문학의 정치성

The Politics of Literature: On Ranciére's Critique of Deleuze

The purpose of my essay is to explore the similarity and the difference between Deleuze and Ranicére in their discussions of literature in relation to politics. In a short interview with Le Magazine Litteraire's 2002 issue, specially dedicated to Deleuze, Ranicére suggests an interesting explanation of Deleuze's aesthetics; Ranciére argues that Deleuze is a philosopher who identifies the end of representative aesthetic regime, "a regime that desires to break with the representative tradition." In this way Ranciére continues to say that Deleuze completes the destiny of aesthetics in the name of philosophy. Ranciére's opinion on Deleuze seems to provide an idea for understanding Deleuze's aesthetics in particular and analyzing the relationship between aesthetics and 'the political' in general. What is at stake here is that Ranciére points out the aspect of Deleuze's aesthetics in terms of 'figuration.' Deleuze, one of the most sophisticated Spinozist aesthetes, yet, always presupposes a pre-figurative dimension, even if he clearly adapts 'figures' for the way of thinking. Similar to Heidegger's notion of sousrature (undererasure), Deleuze's concept of figures implies a preliminary mode of life before and after thinking –what Deleuze argues isnot to postulate any separation between life and thinking such as the biological theory of human beings, but rather 'a life' as pure immanence. For Deleuze, immanence is "not immanence to life, but immanence that is in nothing is itself a life." For Ranicére, an aesthetic dimension is to cancel the social discrimination and status differentiation and serves as another distribution of aesthetical senses which de-construct and re-construct the habitual knowledge. My presentation focuses on the likeness between Deleuze and Ranciére for reformulating the concept of an aesthetic dimension that Ranciére puts importantly the condition of the political. Furthermore, I argue that Ranciére's conceptualization of an aesthetic dimension is theoretically original, but seems not to answer a question as to what makes the dimension to be the political suggested by Deleuze.