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Notes
I am grateful to Rowan Bailey, Edward Langley, Diane Morgan, David Ronalds and Fintan Walsh for their generous comments on early versions of this introduction.
1 Motto of the Italian student movement.
2 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (Routledge: New York and London, 1997), p.2.
3 John Locke, Essay Concerning the Humane Understanding [1690] (John Bumps: London, 1824), p.635.
4 Jordana Rosenberg explains that for Locke the enthusiast's revelation is reprehensible because she cannot explain how she has arrived that knowledge. See Jordana Rosenberg, ‘“Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!”: Secularism, Historicism, and the Critique of Enthusiasm’, The Eighteenth Century, 51:4 (2010), pp.475. I thank Alberto Toscano for directing me to this brilliant essay.
5 Peter Klepec, ‘Lyotard and the “Second Copernican Turn”’, Filozofski vestnik, 25:2 (2004), p.117.
6 See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).
7 Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism. On the Uses of an Idea (London and New York: Verso, 2010), p.xix-xxi.
8 On this aspect see Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2007), p.86.
9 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties [1798], trans. Mary G. Gregor, The Conflict of the Faculties (Abaris: New York, 1979), pp.139-141.
10 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, p.86.
11 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p.149.
12 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p.153.
13 It is important to remind that France was already caught in the Reign of Terror at the time that Kant was writing this essay.
14 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), p.9. The first essay of this collection is a revised version of a lecture Rancière gave at the 5th Internationale Sommerakademie of Frankfurt-am-Mein originally published in Artforum, from which I quote later in my introduction.
15 The English prime minister David Cameron defined the students' behaviour as ‘feral’, while the Italian minister of Interior Roberto Maroni simply revived old memories of political terrorism in the 1970s.
16 ‘This ability of yours to speak well about Homer is not a skill (τέχνη), but, as I was just saying, there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings […]’. Plato, Ion, 533d.
17 Frederich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man [1793], trans. Reginald Snell (Mineral, New York: Dover Publications, 2004), p.76.
18 See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p.160.
19 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, in Artforum International, Vol. 45 (March, 2007), p.273.
20 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, p.277. Here Rancière is referring to his account of Joseph Jacotot, a French schoolteacher who taught in French to Flemish students who knew no French. See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1991).
21 I am glossing over Rancière's arguments against the notion of the unrepresentable as unthinkable, in order to identify the unseen of enthusiasm as a ‘dissent’ from the identity of cause and effect, which otherwise holds together the experience of mimesis. Only by distancing aisthesis and poiesis – the two constitutive terms of mimesis – can enthusiasm ultimately become an ‘economy of affects’. See Jacques Rancière, The future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), p.112ff.
22 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend. Passages in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Theory and History of Literature, 46 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p.167.