Fictioning disagreement: The construction of separation in the work of Jacques Rancière

Although constantly intertwining aesthetic and political considerations, the work of Rancière also forcefully stresses the absence of any evidence in the relation between art and politics. The article uses the theme of this lack of self-evident relation in order to analyse a series of key-concepts of Rancière’s work (regime, contrariété, disagreement, etc.) and, lastly, proposes to read through this reconstruction of its conceptual architecture the place – both conceptual and practical – where a subject can be thought and produced. In this sense, this article proposes to read in Rancière’s work the presence of a structured concept of the subject, the very determination of which is inseparable from the – at once collective and singular – articulation of a space of indetermination and fracture: a space articulating the absence of relation between different modes of interruption of evidences, taking place in the arts and in politics. In this way, Rancière’s work contributes to thinking the subject as groundless, irrelative to any given, specific reality (such as, for instance, ‘humanity’), as a new form connecting together, via a radically new narrative, a series of fractures operated within received, allegedly ‘natural’ modes of classifications of reality.