (lex

suprema)」[註4]然而，傅柯指出，司牧權力的悖論在於，一

位好的司牧者 (pastor)所關注的是牲口的整體，但是其關注的

方式又同時是必須去計算、妥善照料每一隻牲口，整體與單一

是司牧者必須同時關注的，它的職責也就在於整體與單一之悖

論的平衡，因為悖論在於，比如耶和華選定摩西作為眾人的司

牧，正是因為他為了一頭走失的羊而離開羊群，司牧權力之悖

論的張力就介於以下兩者之間的平衡:為了一個犧牲全體，以

[註4]Michel Foucault. S e c u r i t y , Te r r i t o r y , Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78, trans. Graham Burchell. ( N e w Yo r k : Pa l g r a v e MacMillan: 2007):126



及為了全體犧牲一個。對傅柯來說司牧權力之悖論的平衡不僅

是基督司牧的權力技術，也是透過關注「整體與單一」(omnes

et singulatim)而作為人口之人民的現代權力技術[註5]。傅柯

在此講座的隔年以此主題於史丹佛大學的演講 “ “Omnes et

Singulatim”: Toward a Critique of Political Reason”，更明確地指

出:「我所關注的是個體性的問題，我應該說是自我身份所關

聯的個體化之權力的問題[…]十分明顯地，這樣的發展似乎與

中心化的國家對立。然而，我所指的是權力技術的發展朝向了

個人且企圖在一種連續且持久了方式當中統治他們，如果說國

家是中心化的政治形式以及權力的中心化，那麼司牧就是個體

化的權力。」[註6]

在以上概要的討論當中，透過傅柯對於司牧權力之論題的討

論，這正是要指出所謂「政治性的牧歌情調」所關注的就是當

代政治體制當中，個體化權力的形式問題。首先，每一個當

代國家體制當中的個體不再是革命式偉大人民的化身，國家

也不是此偉大理念(idea)的偉大形式，在整體與單一的悖論當

中，現代國家對此悖論提出了回應，這是另一個傅柯進行考察

的概念，他透過探討現代國家的理性技術而指出了「治安」

(Police)的概念，個體的生命成為國家治安的對象，但是司牧

權力的悖論並沒有得到現代性解決，傅柯透過尤斯堤(Johann

Heinrich Gottlob von Justi)的文本指出，治安既要增進國家的權

力並施行其力量，又必須保障每一個公民的幸福以及進步的生

活[註7]，換言之，國家作為整體、人民作為個體，兩者的悖

論的平衡再次成為課題，傅柯似乎指出了現代司牧權力以治安

的形式出現，那麼此悖論之平衡的回應成為了治安的對象。最

後傅柯將挑戰現代國家的難題點了出來: 「政治批評已然責難

了國家同時作為個體化以及集體性原則要素[…]國家同時是個

體化也是集體性的，以個人與其利益來反對國家，就只是貿然

地以共同體與其要求來反對國家。政治理性已然發展起來，且

將整個西方社會的歷史附加於其自身，它首先採取了司牧權

力的觀念，其後是國家理性的觀念，其不可避免的效應就是同

時地個體化也集體化，解放的來到不能從攻擊這兩者效應的其

[註5]Michel Foucault. S e c u r i t y , Te r r i t o r y , Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78, trans. Graham Burchell. ( N e w Yo r k : Pa l g r a v e MacMillan: 2007):128-129

[註6]Michel Foucault. “”Omnes et Singulatim”: To w a r d a C r i t i q u e o f Political Reason[1979],” Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, (New York: New Press: 1994): 300 “ W hat I am working on now is the problem of individuality---or, I should say, self-identity in relation to the problem of “individualizing power ”[…] A pparetly, t h i s e v o l u t i o n s e e m s a n t a g o n i s t i c t o t h e e v o l u t i o n t o w a r d a centralized state. W hat I m e a n i n f a c t i s t h e development of power techniques oriented toward individuals and intended to rule them in a continuous and permanent way. If the state is the political f o r m o f a c e n t r a l i z e d and centralizing power, let us call pastorship the indiv idualizing power ” (300)

[註7]Michel Foucault. “”Omnes et Singulatim”: To w a r d a C r i t i q u e o f Political Reason[1979],” Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, (New York: New Press: 1994): 320-323



114│

一而發生，必須攻擊的是政治理性的根基。」[註8]現代國家

理性的治安績效成就了個人等同於共同體自身，傅柯無疑將解

放的挑戰複雜化了，但同時我們也看見了某種可思的論述展開

的軌跡。

在此作為導讀的一個思想脈絡性提點的前言，我並非要將牧歌

或是田園詩的問題歸結在司牧權力以及治安概念的過度，相反

地，讓我們回到杭希耶的預示，一首理論的、政治的田園詩如

何完成? 雖然沒有任何回歸古典的意圖，但讓我們不要忘記在

希臘概念中的田園詩，這個個人複雜感受的小圖象的書寫。杭

希耶在前面第二章當中便透過傅柯指出:「治安就是一種更普

遍之秩序的特有形式，在共同體分配的身體當中，治安便佈

置了感性 (le sensible)」(fg. 51; eg. 28)[註9]。在粗略地引述傅

柯思想對於「牧歌性」的可能脈絡的同時，牧歌形式與感受

性問題的脈絡正是我保留給導讀杭希耶此處章節的問題，在

此所謂「政治性的牧歌情調」作為共識民主，這章杭希耶討

論將以後-民主之名來討論其內在悖論，共識民主如何完成它

的理論的、政治的、權力的田園詩? 它如何操作著牧歌形式的

簡單與「小」，完成複雜的內轉形式卻又抑制了感受的雜多

(multitude)，簡言之，如何治安化多樣性而達到共識民主政體

的平衡公正? 以下就是杭希耶的問題了。

杭希耶主要將指出，共識民主對於馬克思式後設政治(meta-

politics)的一種經驗主義式的取巧(marxism rampant) [註10]，

將後設政治進行一種治安化的過程，或是杭希耶稱做後民主或

是後設政治的虛無主義式的實踐。這是他對馬克思主義政治到

自由民主的法治國家的共識體制之內在悖論的討論。

一、民主的勝利 (fr. 135-136; eg. 95-97)

杭希耶要討論的民主共識問題，便要從民主之勝利的概念化過

程開始討論它的悖論。它首先指出，當代民主與集權體制之間

的關係，兩者之間的戰爭將根本地取決於其正當性的確立。民

[註8]Michel Foucault. “”Omnes et Singulatim”: To w a r d a C r i t i q u e o f Political Reason[1979],” Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, (New York: New Press: 1994): 325 “ Very significantly, pol i t ica l cr i t ic i sm has repaoached the state with being simultaneously a factor for individualization a n d a t o t a l i t a r i a n p r i n c i p l e [ … ] s t a te i s both individualizing and total i tar ian. Opposing the indiv idual and hi s interests to it is just as hazardous as opposing it with community and its requrements. Poolitical r at i o n a l i t y h a s g ro w n an d i m p o s ed i t s e l f a l l throughout the history of Western societies. It first took its stand on the idea of pastoral power, then on that of reason of state. Its inevitable effects are both individualization and totalization. Liberation can come only from attacking not just one of these effects but political rationality’s very roots.”

[註9]經中譯者林淑芬

教授同意，筆者自行修

改翻譯如此，筆者譯文

不代表中譯者的理解與

翻譯，特此說明。

[註10]爬行的馬克思主

義(marxism rampant)通常與教條馬克思主義

(marxism dogmantique)成對地遭受到馬克思

主義者批評。基本上，

爬行的馬克思主義就是

批評以經驗主義來理解

的馬克思主義，通常被

認為是基本理論修養的

不足與思想的不透徹，

僅由經驗來判斷馬克

思主義的實踐。相對

地，教條馬克思主義常

被形容為跛腳的馬克思

主義，遵從於理論的教

條化而失去實踐的能力

與做為。



主的勝利從司法、政治以及經濟的形式戰勝集權體制且一併地

確立自身的正當性。然而，第一個問題便出現在確立其作為政

治體制的建制後，立即產生了對於此勝利的懷疑。在與集權體

制作戰的凱旋過後，民主體制立即陷入其內部的戰爭或是一種

悖論當中，這便是真實民主與形式民主之間的對立，真實民主

成為被加注的契據以便隨時對民主提出懷疑。相對地，形式民

主的作用便要處理此質疑並將民主與其諸多形式等同起來，這

個等同作用便要完成現代民主當中，人之本性的進取與欲求的

完美形態，並且被認定為共同體的律法(nomos)

二、真實民主與形式民主以及其悖論的回應 (fr. 136-137;

eg 96-97)

當真實民主與人民都被作為契據而抵押的賭注時，在民主之正

當性的賭局當中，這兩者被投注而消解的結果帶來了形式民主

的復權。然而，悖論的產生正是在於當爭議發生時對於形式的

懷疑，甚至左派運動的鬥爭對象也都是針對著諸多民主的形式

而來。然而，當代民主的勝利所帶來的更極端的結果便是，面

對此悖論，以對這些形式的感受性冷感作為回應。結論是，民

主無法保障人民的力量，而只能操作其政治形式來相符於社會

在需求、利益與欲望上各種驅動力的存有模式。

杭希耶認為要從兩個層面來展開這個當代民主獨特的回應方

式，首先，馬克思主義對於真實民主的要求、懷疑乃至於施行

的失敗，自由民主體制便記取了經驗主義式的教訓，將政治作

為某種社會狀態的表述以及社會生產力立作為政治的內容，這

便是政治形式與感性存有的疊合。換言之，杭希耶便指出了，

當民主之勝利便是其政治形式符合了某種存有模式而得到正

當性時，民主的成功要鍵便在於要求政治形式與感性存有的某

種同一性(identity) ，此成功的建立與要求是針對著所謂真實

民主之論辨的奇特轉化，在當代民主的勝利當中，形式與真實

之間有某種同一性的要求，某個程度上取巧了馬克思對於資產

階段攏斷資本所產生之不公的生產關係，讓政治作為感性存有



116│

之社會狀態的表述，同時將生產力作為充實其形式的內容。進

而使民主體制中的個人與團體都能透過政治與司法的形式獲

得其生產的需求。

將人民與真實民主放手一搏的賭注所換來的諸多民主形式的戲

局，此現象便造成悖論的另一個形式，也就是對於感性存有之

再現的民主形式的冷感。民主形式所規劃之可感經驗的形式

與確實的感受產生著誤差，因此在民主形式當中便產生著確實

感受的缺席，冷感便是這個缺席的表徵，但同時與此冷感對應

的形式便是將已被埋葬之人民的回返，因此出現了種族性的人

民成為與自身再次的同一化。

三、契據賭注所產生的問題: 何謂人民、民主、政治、共識民

主?(fr. 138-143; eg. 98-102)

馬克思主義的後設政治尚存對形式民主的質疑，然而勝利民主

致力於複權諸多形式，並考量為政治與社會一併的建構體系，

以表達個人與團體的能量關係，這些形式被提供為個人與團

體多多少少地相符於其中，然而相對的冷感便得以對應於消逝

的內容，因而造成這些若干相應於形式的民主快感與再次塑造

的共同體精神對立。杭希耶便指出這是一種廉價柏拉圖主義

的冒進。然而，杭希耶還是要質問究竟民主的形式意味著什

麼?

杭希耶指出，要根本地探問這些問題就要翻轉政治哲學最初的

賭注，民主應是一種政治性存有的方式，也不應以治安管理與

其分配部署的概念來理解政治，民主是政治的主體化模式:

「民主是一次特異性中斷的名稱，它中斷了共同體內分配

身體的秩序…藉由一種主體化的特異性部署，民主是造成

此秩序之完善運作中斷的名稱」

杭希耶指出可以從三個面向來概括這個特異性的部署:



首先「一種人民特殊之表象領域的存在(l’existence d’une sphere

d’apparence spécifique du peuple)」，此表象將可見性體制引入經

驗，但不造成與現實的對立，而是分裂現實

其二，此分裂性正來自於佔據此表象領域的人民並非一個或是

一組可供總數計算而簡化的組成份子，他是上置了無份之份的

效應在這些被簡化之組成份子的身份之上。然而，杭希耶強

調，他這邊所指出的人民的雙重分裂性，並不同於勒佛所指出

的民主不確定性，因為在勒佛在一種神學政治的論點下論述的

民主不確定性當中，並指出因為神學性政治的解體，現代民

主無法在將他者進行具體化(materialization of the other)，並造

成了權力的虛位(empty of the power)，然而，杭希耶認為民主

的中斷作用與非等同性不應被綁束在此神學政治的解體場景當

中，人民的雙重性在於:「它既一個社會身體，又是一個轉換

所有社會認同作用的身體」

第三，人民表象的場域身發生爭議的場域，此爭議涉及的並非

社會組成份子之間的利益問題，是對話情境發生的交談，是治

安邏輯與平等邏輯對立的發生。

杭希耶指出，作為治安邏輯的中斷以及政治的主體化模式，民

主的形式便是此三元部署，它出現了人民表像的特殊領域，人

民並非社會的組成份子也不是國家代理人，而是轉化這些認同

關係的團體，而以此非等同性的主體引起了一次爭議的發生。

民主並非個人或群眾的時代，也就不是個性與建制性的一致

化，也就不是人們生活的一種體制，民主是政治的設立，且恢

復了主體化形式的偶發性，進而再次對功能、本性以及位置之

間的分配秩序提出質疑。因此，杭希耶認為民主作為政治的

主體化模式便是習性的破裂，它並非言說存有與其言說、行

為和存在之間的倫理性和協，而是其經驗的裂隙。杭希耶在

此所要討論的後民主，並非是要找尋任何關於民主的明確概

念，而是要指出，在人民之後一種治理性的實踐、也就是一種



118│

共識的實踐抹除了民主三元部署的形式，此後民主正是利用民

主之名的悖論:「這種民主已然清除了人民的表象、錯誤計算

(mécompte)以及爭議，於是簡化為一種國家部署、社會能量、

以及利益組合之間的根本操作」。它不留餘地地將國家形式與

社會關係等同起來。杭希耶認為事實上這就是共識民主的意

含: 所以個人與社會團體的一致性。

然而，這種一致性是來自於合理關係的知識，所以的商討都在

既成的言說考量當中被給定，總是可以選擇較為合意且符合利

益的商討或是競爭關係。杭希耶便指出所謂共識就是某種感

受的體制，言說考量的合理性預設為等同於語言的表現，共識

取消了爭議份子與社會組成份子的裂隙，取消了人民表象、錯

誤計算以及爭議的部署，也就取消了政治。杭希耶指出共識體

制是一個全覽的世界，一切都在客觀視點當中被規定、被徹底

地計算整除，這樣的體制也就是被意見與權利決定的體制，被

徹底地在場化的公共輿論與其權利被等同於人民，基本上，

就是作為社會的組成份子在民主體制成為意見與其權利而被

普查與擬像，進一步取消了人民，這就是後民主的共識原則:

「人民完全被把持在可見性的結構當中而被全覽，因此在這當

中不再有任何人民表象的場所」

四、與布希亞的對話:擬像之真實作為後設治安(meta-police)

的佈署(fr. 144-146; eg. 103-106)

但是，杭希耶表視他所要進行的討論必須與布希亞擬像與倣擬

物的理論作出區隔。杭希耶指出，在布希亞的脈絡中「真實的

失落」被作為整合符號的展示而將真實與其擬像相等，或是

以「真實的失落」作為一種新政治的解放性，廢除形上學的客

體世界，而認為多樣性的本真得以解放。但是，杭希耶針對後

者指出，新解放的可見性地位、世界圖像以及政治活動，忽

略了即便擬像的邏輯對立於表象與權力的關係、翻轉並解構了

形上學技術的統治，但卻並沒有對立於真實與唯實論的信念。

在其多樣性解放的全然可見性體制當中，它不僅不是表象的解



放，反到是將擬像的圖像呈遞給不可分離的真實體制，失落了

其自身，但卻佈置了一個整合性可見世界的真實。然而，杭

希耶所要談論的政治與其表象，並非佈置真實，而是分裂現實

作為現實的副本，它引入不同質的爭議對象，此對象並無法成

為具有等同性的物件，因此在擬像之真實的等同性當中，政治

表象引入的異質性對象就不被受理。因為杭希耶認為:「因為

非等同性主體的政治建構藉由使分離的諸多世界一同地被看

見，且組織爭議共同體的諸多世界，而擾亂感受的同質性。」

從此觀點看來，擬像所佈置其真實的等同作用並不指出了真實

的失落，反到是表象本身失落，因此其擬像的圖像總是遞呈給

了其佈置的真實而同一化，表象不但沒有解放，杭希耶更指

出:「一種人口的治安形態，且根本地等同於其組成份子的精

算」

杭希耶相當尖銳地指出，每一個擬像之真實當中所謂解放的表

象都轉向了一種後設政治的真理，「它是一種意見映射自身之

關係的組織化，且等同於主權人民的效應，以及一種可以簡化

為統計樣本之人口表現的科學知識。」它成為了可見性媒體的

孳生以及普察和模擬投票之簡化計算的結合。杭希耶正是透過

他對於布希亞理論的質疑，提出了他前文指出的當代民主共識

體制對於馬克思主義的一種挪用，換言之，在當代民主共識認

肯多元身份與在地理性的可見性時，它們同時也是被佈置在其

真實當中的意見或是投票單位，它們必須在此體制當中做為

公眾輿論與其權利而徹底地在場、徹底地可見化，同時也是映

射了體制或是共同體自身的真實。

五、意見與科學的等同: 從好處(sophrosunè)到公正(dikaïon)

(fr. 146-151; eg. 106-109)

杭希耶更指出，此媒體與科學的結合並非平等的來到，而是把

持了任何人與每一個人的平等成為人口組成份子的整合性分

配。所謂的主權人民便等同於人口意見科學的計算。意見的科

學便是意見與科學的立即統一，組成份子作為意見的單位，宛



120│

如在一面鏡像當中，組成份子在其意見的科學實踐當中觀看

其自身，諸如普查以及模擬投票的科學實踐便是將此鏡像展

開。杭希耶也指出，民主共識體制是一個弔詭的實踐，過去在

柏拉圖論述中彼此敵對的意見與科學，在此互相等同，且它對

於形上學世界的挑戰也未成功，而在其自身等同性的安排當

中，把持著任何人與每一個人的平等，並將每一個人放入其應

該存在的位置當中，並以其分配的位置來發表意見，杭希耶認

為意見的擬像科學也就是:「柏拉圖稱為「認份(sophrosunè)」

之空洞德性的完美實現」。且藉由外在人民空間化的分配，讓

每一個人在其認份之位透過意見發表的科學來映射與整個共

同體自身的等同性，而成為了一種不斷朝向自身的真理關係。

這也就是擬像佈置之真實內的同一性。杭希耶就指出「後民主

「意見」(《opinion》)就是人民與人口等同性，生活如同共同

體的內在性體制，而被認定為整體科學與每一個意見的等同

性。」

因此，處理此共同體的爭議就是要抑制人民的表象以及種種作

為組成份子之人口其自身可能產生的差異性。這種處理程序就

將促使爭議發生的錯誤換置為專業知識性可以指認並解決的問

題。然而，在此共識體制下，幾乎所有的爭議都可以透過意見

科學的組成而導向設立合理且客觀的解決措施。杭希耶也就是

要從般共識體制組成的前題來檢討現代管理性國家與法治國

家的內在悖論，此種民主體制事實上就是做為一種後民主來以

民主之名區消民主與政治的體制。

首先，此共識民主體制便能完全地接受關於「好處

(sumpheron)」與「受害(blaberon)」的古老定義，在必須排除

民主之人民表象所帶來的爭議的前題下，因為此爭議中斷了意

見與權利的體制在共同體內部得以持續映照所確立的共識性，

所以好處便是「商品、觀念、人與團體的「匯聚」(《emporte

ensemble》)」，而受害便是此匯聚之流動的中斷。而所謂的好

處所要保持的流動性，便得以過渡為公正(dikaïon)的要求，這

後果便是意見同時作為自身權利在流動與匯聚的必須性當中，



透過司法、經濟以及社會的形式，而有彈性地循環與擴張。杭

希耶再次明確地指出共識就是一個被感受決定的體制，權利就

是其可見性的根抵(arkhe)或是說權利就是此此共識體制可見

的統治者。權利並不使爭議得以表象，相反地，它抑制爭議與

錯誤，也就抑制所以可能中斷流動的所謂受害，這種受害也就

可以被指為那種稱之為不公正的侵害，杭希耶所要表達的也就

是，權利的義務就是要保持好處的流通與匯聚，而這也就成為

共識政體的公正原則。所謂「權利」(《droit》)的多義性便被

採取此公正原則下的治安管理，不同於元設國家非法治性集權

治安，民主共識體制採取此公正原則的立法，而作為法治國家

來抑制錯誤與爭議等具中斷作用之異質權利。杭希耶便指出，

所謂民主法治國家的等同便表現在公權力的立法、個人權利以

及司法訴訟的組合當中，且此三方在治理體系的上層與下層彼

此搭配循環流通，也同時鞏固了共同體的同一性。也有此可

見民主與政治在共同體精神的法律概念下徹底地被消除。

立法、權利與司法展現了共同體精神作為法律的等同作用，此

等同作用的循環正是好處與公正的循環，杭希耶便指出:「在

一端，它再現「公正」(dikaïon)的穩定本質，透過此端，共

同體便成為其自身; 在另一端，此本質進一步等同於「好處」

(sumpheron)的多樣化操作，而成就了社會的動力狀態。」杭

希耶也指出，所謂法治國家並非國家交由司法管理的法官國

家，而是透過司法中介的傾斜，將政治從屬於國家。杭希耶

認為在所謂「節制國家」的理論當中就可以看到這種操作的

模式，這也就是說，民主法治國家看似將權力歸還給司法與社

會，這當然不是為了讓政治的爭議得以出現而產生對話，而

是透過司法與社會將政治爭議作為專業知識處理的問題而消

解。杭希耶將此稱做「爭議之政治實踐的國家式擬仿(mimesis

étatique)」它將平等邏輯出現的民主爭議性場所轉換為專業知

識的問題。



122│

六、共識民主作為法治與專業知識的等同: 節制國家的無能宣

言(fr. 151-156; eg. 109-114)

杭希耶以最高憲法機構為例指出了這個擬仿。合憲性的平等僅

能在差異當中反覆宣讀平等與其自身的等同，面對分裂共同體

的政治爭議，判決的理由就顯得十分可笑，因為作為大法官的

專業也只是在調合著以下兩種平等的平衡:一者是關於不同的

人有不一樣的平等，另一者是共同體之合憲性的普遍平等。憲

法法庭也就僅僅受理共同體自身得以等同的案例，對於分裂共

同體的政治爭議事實上並不受理，司法專業便是轉換政治爭議

作為憲法精神的等同性問題，司法作為國家式的倣擬，它倣擬

了爭議的論辨但不受理爭議的分裂，透過等同的法律效力將政

治再次從屬於國家，進而取消。這種合憲性的複頌一方面解

決了困難的爭論，另一方面讓共同體靈魂得以等同於司法。節

制國家就是在經濟需求與法治要求下取消人民(demos)與政治

的國家，並且透過經濟與法治統合出一種新公民的定義。

杭希耶指出，司法的擴張也透過治理體系的下層，反應在家庭

法、財產法、議會立法、以及勞動法上。將各種權利給予每一

個具有公民身份的人，並讓其與法律維持彈性的關係，以保持

好處利益的持續流通，每一個有權利公民都一個共同體能量與

義務的縮影，它不僅等同於自身，且作為公民便是等同於共同

體。換言之，司法的擴張不在於加強了公民權利的頑固管制，

為權利而戰已經顯得過時，司法真正的擴張是給予每一個具有

權利的公民，讓其意見得以全面地透過司法來反射其自身與共

同體，進而達成持續的等同，也是作為共同體組成份子的身份

確立。

然而，杭希耶也指出，不僅是司法的擴張，由於一個法治國家

的建立首先在於一種法律形態的建構，但是這個此建構的概念

有時對既存的形式會造成傷害，這就是法律與事實的間隙，這

也是經常會造成政治爭議發生的所在，因此專家性國家的同部

擴張，也就是以專業能力來取消這些間隙，也是取消政治。這



種間隙產生的差錯都是靠著諮詢專家來保衛國家。所以杭希耶

便將這樣的兩方面的擴張概算為三種現象的結合:「擴散的司

法化、一般化專業知識的實踐，以及無止盡的民調演練」法治

與專業知識持續的彼此參照配合，便形成了單純的民主形式，

在好處之公正原則的流通下，民主的形式當然從屬於商業需求

的實踐，在世界市場的要求下更是如此。

節制的國家肯定其自身的無能，且透過法律以及專業知識的等

同作用以及爭議的消除，國家的正當性也就更不受政治爭議的

挑戰。杭希耶指出，這種形態的共識民主法治國家正符合了馬

克思所謂的「政府是單純的國際資本事務代理人」換言之，此

政體之政治德性下的公正原則正是為了好處流通的管理，杭希

耶便說是其政治等同其民主形式下的資本管理。因此對杭希耶

來說，國家宣告自身的無能便是在於它不管理個人快樂最大化

的條件，相對地國家的職權便是在此無能當中設立危機的管

理，且交給學者來對這些危機進行觀察、判讀以及規劃。杭希

耶指出，這是一種微乎其微或是幾乎沒有的管理，它一方面不

受到政治爭議的威脅，因為它在一般狀況時根本顯得微不足

道，但是一個人的成功以及共同體聯繫的惟持卻必須由此微

乎其微的可能性來決定，這也說明了共同體的危機管理標示出

了進取的個人以及契約性團體的成功或失敗，以及共同體當中

公民身份的確立或喪失。因此，杭希耶指出這種微乎其微的管

理首先是法治國家與學者國家的等同，再者國家權力與其無能

也等同起來，這也是說國家權力內化到每一個具有法治權利的

公民身上，透過配合著法律的權利自由擴張，以及專業知識所

決定之危機管理下的身份與狀態確立，國家權力就內化為個人

公民以及公民團體所展現的權力，相對地作為政治活動者的

人民(demos)便徹底地無權。

七、共識民主作為後設政治的虛無主義式實踐(fr. 157-165;

eg114-121)

杭希耶透過悲觀與樂觀的分析者指出了，對於這樣的國家體



124│

制，似乎不管是譴責因缺乏集體性而造成社會關係解體，或是

樂觀地讚揚個人自由的持續提升，這兩者似乎都這般節制國家

的管理看作是空洞的。如同霍布斯指出當任何人的自由都可以

高度提升時，就成為一切人都可以反對一切人的自然狀態，但

是如同杭希耶前文提出的，後民主的後設治安當中，它的相對

空洞是與其飽滿狀態相等的，這就是說它將藉由其組成份子的

整合性簡化計算，使每一個人都參與在共同體自身的映照關係

當中。每一個公民都是權利、能力、商品以及好處之流通的共

同體的縮影，每一個公民作為意見與權利的單位一方面與自身

等同也等同於共同體之整體，杭希耶以十分生動的說明描繪出

這個動態的景象:「「個體」(《individu》)在此看見自身、它

要求在此被看見，作為其自我的奮鬥、如同一個小小的締盟的

力量，從一個環節跑到一個環節，從一次締結到下一次締結，

同時也是一次快感到下一次快感。透過這個個體，其所反映的

便是共同體與自身的等同，社會能量網路與國家正當性迴圈的

等同。」

之所以不同於一切人反對一切人的戰爭狀態，正是因為共識的

邏輯四處設立了和平與戰爭的界限，杭希耶指出，甚至所謂社

會關係的解體也只是共同體再次聯繫的另一個名稱，這也是呼

應了杭希耶所指的後設治安的整合性簡化計算是不曾中斷地浸

透著整個共同體。杭希耶認為這更可以在共識體制對排除的概

念化當中看到此運作。他說事實上排除的出現正好是共識的另

一個名字。

杭希耶指出，排除曾經是一條可以象徵化的線，在此爭議便建

構了兩個世界的一同出現，但是現今在共識體制下的排除是一

種抹除此象徵記號的配享模式，它致力於將排除的內外部統合

起來，它預設包含了所有的組成份子以及所有可能的問題處

理，且禁止了無份之份的參與。每一個人都是意見、問題以及

權利的基本單位，成為了沒有階級的社會。排除不再是可供主

體化的象徵，排除不再是關係分裂下內外部的問題，而是針對

著缺乏身份的增補以及社會聯繫的維持。恢復身份以及保障社



會聯繫便是共識體制使配享成為持續進行的不可見的等同作

用，且在關係解體之處持續締結了新的社會契約以及建立新的

公民身份。

在此共識體制概念化排除的配享模式當中，種族主義以及仇外

心態也得到了新的形式，這些遭受排除的人都透過專業知識，

諸如社會學、經濟學、人類學等等，而被定義了新的身份。這

種透過共識定義其身份的等同作用，使人民、工人、無產者或

是外邦人失去了因其爭議的分裂性而得以在主體化當中多出一

次的超額建構，因為在被共識體制等同前，它們作為錯誤的對

象以及爭議形式的主體具對應現實的雙重分裂性，這種多一次

的超額將被共識體制徹底取消。

共識體制下新的可見性形式便是人口持續普查的簡化計算，民

主的形式也在此孳生，然而對形式的冷感，杭希耶便指出在這

人民被作廢的位置上就出現了名為法國人的主體。此主體作為

意見的主體其本質既是真實也是擬像，亦即兩者的同一。冷感

召喚此主體來多多少少地尋找符合若干形式的小快感，而吐露

法國人之名。此主體被這般快感的可能性誘惑，透過獵捕那些

敗壞的身體來滿足符合形式之名的短暫快感，杭希耶說這顯示

是一場詐欺，因為民主形式滿足最終還是以掏空其自身為代價

而匱乏，不僅內容的真實是失落的，就連短暫表象的是失落

的。

基本上，共識民主的體制就是透過法律來解決感受上的混雜，

共識體系的法律就是自我關係確認，這是一種統合為一的概念

運作，杭希耶指出:「識體系的原則在於建立法律的一 (Un de

la loi)與感覺的一(Un du sentiment) 彼此永久的可轉換性，進

而定義共同的存在(être-ensemble)。於是，共識法律的工作首

先在於建立圖式(schème)，將回拒但不甚確定之感受的一 (Un

ressenti mais indéfinissable du rejet)轉換為共同法律的一(Un de la

loi commune)…因為感覺的對象是超額生產的多樣形態，且持

續非法地複製自身。因此，作為同意且締結契約之權力的規



126│

範秩序(ordre du nomos)，以及作為共-感力量(puissance de con-

sentir)的自然秩序(ordre de la phusis)，共識法律的圖式便將它們

綁束在一起…」換言之，處理對好處流通產生中斷的感受性雜

多，這便是共識法律也是其公正原則。基本上，共識性的後民

主是面對後設政治的一種虛無主義式的實踐。後設政治將作為

自我繁殖生產之雜多性的無產者提出，並作為具有超越性的政

治主體，而進行驅散政治假象的真理運動，然而，具有持續替

代不斷增補的共識性後民主卻透過抑制此雜多性而完成了一種

虛無主義式的實踐在杭希耶看來，這既不民主也不政治。





128│

《對民主的憎惡》 (La haine de la democratie ; Hared of Democracy)[註1]

林淑芬, 國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

[email protected]

Jacques Rancière. La haine de la démocratie, La Fabrique éditions, 2005.英文版：Hatred of Democracy. Tr. Steve Corcoran. Verso (January 19, 2007)


版權所有 ©林淑芬

【大綱】

前言

本書內容

第一章

第二章　Politics, or the lost Shepherd

第三章　民主、共和與代表/代議政治的問題

第四章　憎惡的理性/理由

總結與後記

前言

我猜想可能跟在座大多數的人不一樣的地方是，我是先從

Rancière的政治哲學開始，然後才慢慢接觸閱讀他的美學思

想，並且在這過程中真正感受到政治與美學在Rancière的書寫

中無法切割的關聯，然後才進一步閱讀相關的美學理論。我

要強調「真正」是因為，Rancière不是第一個討論美學與政治

關連的思想家，包括他經常引用批評，而我自己也相對較為

熟悉的政治思想家Hannah Arendt便是一個典型將政治與美學

結合的思想家，例如Arendt也同樣強調政治作為一個space of

[註1]這篇稿子是參與

2009年10/31~11/1由中

山大學哲學所與交通大

學社會與文化研究所共

同舉辦的「Rancière作品研讀會」的發言稿。

必須說明的是，由於是

作品導讀而非正式的學

術書寫，因此簡介章節

內容時，諸多直接引用

翻譯的部份，並未標明

出處（也因時間因素，

無法進一步修改）。提

醒讀者這只是一個閱讀

筆記與整理，很多論點

未進一步闡述，在此處

發表，僅供參考。

128│128│129《對民主的憎惡》( La haine de la democratie ; Hared of Democracy)


appearance,政治行動的展演性、劇場，以及晚期的Arendt受到

康德第三批判的影響，轉而更加強調觀看者的角色，而不僅僅

只是他早期書寫中一再強調的行動者的角色等等。Rancière自

己也曾經說過，他自己相當大一部分的政治哲學的書寫，是為

了回應Arendt在On Revolution這本書中對於John Adams對於「窮

人的不幸乃是因在於他們的不可性」這個句子的解讀。但是，

Arendt顯然不像Rancière那樣真正進入到美學領域，而仍舊比較

是以「政治」為其思考的核心。

其次，我想說的是，正因為我是從對政治思想，特別是以對

當代基進民主思想中政治主體與行動的可能性的興趣，作為閱

讀Rancière的起點，所以當我閱讀Rancière的時候，無可避免地

已經帶著一些基進政治哲學的問題意識，並且總是以不同的

思想家作為參照體系，進行比較閱讀。例如，Rancière與阿圖

塞的關聯；與法國前托派的思想家、同時也受到Hannah Arendt

相當大啟發的Claude Lefort的民主理論與對政治哲學的批判；

與Ernesto Laclau的後葛蘭西的霸權理論中所涉及的政治主體

的問題；與德希達或者與Negri（生命政治與諸眾的問題）、

Agamben以及我剛才提及的Arendt等思想家的對照閱讀。這對

我而言不是純粹政治哲學或理論上的興趣，也是藉此獲得思考

當代台灣民主政治問題的思想資源。而我想我們今天閱讀的這

本書，Hatred of Democracy (La haine de la democratie)便是一本現實

感很強的書。

事實上，這本書的現實感，既是吸引我閱讀的理由，但同時也

是困擾我的主要來源。這本書不像早期的作品，例如昨天下午

我們讀到的Disagreement與另外一本On the Shore of Politics一般，比

較偏向理論概念的建構而似乎能夠期待較普遍的讀者與指涉，

Hatred of Democracy雖然無可避免地也涉及理論概念的使用，但

是那不是他要闡述的重點。他所討論的問題，比較是當代歐洲

民主實踐上的問題，或者更具體的說，是法國共和政治中的問

題（這本書的「在地特質」似乎也說明了這本書在法國以外的

英美學界，並未引發太多的討論）。因此，一方面，我們可



130│

以看到一個涉入更深的Rancière，但是，另一方面，我們不禁

會要問的是，這本書中的這些思考，可以帶給在台灣的我們的

啟發是什麼。畢竟歐洲老牌民主國家與民主之間的愛恨糾葛，

和長期處於戒嚴狀態，在制度上實現最低限度的民主不過二十

來年的台灣，可能會要處理的是不太一樣的問題。當然，我也

要強調的是，這不意味著，這本書中所討論的主題，全部都只

是適用在法國特定的情境中。我只是認為，我們在閱讀的時

候，可能要把脈絡的因素，歷史的因素帶入思考。畢竟歐美的

民主政治的可能性，跟作為歐美外部的台灣或者亞洲，或者簡

單地說，先進民主與後進民主之間的關係，其實是需要放在一

起思考的。

　

好，接下來我就簡單地介紹這本書內容。

這本書法文是2005年出版，英譯本則是2006年出版。（我將之

翻譯為《對民主的憎惡》我覺得《民主之恨》太強烈，「憎

惡」、「反感」、「厭惡」或「敵意」可能會好些）

本書內容一共分成四章。

其實有相當大一部份在昨天的Disagreement的導讀，特別是陳

克倫負責報告對於當代「後民主」或「共識民主」的探討中已

經談過了。

我們可以簡單地說，Rancière讓我們看到「對於民主的憎惡」

在當代如何環繞著個人主義與消費主義、民粹主義，技術官僚

與科學（包括作為治理技術最前言的統計學，或者社會學與政

治科學）以及新自由主義金融資本全球化的無限擴張與國家寡

頭治安力量的共構，而被賦與的一個新而複雜的面目（這些批

評有時表面上看起來相互矛盾，但實際上卻建立在相同的基礎

之上）。

Rancière說，「民主的憎惡」，自古即有，包括我們可以看



到柏拉圖幾乎總是R an c i ère第一個要批評的對象，也包括

parapolitics的操作與後設政治區分形式民主與實質民主的等

等。簡單地說，憎惡的緣由不太一樣，而去政治化或反民主的

手法，則有各種不同的變形。

Rancière在〈序言〉中提到當代對民主憎惡或者說對於民主的

批判，雖然結合了上述批判的部份元素，但又有些不同。他們

不追求實質民主，同時，他們也接受民主體現的是人民的權

力。他們抱怨的是人民的道德的淪喪以及因此所可能帶給文明

的危機。而他強調，他在這本書中所要的做的，其實比較不是

一種意識形態分析，而是我們所處的這個世界如何理解政治，

好讓我們能夠比較正面地理解民主醜聞（或喧囂）的意義，及

此一概念的批判性。

第一章的重點

Rancière指出當代一個很令人困惑的現象。那些曾在冷戰時期

堅守民主價值，那些支持以軍事力量介入，解放處於非民主狀

態的伊拉克的人們（當中很多是學者）何以紛紛地對於歐洲，

特別是大革命之後的民主政治感到危機四伏，問題重重？

問題出在人民身上。人民被視為個人主義消費社會中欲求不滿

的個人。所以對於許多人而言，既可以以軍事力量討伐作為西

方民主敵人的獨裁者，也必須要深刻地檢討民主社會內部的這

些自利的個人，以及失序的危機。Rancière舉了一些對於民主

的反省的例子。例如：Jean-Claude Milner的反省，這是一個很

奇特的思考方式。Milner認為歐洲民主基本上是一種技術以與

技術相互催化的慾望的結果，這個發展的極致表現便是納粹對

於猶太人的屠殺，因為後者基本上是建立在一種血緣關係上，

而這個關係卻不見容於民主。而這種對於民主的反省，也出現

在一九八零年代出現地挑戰民主與極權主義區分的一些論述，

包括對於法國大革命時期民主與恐怖緊密連結的反省之中。但

是，當代對於民主與恐怖的連結的反省，重點不在於群眾集體



132│

政治對於個人自由的壓迫，而是對於個人自由無限上綱的恐

懼。

在此我們看到一個有趣的現象，冷戰結束之後，個人自由不再

成為一個值得沾沾自喜的東西，可以對抗極權國家，而是一個

必須被徹底檢討的問題。在這種情況下，各式各樣有問題的個

人：貪婪的消費者、不斷索求社會福利的工會成員、將學校視

為市場的把自己是為消費者的學生；女性主義者追求比例保障

等等……於是：我們便看到一系列的等同的操作：Democracy

＝ limitlessness（永無止盡的慾望、不受限制的個人）＝ society

(消費社會、個人主義的社會）。民主被等同為社會，等同於

僅僅在乎個人權利、欲求不滿的個人。

Rancière說這是很多法國當代社會學家對於消費社會個人主義

的批判立場，而有趣的是，這個立場竟然跟很多強調政治純粹

性的思想家，主張政治領域與社會領域之間區分的思想家，例

如，Aristotle、Hannah Arendt與Leo Strauss一致。而這些問題，

也反應在共和教育的危機之上。法國當代教育問題的反省，因

為變成了超驗價值不復存在，個人平等成為唯一。

於是在當代法國對於民主政治的反省，主要便是對於大眾社會

消費主義個人的檢討，將之與一種「好的民主」對立起來，此

一所謂的好的民主，便是強調共和普遍性，可以將「雜多」融

合在具有超越性的「一」之中。而這也是他在第二章中要繼續

討論的問題。

第二章：Politics, or the lost Shepherd

在第二章中，Rancière一開始討論柏拉圖在理想國中的理論佈

署方式，對柏拉圖而言，民主便是對於良好秩序的破壞，而

此良好秩序是建立一種每一個人充分認識自己，各司其職各

得其所（安份守己）的秩序之上。民主是一種紛雜的狀態，

不是從屬於一的政體。而在當代我們看到了一種與柏拉圖對



民主批評的遙相呼應的說法。總總社會學的批評所針對的便

是民主這個不祥之物，這種不具基礎的政治。這也把我們帶

到 “arche”，關於統治原則與正當性問題（昨天曾經提到的

Arendt的討論，the commandment of those who commence，關於正

當性的問題）。而民主便是對於一種建立在財富或者出生血緣

等既定配置基礎上的統治正當性的質疑、挑戰與破壞。

對Rancière而言，民主不是狂熱的消費，而是對於一種基於自

然秩序所建立的社群與社會身體的破壞或溢越。民主是由一群

不具有統治的權利、資格的人們所進行的統治。對Rancière而

言，民主政治不是一種社會形式或政體，而是一種人民的力

量，一群沒有身分資格的人的統治，一群沒有資格的人對於既

存運作的增補（supplement)或者一種例外（exception)，或者

說，民主便是建立在一種不受治理（無法治理）的基礎之上。

倘若不是如此，政治便會消失。而這一切，對Rancière而言乃

是建立在平等的預設之上。此處的平等，不是虛構的，而是

可以從最根本的「理解」（昨天disagreement的報告中曾指出

的）出發，也就是任何的統治與被統治的關係，仍必須預設最

低限度理解的可能性。雖然從這個隊平等的預設出發，可以走

得多遠，或者會涉及哪些轉化的機制（例如「主體化」的問

題），則是我們必需要進一步討論的問題（否則我們還是可能

維持既定的發號施令者與接受命令者的區分秩序）。

第三章民主、共和與代表/代議政治的問題

Rancière重申，民主所帶來的醜聞或者喧囂與激發的不滿，乃

在於其無法替共同體的統治或治理找到那個最終單一基礎。共

同體的基礎，是民主的後果。但是我們已經知道，Rancière認

為民主建立在一個沒有基礎的基礎，或是一種對於既定社會關

係的增補與例外的基礎。民主既不是社會也不是政府型態，而

是對於不平等與寡頭代議制度的挑戰，也是一種讓社會與自己

偏離或分離的政治。簡單地說，就是打破原本社會配置秩序的

方式。



134│

對Rancière而言，代議政治的問題，其實不是直接民主或間接

民主的差別，從一開始，代議便與民主背道而馳。投票更只是

一種統治者獲得授權的機制，好讓菁英們得以藉人民的同意之

名進行統治。但是Rancière在這裡所採取的並不是馬克思主義

後設政治的立場，在假象與真相之間進行對比。他認為，民主

雖然不能被等同於法律政治的形式，但是並不意味著民主跟這

些法律—政治形式無關。一如我們昨天也提過的le politique作

為政治（la politique) 與治安(la police)的交會場域的概念。一

旦政治與治安的邏輯相互遭遇，公共空間便會出現，而此一公

共空間的出現，也會打破原先公私領域的劃分。民主便在於對

抗國家對於公領域的壓縮，或者所謂的私領域化，對於分配

公、私區分的方式。讓被置入私領域而被認為與政治無關之人

可以被納入，打破治安邏輯與代議制度

Rancière也說明，這不是要求一個強國家介入私領域的訴求。

他舉了一個例子：比方說，十九世紀的工人要求增加工資的運

動，不是要求提供社會福利的協助，而是要求將工作視為集體

生活的一部分）。也就在這個意義上，公共領域的跨大，其實

不是一般認為的「社會運動」的蓬勃發展。因為Rancière認為

這種說法這似乎預設了社會與政治的本質區分。（其實，在台

灣八零年代末期與九零年代初期的關於政治運動社會化與社會

運動政治化，乃至「泛政治化」討論也有類似的問題，但是，

我們在此必須要檢討的是「去政治化」與「泛政治化」的論述

進行對於民主實踐的批判之利弊得失）

無論如何，對Rancière而言，民主因此是對於區分、對於界線

的踰越。這個關於「踰越」的思考，也讓我們看到Rancière 與

一些重新反省人權問題，特別是針對關於法國革命之後的人權

宣言的理解的當代政治思想間的顯著差異。（Arendt在「極權

主義的起源」中討論「無權利者的權利」以及受到這個討論相

當大啟發的Agamben）。他認為，這些當代思想家基本上對於

人權抱持一種懷疑的態度，不是視之為一種沒有民族國家授與

權利之人的權利，因此顯得可疑與無保障，或者將公民與人



（類，乃至男人）的區分，悲觀地視之為當代生命政治赤裸生

命的典範。但是Rancière卻將兩者之間的區分或界線視為一種

可能的政治空間。對他而言，不論是「公民」或者是「人」都

不是必然的政治主體，但卻也都有可能成為政治主體，問題在

於如何穿越兩者，在兩者的區間（interval)中成為政治主體。

從Rancière對於人權的討論，我們可以看到，在認知到普遍性

範疇或宣稱往往被治安邏輯特殊化的情況下，不是因此放棄普

遍性，而是藉由政治主體化的方式持續地讓普遍性受到檢驗，

受到挑戰，持續地跨大公共領域。 Rancière說，如果民主是所

謂的「不受拘限」（“limitlessness”），這才是「不受拘限」

的本質，而非從消費主義的角度進行檢討。如果，沒有這種對

於越界的實踐，普遍性便只會是一種結合法律與道德、制度與

社會身體，收編差異、多樣性的共和理想。

藉由這個討論，Rancière也在提醒我們，一九九零年代出現各

種「回歸政治」的訴求，其中也包含共和主義思想的版本，但

共和思想在提醒我們政治解消的同時，卻弔詭地將政治歸為國

家管轄，嚴格恪守公、私；政治與社會的區分，並對民粹主義

提出批評。

第四章憎惡的理性/理由（此章也處理了全球化的問題）

Rancière說所有的國家都是寡頭統治的國家，但是人們多半認

為寡頭國家仍或多或少可以保有民主，透過各種民主選舉制度

的設計與限制(例如：任期、競選經費的上限等等），可以維

持最低限度的民主（這也是第三波民主化的標準，認為透過這

個方式，可以保有民主最核心的不確定性，可以「制度化不

確定性」，但這其實是限制了不確定性發生與作用的範圍），

可以達到力量平衡。但是事實上我們目前稱之為民主國家的狀

況卻跟上述的狀況大異其趣。Rancière指出法國的狀況事實上

便是受到國家寡頭與經濟寡頭對公共事務的獨佔。但是很多人

卻認為我們目前擁有的民主已經夠好了。



136│

但是陸續出現的一些意外狀況，例如在法國，菁英們對於人民

公投（歐盟）的結果與他們的預測之間的落差感到無法接受，

便宣稱人民的無知，沒有認識到客觀事實。他們似乎將人民的

投票當成是對於一個建立在客觀科學基礎所形成的普遍共識的

形式肯認，但是當事與願違時，便有展開了所謂的「民粹主

義」的批評。

對Rancière而言，「民粹主義」的批評者將所有各式各樣的問

題，包括極右派、左派懷舊者、基本教義派全都被混為一談，

對他們而言，人民便是落伍、無知的群眾。同樣地，對於將全

球化視為一種不可逆轉的歷史法則者，亦是抱持類似的態度，

對這些人而言，當人們反對全球化時所表現的便是人們欠缺便

是對於專家與統治者的信念。這些人事實上處心積慮想做的便

是排除人民與政治。

此處我們看到Rancière所看到的當前的問題乃是寡頭權力與資

本的無限擴張，這兩者之間的關係在全球化時代產生了更緊密

的結合。事實上不論是歐盟或者其他跨國公司的出現，事實上

並未減損國家的力量，就如同對福利國家的批評，重點也不在

於讓國家退出，而全然是一種重新佈署權力的方式。

針對這個狀況，可以如何因應呢？Rancière的回應有點晦澀

（而這個回應也涉及到他對主體的理解。其實已經有一些學者

提出，Rancière雖然非常強調「主體化」的重要性，但是他並

未提供一個較為清楚細緻的主體化「過程」的理論）在此，

Rancière並未提出具體的方案，他討論的是政治運動的普遍性

與獨一性（singularit)的問題：

Rancière說政治運動雖然試圖打破疆界，從個別衝突所涉及的

利益中抽取出民主的普遍元素，但這同時也意味了：在永遠都

是singular的鬥爭之中，政治運動也總是會冒著受限於捍衛特定

團體之特殊利益的危險之中。特別是當這個鬥爭是由寡頭政府

所開啟的，在「主權國家」與「無權力的國家」雙重面貌之



下進行，運動之間彼此的連結就更加困難抺全球化下的弔詭處

境。

Rancière說，要建立一個共同的行動與意義的民主空間越來越

困難。所有具有個別訴求的運動，即使他們的鬥爭溢越了個別

的限制，仍是不斷地被指責說他們僅僅只是限於一國疆界之

內，並因要求國家疆界的封閉而強化了國家（例如工運的情況

便很明顯）。相反地，那些認為應該超越此一疆界，而已跨國

運對對抗上述自我保存的運動者，往往則會導致支持那國家寡

頭與金融寡頭聯盟的跨國組織。（補充說明：在一個訪談稿

中，Rancière認為：national mediation仍是有效的，也就是說，

那是the relation between a structure of inclusion and what it excludes

plays itself out的空間）。

最後總結，Rancière說：

Democracy is neither a form of government that enables oligarchies

to rule in the name of the people, nor is it a form of society that

governs the power of commodities. It is the action that constantly

wrests the monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments,

and the omnipotence over lives from the power of wealth. It is

the power that, today, more than ever, has to struggle against the

confusion of these powers, rolled into one and the same law of

domination. Rediscovering the singularity of democracy means

also being aware of its solitude. (Hatred of Democracy, p. 96)

後記：

在這個導讀與後續討論中，與會者提出了幾個有趣的問題，在

此無法一一複述，僅整理幾個被提出的問題重點：

1.singularity的意義，如何理解「民主的孤獨」

2.政治主體（個人或集體，以及兩者之間的關聯）如何出現的

問題，或其顯現的方式



138│

3.政治行動與現實政治實踐的關聯（此處涉及le politique, la

politique, la police之間的區分與關聯）

4.再現體制的問題（這個部份除了這本書所及中討論的代議政

治的問題，也涉及到感性分配、再現體制的問題）

值得一提的是，因為時間的限制，除了Rancière與其他基進思

想家的比較未能進行之外，針對台灣民主政治實踐的問題，以

及，例如，全球化、教育、學術生產與民主實踐等等在這本書

中較為具體實質的問題，也未進行討論。





140│

美學無意識

楊明敏, 台灣精神分析學會

Jacques Rancière, L'inconscient esthétique, Galilée , 2001.


版權所有 ©楊明敏

作者先是說明﹕『在這標題之下，我所要談論的，並非以佛洛

伊德的，有關無意識的理論，將其應用於美學的領域。因此，

我所要說的，既不屬於藝術的精神分析，也不是藝術史家、哲

學家，借助於佛絡伊德的論點，特別是拉岡的(lacanienne)論

點，所得出的為數眾多、頗為重要的論點。以精神分析的理論

觀點來談論，是我力有未逮的。但是，重要的是，我的旨趣另

有所指。我並非要尋求、了解佛洛伊德的概念，是如何對造形

藝術的作品、文學的文本進行分析與詮釋。相反地，我要問的

是，為何這些文本與作品的詮釋，在展示精神分析的詮釋形式

與概念的重要性時，佔有一種策略性的位置。』

接著作者列舉法國古典主義劇作家科內耳(Corneille)啟蒙主義

發軔的主導者伏爾泰(Voltaire)在他們的筆下如何改造古希臘悲

劇伊底帕斯的故事，來說明精神分析的伊底帕斯情結的呈現，

並非舉世皆準，究其實佛洛伊德身處的世代是經歷著美學的革

命，在本書中作者有以維柯在『新科學』一書中對荷馬這個人

的爭議，重新主張了形象、文字、語言的觀係，用來鋪陳美學

革命中Logos與Pathos的緊密觀係，這種關係是雙重的，Logos

必然蘊含了Pathos，也可以是每種Pathos必然有它的Logos。

接著作者選取了佛洛伊德在第一次世界大戰前，幾篇有觀文學

140│140│141美學無意識│洪席耶作品導讀│

作品與雕刻等造型藝術的文章，闡述這位精神分析的奠基者，

傾向上述雙重關係的後者，避免掉入Pathos的深淵，並以易普

生的作品為例，說明他的詮釋與作者筆下的虛無毀滅是不同的。

最後再指出這是在主張死亡本能之前的佛絡伊德，當代有些與

死亡本能、與空無共舞的基進的佛洛伊德主義者，他們的主張

是另一段故事，但也是精神分析與美學革命的最後一曲。



142│

《歷史之名》(Le noms de l’histoire)導讀

楊淳嫻, 國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

[email protected]

Jacques Rancière, Les Noms de l’histoire. Essai de poétique du savoir. Paris : Editions du Seuil. 1992.英文版：The Names of History: on the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melehy, intro. Hayden White, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994.


版權所有 ©楊淳嫻[※]

【大綱】

前言

1.科學與文學的問題

2.事件與詮釋的問題

3.場所與空間的問題

前言

這篇文章是對於洪席耶(Jacques Rancière)出版於1992年的《歷

史之名：知識的詩學》(Le noms de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du

savoir)所做的簡單介紹。洪席耶是法國當代重要的政治哲學

及美學家，對於這本書的第一個提問，或許便是何以他會想

要寫一本討論歷史書寫的書？[註1]早在《歷史之名》發表

之前，洪席耶在1981年已出版了《勞動者之夜》(Les Nuits des

Proletaires)，從工人辦的報紙、信件、雜誌、詩歌創作等去探

討無產階級與法國1830年革命問題，展現出他對於歷史的興

趣。而此書的緣起，在懷特(Hayden White)為此書所作的前言

中提到，是洪席耶從他在康乃爾大學所開設的講座主題「寫作

的政治」中發展出來的。此書所談論的寫作，有一個明確的對

話對象，乃是針對歷史學家所使用的書寫方式和研究途徑、發

[※]本文為口頭發表於

2009年10月31日至11月

1日的Rancière作品研讀

會上的導讀稿，內容請

勿引用。關於這本豐富

的小書，有許多問題面

向是文章中無法關照到

的，像是與洪席耶其

他作品概念上的連結，

與年鑑學派和當時法

國史學界之間的互動與

回應，與當代的哲學

家談論時間問題觀點上

的異同，以及在最後一

章中洪席耶對於歷史書

寫與當代政治的契約關

係，這些問題都有待進

一步的討論與開展。

[註1]洪席耶對於歷史

的關注，可參考〈挪移

的哲學〉一文，黃建宏

譯，刊載於《文化研究

月報》第三十九期，

2004年6月。

142│142│143《歷史之名》( Le noms de l’histoire)導讀│洪席耶作品導讀│

展概念的方式、以及如何選擇研究主題、處理材料的方式來討

論。透過這些書寫方式，所構成的是我們所知道的歷史知識與

歷史論述。然而，這些知識與論述所呈現的，是否祇是單純對

於過去真相的還原？

打從十九世紀的最後幾十年，歷史開始致力於培養客觀性，讓

自己成為一門專業學科以來，發掘真相一直是歷史學者所追求

的目標。但是這本書並非廣泛地去關注十九世紀以降所有的歷

史學書寫，而是把重點放在所謂的新史學，即發展於二十世紀

中期，以《年鑑》(Annales)這份刊物而建立起學界名聲的一批

法國歷史學者，包括第一代的呂西安‧費夫賀(Lucien Febvre)

及第二代的費爾南‧布勞岱爾(Fernand Braudel)等人。他們在

歷史研究中加入社會科學的研究方法，開闢了新的研究主題，

使得發生於過去的人類活動，例如地中海這樣廣大的區域所發

生長時期的人類活動，或者發生在某個特定時期、一個名叫蒙

大猷的偏僻小村落的異端思想，或者如拉伯雷這樣一個人物的

不信仰行為可能與否，都能夠被加以問題化以及闡述。[註2]

一方面，透過年鑑學派不一樣的研究方式，讓我們所能知道的

過去更為多樣化，不再只限於皇家檔案中所陳述的重大事件，

而讓一個看不見的歷史主體—「人民」—得以出現在歷史舞台

上。然而另一方面，洪席耶對他們所提出的問題在於，諸如群

眾的歷史、地中海的歷史、心態的歷史，這些沒有被過去的編

年史家明確紀錄在歷史文件中的歷史主題是怎樣被挖掘、建

構出來的？這些新歷史不僅是對過去的描述，同時也開闢了一

些過去所沒有的、新的知識的領域。而這些知識的建立，和我

們當前所身處的民主與科學的時代又有怎樣的關連？

由本書的書名來看，所謂歷史，洪席耶說，「一般而言，指的

是一連串發生於那些被指派了專有名稱的一般主體身上的重大

事件。……第二個面向，亦是將一連串重大事件歸屬於專有名

詞的敘事。」根據此作為開場白的一般定義，或可略知這本

書所涉及的將是一個關於事件、命名與敘事的問題，簡而言

之，便是關於如何書寫。我們或可從此書的副標題「知識的詩

學」再次地去試加理解什麼是書寫可能產生的問題，洪席耶所

[註2]此處提到三本年

鑑學派的作品：布勞

岱爾的《地中海史》

(La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a l’époque de Philippe II)，費夫賀的《拉伯雷與

十六世紀的不信神問

題》(L e p r o b l è m e d e l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais)，勒華拉度里(Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie)的《蒙

大猷》 ( M o n t a i l l o u : Village Occitan de 1294 à 1324)。



144│

謂知識的詩學可以從兩個面向去捕捉，一方面他提到，此乃指

對於新歷史的一整套書寫程序的研究，這個書寫程序包括「對

一些作為示範的對象與人物施予持續性的影響」，這些「如何

成為情節的一部份」，對於「句法的使用—主詞、補語與述詞

的佈署、連接詞和從屬連接語的玩弄」，以及對於「動詞的現

在式和過去式、它們的在場和缺席」。這些看起來都是對於

「寫作」方法上的分析，又與歷史何干？而另一方面，洪席耶

注意到這些寫作技巧正是新歷史不可或缺的構成方式，他指出

其為「一種對客體和知識語言的詩學闡述」，是一種連結的技

藝，語言的實踐。洪席耶將亞裡斯多德的詩學討論挪移到對歷

史學寫作方式之討論，尋找在新史學所借重的社會科學的實證

方法，以及虛構的敘事手法，這兩個看似背反的研究方向之間

所存在弔詭的連結關係。擺盪在科學與人文學科之間的詩性原

則，成為洪席耶的切入點，在此連結的基礎上，他要更進一

步去關心「知識是如何被讀和寫，如何被建構為一種特殊論述

的規則」，透過此特殊論述的規則所建立的是一套「將專有名

詞與一般名詞、詞與物、說話者的秩序與認知對象的秩序，

加以統合的專屬命名」。而這個問題不僅發生在歷史學上，

也是所有人文或社會科學都會面對，甚至是民主時代亦會面對

的問題。在這個講求科學理性的時代，科學不僅影響了我們的

思維，也涉及了對於知識與生命的分配管理。新歷史的特別之

處，在於其所形成的論述構成了一個與科學、敘事、政治的三

重契約。洪席耶同時看到了其中的矛盾與調和：新歷史所帶入

的科學規則，被隱藏在一個可閱讀的敘事形式下，形塑出一個

可教育全體大眾的共同歷史。究竟歷史如何構成此既矛盾又

調和的自身之名，便將成為引導此書的核心問題。[註3]

本書共分為七個章節，洪席耶在各章中分別針對特定的歷史作

品，作為理論上的結點而展開討論：在第一二章時他所使用的

主要範例是布勞岱爾的《地中海史》；第三章時他藉由塔西

陀斯(Tacitus)在《編年史》(Annals)中對於羅馬士兵的描述手

法，比較法國修正主義史學對於法國大革命的翻轉；第四章和

第五章他談到浪漫主義史家米榭萊(Jules Michelet)如何書寫法

國史及對於女巫、棄嬰的歷史，比較勒華拉度里在《蒙大猷》

[註3]這一段內引號內

的引文皆取自《歷史之

名》的第一章。


中如何書寫關於異端的心態史；在第六章時，洪席耶綜合之

前的討論，再度分析了《地中海史》所呈現的空間和時間的關

係，並以此解釋何謂歷史性。這些討論環環相扣，為了便於說

明，底下我將洪席耶在每個章節所處理的不同主題，整理成幾

組對比或互為關連的問題意識：科學與文學、事件與詮釋、場

所與空間，在其中連結彼此的便是洪席耶所謂的詩性原則。

1.科學與文學的問題

在第一章的總論當中，洪席耶便開宗明義點出新歷史處在科學

與文學之間的兩難。洪席耶以histoire這個字在法文中的同名異

義(homonymy)，同時可指向歷史和故事，來說明歷史與文學

難以分割的關係。同名異義即一個字可能指向多個意思，為了

要減低歷史敘事中的虛構成分，歷史學者傳統上所採取的對應

之道是添加註解(references)，以詳細說明每個字精確的意思。

然而光是以註解的方式，並不能構成足以說明事物關連的論

述。因而新史學採用的科學方法，例如計量法，企圖增加歷史

於敘事外的實證性與合理性。然而，洪席耶注意到一個特別的

例子，在布勞岱爾的《地中海與菲力普二世時代的地中海世

界》（La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe

II）[註4]這個頗長的書名中，怪異的結合了「地中海」這個

新歷史的研究主題，與「菲力普二世」這個於傳統編年史以及

政治史的中心人物：國王。洪席耶指出，布勞岱爾之所以將

菲力普二世的國王駕崩事件保留在作品當中，是為了要把此事

件象徵性地移動到書的最後，以顯示國王與事件的歷史不再

重要。在這裡，我們必需瞭解布勞岱爾最重要的「長時段」

(longue durée)這個歷史概念，布勞岱爾對於歷史時間的三種

區分為：事件和日常生活行為是變動得最快的，而交換、制度

等發展在時間上則會比事件長一些，例如資本主義這種持續了

數個世紀的文明發展或社會變化，則需要最長的時間方能呈顯

出來。在長時段的觀點下，國王之死的事件在布勞岱爾的作品

中便顯得無足輕重，不再具有如它在傳統的編年史、政治史

中的重要地位。然而，布勞岱爾刻意保留此事件並安置在結尾

處，洪席耶認為這麼一來便形成了比喻，此比喻具有雙重的意

[ 註 4 ] 即《地中海

史》，此書已於2002年

由台灣商務出中文版，

中文書名比法文版較為

節略。



146│

義，一是解釋了長時段的概念，另一是顯示了歷史學發展上具

有革命意義的轉向。

洪席耶指出，歷史學家的觀點取代了國王在事件與歷史中的位

置，而支撐歷史學家使其形成合理論述的，便是科學原則。儘

管在其背後所運用的社會學、經濟學方法並不會出現在字裡行

間，但是可以從另一種書寫手法看出這些科學性的痕跡，此即

在書寫中大量出現現在式的時態。[註5]洪席耶藉由語言學家

本維尼斯特(Benveniste)的語言學理論，指出在論述系統與敘

事系統中對於人稱與時態的使用不同，在描述過去的歷史時，

經常使用的時態本來應該是不定過去式、未完成式和過去完成

式，但在《地中海史》中出現論述的部份，可以看到表達肯

定、客觀與中立語氣的現在式、完成式與未來式。甚至於現在

的論述與過去的敘事，在像這樣的句子中更加模糊難辨：「我

們歷史學家冒昧地接觸他：他像是對待他的使臣一般接受我

們，以最大的禮貌聆聽我們，回覆以晦澀難辯的低語，且絕不

談及自己。」洪席耶注意到的是，像是這樣的句子，既是敘事

又像是論述，但在書中所卻是作為隱喻來使用，與將國王之死

的事件象徵性的安排到書末，具有類似的作用。洪席耶認為，

這種詩性手法的運用，是歷史學家為了調和歷史中的科學與文

學不得不然的安排。

2.事件與詮釋的問題

國王在傳統歷史事件中的地位在新歷史中遭到了取代，取代他

的是對於人類行為長時期發展的研究和陳述。這些歷史敘述中

的主角並非大人物，而是原本在舊歷史中不具重要地位、沒有

聲音的群眾。然而，這些在昔日社會中的窮人，缺乏自己發言

的文字紀錄，要如何證明他們的歷史？布勞岱爾透過社會科學

方法去分析大量的卷宗檔案，這些檔案很多是當時的國王跟使

臣的書信，從中去分析推論，例如傳染病的傳播途徑。正因這

些群眾無法自己顯現在歷史舞台之上，必需要透過字詞的詮釋

去呈現，因而帶出了從第二章到第三章中洪席耶所欲討論的言

說過度問題。同名異義說明了名詞可以是浮動的，可能被放在

[註5]關於洪席耶對歷

史書寫中的時態分析，

也可參考尚‧勒狄克

(Jean Leduc)的《史家

與時間》(Les historiens et le temps : Conceptions, problématiques, écritures)中第六章〈我們以何種

時態寫史〉，林錚譯

（台北：麥田出版，

2004）。


各種脈絡下使用，任何言說都有可能引發過度使用甚至濫用的

問題。在第二章中，洪席耶引用了一個在歷史上由於言說過度

所引發的政治事件，造出「皇家經驗論」 (royal-empirisme)之

理論名詞。這個造成英國國王查理一世被罷黜處死的事件，

[註6]曾被霍布斯在其作品《論公民》(De Cive)和《利維坦》

(Leviathan)中所批評，因為群眾言說的過度而造成當時的君權

政治的崩壞。洪席耶以這個例子去指涉在新史學中，歷史學家

必需呈現群眾的言說事件，但又需要用論述解釋來控制他的書

寫主題。在第三章當中，洪席耶進一步推展了這個問題，他指

出，塔西陀斯乃是透過文學的模擬方式，賦予羅馬士兵這樣一

個歷史上的小人物聲音。他引用奧爾巴哈(Auerbach)對塔西陀

斯的批評，認為這個羅馬士兵的言說是空洞的，因為基本上這

是一種模擬。而洪席耶認為有趣的地方在於這裡造成了一個保

留。塔西陀斯在他的作品裡保留了一小塊場所給一個他宣稱沒

有場所可以發言的士兵，而形成了一種對於他者言說的挪用，

間接的引述。在整個論述的脈絡中會需要士兵這個角色發言，

儘管這段話語可能士兵本人並沒有這樣的表達能力。在歷史學

家的論述中，將非法的說話者、虛構的話語變成了合法的，洪

席耶認為這是一種特殊的懸置。歷史學家既可以同樣的方式去

模擬士兵的言說，也可以同樣地描述羅馬領袖的演說，兩個角

色，兩段言語，在歷史述述中產生了同質性。而透過歷史作為

一種教育方式，又可以再把這些同質性的論述散播出去。

如此一來，在歷史書寫上所造成的另一個問題是時間上的錯

置。而為了防堵這個錯誤，其相反的極端便是對於這種挪用倒

錯的完全否定。洪席耶以柯班(Alfred Cobban)《法國大革命的

社會詮釋》(The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution)對法國

大革命起源的修正主義詮釋為例，柯班以馬克思主義對革命所

下的定義為據，認為法國大革命並不能稱為階級鬥爭的革命，

理由是在事件爆發之前，貴族與資產階級之間的區分早已模

糊。而孚勒(Francois Furet)在《思考法國大革命》(Interpreting

the French Revolution)中更進一步地認為，法國大革命作為一個

歷史事件的意義在於形成了一個空洞，吸引各種解釋去重構革

命。在這個空洞的概念之上建立了「以民主言說的替代政權，

[註6]查理一世(1600-

1649)因為徵稅問題與

英國國會鬧翻，國會

於1628年提出權利請願

書，1629年，查理便違

反權利請願書並解散國

會。1640年，為解決蘇

格蘭戰爭再度召開國

會，國王與議會決裂並

逮捕議員，激怒倫敦市

民起而造反，1642年查

裡逃往約克，英國爆發

內戰。1648年國王被

俘，並被特別法庭審

判。1649年查理一世被

送上斷頭臺，成為英國

歷史上唯一被處死的國

王。1649年英國短暫成

為共和國，由克倫威爾

主政。



148│

以大眾為名的社會的統治」。作為一個歷史事件的法國大革命

在因而在這些解釋中被取消了，但仍以錯誤的在場的方式，作

為無場所、空洞與幻象而繼續存在。意識型態透過解釋，替

代了事件而填補了歷史上的無場所，透過對歷史的詮釋成為我

們所知道的過去真實。

3.場所與空間的問題

在第四章到第五章當中洪席耶討論的是另一種完全不同的歷史

構成，與之前所討論同名異義的規則與歷史的無場所完全相

反。洪席耶指出，在米榭萊的浪漫主義史學中可以看到歷史學

家如何透過書寫而掌握真實意義。[註7]這種書寫方式，洪席

耶稱之為異名同義(synonymy)，歷史學家的敘述並非對真實的

模仿，而是對於事件的直接描述。例如當米榭萊談論里昂的烈

士夏里葉時，他並非模仿夏里葉的口氣，編造一段話讓這個角

色說出，而是直接敘述「他是里昂憤怒的哭訴」。洪席耶注意

到，這種名詞子句只有客體而沒有主詞，同時也沒有時態，其

結果便造成事件的意義絕對化，讓每一個句子本身就直接等於

活生生的真理。於此，洪席耶提出了另一個關於「沈默的見證

者」的問題。在上述的句子中並沒有辦法判別是誰的聲音，它

呈現了一個由學者的描述與本應說話的沈默者所構成的雙重

敘事。例如米榭萊談論棄嬰的歷史時，他以石頭為母親哭泣與

海洋為母親感動來表達失去孩子的母親的悲傷，而母親作為唯

一有資格說話的角色，卻沈默不開口，祇是無聲地充當這些敘

述的見證人。在這樣的敘事方式當中蘊含著一種連續性，使得

敘事連續於論述，讓意義被銘刻在事物的脈絡當中，使得意

義被內在化，讓整個敘事成為表現性與意義的場所。

洪席耶認為，此種表現意義的真實場域其實建立在雙重的缺席

上，一是死亡，另一者是文字。死亡作為生者唯一的非知，而

文字的虛假卻是唯一通往死亡的途徑。這個雙重缺席居於歷史

的核心，歷史所處理的就是那些已然不在的事物本身，且從來

沒有被訴說過的事情。因此，作為對於缺席的償還，對於無知

和過去生命的增補，歷史提供了一個言說的場所，讓這些沒有

[註7 ]此處提到米榭

萊(Jules Michelet )的幾

部重要作品為：《法

國大革命的歷史》

(Histoire de la Révolution française)、《海》(La m e r )、《女巫》(L a Sorcière)。


位置的死者的聲音可以透過言說的產物而得到一個合法的表達

位置。從「場所」作為一種空間的概念，洪席耶比較了費夫賀

將地理學的空間概念於引入歷史研究的作法。按照費夫賀的想

法，地理學在歷史研究中的作用，例如討論一個地區或氣候，

不應只作為背景的資料，而應視為影響歷史變化的要素，在這

個地理空間內所有事物都受其影響，它劃出了一個明確的範

圍。洪席耶認為，這種對於空間的安排，可以說是將「空間」

作為一個象徵化的場所。當每件事物都被安放到一個被領土化

的空間當中，其合理性便可以一種拓樸的方式來表現。洪席耶

舉了另一個相反的例子，異端的歷史要如何被理解？在米榭萊

的作法中，乃是將女巫這個名字轉為一個未被承認的女人，以

家庭最私密的中心（床或搖籃）作為她的代表，而使得這個被

教會放逐的罪惡再度在塵世中獲得了屬於她的具體位置。在第

五章當中洪席耶談到另一個有趣的例子是關於蒙大猷這個村莊

的異端思想。在這個例子裡，歷史學家把研究重點放在分析這

個村莊的生活習慣上。村莊作為給予異端思想存在的場所，由

歷史學家為它劃下一個領土，但目的是為了將它埋葬。用給予

它一個根源的方式加以鎮壓。

在分析上述問題之後，洪席耶再一次地回到布勞岱爾的《地中

海》這個例子。或許於此讀者可以比較清楚地瞭解，何以地中

海作為一個新史學的主題，這個名詞，不只是一個地理名詞，

而是作為一個可以容納並統合歷史多樣性的空間。洪席耶指

出，在這個經統合的多樣性當中包含了兩種圖式，其一是按照

人類行為發展的科學模式，從最簡單的交換行為到複雜的資本

主義市場，所做出的理性排列。而另外一個在時間上的排列，

則是布勞岱爾依其長時段的歷史概念去發展。有趣的是，這些

最複雜、最理性、最進步、最活躍的人類行為，卻必需要透

過一個最長期的觀察方能顯現。這是兩種完全相反的歷史意

義，一種是社會學的，另一種卻是歷史的。洪席耶由此去談什

麼是歷史性(l’historialité)：我們得從一個象徵性的空間去瞭解

銘刻在諸般事物上的真正的歷史特性——歷史性的時間，一種

被空間化了的時間。然而，更重要的一點或許在於洪席耶所給

予的提醒，地中海之所以能夠成為歷史的主體，成為一個隱藏



150│

了知識的身體以及可感知的證據的身體，這些意義都需要透過

歷史學家的書寫來呈現。歷史學家的書寫，就像是神話中的伊

底帕斯，或史詩中的尤里西斯，透過他的旅程將這個物質的世

界與書寫的世界串連起來。這個非經歷不可的書寫之旅程，或

許對於一心想要排除掉敘事的虛構性的歷史學來說，就像是來

自於盲眼先知的詛咒。

透過上述的分析，洪席耶讓我們瞭解何以歷史可被稱為一種

知識的詩學。但我們要如何將新歷史的書寫與民主時代連在

一起，以理解洪席耶所謂新歷史的第三個合約？在全書的最

後一章裡，洪席耶比較了一個當代的歷史書寫：湯普森(E. P

Thompson)的《英國工人階級的形成》(The Making of the English

Working Class)。洪席耶認為，湯普森筆下英國工人階級的形

成，或可說是一個主體化的過程，沒有任何神話的起源，而

是一個無所限制的純粹開始，從一個言說的場所的發展來構

成。這個言說場所的形成不是來自工廠或街道上的工人「階

級」，而是來自無盡的文字、語句、名詞，對於人的權利的

模糊概念或者來自於聖經或天路歷程的訓諭，在物質的場所

與象徵的場所之間，在名字與身體之間，在現實狀況與知識之

間去調整這個無限的空間，製造歷史與言說的主體。洪席耶將

此社會主體的宣稱視為異端。異端作為他者的邏輯，位在字與

物之間，在意識當中的不可思處，是被排除的絕對他者，那些

還沒有被說出的部份。它是一個由許多借來的名詞交織而成的

新認同，同時它也可以將位置指派給名詞。洪席耶認為，在一

個歷史的主體行經時所造成的裂隙或距離，或可說是所謂的文

化，而文化史則是由一個被定義了歷史性意義的程序所形成，

由一個透過將他們自己銘刻在敘事的類別和真理的形象中以說

明自身的書寫形式所形成，或可說是一個主體形成歷史的可能

性。洪席耶似乎認為，這樣一個可能性不是從科學性，而是由

敘事的文學性中方可能給出。

從洪席耶的分析，我們可以看到從米榭萊的浪漫史學到年鑑的

新史學，知識的詩學如何被建立、發展及運作。試圖在社會科

學方法與歷史敘事之間進行調節的新史學，發展出了歷史性的


專有形式：可感的經驗形式、時間感的形式、或知識和信仰之

間的關連的形式。這些形式有其依據的法則，也有它的侷限，

同時它也帶來一些可能性與風險。然而，或許就因這些可能性

與不可能才讓這個民主與社會的時代成為一個等待的時代(the

age of the wait)。在《歷史之名》中，洪席耶所給予的是一種與

歷史科學完全相反的思考，或許，如他所建議，歷史應該重新

去思考自身之名，以及在這個名字之下所有複雜的可能性。



152│


楊成瀚, 國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

[email protected]

Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique. 2000 英文版：The Politics of Aesthetics : The Distribution of the Sensible. Continuum International Publishing Group; Pbk. Ed edition, 2004


版權所有 ©楊成瀚

[註1]這次提問的主題

是「感性工廠」（ « La fabrique du sensible »），主要收錄於《艾

莉絲》1998年的秋季刊

(現已移至《諸眾》雜

誌)。《艾莉絲》的主

編Bernard Aspe和哲學

家Muriel Combes兩人同

對對德勒茲影響極大

的法國哲學家西蒙東

（Gilbert Simondon）有

所研究，Combes甚至還

撰有《西蒙東：個體與

集體性》（Simondon : Individu et collectivité）一書。兩人合撰的文

章包括了有〈返回作

為生命政治典範的集

中營〉（ « Retour sur le camp comme paradigme b i o p o l i t i q u e »）以及

〈瘋狂行為〉（« L’acte fou »）等。

【大綱】

現代性問題

現代性論點的微薄利益與藝術的種種政體

影像的倫理政體

藝術的詩學/再現政體

藝術的美學政體

現代性論述的兩種變體及其敗筆

後現代主義的哀悼災難

前衛藝術論點與政治主體性

諸機械藝術與匿名者的科學美學提倡

班雅明「機械藝術」論點的問題性

「匿名性」與大眾的「成為一種藝術/真實/徵侯/秀美」

文學文件與歷史學家文件間的對立（文學的政治）

這本書的內容實際上是Rancière對《艾莉絲》（Alice）季刊的

主編慕希耶勒・康布斯（Muriel Combes）和柏納德・艾斯普

（Bernard Aspe）[註1]的提問所進行的回應。於〈前言〉中，

Rancière便提到，他要處理的不是普遍意義下的藝術理論或藝

術的某個理論，不是藝術作品對感性所造成的效果的問題，而

是對種種藝術進行思考及其辨識（identification）的問題，或是

152│152│153洪席耶的《感性分享：美學與政治》│洪席耶作品導讀│

我們究竟該如何在前衛美學/政治理念已轉變為某種鄉愁情調

（境遇主義者），在許許多多藝術終結/回歸、影像已死的論

述、奇觀、擬像、「無法呈現」（l’imprésentable）或「哀悼」

的思想（Lyotard）氾濫的今日—重新賦予「美學」意義或形塑

「美學」與「政峙」（le politique）[註2]扣連的種種新模式，

形塑「感性分享」（partage du sensible）的種種新模式的問題。

換個方式說，他要處理的乃是在種種製作/創作方式及其可見

性形式、可思性模式間所進行的分享及對其進行模塑的特定政

體的問題。

現代性問題

尤其，在藝術的終結與回歸的論述中，Rancière指出，佔關鍵

地位的乃是「現代性」的問題，這在今天將所有現代主義實踐

都捲入那融合著再現禁令與機械複製技術等論點的巨大混亂。

正如同Rancière所寫道的，這乃是某種在「今天將荷爾德林或

塞尚、馬拉美、馬列維奇或杜象全捲進那混合著笛卡爾式的科

學及革命式的弒父、大眾時代與浪漫的非理性主義、再現的

禁令與種種機械複製技術、康德式崇高與佛洛依德的原初場

景；諸神退隱與歐洲猶太人的滅絕的巨大旋渦的所有混亂的

法則。」[註3]Rancière說，他所要思考的乃是藝術的「單純實

踐」（« simples pratiques »）與某種生命形式、某種即將到來的

共同體形象、感性形式或虛擬性間所進行的扣連問題，也就是

說，「政治」（la politique）是如何出現或「美學」究竟是如

何與「政峙」相扣連的問題。

現代性論點的微薄利益與藝術的種種政體

而在第二章中，Aspe和Combes則就前衛藝術、現代性以及後

現代性的範疇是否向美學與政峙間的扣連關係提供了某種概

念化模式的這個問題向Rancière進行了提問。針對這個問題，

Rancière首先點出了前衛藝術與現代性論點的某種問題性或不

純性（impurity）。Rancière指出，前衛藝術和現代性的論點事

實上融合了兩種不同的想望：一種是普遍意義下的藝術（arts

[註2]我之所以將「 le p o l i t i q u e」譯為「政

峙」主要是取決於

Rancière將「政峙」指

稱為「警治」與「政

治」間「對峙」或

「交鋒」（rencontre；「rencontre」在法文裡

同時有碰見、遇見、

會見、遭到、遭遇、

交鋒、面對與對峙之

意）的「舞台」、「場

景」或「疆域」，以

及「治」與「峙」在

中文脈絡裡的同音異

義和「la politique」與

「le politique」在法語

裡的同形異性以及同形

異義間遙遠的類比關

係。Rancière曾於《政

峙臨界》（Au x bord s du politique）一書中寫

道：「……政治乃是兩

種異質程序的對峙。首

先乃是屬於政府的這種

程序。它主要在於將人

們組織集結在共同體以

及他們的贊同中，並奠

基在對於位置和功能的

階序性分配之上。我

將把警治（police）這

個名字给予這種程序。

第二種乃是屬於平等

（ l ’éga l i té）的這種程

序。它主要存在於受任

何一個人與任何一個人

間的平等預設以及某種

對於驗證這種預設的關

心所引導的實踐遊戲

（le jeu des pratiques）中。指稱這種遊戲更

為適當的名字乃是解

放（emancipation）。

我們說所有的警治傷

害著平等（ f a i t to r t à l ’éga l i té），而不是所

有的警治否認著平等

（dénie l’égalité）。我

們說政峙乃是這平等的

驗證在其上必須以對

待某種錯誤（un tort）的形式呈現的舞台（la scène）。……政峙（le politique）將是政治和

警治在對待某種錯誤中

的對峙疆域（le terrain de la rencontre）。」

請參閱Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 1998), p. 112-113.



154│

en général）的某個政體的歷史性，另一種則是在此藝術政體的

內部進行操作的期待以及斷裂的種種想望，某種政治主體性的

形構。於此，為了更進一步地釐清問題，Rancière便著手進行

了三種藝術的認同政體的定義和區分。

影像的倫理政體

首先是影像的倫理政體。R an c i ère指出，在這種反對擬像

(simulacres)的柏拉圖式的政體中，「藝術」（l’art）根本不存

在（藝術尚未個體化[註4]）。有的只是種種製作的方式，種

種使用的方式，種種「技術」（arts）或種種影像的存在方式

（l’être de l’image）。這些製作的方式，這些影像首先以他們的

來源、欲達成的效果以及究竟誰的身上握有真理的準則般被規

訓著。如同「不得製造偶像」的神聖禁令一般，Rancière說，

在這裡我們乃看到了建立在對於有著確定目的地的技術模式

的仿造（l’imitation）之上的知識（savoir）和僅僅仿造著大略

外觀的擬像（simulacre）之間的對立或者是配享。在這種政體

中，重要的乃是知識/知道，知道這些技術，這些製作的方式

究竟是在哪裡和個體或集體的習性（l’ethos）有關或究竟是在

哪裡彰顯出了某種個體或集體的習性或生活方式。事實上，這

乃是對影像的存在方式究竟是在哪裡和個體或集體的「習性」

有關進行辨識的特定政體。也正是在這種政體中，哲學家乃透

過了影像對市民觀眾進行了教育，並將他們給納入了共同體事

務的分派（partage）體系之中。也就是說，這乃是使某種（共

同的）生存之道或習性得以透過影像的實存而彰顯，這乃是某

種作的方式或某種影像得以活生生地對市民（該有或不該有）

的習性或生活方式進行彰顯以及教育的「元政治」（archi-

politique）理念（就如同大家常在捷運站看到的「禁止任意塗

鴉檢舉專線」或「輕短簡的手機禮儀」的廣告或政令宣導一

般：「Graffiti is bad for the city’s image」…）。

藝術的詩學/再現政體

Rancière緊接著定義了他稱之為藝術的詩學或再現政體。在這

[註3] Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 2000), p. 10-11.

[註4]Rancière在這裡也

點出了試圖從影像的本

體論模式（從神學脈絡

的圖像/聖像）出發對

（繪畫、攝影、電影

等）「藝術」的專屬特

徵進行演繹的手勢中的

不合邏輯或「謬論」

之處。Rancière寫到：

「大家可以從這出發對

包含在所有試著從影像

的本體論地位中演繹出

種種藝術特徵的企圖中

的謬論（paralogisme）進行理解（舉例來說，

試圖從圖像的神學中拉

出繪畫、照片或電影的

「專屬」理念的不斷嘗

試）。這種嘗試連接了

互相排斥的思想的兩種

政體的諸屬性。同樣的

問題乃被對光暈的班雅

明式分析所提出。班

雅明實際上在藝術作

品的獨特性（unicité）價值中建立了影像的

儀式性價值的某種模

稜兩可的演繹。「當

它一不再能保留它的儀

式性功能的任何痕跡之

時，藝術作品就僅能喪

失其光暈；這乃是具有

關鍵重要性的事實。換

句話說，專屬於『真正

的』（authentique）藝

術作品的獨特性價值

乃建立在起初作為效

用性（uti lité）的古代

價值的支柱之上。」

（《機械複製時代的藝

術作品》）實際上，

這個「事實」（ fait）僅是對轉型的兩種圖

示所進行的問題意識

調整：「神聖的世俗

化」的歷史化圖示（le schéma historicisant de la « sécularisation du sacré » ）以及使用價值轉型為

交換價值的經濟圖示。

但神聖的侍奉既然在此

定義了塑像或作為種種

影像一般的繪畫的目的 →


種再現或階序性的政體中，「藝術」（l’art）乃透過了「製作

/模仿」（poeisis/mimesis）的對偶而被進行了辨識。「詩歌」

或「藝術」的事實/行為（fait）[註5]，對於敘事、情節的布

置安排、對於行動的再現以及「精緻藝術」（« beaux-arts »）

的範疇乃透過「模仿」（mimesis）的法則或再現的邏輯而被

進行了辨識，或從種種製作方式的內部被區辨了出來，並由此

避免了透過對被規範的技術或製作方式的應用而來的驗證。事

實上，這乃是依被再現物的高貴或低賤而對類型以及再現形式

/行動的階序進行劃分，並對其合宜性、肖真性或呼應性進行

規範，對「相似性」（ressemblances）進行分配，對種種藝術

進行比較、區辨和鑑賞的亞里斯多德式的詩學政體：在其中，

「行動」凌駕於了「特質」、「敘事」凌駕於了「敘述」、

「話語」凌駕於了「影像」。尤其，Rancière指出，「模仿乃

是使得這些藝術變得可見的社會職業分配中的皺摺」；它不是

某個特定藝術的進程，而是藝術的某種可見性政體，這使得藝

術自治並將這種自治扣連到某種社會職業及其相應的製作方式

的階序性體制（使得種種藝術成為可見的正是對社會職業進行

分配的再現邏輯）。所以說，在整個共同體的階序視野中，這

種在種種製作方式的內部區辨出模仿與「精緻藝術」的外在劃

界原則同時也是對人民的事務進行吸納及再現，對社會職業進

行（重）分配（distribution）的規範性原則。也就是說，這乃

是將demos收編進某種憲政、律法、司法邏輯或契約關係（諸

如希臘悲劇的catharsis）的「旁設政治」（para-politique），某

種在現代早已成了公家機關對不同社會階層的人們進行階序性

的吸納、分派與管制，並（在台灣）使得互踢皮球的戲碼不斷

上演的「無為政治」或再現邏輯。

藝術的美學政體

最後是藝術的美學政體。在這種政體中，「藝術」乃透過其

專屬的感性存在模式而被進行了辨識。在其中，如同德國詩

人席勒（Friedrich Schiller）所提出的「審美狀態」[註6]、荷

爾德林（Friedrich Hölderlin）所重新發明的希臘悲劇、馬拉美

（Stéphane Mallarmé）那作為「舞者的寂靜書寫」的「詩書」

[註5]「fait」在法文裡

同時有行為、行動、業

績、事件、事實、現象

之意。

[註6]事實上，Rancière也寫到，席勒所提出的

「審美狀態」的理念也

是第一個對這種藝術

的美學政體所進行的展

示，某種「感性被動性

（la passivité sensible）及知性活動（l’ activité d’ entendement）雙重懸

置的事實」。對此，席

勒寫道：「當我們因認

識而感到快樂時，我們

就毫不費力地分辨出從

主動到被動的轉移，並

且清楚地看到後者開始

地，藝術的特定性及

其「作品」（œuvres）的獨特性的某種屬性

就無法顯現。在此，

一個的消除對另一個

的出現乃是必要的。

藝術的特定性及其作

品的獨特性並不就是

某種神聖侍奉的轉變

形式。「換句話說」

（Le « en d’autres termes »）預設了相異的兩個

命題間的相等關係，

並允許了藝術的物質

主義說明與凡俗神學

轉型間的所有通道。

這就如同展覽的文化

通道的班雅明式理論

化一般，在今天，主

張著三種彼此競爭著

的論述：主張藝術神

祕主義的現代去神祕

化的這種論述，將不

可見的再現的神聖價

值賦予作品和展示空

間的這種論述以及以

人的那「被曝露」的

孤單時刻（le temps du délaissement de l’ « être-exposé» de l’homme）反

對諸神在場的隱退時

刻的這種論述。」請

參閱 Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 2000), p. 74.

←

→



156│

（« livre de vers »）理念[註7]、韓波(Arthur Rimbaud)那作為

「逃亡者—見者」(fugueur-voyant)的「反叛邏輯」（révoltes

logiques）[註8]或布列松（Robert Bresson）那作為「存有而非

表現」的「角色模型」（modèles）[註9]一般，理性與感性、

知與非知、意識與無意識、藝術與非藝術、哲學與反哲學乃

進行了統一。事實上，這乃是某種對感性不斷地變得與自己

陌生，自己不斷地變得與自己陌生的異質性力量進行模塑的

特定政體，某種Rancière所謂的「美學無意識」（l’inconscient

esthétique）[註10]：這使得藝術與種種被再現物、主題、類型

間的階序體系或再現政體脫勾，使得藝術與某種實用的判準脫

勾，並使藝術得以與某種特定的生命形式，某種共同體的生命

形式或生命的自我形塑同一的「政治」實踐。Rancière指出，

這乃是不斷地對某種感性的生命形式以及某種虛擬或即將到來

的生命或共同體（形象）進行發明以及預言的新政體。「古代

乃是在模仿的政體中才與現代對立」[註11]，Rancière說到。

事實上，Rancière在這裡不但對「現代性」論述將古代和現代

視為截然二元對立，將現代視為古代的徹底斷裂的想法進行了

批判，還對現代性論點那不斷地想要建立反模仿的神聖莊嚴領

地，它與美學政體的那隱而不顯的曖昧關係，那現代性論點一

方面想要保持美學政體的反模仿反再現邏輯，一方面又想要從

賦予美學政體力量的種種再製形式抽離（現代性似乎成了這

不斷破壞藝術與任何集體經驗領域連結的東西）的想像進行了

直指。

事實上，藝術的美學政體乃是「這與古代發生關係的新政體」

[註12]，這不斷地對古代進行發明的新政體。換言之，我們可

以這麼說，正是某種不斷地與真實或不斷地與非藝術的現實拉

開距離的潛能，正是這種在藝術和非藝術，在真實和想像間的

聯繫，這種距離的不斷調整互補或測量，這種「真實的幻影向

度」真正地成就了藝術作為了某種文明精神的測量術或診斷的

可能，真正地刻畫了藝術的美學政體。這乃是某種使得現在

和未來，使得某種異質的時間性得以共同在場（co-présence）

[註13]的美學邏輯。

消失。相反，當我們

因美而感到賞心悅目

時，我們就分辨不出

主動與被動之間的這

種更替，在這裡反思

與情感完全交織在一

起，以致使我們以為

直接感覺到了形式。

因此，美對我們來說

固然是對象，因為有

反思作條件時我們才

對美有一種感覺；但

同時美又是我們主體

的一種狀態，因為有

情感作條件時我們才

對美有一種意象。因

此，美固然是形式，

因為我們觀賞它；但

它同時又是生活，

因為我們感覺它。總

之，一句化，美既是

我們的狀態又是我們

的行為。……當享受

美或審美統一體的時

候，在材料與形式之

間，被動與主動之間

發生著一種瞬息的統

一和相互調換，這恰

好證明了這兩種天性

的可相容性，無限在

有限中的可實現性，

從而也證明了最崇高

人性的可能性。……

總之，一句話，人如

何從美過渡到真理，

再也不可能成為問題

了，因為真理按其功

能已在美之中了；成

為問題的是，人是如

何為自己開闢道路，

從日常現實走向美的

現實，從純粹的生活

感走向美感的。」請

參閱弗里德里希．席

勒著，馮至、范大燦

譯，《審美教育書

簡》（台北：淑馨出

版社，1989），頁130-131；Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 2000), p. 32.

[註7]Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: La politique de la sirène (Paris: Hachette Livre, 1996), p. 95.

←


而這也是使（小說的）「現實主義」（réalisme），使「現代

性」（論述）或「現代性主義」（modernitarisme）[註14]得

以誕生的真正邏輯。換言之，這乃是使藝術得以民主化的美

學實踐，某種使「後設政治」（méta-politique）得以出現，使

「美學」與「政峙」得以相互混合流變為某種單一現實的平等

邏輯（ex.《不能沒有你》…）。尤其，我們可以說，這也是

使某種大寫的、單一的、神聖的政治主體性誕生的種種「必要

條件」與全球政治主體性對某種即將到來的（共同）生活方式

所進行的想像/實踐的虛擬性間的對峙（大家或許可以想想看

的是，《不能沒有你》在國內和「國外」的「成功」究竟意味

著什麼？而又介入了怎麼樣的一種感性生命的部署和可見性模

式？），某種透過對歷史進行詮釋和再製（諸如博物館遺產的

展演…）而來的異質性的共同顯現。

現代性論述的兩種變體及其敗筆

而接下來，Rancière則提到了建立在藝術美學政體的這構成性

的衝突之上的現代性論述的兩種變體及其敗筆。這兩種變體一

種是對當代藝術自治與對其專屬的特定形式的可能性進行探索

的現代性，某種作為「藝術危機」的指涉物，某種常與政治革

命有著遙遠的類比關係的現代性，某種「有節制的現代性」，

Rancière說。另一種則是「現代性主義」，這將藝術美學政體

的政治革命計畫與某種人性的感性實現方案（從席勒的「審美

狀態」到德國浪漫主義的「美學計畫」）進行扣連的現代性理

念，這使得支配和奴役原初乃是某種思想活動和感性被動性對

抗的不對稱關係的這個事實得以被揭示，這使得思考和感性得

以流變為某種單一現實，這使得「平等」得以被思考，使得某

個中立的平等空間得以被開啟，使得某種感性世界的棲居模式

得以被思考的革命性理念。Rancière指出，正是這樣的一種連

結促成了馬克思主義革命與新生命的種種創造間的連結，某種

作為政治革命典範的美學典範的出現。但這場革命往後的垮

台，也在兩個時間點上決定了現代性論述的災難性命運，其一

乃是藝術現代主義對政治革命失敗的批評：超現實主義和法

蘭克福學派對於現代性工業的批評。其二則是以李歐塔（Jean-

[註8]Jacques Rancière, “Les Voix et les corps”, in Le Millenaire Rimbaud (Paris: Belin, 1993), p. 12, 40-42.

[註9]羅貝爾给布列松

著，譚家雄、徐昌明

譯，《電影書寫札記》

（北京：三聯書店，

2001年），頁4。

[註10]Jacques Rancière, L’inconscient esthétique (Paris: Galiée, 2001), p. 41

[註11]Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 2000), p. 35.

[註12]Ibid., p. 36.

[註13] Ibid., p. 37.

[註14]對R a n c i è r e來說，「現代性主義」所

標示的乃是「藝術的美

學政體的種種形式與專

屬於現代性的某個命運

或某個任務得以實現的

種種形式間的同一」。

請參閱Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 2000), p. 39.



158│

François Lyotard）對康德式「崇高」理念的再詮釋為出發點的

後現代論述：在其中，政治革命的失敗乃如同其本體論—美

學模式的潰敗，如同海德格所謂的「基礎性遺忘」（un oubli

fondamental）的災難性命運一般，不斷地以一種「不可能」

或「無法想像」（unimaginable）的方式被重新詮釋/哀悼著。

Rancière寫道：「現代性因而成為了如同建築在某種基礎性遺

忘之上的某個致命命運般的東西：技術的海德格式本質，人類

傳統和國王腦袋的革命性鴻溝，且最終是人類這受造物的原

罪，遺忘了他所虧欠給他者的債務以及他對於感性異質力量的

從屬。」[註15]

後現代主義的哀悼災難

而對Rancière來說，後現代主義也沒好到哪裡去。Rancière指

出，並不存在著某種作為現代主義歷史終結或斷裂的「後現代

主義」。以李歐塔對康德的「崇高」分析的再詮釋為理論基

底，後現代主義一方面以藝術間的混種雜交，以圖像（icon）

和形象化（figuration）的回歸，以三度空間創作，以普普和數

位藝術的普及摧毀了現代主義對純藝術的追求，另一方面則

成為了某種原始場景的迴歸，某種哀悼的思想，如同理念和

感性呈現間的原初間距，如同兩個絕對的理念，如同「負呈

現」（negative presentation），如同兩個「句子」（phrase）間

的「歧異」（le différend）[註16]，如同「在見證的衝突中論

據公正交換的不可能性」[註17]一般，成了某種不斷地去彌補

現代性於集中營中所犯下的那無法再現也無法彌補的災難性後

果的嘗試。對此，Rancière寫道，某種對哀悼思想的哀悼，某

種哀悼的哀悼：「由此開始，後現代主義乃陷入了債務與重新

彌補現代性思想的巨大和諧之中。崇高間距的場景也即將概括

各種磨難或原初間距的場景：諸神的海德格式隱退、佛洛依德

的那無法化約的死亡驅力和無法象徵化的客體；絕對他者的聲

音宣告著再現的禁令；對父親的革命性謀殺。後現代主義乃變

成了無法再現/無法論述/無法彌補（l’irrpresentable/intraitable/

irrachetable）的巨大輓歌，譴責著人的人性的某種自我解放的

[註15]Ibid., p. 41.

[註16] Je a n - Fr a n ç o i s Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime ( S t a n f o r d : S t a n f o r d University Press, 1994), p. 152, 239; Le Différend (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983), p. 9-55.

[註17]G e o r ge s D i d i -Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003), p. 132.


理念的現代愚癡及其在集中營中那無法避免也無法禁止的實

現。」[註18]

前衛藝術論點與政治主體性

最後Rancière則提到了前衛政治的理念。事實上，Rancière說，

前衛的論點乃提供了使得美學和政治連結的某種政治主體化的

理念，它那強調新穎性的藝術理念和某種對於政治方向理念的

謀畫。這首先乃是前衛的流派對於歷史進行閱讀、診斷並定義

政治運動方向的理念，以及依據席勒的模型，對感性以及某種

即將到來的生命形式進行發明，並將「政治」（la politique）

轉變為某種對生命的完全計畫的理念，某種美學革命所提供

給政治革命的真正資源。尤其，Rancière指出，種種黨派和美

學革命間混淆（confusion）的歷史也正是提出改變的「必要狀

況」的大寫政治主體性理念（元政治理念）和某種對於即將到

來的感性生命進行創造的想像虛擬性（後設政治）間的某種混

淆或對峙的歷史，某種在前衛的美學革命和運動方向、策略的

理念間所進行的政治前衛的理念分享的歷史。

諸機械藝術與匿名者的科學美學提倡

而在第三章中，Aspe和Combes則向Rancière提出了他在〈無

法遺忘〉（« L’ inoubliable »）這篇文章中所提及的「機械」

藝術(攝影和電影)和(年鑑學派)「新史學」誕生間的某種同

時性（simultaneity）是否也賦予了無名的大眾某種程度的可

見性（visibilité）的這個問題。在〈無法遺忘〉一文中，透過

了對於法國導演克里斯．馬克(Chris Marker)和「梅德韋金集

團」（Medvedkin Group）、法洛奇（Harun Farocki）、蘭茲曼

（Claude Lanzmann）、福樓拜（Gustave Flaubert）和馬拉美等

作者的討論，Rancière提到，電影被發明並逐漸意識到自己作

為某種藝術的專屬力量（以福樓拜為例，某種對不確定的意義

或無意義的意義進行自然表現的力量）和表現性的時代也正是

某種與官方書寫，與官方歷史，與大人物的歷史，與事件史

[註18] Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 2000), p. 43-44.



160│

與編年史對抗的歷史的「新科學」（science nouvelle）或「新

史學」出現的時代。尤其，Rancière在這裡所指出的乃是「文

件」（document）和「紀念碑」（monument）間的對立：「文

件」是編年的、官方的記憶史料；而與此相反，「紀念碑」

則是透過某種現今存在的事實、透過感性被動性而來的對過

往的日常生活或市井小民的日常活動的某種無聲的見證。正

如Rancière所說，它，「以毫無意願指示我們的方式指示著我

們」[註19]。事實上，這也正是年鑑學派史學和電影影像的專

屬力量。

班雅明「機械藝術」論點的問題性

對此，R an c i ère答道，他要處理乃是某種科學及美學的革

命典範，而非班雅明在〈攝影小史〉（Kleine Geschichte der

Photographie）或〈機械複製時代的藝術作品〉（Das Kunstwerk

im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit）裡所作的從作品

的技術屬性出發演繹其政治和美學屬性，或使藝術與使其成為

可能的技術狀況或媒材差異進行同化（assimilation）的問題。

對Rancière來說，這種使藝術和其技術狀況間進行同化的手勢

所呼應的正是現代性主義的範疇，某種對於技術力量的信仰，

某種美學和本體論—技術範疇間的扣連，某種在馬克思唯物主

義和海德格的技術批判間的穿梭：如同在〈攝影小史〉中，班

雅明在替「作為攝影的藝術」（Kunst als Photographie）鮮少受

到關注打抱不平以及對攝影的「創造性」（schöpferisch）傾向

進行警告後說到：「…它[攝影創造]的合法對手乃是揭露或建

構。」[註20]事實上，對班雅明來說，正是在這個對廣告以

及商品拜物教進行建構或揭露的基礎上，照片的「本真性」

（Authentizität）以及圖說的重要性才得以確立。

「匿名性」與大眾的「成為—藝術/真實/徵候/秀美」

尤其，與後現代主義相同的是，這還常伴隨著某種對於圖像

（icon）的回歸和對於某種（藝術作品的）「真正的影像」

[註19] Jacques Rancière, « L’ inoubliable », in Arrêt sur histoire (Paris: Editions d u Ce n t re Po m p i d o u , 1997), p. 55.

[註20] Walter Benjamin, “ K l e i n e G e s c h i c h t e der Photographie”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Band II·1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 383.


（true image）的複製和再現的信仰（le voile de Veronique；聖薇

若妮卡的面紗→耶穌的真正影像、真理的影像或對耶穌的如實

再現）。而為了讓這些機械複製藝術能真正地賦予無名的大

眾某種可見性，Rancière也指出，我們必須逆轉從作品的種種

技術屬性出發定義藝術的政治以及美學屬性的現代（性）主

義模式。換言之，並非機械複製技術帶動了之後的藝術的典範

轉移，而是使平凡的日常生活或大眾成為「藝術」（art）、

成為某種「特定藝術」（l’art）的主題或成為某種特定的秀美

（beau）的承載者的美學政體或美學邏輯帶動了日後的技術

革命，並破壞了強調主題優越性的再現政體。Rancière說，這

乃是「任何一個的假設」（l’assomption du quelconque）或「任

何一個的榮耀」（la gloire du quelconque）[註21]；就如同《甲

板》（L’ Entrepont）中/上的移民（Alfred Stieglitz），如同德勒

茲所說的「人們的璀璨」（la splendeur du on）[註22]般，每一

個都獨一無二地假定著一個新生命或一個共同世界的到來。

文學文件與歷史學家文件間的對立（文學的政治）

於此，Rancière也試圖打破文學及歷史科學間線性進化/斷裂/

躍升的現代主義邏輯，並指出了早在所謂的歷史科學、「新

史學」或技術革命出現前，就已有了某種「作家的科學」

（science de l’écrivain）。Rancière指出，早在攝影和電影等機械

複製技術誕生前，藝術美學政體或思考藝術主題及其感性/生

命形式間的這些新方式所帶動的美學革命首先乃是在文學的

場域或文學的政治（la politique）[註23]中誕生的。且正是以

巴爾札克（Honoré de Balzac;巴爾札克在Another Study of Woman

中從英國人家庭裡的那種造作、故裝機智、大家附和著哄堂

大笑的姿態中所看到的「機械化」傾向）、普魯斯特（Marcel

Proust）、福樓拜（「警治：總是錯的」[註24]…福樓拜的這

部《接受的概念字典》，這部既百科全書又民主的文本）、

雨果（Victor Hugo；「我們對事實進行指認。我們是歷史學

家，不是批評家。就是如此—因此…試著讓這個怪誕和崇高

間的豐富連結得以被看見吧！」[註25]…）、扥爾斯泰（Leo

[註21]Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 2000), p. 50.

[註22]Gil les Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), p. 178.

[註23]對R a n c i è r e來說，文學的政治並不是

作家的政治，並不是作

家實際介入同時代的社

會和政治抗爭的政治，

不是這些作家如何在他

們的作品中再現了某種

社會結構、政治運動以

及認同的政治，而是

「文學以作為文學的方

式」製造的政治。換言

之，這乃是某種對於時

間和空間、可見與不可

見、話語和噪音間的劃

分進行介入，某種對於

書寫實踐、可見性形式

以及說話方式間的種

種連結進行介入，並

透過它，建構許許多

多共同世界或「感性

棲居模式」的政治。

請參閱Jacques Rancière, “Politique de la litérature”, in Politique de la litérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007), p. 11-39. Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique ( Pa r i s : L a Fa b r i q u e -éditions, 2000), p. 13.

[註24] Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées r e c u e s . 原文是：

「POLICE: A toujours t o r t .」 S e e h t t p : / /w w w. g u t e n b e r g . o r g /files/14156/14156-8.txt.

[註25]V i c t o r H u g o . Cromwell. See http://books.google.com.tw/books?id=2HgGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA59&dq=hugo+cromwell#v=onepage&q=&f=false.



162│

Tolstoy）為代表的這些「文學」（而非史學的文學前史），早

在（新）史學書寫及「歷史建構」前，就以某種社會診斷的

形式，將平凡的大眾視為了佈滿了社會病徵以及符號的「內

在性平面」（plan d’immanence），視為了（社會）真實的銘

刻場域，因而賦予了平凡的大眾某種「可看性」以及無功利

性的「秀美」特質。Rancière提到，這由巴爾札克和普魯斯特

所開啟的小說傳統，也正是往後使馬克思、佛洛依德、班雅

明的「批判思想」得以成形的邏輯脈絡，這如同馬克思對商

品拜物教的診斷一般所打開的「真實的幻影向度」（dimension

fantasmagorique du vrai），這得以成為社會與人文科學批判典範

或批判間距的幻影向度。

而事實上，這種藝術和非藝術、真實和想像、現在和未來間距

離的不斷調整、測量或所謂的「共同在場」也正是使攝影以及

電影成為某種得以探究、解謎或挖掘的「紀錄」（-graphe），

某種繪製以及探勘某個時代、某個文明、某個社會、某個國

家…的地形學（topography）的虛擬浮標，某種「藝術」的真

正關鍵。如果對Rancière來說，電影影像所能蘊載的最大力量

乃在於其「紀實/計時」（documentary）潛能的話，那麼，在

法國藝術史學家達米許（Hubert Damisch）以及迪迪-于柏曼

（Georges Didi-Huberman）那裡，我們則看到了某種專屬於電

影影像的另一種可能性：即所謂的「節奏─影像」（l’image-

rythme）[註26]或者是「遺跡─影像」（l’image-monument），

某種專屬於電影的另一種使命或賭注，那不顧一切地在不可能

完整述說的歷史中進行述說的可能。而也正是這種電影所可

能處理的「見證」面向與「揭示」或（康德意義下的）「表

現」間的時而對峙，時而扣連的曖昧關係，定義了Rancière

所謂的那作為當代影像辯證典範的「明示影像的變形」（the

metamorphoses of the ostensive image）特質。只不過，這樣的一種明

示影像自身所進行的蛻變，這種從電影影像自身出發所進行的

演繹，這樣的一種電影影像作為某種「自然哲學」（philosophy

of nature）介面的可能性，是不是也在「當代」或「當代性」的

不同展現方式以及型態中蘊含了不同的「退行」（regression）

的可能，這恐怕也是值得讀者們進一步去思考的。

[註26]Hubert Damisch, La Dénivelée: À l’épreuve de la photographie (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 202-213.




164│

洪席耶的《感性分享：美學與政治》第1、4、5章導讀

關秀惠, 國立交通大學社會與文化研究所

[email protected]

Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique. 2000英文版：The Politics of Aesthetics : The Distribution of the Sensible.Continuum International Publishing Group; Pbk. Ed edition, 2004


版權所有 ©關秀惠

【大綱】

第1章

第4章

第5章

本書「感性分享」（Le partage du sensible）的概念起始於杭曦

耶在德希達創立的國際哲學研討會裡主持美學講座，主講「藝

術表現的美學制域」（Régime esthétique des arts）（1999-2001）

的內容。在序言裡說明為《Alice》雜誌兩位主編Muriel Combes

與Bernard Aspe訪談杭曦耶的紀錄。

第1章：感性分享和其建立在政治與美學之間的關係

在《歧見》裡，政治被你檢視為“感性分享”(par tage du

sensible)，依你之見，是否這個觀點對美學實踐與政治實踐的

匯合提供了主要關鍵？

杭曦耶一開始就言何謂感性分享：「我稱作感性分享是一種感

官知覺不證自明的系統，此系統同時透露了共同事物的存在和

164│164│165洪席耶的《感性分享：美學與政治》第1、4、5章


[註1]Rancière, Jacques. “ f r o m p o l i t i c s t o aesthetics?” Paragraph, Mar.2005, Vol. 28 Issue 1, p.13

其中所定義的地方與相關部分的劃分。因此感性分享同時建立

了共享和排除的部分。」（fr.12）

‧Plato：「柏拉圖說工匠們不能主管共同體共享或共同的成

分因為它們沒有時間(pas le temps)投注於自身之外的工作。」

（fr.13）

‧Aristote: 「一位公民就是一位在管理與被管理的行為中佔據

一部份（a part）的人。然而共同體的任何分享的形式會先行

於此佔據一部份：分享形式決定了哪些能在公民共同體中佔據

一部份。」(fr.13)

由此先理解政治是：包含了關於政治本身什麼可見、可說，還

有誰有能力看、有才能說和擁有空間和時間可能性等。「擁有

一個這樣的“職業”位置（occupation）決定了能不能管理共

同體所共同擁有的，定義了在共同空間中可做或不可見者，還

有賦予共同的語言等等。因此在政治的核心中有一個“美學”

（esthétique）存在。」(fr.13)

對杭曦耶來說，「美學用康德的思想來理解的這個類比是，

一種先驗（a prioi）形式的系統，決定在感官經驗中自身的感

受。」（fr.13-14）杭曦耶的美學更靠近是Kant，但不是討論空

間與時間如何成為掌握客體知識的範疇，而是討論空間與時間

如何成為形塑我們在社會中位置的某種形式。[註1]

就是從這最基本的美學開始，才有可能去提出我們所理解的

“美學實踐”(pratiques esthétiques)的問題，也就是從藝術家

他們佔據的場所、以及他們如何從共同體的共同觀點而來的

“創作”去解開藝術家實踐的視覺形式。(美學實踐從藝術家

實踐層面上談)藝術家的實踐本身即是“製作/創作的方式”

(manières de faire)，參預了共同體的製作/創作方式的分享，而

且此製作/創作的方式也參與可見性形式的關係。（fr.14）

從上述中，政治的美學體制緊密地同一於民主體制：Plato提出



166│

三種藝術體制的結構化形式：書寫、劇場與舞蹈。但杭曦耶提

到，雖然柏拉圖已經標記出三種美學形式，但它們不能定義共

同體形象被美學設計的所有方式。由於它們變成是歷史中持續

的概念的緣故。」（fr.24）

這三種感性政治性（politicité）的存在立刻促進了美學分享

的主要形式，這些“政治”（politiques）遵循它們自身屬性

的邏輯，會轉化為在不同的脈絡與時代中提供服務。舉例：

抽象圖畫的革命，如同繪畫發現了它本身適合的“媒介”

（medium）－二維的表面。藉由取消透視主義者三度空間的

幻象，繪畫重新主宰適合自身的表面，然而事實上，「這表面

並沒有明確的特點。一個“表面”（surface）不只是幾何線條

的組成，也是某種感性分享。」（fr.19-20）杭曦耶認為這個介

面具有政治的，因為它廢除了再現邏輯隱藏的兩個政治層面。

先前提到，在Plato時代的古典的再現系統中，悲劇的舞台變成

一個提供可見性的舞台給予那些被劇情主題、情境和必須為階

序說話所掌控的世界。這一個例子表現了一個再現的邏輯：再

現邏輯劃分了藝術的模仿世界、對活生生展出的興趣；此再現

邏輯的組織階序其實類比了社會-政治的秩序。

杭曦耶另外提到：美學政治的歷史就是這些主要的形式如何對

抗或混和其他類型的方式。例如各種不同的符號或形式表面的

範式，如何與戲劇呈現的範式和本身已被其他不同形式的範式

採納還有這之間的反抗或結合。

杭曦耶提出批評：然而美學的政治化歷史運動與潮流中，許多

形式從不同的脈絡中帶來了等同於共同體自身的形象，它們也

容易被編入內有矛盾、衝突的政治範式之中。意即帶來另一種

政治美學的體制。

重要的是，從上述的討論裡，如何看到美學/政治之間關係的

問題？杭曦耶認為必須在感性劃分何謂共同體所共有和其可見

性與組織形式的層次上提出，而從這點才能思考藝術家的政治

介入：從解碼社會的浪漫主義文學形式到當代表演與裝置的模



式，以及其中所經歷的夢的象徵主義詩學或達達主義者、構成

主義者對純粹藝術的廢除。（fr.24）

第4章：是否應該斷定歷史為一種虛構。虛構的模式

在我們已「涉身」(embarqués)的歷史與被敘事藝術述說(或解

構)的故事之間的連結為何？我們如何理解詩歌或文學習語

“塑型”（prenent corps）的影響，而不僅只將它們理解為真

實的反映？

一開始先談虛構合理性和歷史與社會現實裡的詮釋模式，還有

虛構理性與事實理性之間的關係。

虛構合理性的問題會遭遇到歷史所建構出的讓讀者理解的模

式與為了歷史現象而產生的理解模式兩者的區分/無法區分。

舉亞理斯多德《詩學》（Poétique）為例，詩學的“模仿”

（mimesis）與柏拉圖的批評不同，「詩不闡釋其中的“真理”

（vérité），因它的原則就是，它來自虛構而不是影像或言論，

也就是來自行動之間的安排。」

美學革命的到來模糊了事實理性（raison des faits）與虛構理性

之間的疆界，另一方面其中新的合理化模式帶來了歷史科學。

以浪漫主義語言符號為例，虛構的安排不再與亞里斯多德所謂

的“根據必要性與可信性” (selon la nécessité et la vraisemblance)

的行動因果相關。它變成是一種符號的安排。亞里斯多德所劃

分“故事/歷史”（histoires）的界線—詩人的故事與歷史學家

的歷史—因此被撤除。這條界線原初不只劃分了現實與虛構，

也劃分了經驗的連續性與建構的必然性。

美學的革命發生巨大變革：見證與虛構處於同樣的意義政體之

下。一方面，經驗帶來了某種痕跡與印記形式的真實符號，

“已發生”（ce qui s'estt passé）的事件因此直接受真理體制影

響出現，此體制隱藏在已發生事件之後，操作讓事件發生的必

然性；另一方面，“可能發生”（ce qui pourrait se passer）的事



168│

件不再意指具有自動自發，線性安排形式的行動。詩的“故事

/歷史”（histoires）的現實主義顯明的是相同於人工主義的編

排理解力機器作用下的詩性痕跡。

然而，杭曦耶提到，不能將為了被思考，現實應該被虛構化的

美學表現放到虛構與人工的對立上。宣稱任何事都是虛構並不

重要，重要的是指出：

美學時期的虛構由於為了聯繫現實與理解的形式，其所定義出

的模式已經模糊了事實理性與虛構理性之間的界線。而且，這

些模式也被歷史學家與分析社會現實的分析家們所引用。書寫

歷史或書寫故事同樣在此真理政體之下進行，此舉已經與關於

現實的理論或事物的非現實性無關。相反地，組織故事的模型

與某種被當作共通命運的歷史觀念結合，以那些所謂“製造

歷史”（font l'histoure）的觀念結合，特別是當任何人與所有

人被認為同樣在參與“製造”(faire)歷史的工作時候。

第5章：論藝術與工作（le travail）[註2]，為何藝術實踐不/

成為其他實踐的例外

在“感性工廠”（fabrique du sensible）假說中，藝術家的實踐

與其明顯的外在工作之間的聯繫變成是重要的一環，你怎麼認

知這種聯繫（或排除、區分、無關緊要…….）？有可能從這

聯繫中談論普遍的“人類活動”（l'agir humain）和包含其中的

藝術家的實踐，或者，這些實踐與其他實踐活動相比是種例

外？

在《理想國》(République)裡，工作的概念並不最初來自於個

人所從事的活動或者如何轉換物質過程的概念。「它是感性分

享的概念：不可能在已“消失的時間”（absence de temps）裡

做“其他事”（autre chose）。這“不可能性”(impossibilité)是

編和共同體概念其中的一部份。」

藝術家的實踐非指表面的工作，而指的是他另置換了可見性的

[註2 ]譯注：英文版

說明在Rancière的認知

中，le travail 與l’ labour兩詞有時通用。英文版

的翻譯經常交換譯成

work和labour，但法文

都是travail。（所以工

作的意義裡包含了勞動

的概念。）



形式。感性的民主分享使得工作者進入雙重存有的狀態，它使

工匠脫離“他的”(son)屬於自身家務的工作空間的位置，讓

他有“時間”(temps)去以自由國民的身份佔據公共議論的空

間。於是管理藝術再現體制的虛構的原則在於穩定藝術家為一

種例外，將他們的例外視為一種技藝（tekhnè），模仿的藝術

因此是一種技術，不是謊言。

美學體制開始質疑模仿的分配—例如一分為二的模仿行為，也

質疑了技藝（tekhnè）本身中立的角色。技藝就像將事件內在

的某個思想形式作用出來的作用力，再一次帶來了確認活動區

域分配的位置/職業（occupations）分享。

「工作」現代化意義：勞動層面的「生產」意義，等同於共同

體自我呈現時形式上的物質化過程。生產確認出新的感性配享

原則即是製造與可見性的活動，欲製造不同，生產整合了製造

行為與新的定義如何做（faire）與如何看（voir）關係的行為。

杭曦耶對工作意義的翻轉：關於工作的觀念是種對於可見視域

的重新組構，對於做、存有、看和說關係的重新組構，而不是

對人類活動本質的發現。

回到藝術的工作的現代化意義上，杭曦耶認為，從美學的思想

模式上去思考藝術實踐與工作的關係時，也無法避免它是一種

與感性分享觀念結合的思想觀念。也就是不能僅從藝術的表面

形式去定義藝術實踐與工作的關係。藝術家的實踐並不是其他

實踐的“例外”(en exception)。它深入其中，而且也重塑了人

類普遍活動的分享狀態。（Fr.73）



170│

《影像的宿命》研讀報告

黃建宏, 國立台北藝術大學美術學系

[email protected]

Jacques Rancière, Le Destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique. 2003 英文版：The Future of the Image Verso; Reprint edition (February 2, 2009)


版權所有 ©黃建宏

《影像的宿命》這本2003年出版的論文集包含〈影像的宿命〉

（2002）、〈構句、影像、故事〉（2002）、〈文本中的繪

畫〉（1999,2002）、〈設計的表面〉（2002）與〈如果存在

不可再現〉（2001）五篇文章，主要集中討論影像、書寫與思

維之間無法切割的關係，這個關係對於洪席耶來說就是「美

學」。並且在每一篇文論的切題上，都迴避著捲入一般性的問

題辯證中，企圖從全面性的檢討中逃逸出邏輯的困境。〈影

像的宿命〉討論影像再現的問題，而〈構句、影像、故事〉則

討論著書寫與影像之間功能連結的關係，〈文本中的繪畫〉專

注在文字與繪畫影像在藝術概念之認同上的關係，〈設計的表

面〉則特別討論設計的影像中圖像與文字之間的共構關係，最

後，〈如果存在著不可再現〉則就集中營屠殺的再現問題，

討論現代與後現代之後對於「不可再現」的指稱。在此，為了

能夠集中這兩天下來的討論，僅就第一篇與最後一篇進行說

明。

　

在〈影像的宿命〉中，洪席耶由－「從今而後不再存在事實，

而僅剩下影像，或是相反地，從不存在影像，唯有不斷向其自

身自顯的事實。」－這個極端的辯證關係出發，討論影像問題

如何跟宿命的論題連結在一起。藉此提示揭開關於影像的假問

題－意即「將指向他者（Autre）的影像（Image），與僅指向

170│170│171《影像的宿命》研讀報告│洪席耶作品導讀│

自身的可見（Visible）對立起來」－因為這個辯證後面有個同

樣的邏輯，即他者與同者的區分。而提出「同一性與異類性

（altérité）亦以著不同的方式相互銜接」。

這個基本的邏輯關係使得洪席耶企圖將影像或說影像性，從

同與不同的「認同」「相似」的關係中解放出來：「意即為

了產生移轉的效應、甚至產生反效果而超前效應的權力。…

影像從未是一種單純的現實，電影的影像首先就是操作」。

也因此「影像描述著兩種不同的事物，存在著生產原型之相

似物的簡單關係：無須是忠實拷貝，而是足以替代者；另外

就是製造著我們稱之為藝術的操作遊戲：可以就是相似性的

質變（altération）…藝術的影像就是製造某種差距與某種離似

（dissemblance）的操作。」所以，影像的問題就牽引出「典

型－相似是一種原初的相似，這種相似並非出自現實的回應，

而是對於它所緣生之他處的立即見證。」

至此，洪席耶又回到巴特這個主要參照，意即「刺點」這個重

要概念，強調逃離思考與意義的影像特質，這個連結上觀者之

「本我」的力量，對洪席耶來說就是說明美學經驗中最為重

要的部分：待解的符號與自明的部分客體巧妙地共同存在於影

像中。這個美學經驗在洪席耶的理論脈絡下，也就自然地提示

出與他另一個從文學發展出的概念契合，「靜默話語」的雙重

意義：事物自身銘刻其上的意指（待解的可見語言），緘默自

身作為話語。但洪席耶也提出了刺點與知面的截然二分使得藝

術操作、影像集錦的形式與徵候的論述性這三個面向的編織無

法被討論。接著論者便提出影像操作或靜默話語所生產出的三

種影像類型，分別是裸現影像、明現影像與蛻現影像。這三

種影像的區分並非出自概念思辯，而是2002年左右當代藝術現

場所表現的分化。

裸現影像、明現影像、蛻現影像這三種影像的區分，主要在於

直接的見證、藝術的直接宣稱，以及會在再現中轉化出其他意

涵。「這三種影像性的形式，就是三種連結或脫離呈現之權



172│

力與能指之權力的手法、連結與脫離現身之證明與歷史見證的

三種方法；也是三種藝術與影像之連繫的手法」，並分別參照

到《集中營的記憶》、《就這樣》和《那般》三個展覽。洪席

耶除了說明每種影像的特性之外，也強調出不同影像監必然的

連結。最後以這句話作結「在矛盾的表象背後，需要進一步細

究這些交換的操作。」　

〈如果存在不可再現〉以著這個問句開場「在甚麼條件下，我

們會賦予不可再現某種特殊的概念形象？」這裡的「形象」意

味著隨論述與脈絡而改變其意義的圖像。提問的出發點主要在

於這個觀念的過度膨脹，以及對相關的「不可」或「非」的無

法忍受。而洪席耶認為這個脈絡可以從猶太浩劫的不可再現

起，再經由康德的崇高，一直回溯到杜象與馬列維奇。在這個

調研工作中，論者將再現視為藝術的思維體制，並提出「不可

再現」的兩種不可能：第一種不可能就是藝術的無力（無法呈

現出事物的本質特徵，或是無法找到能夠與想法相應的感性呈

現），第二種則是擬像所衍生的呈現過度（呈現過度背叛了原

本事件的獨特性，對應到一個非現實的位置，將被再現事物付

諸各種動情形式）。

柏拉圖曾經提出的對立：單純記事與擬像的對立。這可以左右

見證話語之評估的對立有兩種形象，一種是柏拉圖式的，而另

一種則是李歐塔式的崇高藝術。由此可見廢除再現的思維形構

由一種雙重畫面構成，一邊提出再現的內在不可能性（藝術再

現模式的無法跨越），另一則提出再現的失格（在藝術觀念之

外，僅就影像的起源與終點來論斷）。這兩種邏輯：一是兩種

不同藝術思維體制的區分，另一邏輯則著眼於模仿與影像的不

同形態。這兩種邏輯都具備同一效應，即將再現距離的調整問

題轉化為再現的不可能。接著以高乃伊的伊底帕斯在法國無法

原本再現的三個原因：挖眼睛的殘酷畫面、神喻的過度與愛情

橋段的缺席。這裡事實上出現了同一種失序：一方面是可見的

過度，另一方面則是可知的過度，然後其中缺少了用以連結可

見與可知的旨趣。而伊底帕斯之所以重要，對洪席耶而言，主

172│172│173《影像的宿命》研讀報告│洪席耶作品導讀│

要因為這個悲劇角色同一化了矛盾，自身即鮮活的美學表達。

在再現想表達的事情這一小結，再現的受制主要有三：首先就

是可見對於話語的依賴（話語的可見性模型），再則就是知與

不知（校正知與情之間的連繫），第三就是依據現實之校正

（虛構的合理性）。洪席耶因而推論說不可再現必然出現在藝

術再現體制之中，「因為正是這體制界定了同原則的相容性與

不相容性，可接收性的條件與不可接收性的判準。」不可再

現性是相對的，在這相對性底下，決定著藝術的正確主題。

而在反再現想表達的一節，則說到在新的體制中，並不存在主

題與形式間是否適合的規則，而是所有主題都能夠開放給任何

的藝術表達形式，但相對地，有一些特定人物與故事，就不可

能任其調整，因為它們並非「開放性」主題，而是基礎神話。

衝突者之間的雙重認同令美學革命對立於藝術再現樣式。這對

立一邊是用創作的絕對力量對抗著再現行動的規範，另一邊則

是將無條件的生產力量等同於一種絕對的被動性。

將再現與非再現或非形象化對立起來的寓言，將反再現革命接

合上一種現代性的整體命運。反再現並非從相似性中解放，而

是要從三重受制中解放出來。「同樣可再現」才是再現系統的

瓦解。低度決斷變成為藝術感性呈現的模式自身。用kath'olon

（組織性整體）與kath'ekaston（小知覺）兩種再現邏輯說明藝

術與日常生活之間如何交替影響；但同時強調第三種再現邏輯

的面向：意即「再現的意外」

而在非人的再現一節裡說道，還有一種美學體制無法處理的客

體，也就是我們一般說的集中營屠殺的不可再現。洪席耶以小

說為例，推到福樓拜。見證必須回到非人的表達，因為所使用

的語言已經變得非人，不只是再現著猶太人的消抹，同時也再

現著這些歷史痕跡的消抹。而在不可再現的思辯式浮誇中則直

接講述康德的崇高不屬於藝術，而是將我們帶離藝術。

成為那特異的

這是哲學的啟示

於是習練越界

瘋狂有時　殺戮有時　跳舞有時　哀慟有時　靜默有時　言語有時

生命有翻飛摺曲之美

是界限上我們活著我們思考

我們繼續活著　因為我們將繼續思考

如何　未來　我是我不思考之物而　我思考我所不是之物

二零零九洪席耶訪台活動執行委員會

│概念創造│　未來－思考實驗室

│執行統籌│　張庭涵

│視覺設計│　林耀秋

│工作人員│　曾瑋婷，陳令豪，洪苑竹，馮國瑋，林韋萱，陳美倫，吳尚前(現旅法,精神支持)

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