I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed. However, another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in government: the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community of citizens. A speaking being, according to Aristotle, is a political being. If a slave understands the language of its rulers, however, he does not ‘possess’ it. Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community because they do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work. They cannot be somewhere else because work will not wait. The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed. Having a particular ‘occupation’ thereby determines the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community; it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. There is thus an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics that has nothing to do with Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ specific to the age of the masses’. This aesthetics should not be understood as the perverse commandeering of politics by a will to art, by a consideration of the people qua work of art. If the reader is fond of analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense - re-examined perhaps by Foucault - as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of  spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. 

It is on the basis of this primary aesthetics that it is possible to raise the question of‘aesthetic practices’ as I understand them, that is forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community. Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility. The Platonic proscription of the poets is based on the impossibility of doing two things at once prior to being based on the immoral content of fables. The question of fiction is first a question regarding the distribution of places. From the Platonic point of view, the stage, which is simultaneously a locus of public activity and the exhibition-space for ‘fantasies’, disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces. The same is true of  writing. By stealing away to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space. Plato thereby singles out two main models, two major forms of existence and of the sensible effectivity of language - writing and the theatre -, which are also structure-giving forms for the regime of the arts in general. However, these forms turn out to be prejudicially linked from the outset to a certain regime of politics, a regime based on the indetermination of identities, the delegitimation of positions of speech, the deregulation of partitions of space and time. This aesthetic regime of politics is strictly identical with the regime of democracy, the regime based on the assembly of artisans, inviolable written laws, and the theatre as institution. Plato contrasts a third, good form of art with writing and the theatre, the choreographic form of the community that sings and dances its own proper unity. In sum, Plato singles out three ways in which discursive and bodily practices suggest forms of community: the surface of mute signs that are, he says,  like paintings, and the space of bodily movement that divides itself into two antagonistic models (the movement of simulacra on the stage that is offered as material for the audiences identifications and, on the other hand, the authentic movement characteristic of communal bodies). 

Here we have three ways of distributing the sensible that structure the manner in which the arts can be perceived and thought of as forms of art and as forms that inscribe a sense of community: the surface of ‘depicted’ signs, the split reality of the theatre, the rhythm of a dancing chorus. These forms define the way in which works of art or performances are ‘involved in politics’, whatever may otherwise be the guiding intentions, artists’ social modes of integration, or the manner in which artistic forms reflect social structures or movements. When Madame Bovary was published, or Sentimental Education, these works were immediately perceived as ‘democracy in literature’ despite Flaubert’s aristocratic situation and political conformism. His very refusal to entrust literature with any message whatsoever was considered to be evidence of democratic equality. His adversaries claimed that he was  democratic due to his decision to depict and portray instead of instruct. This equality of indifference is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very equality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone’s eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word. 
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In this way, a sensible politicity exists that is immediately attributed to the major forms of aesthetic distribution such as the theatre, the page, or the chorus. These ‘politics’ obey their own proper logic, and they offer their services in very different contexts and time periods. Consider the way these paradigms functioned in the connection between art and politics at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Consider, for example, the role taken on by the paradigm of the page in all its different forms, which exceed the materiality of a written sheet of paper. Novelistic democracy, on the one hand, is the indifferent democracy of writing such as  it is symbolized by the novel and its readership. There is also, however, the knowledge concerning typography and iconography, the intertwining of graphic and pictorial capabilities, that played such an important role in the Renaissance and was revived by Romantic typography through its use of vignettes, culs-de-lampe, and various innovations. This model disturbs the clear-cut rules of representative logic that establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between the sayable and the visible. It also disturbs the clear partition between works of pure art and the ornaments made by the decorative arts. This is why it played such an important - and generally underestimated - role in the upheaval of the representative paradigm and of its political implications. I am thinking in particular of its role in the Arts and Crafts movement and all of its derivatives (Art Deco, Bauhaus, Constructivism). These movements developed an idea of furniture - in the broad sense of the term - for a new community, which also inspired a new idea of pictorial surface as a surface of shared writing.

Modernist discourse presents the revolution of pictorial abstraction as painting’s discovery of its own proper medium’: two-dimensional surface. By revoking the perspectivist illusion of the third dimension, painting was to regain  the mastery of its own proper surface. In actual fact, however, this surface does not have any distinctive feature. A ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible. For Plato, writing and painting were equivalent surfaces of mute signs, deprived of the breath that animates and transports living speech. Flat surfaces, in this logic, are not opposed to depth in the sense of three-dimensional surfaces. They are opposed to the ‘living’. The mute surface of depicted signs stands in opposition to the act of ‘living’ speech, which is guided by the speaker towards its appropriate addressee. Moreover, painting’s adoption of the third dimension was also a response to this distribution. The reproduction of optical depth was linked to the privilege accorded to the story. In the Renaissance, the reproduction of three-dimensional space was involved in the valorization of painting and the assertion of its ability to capture an act of living speech, the decisive moment of action and meaning. In opposition to the Platonic degradation of mimesis, the classical poetics of representation wanted to endow the ‘flat surface’ with speech or with a ‘scene’ of life, with a specific depth such as the manifestation of an action, the expression of an interiority, or the transmission of meaning. Classical poetics established a relationship of correspondence at a distance between speech and painting, between the sayable and the visible, which gave ‘imitation’ its own specific space. 
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It is this relationship that is at stake in the supposed distinction between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space as ‘specific’ to a particular form of art. To a large extent, the ground was laid for painting’s ‘anti-representative revolution’ by the flat surface of the page, in the change in how literature’s ‘images’ function or the change in the discourse on painting, but also in the ways in which typography, posters, and the decorative arts became interlaced. The type of painting that is poorly named abstract, and which is supposedly brought back to its own proper medium, is implicated in an overall vision of a new human being lodged in new structures, surrounded by different objects. Its flatness is linked to the flatness of pages, posters, and tapestries. It is the flatness of an interface. Moreover, its anti-representative ‘purity’ is inscribed in a context where pure art and decorative art are intertwined, a context that straight away gives it a political signification. This context is not the surrounding revolutionary fever that made Malevich at once the artist who painted Black Square and the revolutionary eulogist of ‘new forms of life’. Furthermore, this is not some theatrical ideal of the new human being that seals the momentary alliance between revolutionary artists and politics. It is initially in the interface created between different ‘mediums’ - in the connections forged between poems and their typography or their illustrations, between the theatre and its set designers or poster designers, between decorative objects and poems - that this ‘newness’ is formed that links the artist who abolishes figurative representation to the revolutionary who invents a new form of life. This interface is ​political in that it revokes the twofold politics inherent in the logic of representation. On the one hand, this logic separated the world of artistic imitations from the world of vital concerns and politicosocial grandeur. On the other hand, its hierarchical organization - in particular the primacy of living speech/action over depicted images - formed an analogy with the socio-political order. With the triumph of the novels page over the theatrical stage, the egalitarian intertwining of images and signs on pictorial or typographic surfaces, the elevation of artisans’ art to the status of great art, and the new claim to bring art into the décor of each and every life, an entire well-ordered distribution of sensory experience was overturned.

This is how the ‘planarity’ of the surface of depicted signs, the form of egalitarian distribution of the sensible stigmatized by Plato, intervened as the principle behind an art’s ‘formal’ revolution at the same time as the principle behind the political redistribution of shared experience. The other major forms, among which there are those of the chorus and the theatre that I mentioned earlier, could be considered in much the same way. A history of aesthetic politics, understood in this sense, has to take into account the way in which these major forms stand in opposition to one another or intermingle. I am thinking, for example, of the way in which this paradigm of the surface of signs/forms entered into conflict or joined forces with the theatrical paradigm of presence, and with the diverse forms that this paradigm itself has taken on, from the Symbolist figuration of a collective legend to the actualized chorus of a new humanity. Politics plays itself out in the theatrical paradigm as the relationship between the stage and the audience, as meaning produced by the actor’s body, as games of proximity or distance. Mallarmé’s critical prose writings stage, in an exemplary manner, the play of cross-references, oppositions or assimilations between these forms, from the intimate theatre of the page or calligraphic choreography to the new ‘service’ performed by concerts. 
In one respect, these forms therefore appear to bring forth, in very different contexts, figures of community equal to themselves. However, they are susceptible to being assigned to contradictory political paradigms. Let us take the example of the tragic stage. It simultaneously carries with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion. By isolating mimesis in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of genres, Aristotle - even if this was not his intention - redefined its politicity. Furthermore, in the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would become the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy of subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of speaking to this hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a monarchical paradigm. Let us also consider the long and contradictory history of rhetoric and the model of the good orator. Throughout the monarchical age, democratic eloquence à la Demosthenes denoted an excellence in speaking, which was itself established as the imaginary attribute of the supreme power. It was also always receptive, however, to the recovery of its democratic function by lending its canonical forms and its consecrated images to the transgressive appearance of unauthorized speakers on the public stage. Let us consider as well the contradictory destinies of the choreographic model. Recent research has evoked the metamorphoses undergone by Labans notation of movement. It was developed in a context favouring the liberation of bodies and became the model for the large Nazi demonstrations before regaining, in the anti-establishment context of performance art, a new subversive virginity. Benjamins explanation via the fatal aestheticization of politics in the era of the masses’ overlooks, perhaps, the long-standing connection between the unanimous consensus of the citizenry and the exaltation of the free movement of bodies. In a city hostile to the theatre and to written law, Plato recommended constantly cradling unweaned infants. 

I have evoked these three forms because Plato conceptually charted them out and because they maintain a historical constancy. They obviously do not define all of the ways that figures of community are aesthetically designed. The important thing is that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization.  It is from this perspective that it is possible to reflect on artists’ political interventions, starting with the Romantic literary forms that aimed at deciphering society, the Symbolist poetics of dreams or the Dadaist or Constructivist elimination of art, and continuing up to the contemporary modes of performance and installation. From this perspective, it is possible to challenge a good many imaginary stories about artistic ‘modernity’ and vain debates over the autonomy of art or its submission to politics. The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or the subversion they can claim credit for rest on the same foundation.

JACQUES RANCIÈRE /The Politics of Aesthetics (The Distribution of the Sensible)

Rendering the invisible: the problem of painting - Deformation: neither transformation nor decomposition - The scream - Bacon's love of life - Enumeration of forces

From another point of view, the question concerning the separation of the arts, their respective autonomy, and their possible hierarchy, loses all importance. For there is a community of the arts, a common problem. In art, and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces. For this reason no art is figurative. Paul Klee's famous formula "Not to render the visible, but to render visible" - means nothing else. The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible. Likewise, music attempts to render sonorous forces that are not themselves sonorous. That much is clear. Force is closely related to sensation: for a sensation to exist, a force must be exerted on a body, on a point of the wave. But if force is the condition of sensation, it is nonetheless not the force that is sensed, since the sensation "gives" something completely different from the forces that condition it. How will sensation be able to sufficiently turn in on itself, relax or contract itself, so as to capture these nongiven forces in what it gives us, to make us sense these insensible forces, and raise itself to its own conditions? It is in this way that music must render nonsonorous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible. Sometimes these are the same thing: Time, which is nonsonorous and invisible - how can time be painted, how can time be heard? And elementary forces like pressure, inertia, weight, attraction, gravitation, germination how can they be rendered? Sometimes, on the contrary, the insensible force of one art instead seems to take part in the "givens" of another art: for example, how to paint sound, or even the scream? (And conversely, how to make colors audible?). 
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This is a problem of which painters are very conscious. When pious critics criticized Millet for painting peasants who were carrying an offertory like a sack of potatoes, Millet responded by saying that the weight common to the two objects was more profound than their figurative distinction. As a painter, he was striving to paint the force of that weight, and not the offertory or the sack of potatoes. And was it not Cezanne's genius to have subordinated all the techniques of painting to this task: rendering visible the folding force of mountains, the germinative force of a seed, the thermic force of a landscape, and so on? And Van Gogh: Van Gogh even invented unknown forces, the unheard-of force of a sunflower seed. For many painters, however, the problem of capturing forces, no matter how conscious it may have been, was mixed with another problem, equally important but less pure. This other problem was the decomposition and recomposition of effects: for example, the decomposition ​and recomposition of depth in the Renaissance, the decomposition and recomposition of colors in impressionism, the decomposition and recomposition of movement in cubism. We can see how one problem leads to the other, since movement, for example, is an effect that refers both to a unique force that produces it, and to a multiplicity of decomposable and recomposable elements beneath this force.  
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Bacon's Figures seem to be one of the most marvelous responses in the history of painting to the question, How can one make invisible forces visible? This is the primary function of the Figures. In this respect, we will see that Bacon remains relatively indifferent to the problem of effects. Not that he despises them, but he thinks that, in the whole history which is that of painting, they have been adequately mastered by the painters he admires, particularly the problem of movement, of "rendering" movement. But if this is the case, it is reason enough to confront even more directly the problem of "rendering" invisible forces visible. This is true of all Bacon's series of heads and the series of self-portraits, and it is even the reason he made these series: the extraordinary agitation of these heads is derived not from a movement that the series would supposedly reconstitute, but rather from the forces of pressure, dilation, contraction, flattening, and elongation that are exerted on the immobile head. They are like the forces of the cosmos confronting an intergalactic traveler immobile in his capsule. It is as if invisible forces were striking the head from many different angles. The wiped and swept parts of the face here take on a new meaning, because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of ​striking. This is why the problems Bacon faces are indeed those of deformation, and not transformation. These are two very different categories. The transformation of form can be abstract or dynamic. But deformation is always bodily, and it is static, it happens at one place; it subordinates movement to force, but it also subordinates the abstract to the Figure. When a force is exerted on a scrubbed part, it does not give birth to an abstract form, nor does it combine sensible forms dynamically: on the contrary, it turns this zone into a zone of indiscernibility that is common to several forms, irreducible to any of them; and the lines of force that it creates escape every form through their very clarity, through their deforming precision (we saw this in the becoming-animal of the Figures). Cezanne was perhaps the first to have made deformations without transformation, by making truth fall back on the body. Here again Bacon is Cezannean: for both Bacon and Cezanne, the deformation is obtained in the form at rest; and at the same time, the whole material environment, the structure, begins to stir: "walls twitch and slide, chairs bend or rear up a little, cloths curl like burning paper.. . ."2 Everything is now related to forces, everything is force. It is force that constitutes deformation as an act of painting: it lends itself neither to a transformation of form, nor to a decomposition of elements. And Bacon's deformations are rarely constrained or forced; they are not tortures, despite appearances. On the contrary, they are the most natural postures of a body that has been reorganized by the simple force being exerted upon it: the desire to sleep, to vomit, to turn over, to remain seated as long as possible...

We must consider the special case of the scream. Why does Bacon think of the scream as one of the highest objects of painting? "Paint the scream...". It is not at all a matter of giving color to a particularly intense sound. Music, for its part, is faced with the same task, which is certainly not to render the scream harmonious, but to establish a relationship between the sound of the scream and the forces that sustain it. In the same manner, painting will establish a relationship between these forces and the visible scream (the mouth that screams). But the forces that produce the scream, that convulse the body until they emerge at the mouth as a scrubbed zone, must not be confused with the visible spectacle before which one screams, nor even with the perceptible and sensible objects whose action decomposes and recomposes our pain. If we scream, it is always as victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle, and that even lie beyond pain and feeling. This is what Bacon means when he says he wanted "to paint the scream more than the horror." If we could express this as a dilemma, it would be: either I paint the horror and I do not paint the scream, because I make a figuration of the horrible; or else I paint the scream, and I do not paint the visible horror, I will paint the visible horror less and less, since the scream captures or detects an invisible force. Alban Berg knew how to make music out of the scream in the scream of Marie, and then in the very different scream of Lulu. But in both cases, he established a relationship between the sound of the scream and inaudible forces: those of the earth in the horizontal scream of Marie, and those of heaven in the vertical scream of Lulu. Bacon creates the painting of the scream because he establishes a relationship between the visibility of the scream (the open mouth as a shadowy abyss) and invisible forces, which are nothing other than the forces of the future. It was Kafka who spoke of detecting the diabolical powers of the future knocking at the door. Every scream contains them potentially. Innocent X screams, but he screams behind the curtain, not only as someone who can no longer be seen, but as someone who cannot see, who has nothing left to see, whose only remaining function is to render visible these invisible forces that are making him scream, these powers of the future. This is what is expressed in the phrase "to scream at" — not to scream before or about, but to scream at death-which suggests this coupling offerees, the perceptible force of the scream and the imperceptible force that makes one scream. 
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This is all very curious, but it is a source of extraordinary vitality. When Bacon distinguishes between two violences, that of the spectacle and that of sensation, and declares that the first must be renounced to reach the second, it is a kind of declaration of faith in life. The interviews contain many statements of this sort. Bacon says that he himself is cerebrally pessimistic; that is, he can scarcely see anything but horrors to paint, the horrors of the world. But he is nervously optimistic, because visible figuration is secondary in painting, and will have less and less importance: Bacon will reproach himself for painting too much horror, as if that were enough to leave the figurative behind; he moves more and more toward a Figure without horror. But why is it an act of vital faith to choose "the scream more than the horror," the violence of sensation more than the violence of the spectacle? The invisible forces, the powers of the future - are they not already upon us, and much more insurmountable than the worst spectacle and even the worst pain? Yes, in a certain sense - every piece of meat testifies to this. But in another sense, no. When, like a wrestler, the visible body confronts the powers of the invisible, it gives them no other visibility than its own. It is within this visibility that the body actively struggles, affirming the possibility of triumphing, which was beyond its reach as long as these powers remained invisible, hidden in a spectacle that sapped our strength and diverted us. It is as if combat had now become possible. The struggle with the shadow is the only real struggle. When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible force, or even befriending it. Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-toovisible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream. Death is judged from the point of view of life, and not the reverse, as we like to believe.6 Bacon, no less than Beckett, is one of those artists who, in the name of a very intense life, can call for an even more intense life. He is not a painter who "believes" in death. His is indeed a figurative miserabilisme, but one that serves an increasingly powerful Figure of life. The same homage should be paid to Bacon as can be paid to Beckett or Kafka. In the very act of "representing" horror, mutilation, prosthesis, fall or failure, they have erected indomitable Figures, indomitable through both their insistence and their presence. They have given life a new and extremely direct power of laughter.

Since the visible movements of the Figures are subordinated to the invisible forces exerted upon them, we can go behind the movements to these forces, and make an empirical list of the forces Bacon detects and captures. Although Bacon likens himself to a "pulverizer" or a "grinder," he is really more like a detective. The first invisible forces are those of isolation: they are supported by the fields, and become visible when they wrap themselves around the contour and wrap the fields around the Figure. The second are the forces of deformation, which seize the Figure's body and head, and become visible whenever the head shakes off its face, or the body its organism. (Bacon knows how to "render" intensely, for example, the flattening force of sleep [53, 76]). The third are the forces of dissipation, when the Figure fades away and returns to the field: what then renders these forces visible is a strange smile. But there are still many other forces. What can be said, first of all, of that invisible force of coupling that sweeps over two bodies with an extraordinary energy, but which they render visible by extracting from it a kind of polygon or diagram? And beyond that, what is the mysterious force that can only be captured or detected by triptychs? It is at the same time a force (characteristic of light) that unites the whole, but also a force that separates the Figures and panels, a luminous separation that should not be confused with the preceding isolation. Can life, can time, be rendered sensible, rendered visible? To render time visible, to render the force of time visible - Bacon seems to have done this twice. There is the force of changing time, through the allotropic variation of bodies, "down to the tenth of a second," which involves deformation; and then there is the force of eternal time, ​the eternity of time, through the uniting—separating that reigns in the triptychs, a pure light. To render time sensible in itself is a task common to the painter, the musician, and sometimes the writer. It is a task beyond all measure or cadence.

 Excerpt from the book: Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation/Painting Forces by Gilles Deleuze

edit  in Grammarly by Dejan stojkovski

Thus, the 'failing of the stable relationship between the perceptible and the intelligibIe' might perfectly well be construed as the unlimited character of the powers of representation. In order to interpret it in the sense of the 'unrepresentable" and posit certain events as unrepresentable, a double subreption has to be made - one involving the concept of the event, the other the concept of art. This double subreption is what is presented in Lyotard's construction of a coincidence between something unthinkable at the heart of the event and something unpresentable at the heart of art. Heidegger and 'The Jews' create a paraIlel between the immemorial fate of the Jewish people and the anti-representative modern destiny of art. Both similarly attest to an original poverty of mind. This is only set in motion when moved by an original terror, an initial shock that transforms it into a hostage of the Other, that unmasterable other which, in the individual psyche, is simply caIled the primary process. The unconscious affect, which not only penetrates the mind but literally opens it, is the stranger in the house, always forgotten, and whose mind must even forget this forgetting in order to be able to pose as master of itself. In the Western tradition, thus Other has supposedly assumed the name of the Jew, the name of the people that is witness to forgetfulness, witness to the original condition of thinking which is the hostage of the Other. It follows that the extermination of the Jews is inscribed in the project of self-mastery of Western thought, in, its will to have done with the witness of the Other, the witness of what is unthinkable at the heart of thought. This condition is supposedly comparable to the modern duty of art. The construction of this duty in Lyotard causes two heterogeneous logic to overlap: an intrinsic logic of the possibilities and impossíbilities specific to a regime of art and an ethical logic of denunciation of the very phenomenon of representation. 

In Lyotard, this overlap is created by the simple identífication of the divide between two regimes in art with the distinction between an aesthetic of the beautiful and an aesthetic of the sublime. 'With the aesthetic of the sublime: Lyotard writes in The Inhuman, 'what is at stake in the arts is their making they witness to the fact that there are things which are indeterminate.' Art supposedly makes itseIf the witness to the 'it happens' which always occurs before its nature, its quid can be grasped; wítness to the fact that there is something unpresentable at the heart of thought which wishes to give itself the material form. The fate of the avant-garde is to attest to this unpresentability that seizes hold of thought, to inscribe the shock of the material, and testify to the original gap. 
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​How is the idea of sublime art constructed? Lyotard refers to Kant's analysis of the powerlessness of the imagination which, faced with certain spectacles, feels carried off beyond its domain led to see in the sublime spectacle - what is called sublime a negative presentation of the ideas of reason that elevate us above the phenomenal order of nature. These ideas manifest their sublimity by the powerlessness of the imagination to create a positive presentation of them. Kant compares this negative presentation with the sublimíty of the Mosaic command thou shalt not make graven images'. The problem is that he does not derive from it any idea of a sublime art attesting to the gap between Idea and material presentation. The idea of the sublime in Kant is not the idea of a kind of art. It is an idea that draws us outside the domain of art, transferring us from the sphere of aesthetic play to that of the ideas of reason and practical freedom.

The problem of 'sublime art' is thus posed in simple terms: one cannot have sublimity both in the form of the commandment prohibiting the image and in the form of an image witnessíng to the prohibition. To resolve the problem, the sublime character of the commandment prohibiting the image must be identified wíth the principIe of a non-representative art. But in order to do that, Kant's extra-artistic sublime has to be identified with a sublime that is defined within art. This is what Lyotard does when he identifies Kant's moral sublime with the poetic sublime analysed by Burke.
 
What, for Burke, did the sublimity of the portrait of Satan in Paradise Lost consist in? In the fact that it brought together 'images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolutíons of kingdoms'. This accumulation of images creates a sense of the sublime by virtue of its multiplicity and disorder - that is, through the under-determination of the 'images' proposed by the words. There ís, Burke noted, an affective power to words that is communicated directly to the mind, short-circuiting material presentation in images. The counter-proof of trust is provided when pictorial visualisation transforms the poem's sublime 'images' into grotesque imagery. Such sublimity is therefore defined on the basis of the very principles of representation and, in particular, the specific properties of the 'visíbility of speech'. Now, in Lyotard this under-determination - this loose relationship between the visible and the sayable - is taken to a limit where it becomes the Kantian indeterminacy of the relationship between idea and material presentation. The colIage of these two 'sublimes' makes it possible to construct the idea of sublime art conceived as a negative presentation, testimony to the Other that haunts thought. But this indetermination is, in reality, an over-determination: what arrives in the pIace of representation is, in fact, the inscription of its initial condition, the trace of the Other that haunts it displayed. 
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This is the price for an alignment of two sets of testimony, of two 'duties to witness'. Sublime art ís what resists the imperialism of thought forgetful of the Other, just as the Jewish people is the one that remembers the forgetting, which puts on the basis of its thought and existence this founding relationship to the Other. The extermination is the end-point of the process of a dialectical reason 'concerned to cancel from its core any alterity, to exude it and, when it is a people, to exterminate it. Sublime art is then the contemporary witness of this planned death and its implementation. It attests to the unthinkability of the initial shock and the unthinkable project of eliminatíng this unthinkability. It does it by testifying to the naked horror of the camps, hut to the original terror of the mind which the terror of the camps wishes to erase. It bears witness not by representing heaps of bodies but through the orange-coloured a flash of lightning that traverses the monochrome of a canvas by Barnett Newman, or any other procedure whereby painting carries out an exploration of its materiaIs when they are diverted from the task of representation.

But Lyotard's schema does quite the opposite of what it claims to do. It argues for some original unthinkable phenomenon resistant to any dialectical assimilation. But it itself becomes the principle of a complete rationalisation. In effect, it makes it possible to identify the existence of a people with an original determination of thought and to identify the professed unthinkability of the extermination with a tendency constituive of Western reason. Lyotard radicalises Adorno's dialectic of reason by rooting it in the laws of the unconscious and transformíng the 'impossíbility' of art after Auschwítz into an art of the unpresentable. But this perfectíng is ultimately a perfecting of the dialectic. What is assigning a people the task of representing a moment of thought, and identifying the extermination of this person with a law of the psychic apparatus, is not a hyperbolic version of the Hegelian operation that makes the moments of the development of spirit - and forms of art - correspond to the concrete hístorícal figures of a people or a civilisation? 

It will be said that this attribution ís a way of disrupting the machine. lt involves haltíng the dialectic of thought at the point where it is in the process of plungíng in. On the one hand, however, the plunge has already been taken. The event has occurred and this having happened is what authorises the discourse of the unthinkable-unrepresentable. On the other hand, we can query the genealogy of this sublime art, anti-dialectical witness to the unpresentable. I have said that Lyotard's sublime was the product of a singular montage between a concept of art and a concept of what exceeds art. But this montage, which confers on sublime art the task of witnessing to what cannot be represented, is itself highly determinate. It is precisely the Hegelian concept of the sublime, as the extreme moment of symbolic art. In Hegel's conceptualization of it, the peculiarity of symbolic art is that it is unable to find a mode of material presentation for its idea. The idea of divinity that inspires Egyptian art cannot hit upon an adequate image in the stone of the pyramids or colossal statues. This failing of positive presentation becomes a success of negative presentation in the sublime art, which conceíves the non-figurable infinity and alterity of the divinity and, in the words of the Jewish 'sacred poem', states this unrepresentability, this distance of divine infiníty from any finite presentation. In short, the concept of art summoned to disrupt the The Hegelian machine is none other than the Hegelian concept of the sublime. 
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In Hegel's theorization, there is not one moment of symbolic. art but two. There is the symbolic art prior to representation. And there is the new symbolic moment that arrives at the end, after the representative era in art, at the end of the Romantic dissociation between content and form. At this extreme point, the interiority that art wishes to express no longer has any form of determinate presentation. The sublime then returns, but in a strictly negative for it is no longer the simple impossibility of a substantial thought findíng adequate material for It is the empty infantilization of the relationshíp between the pure will to art and the thíngs which can be anything - in which ít asserts itself and contemplates its reflection. The polemical functíon of this Hegelian analysis is clear: it aims to reject the notion that another art might be a box out of the dissolution of the determinate relationship between idea and material presentation. For Hegel, such dissolution can only signify the end of art, a state beyond art. The peculiarity of Lyotard's operation is to reínterpret this 'beyond" to transform the bad infinity of an art reduced to reproducing solely íts signature into a fidelity to an original debt. But sublime unrepresentability then confirms Hegel's identification between a moment of art, a moment of thought, and the spírit of a people. The unrepresentable paradoxically becomes the ultimate form in which three speculative postulates are preserved: the idea of a correspondence between the form and the content of art; the idea of a total intelligibílíty of the forms of human experience. including the most extreme; and, finally, the idea of a correspondence between the explanatory reason of events and the formative reason of art. 

I shall conclude briefly with my opening question. Some things are unrepresentable as a function of the conditions to which a subject of representation must submit it is to be part of a determínate regime of art, a specífic regime of the relations between exhibition and signification. Corneille's Oedipe provided us with an example of maximum constraint, a determinate set of conditions defining the properties that subjects of the representation must possess to permit an adequate submission of the visible to the sayable; a certain type of intelligibility concentrated in the connectíon of actions and a well-adjusted dívision of proximity and distance between the representation and those to whom it is addressed. Thís set of conditions excIusively defines the representative regime in art, the regime of harmony between poiesis and aesthesis disrupted by the The Oedipal pathos of knowledge. If there are things which are unrepresentable, they can be located in this regime. In our regime - the aesthetic regime in art this notion has no determinable content, other than the pure notion of discrepancy with the representative regime. It expresses the absence of a stable relationship between exhibition and signification. But this maladjustment tends towards more representation, not less: more possibilities for constructing equívalences, for rendering what is absent present, and for making a particular adjustment of the relationship between sense and non-sense coincide wíth a particular adjustment of the relationship between presentation and revocation. 
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Anti-representative art is constitutively an art without unrepresentable things. There are no longer any inherent límits to representation, to its possibilíties. This boundlessness also means that there is no longer a language or for which is appropriate to a subject, whatever it might be. This lack of appropriateness runs counter both to credence in a language peculiar to art and to the affirmation of the írreducible singularity of certain events. The assertion of unrepresentability claims that some things can only be represented in a certain type of form, by a type of language appropriate to their exceptionality. Stricto sensu, the thís idea is vacuous. It simply expresses a wish: the paradoxical desire that, in the very regime which abolishes the representative suitability of ferrous to subjects, appropriate forms respecting the singularity of the exception still exist. Since this desire is contradictory in principIe, it can only be realised in an exaggeration which, in order to ensure the fallacious equation between anti-representative art and an art of the unrepresentable places a whole regime of art under the sign of holy terror. I have tried to show that this exaggeration itself merely perfects the system of rationalisation it claims to denounce. The ethical requirement that there should be an art appropriate to exceptional experience dictates exaggeration of the forms of dialectical intelligibility against which the rights of the unrepresentable are supposedly being upheld. In order to assert an unrepresentabílity in the art that is commensurate with an unthinkabílity of the event, the latter must itself have been rendered entirely thinkable, entirely necessary according to thought. The logic of the unrepresentable can only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it.

Jacques Rancière​/The Future of the Image/Part 1: The Future af the Image/THE SPECULAtIVE HYPERBOLE OF THE UNREPRESENTABLE