Literature and politics in Jacques Rancière

the distribution of the sensible and the glimpse of emancipation

Abstract

From the perspective of Jacques Rancière, this article aims to understand the politics of literature based on the author’s pre-existing discussions. Politics, understood as a specific form of collective practice, and literature, as the practice of the art of writing, are presented by Rancière as constructs of “fictions” that reconfigure hierarchies and domains of truth within the shared regime of the sensible. It will be shown that, through the aesthetic regime of art, especially through the forms of artistic autonomy, a dissolution of hierarchies occurs, signaling a movement towards an egalitarian order. In this context, both the writer and the reader share the same condition of equality, envisioning a process of emancipation. The article thus seeks to demonstrate that cultural exclusivism, confined to a representative regime of the arts, is overcome by opening spaces for the perception of a new regime of the arts.