Jacques Rancière's 'Aisthesis' Redefines Aesthetic Regime

In 'Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art', Jacques Rancière reexamines the aesthetic question opened by Baumgarten, Kant, and Hegel. The book is structured as a series of 'scenes'—small optical machines that weave together ways of doing, seeing, and saying, spanning from 1764 to 1941 and from Dresden to New York. Rancière challenges Clement Greenberg's view of modernity as each art's conquest of autonomy, arguing instead that the works in 'Aisthesis' tend to erase specificities and blur boundaries between arts and ordinary experience. He draws on diverse figures: Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville, Loïe Fuller, Charlie Chaplin, Winckelmann, Schiller, Rodin, Adolphe Appia, Gallé, Lalique, Peter Behrens, the Hanlon Lees brothers, Walker Evans, and early cinema. The aesthetic regime emerges when beauty's essence becomes 'absence of expressivity, indeterminacy'—not a defeat but a dynamism, a tension of surfaces and corporealities. Rancière traces this from Winckelmann's 1764 description of the Belvedere Torso to Schiller's commentary on the Juno Ludovisi, showing how a new principle since the 17th century transforms immanence and contingency into creative powers, expressing the 'equality of life'. The book builds on Rancière's earlier works 'The Politics of Aesthetics' and 'Malaise in Aesthetics', offering a classic that opens unforeseen horizons for the future.