jewish philosophy place

Rather than look at the spectacle and spectator as mere captives to the logics of capital, Rancière places both at the heart of the relation between art and politics. The spectator is no passive and unknowing dupe of ideology and the appearances made possible by forms of false consciousness. Concepts like “intellectual equality” and
emancipated spectatorship” signal a basic trust in the human capacity to figure things out, no matter how smart you are, the “same intelligence at work –an intelligence that translated signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate  its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavoring to communicate to it” (p.10). Blurring the difference between those who act and those who look or gaze,  Rancière asserts the ontological  and political dignity of theater, illusion, art, mediation,  images, and the distance that is the sine qua non of communication (pp.10, 19).

Central to the image is not a mimetic relation between the image and its referent, which it either gets right or wrong. The image is most of all constituted by its relation to other images, a multiplicity of images, poetic and visual alike, a set of relation between the said and the unsaid, the visible and invisible (p.93), and the way in which they combine to create an “equivalence” (i.e. not a copy of something real) to form a “common sense” or “aesthetic community.” These are defined as “a spatiotemporal system in which words and visible forms are assembled into shared data, shared ways of perceiving, being, affects, and imparted meaning. The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense –that is to say, “different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings” (p.102).

Against didactic forms of political art that presume a direct, causal relation between an image and political action,  Rancière sets up a more subtle model in which political effects are not so easily predetermined or even anticipated. What art does to us is to stimulate a more basic desire to look more closely (p.103-4). For Rancière, the aesthetic dimension of politics lies in a “distribution of the sensible,” “the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being together’” and being apart, a complex set of connections and disconnections between persons, words, and objects (p.56). An integral part of this, spectacle is embraced always to the degree in which it “displays its aspect of brilliant appearance and its other side of sordid truth” (pp.83-4)

In relation to religion and to Judaism, it is easy enough to transpose into them everything said by Rancière about aesthetic community and about these  combinations of brilliant appearances and sordid truths as the essence of the aesthetic and ethics of religion in its constitution as a system of representation. At least twice, Rancière himself notes that the critique of the image and of spectacle can be traced back to Feuerbach and Marx’s critique of religion, and we might add, of metaphysics. Rancière very much promotes the value of separation in relation to non-separation (pp.6-8, 15). What opens this kind of political theory to religion post-critically is its investment in the sensible, in images and the imagination, the way it suggests how one might  suspend “reality” without ever losing touch with it.