抄録
The word “politics” often appears in the titles of Jacques Rancière’s writings on art such as Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren and The Politics of Literature, indicating that the concept figures prominently in his aesthetics. Namely, Rancière’s aesthetics most of all engages in reconfiguring the “distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible)”. An original determination about political aesthetics appears to emerge in work from 2000 onwards, but the fact is that, even before then, Rancière educed widely varying political aspects in the realm of art with incompatibilities that nonetheless deserve attention. In order to disentangle the conflict within Rancière’s oeuvre, this paper focuses on his readings of Gustave Flaubert, an author Rancière held in high regard for his work at the dawn of “the aesthetic regime of art”. More specifically, this investigation aims to elucidate the plurality that exists in the democratic elements of Flaubert’s texts. After examining Rancière’s works chronologically from the 1980s to the 2000s, this paper finally affirms that the essence of Rancière’s own concept of “politics” resides within the very conflict that lies between the political and democratic aspects of Flaubert’s texts. Through this sustained role of such conflict derived from readings of Flaubert, Rancière comes to the larger task of reconfiguring our “distribution of the sensible” with regard to literature and art.
