Parody and Politics of Incarnation: Jacques Rancière's Aesthetics of Politics and Michel Journiac's Body Art

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Notes

¹ Denis Lacorne, ‘Tea Party, une vague de fond’, Le Monde (10 October 2010); ‘L'inconnue “Tea Party”’, Le Monde Magazine (31 October 2010); Corine Lesnes, ‘Défaites cuisantes et triomphes éclatants: le bilan mitigé du mouvement Tea Party’, Le Monde (3 November 2010).

² Andrew Kaspar, ‘Minding the Enthusiasm Gap’, In These Times (18 October 2010) < http://www.inthetimes.com/main/article/6535/> [12/11/2010]; Susan J. Douglas, ‘Democrats and the Anger Gap’ In These Times (19 October 2010) < http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/6542> [12/11/2010].

³ See Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’. The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, New York and Köln: Brill, 1995). Heyd relocates this historical evolution, from its theological and spiritual critique in the sixteenth century, as related to the perversion of the true religion, to its medical critique in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which opened up to the secular culture of the Enlightenment. See also Shaun Irlam, Elations. The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). This book stresses the way in which poetic enthusiasm and the poetics of enthusiasm in the eighteenth century were representative of the heteronomy of the subject before the advent of psychoanalysis, and thought of as a moral subjectivity that included affectivity.

⁴ We borrow this expression from Sophie Wahnich, ‘De l'économie émotive de la Terreur’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 4 (2002), pp.889-913.

⁵ Sophie Wahnich cites the famous passage from Kant which describes how this revolution ‘nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely to enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race’. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties [1798], trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), p.153.

⁶ Noam Chomsky, ‘Outrage, Misguided’, In These Times (November 4 2010), < http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/6615> [12/11/2010].

⁷ Jacques Rancière, ‘Racisme: une passion d'en haut’, speech given during the rally Les Roms, et qui d'autre? at Montreuil (93), also available in English translation at < http://www.mediapart.fr/club/edition/english-club/article/221010/racism-top-down-passion> [6/11/2011]. All following quotes are taken from this speech.

⁸ See Rancière ‘The Aesthetic Heterotopia’, Philosophy Today, 54 (2010), p.21.

⁹ Jacques Rancière, ‘Les territoires de la pensée partagée’, interview with Jacques Lévy, Julienne Rennes and David Zerbib, EspacesTemps.net (8 January 8 2007), < http://espacestemps.net/document2142.html?format = print> [11/01/2011]; republished in Jacques Rancière, Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 572-586.

¹⁰ Jacques Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Heterotopia’, p.24.

¹¹ For an enlightening summary, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's entry ‘Sublime’ in Encyclopaedia Universalis, < http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/sublime-philosophie/>[1/2/11].

¹² See Christian Ruby, L'Enthousiasme. Essai sur le sentiment en politique, Paris, Hatier, 1996.

¹³ The following reflections have benefited immensely from an exchange with Rancière, whom I wish to sincerely thank here.

¹⁴ Jacques Rancière, ‘La forme et son esprit’, in Michèle Lagny, Marie-Claire Ropars, Pierre Sorrily, eds, La forme en jeu, (Presses universitaires de Vincennes: Saint-Denis, 1998), p.141.

¹⁵ Jacques Rancière, ‘La forme et son esprit’, p.141

¹⁶ Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (London: Polity, 2009), p.6.

¹⁷ Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, p.28.

¹⁸ Jacques Rancière, ‘L'irreprésentable en question’, interview with Jean-Louis Déotte and Pierre Bayard, Europe, 84: 926-927 (2006); republished in Jacques Rancière, Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués, p.525.

¹⁹ Jacques Rancière, ‘Politique et esthétique’, interview with Jean-Marc Lachaud, Actuel Marx, 39 (2006); republished in Jacques Rancière, Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués, p. 473.

²⁰ Jacques Rancière, ‘L'irreprésentable en question’, p.525.

²¹ Jacques Rancière, ‘L'irreprésentable en question’, p.524.

²² The performance was reenacted in February 1975 at the Stadler Gallery in Paris. It also featured during a retrospective exhibition on Journiac's work which took place in Strasbourg in 2004, and again in Paris in 2009. The latter used photographic and filmic documents, with Journiac's voice-over reading out the Mass in Latin, which of course miss the point: the artist's performing ‘organic’ body and the Eucharist, pudding-sausage made with his blood.

²³ Georges Didi-Hubermann shows how, paradoxically, ‘a theological hatred of the visible could constitute a theological demand for the visual’. See Georges Didi-Hubermann's entry ‘Art et theologie’, in Encyclopaedia Universalis, < http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/art-et-theologie> [01/02/11].

²⁴ See the entry ‘Eucharistie’ in Encyclopaedia Universalis < http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/eucharistie> [01/02/11]

²⁵ ‘Eucharistie’.

²⁶ François Pluchart, L'Art corporel (Paris: Limage 2, Alain Avila, 1983), p.78.

²⁷ François Pluchart, L'Art corporel, p. 78

²⁸ François Pluchart, L'Art corporel, p. 79.

²⁹ Jacques Rancière, ‘La forme et son esprit’, p.145.

³⁰ See Jacques Rancière, ‘Problems and Transformation s of Critical Art’, in Aesthetics and its Discontents, pp.45-60.

³¹ Martin Jay, ‘Somaesthetics and Democracy. John Dewey and Contemporary Body Art’, in Refractions of Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p.176.

³² Eric Mullis, ‘The Violent Aesthetic: A Reconsideration of Transgressive Body Art’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 20:2 (2006), p.85.

³³ This is Rancière's own formulation of his project offered in a personal exchange.

³⁴ Jacques Rancière, ‘Aesthetics against Incarnation’, interview with Anne-Marie Oliver, Critical Inquiry, 35:1 (Autumn 2008), pp.181-182.

³⁵ Jacques Rancière, ‘Aesthetics against Incarnation’, p.181.

³⁶ See the interview with Hermann Nitsch dated 13 December 2000 in Virginie Luc, Art à mort (Paris: Editions Leo Scheer) p.72.

³⁷ Gina Pane's emphasis.

³⁸ Jacques Rancière, La parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la literature (Paris: Hachette, 1998).

³⁹ Jacques-David Ebguy has already noted that the recurring tale of incarnation, where writing is though of as deriving from the Christian contrast between the Word and the Spirit, and which rejects the idea of ‘Judaism based on inifinite auto-commentary and Christianity based on the living word, torn apart in the interminable quest for its glorious body’. See Jacques-David Ebguy, ‘Le travail de la vérité, la vérité au travail: usages de la littérature chez Alain Badiou et Jacques Rancière’, Fabula LHT, ‘Les philosophes lecteurs’, 1 (February 2006) < http://www.fabula.org/lht/1/Ebguy.html> [12/12/2010].

⁴⁰ Jacques Rancière, ‘L'historicité au cinéma’, in Antoine de Baecque and Christian Pelage eds, De l'histoire du cinéma, (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1998).

⁴¹ Jacques Rancière, ‘The Use of Distinctions’, in Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 205-218.

⁴² Jacques Rancière, ‘The Use of Distinctions’, p.209.

⁴³ Jacques Rancière, ‘The Use of Distinctions’, p.211.

⁴⁴ Jacques Rancière, ‘The Use of Distinctions’, p.216.

⁴⁵ See Solange Guénoun ‘Politiques et théologies de l'image chez Jacques Rancière: ou l'hyperbole spéculative de l'irreprésentable’, in Jacques Rancière. Politiques de l'image, (Paris: Éditions La Lettre volée, 2011 forthcoming).

⁴⁶ Jacques Rancière, ‘La communauté esthétique’ in Pierre Ouellet, ed. Politique de la parole. Singularité et communauté, (Montréal:Trait d'union, 2002), p.165.

⁴⁷ Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Polity, 2009), p.14.

⁴⁸ Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, p.27.