The work Aisthesis. Scènes du régime esthétique de l'art by the philosopher Jacques Rancière allows us to understand with greater subtlety and precision the articulations of the thought of this philosopher who constructs aesthetics. The contribution therefore to deliver to the public part of the fund of studies and particular works on which each of the more theoretical works of the author is based. Subtitle Scènes du régime esthétique de l'art, is organized around fourteen such scenes which each refer to an event, dated and placed in Space and time, hence the question of the constant change of this here appeals to “Art” since the emergence of aesthetics can be proposed. “Aisthesis”, a term coined from the Greek, is in fact the name of the category which, for three centuries (Baumgarten and Kant), has designated in the West the sensitive fabric and the form of intelligibility of what we call “Art” is also good because, on the one hand, this notion it is based, according to Rancière, on devices, forms of sensibility and discourses on artistic revolutions, and on the other, “Art” – with a capital letter – is a notion that designates a specific form of experience of the sensible. The latter has only existed in the West since the 18th century, the century of aesthetics itself, even if it empties the general concept of beauty as we inherit it from the Greeks.
This category, "Art", therefore refers to forms of sensitive experience, ways of perceiving and being affected, to a way of life "according to which, for two centuries, we have perceived very different things through their production techniques and their destinations as belonging in common with the art. However, we must not believe that Rancière thus returns a reflection of the essence. The regime of perception, sensation and interpretation of art is constantly constituted and transformed. We know that Rancière's reconfiguration of aesthetic thinking has produced a whole new set of reflections on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The author has also shown that the encounter between the two, aesthetics and politics, was not contingent, but inscribed in the very concept of politics. It is the concept of "sharing the sensitive" that has given its contours. However, it remained to give a statute to this notion of "Art", to extract it from the traditional basis of imitation.
"Art"? And this concept? This use of the term without noun complement has established itself historically. Rancière took him to Winckelmann. It does not in any way refer to a competence (that of the creators), but to the existence of a "sensitive environment in which the works coexist". To make such an assembly, many operations had to be performed. One consisted in extracting the concept of Art from the horizon of the artist's life and from that of the arts; Art had to become art in itself; then it takes the form of a story, a temporal and causal scheme, which inscribes beauty in a process of progress; to end up being offered to a disinterested gaze within the museums. Thus Art has become an autonomous reality, in relation with an environment (forms of collective life and the possibility of individual invention).
The aesthetic regime of art is opposed to the representative regime. The first reveals to us that "the will is exhausted for what he believes to be his ends and which in reality are nothing but the obstinate march of a life that wants nothing". Art no longer has to imitate physical nature or human passions. It now attributes to marrying the specific power of things or of the sentence, its "pure power to produce or to disappear in its production". Rancière shows it to us in each of the scenes, for example, describing in detail the way in which Emerson, in 1841, in Boston, formulates in all its radicalism the modernist ideal of a new poem of the new man, who does not commit himself ultimately in vulgar materiality only to bring them back to the life of thought and of the whole.
These scenes of the aesthetic regime of art they constitute a formidable mechanism for incorporating an understanding of this concept. One could conclude that the student of this philosophy must not give in to the unceasing effort to practice denying the inherited judgments on the history of modernity. He must step by step build the gaps that allow it both to create a new history of the latter, and to become contemporary, asserting itself in the clash between heterogeneous temporalities and in a radical gap with what is alone.
