aesthetucs and the political. an essay on francis alys's green line

Cultural Critique 78—Spring 2011—Copyright 2011 Regents of the University of Minnesota

AESTHETICS AND THE POLITICALAN ESSAY ON FRANCIS ALŸS’S GREEN LINE

Tony Fisher

In 1949 a peculiar act of political vandalism, perversely remi-niscent of Paul Klee’s technique of “taking a line for a walk,” saw thede facto division of East and West Jerusalem. This act, which soughtto reXect the new distribution of power following the cessation ofhostilities in the war between Arab and Zionist forces of the previousyear, was one that both literally and symbolically redrew the map ofthe region. All that it required was the penciling of two lines across amap of Palestine.1 The Jordanian representative, Abdallah El-Tal, drewhis line using a red wax crayon, while Moshe Dayan on the Israeli sidedrew his line in green. It is the green line that would in time, of course,acquire an emblematic signiWcance for Palestinian aspirations, reach-ing far beyond the pressing exigencies of the political situation of 1948.The profound ambiguity of Dayan’s simple act of inscription wouldlater be captured by Meron Benvenisti when he astutely remarked:“Who owned the ‘width of the line?’” (Benvenisti, 57). Indeed the thick-ness of the line created by the wax crayon would produce a bizarreand unintended consequence: on a map whose scale was 1:20,000, it would equate to a stretch of no-man’s land, sixty to eighty metersin breadth and several hundred kilometers in length. The rhetoricalweight of Benvenisti’s question, however, has less to do with the facts ofthis aberrant result and more to do with the stark way in which it madeproblematic the issue of ownership. In this way, Benvenisti ex posedthe fundamental paradox of the founding act of partition itself. This“cartographic monstrosity,” as Benvenisti was to describe the “greenline,” insofar as it resolved the crisis, at the same time perpetuated it.

It is not hard to see why an artist such as Francis Alÿs, whose workis preoccupied with exploring and uncovering those misaligned andatopic or unplaceable regions located on the margins of sociogeo-graphic visibility, would be attracted to the story of the green line.

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One can also see why he might perceive in it something rather alle-gorical, whose signiWcance is yet to be determined. At any rate, overhalf a century after the line was Wrst fatefully executed, this Belgianexile-cum-Mexican artist would spend two days walking the now in -famous green line. Armed with a can of paint into whose base he hadpunctured a small hole, Alÿs traversed the hills, valleys, and streetsof Jerusalem, leaking along the path behind him a thin drizzle of greenpaint. Alÿs was not only retracing the contours of Dayan’s line, drylyinverting Klee’s dictum, he was also reinscribing the original act of par-tition through a performative act of iteration. In doing so he was open-ing up the undeniable ambiguity of the “margin,” at once both realand imagined, created by the arbitrary thickness of Dayan’s pencil.

At Wrst glance, the purpose and meaning of this act would appearto be self-evident. Alÿs was using art as a way of confronting one ofthe world’s most wretched and intractable political crises. The GreenLine is thus a manifestly political work of art. Even the title Alÿs gave tohis “dérive” through Jerusalem in 2004 attests to its obvious political

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Figure 1. Survey of Palestine, 1946.

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Figure 2. Francis Alÿs, Jerusalem. Photo Rachel Leah Jones, 2004.

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intent: Sometimes doing something political can become poetic . . . and some-times doing something poetic can become political. Nevertheless we shouldtake care not to make premature judgments about what this signiWes,especially since Alÿs warns us that his turn to the political should byno means be taken as embracing any kind of militancy. In point offact, one must situate the work in the context of the broader questionAlÿs was himself to ask: “How can art remain politically signiWcantwithout assuming a doctrinal standpoint or aspiring to become socialactivism?” Framed in this way, the meaning of the work appears per-plexing. How are we to comprehend the nature of Alÿs’s interventiongiven this puzzling question? Here is the challenge that will preoc-cupy us in what follows. Certainly Alÿs wishes us to understand theGreen Line as a “political” work of art. But it is also, at the same time,a work of art that poses a disconcerting and in fact decisive question:In what way can a work of art be political?2

This is not a new question, of course—thinkers such as Althusser,Bourdieu, and, more recently, Jacques Rancière have all attempted tograpple with it, as did Sartre, Adorno, Brecht, and Lukács a genera-tion before them.3 What can be said however is that Alÿs provides uswith a fresh way of posing the question. What is more, to the extentthat it is articulated through the work itself, the Green Line also pro-vides a clue as to how it should (and equally should not) be answered.My approach to this question, however, will be oblique. Before wecan hope to Wnd an answer to the question posed by this work, we mustWrst discern for ourselves what that question means. To do this re -quires that we enquire into the general, one might even say “formal,”terms of the problematic regarding the relation between the politicaland the aesthetic. Only after we have done this might we then Wndourselves in a position to detect in what way Alÿs’s work provides aresponse to the problematic of the political within the concrete, spe -ciWc, and material setting of the Green Line.

THE STATE OF AESTHETIC EXCEPTION

Let us consider Alÿs’s title a little more closely, with its two thought-provoking “axioms”: (1) sometimes doing something political can be -come poetic, and (2) sometimes doing something poetic can become

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political. One can extrapolate from these statements at least threeunderlying assumptions or, better still, “theorems” that might be saidto govern the relation of the political to the aesthetic and whose valid-ity the work aims, one way or another, to put to the test.

The Wrst theorem presents the poetic and the political as twonomenclatures standing in an antagonistic relationship to one another.According to this theorem we Wnd, on one side of the divide, the sys-tem of poetic utterances and, on the other, the system of proper namesfor expressions of good governance—in fact, what will amount to theopposition of politics and poetics in its classical Platonic sense. Thepoetic refers to a certain type of speech act that must be differentiatedfrom the discursive sphere of the political, just as persuasion, oratory,and rhetoric must be properly preserved according to the Platonicschema from their falsiWcation within the idiom of mimetic acts inso-far as the latter appropriates them for theatrical effect. While onedomain aims at reality and justice the other delivers us over to noth-ing other than mere semblance. To be sure, Plato accepts that there isan art to politics, but this by no means requires the reduction of pol-itics to a form of poeisis. On the contrary, the Wrst theorem adverts toan argument for the containment of the power of art or more pre-cisely, the “artisan,” by delimiting that power as one suitably sub-servient to the needs and requirements of the political and moral orderof the polis.4

A second theorem introduces a paradox since it simultaneouslyenforces and undermines this classical differentiation of the poeticand political, with its insistence on the obeisance of the former to thelatter. It can be derived, on the one hand, from Alÿs’s use of the adverb“sometimes,” which bears within it signiWcantly the quantiWer “some.”There may be some times in which political acts are poetic, just asthere are some poetic acts that are on occasion political. Equally, thereare other times when this is not the case. Alternatively, as this way offormulating the matter shows, the second theorem derives from thefact that for Alÿs the statement is always in principle reversible. Andso now the opposition of art and politics does not preclude the tra-versal by the poetic of that which separates and differentiates it fromthe political, or vice versa, but neither does it necessitate such a cross-ing. In this way, one can acknowledge the interpenetration of thesetwo idioms, these two modes of speech, and also of what makes them

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distinct. One admits, accordingly, the possibility for the appearanceof the political within the poetic and for the incursion of the poetic inthe sphere of politics, each describing two discrete movements. At thesame time, one also maintains a logical space of non-contaminationand non-identity, preserving the formal autonomy of art and the spe -ciWcity of political utterances by allocating to each its proper domain.Art and politics still refer in the last instance, according to this read-ing of the axiom, to two different modalities of speech and action,and in fact, in their purest form, to two distinct langues.

To get some leverage on the third theorem, which volatizes every-thing, we need to ask how this might yet be possible. How can thesetwo opposing terms come to occupy the place of the other withoutsimply collapsing the difference that makes them what they are; thatis, without raising the perilous specter of which Benjamin once spoke,the aestheticization of politics, or its converse, the deWling of the aes-thetic by base political sentiment? To be sure, such a traversal wouldalways in practice imply the risk of conXation, reducing politics tofacile presentation, or, alternately, enlisting art into the service of anunreWned and aesthetically naïve didacticism. Nevertheless, the thirdtheorem also signiWes for our understanding of Alÿs something rathermore scrupulous and precise. It names the condition of possibilitythat allows art to intervene in the sphere of the political. To be precise,what the axiom states on this third reading is that the poetic act canbecome political and yet retain its autonomy from politics; while cor-respondingly the political can assume a poetic form without surren-dering everything to mere semblance, as Plato feared. For this theorem,which speciWes the condition for the possibility of a poeisis that is polit-ical and of a politics of the poetic, what we Wnd is that in both for-mulations the statement refers us to a reversible movement where itis a matter of doing one thing in the act of becoming another.

Of course we need to make sense of this rather obscure idea of“doing one thing in the act of becoming another,” and in terms of Alÿs’sproject, but to set the scene for doing so we must delve somewhatdeeper into the general implications posed by this work with regardto the relation of the political to the aesthetic. Let us remind ourselvestherefore of Alÿs’s question, but now attending to what it speciWcallyexcludes. How can art remain politically signiWcant without assum-ing a doctrinal standpoint or aspiring to social activism? What this

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excludes in fact, or so it would seem, is precisely politics from the workof art—what Sartre once referred to as the “committed” work of art.It is precisely because it puts into contention the idea of a committedwork of art that the question strikes us as interesting, even paradoxi-cal. As a consequence, Alÿs’s question might be restated as follows:in what way can art be “political” without engaging in politics?

Sartre himself, it should be said, believed that—with the excep-tion of literary prose—art provided a rather inadequate means forexpressing the artist’s political commitments. ReXecting on Picasso’sGuernica, he would write, “Does anyone think that it won over a sin-gle heart to the Spanish cause?” (Sartre, 4). In this way, Sartre’s notionof a committed work performed its own act of exclusion. He ex -cluded any work that pointed away from a situation due to the self-referentiality of the medium. Prosaic semioticity is thus awarded priority by Sartre over the opaque aestheticism of nonliterary formsof art. What he presupposed in so doing was an immediate and un -problematic correlation of form and function within the committedwork of literary art. And thus in his mind an unbroken continuumextended between literature, life, and the rhetorico-political act. Spe -ciWcally, Sartre presupposed, on the one hand, a correlation betweenwriting, rhetoric, and intended effect and, on the other hand, analmost authoritarian identity of sense and reference, through whichthe work of literature was able to designate, on his account at least, thetruth of a situation. Because of this, writing was conceived by Sartreas equivalent to a speech act possessing a certain illocutionary force;“style” was understood as the form through which the art of persua-sion was to produce its effects on the reader; and Wnally, reading wasgrasped, not just in terms of a better understanding of the politicaldimension of the situation, but in terms of the generation of actualperlocutionary outcomes as directed by the author’s explicit inten-tion vis-à-vis the situation in question. In short, Sartre presupposedwhat Jacques Rancière has recently called “the pedagogical model ofthe efWcacy of art” (Rancière 2008, 59 [my translation]).

It should be observed that what is in dispute here is not the ideathat “commitment is harmful to the art of writing,” which is whatSartre’s early critics had assumed. The objection, rather, is to the ideathat the writer’s function is to “call a spade a spade,” as Sartre, betray-ing his impatience with the literary avant-garde, proclaims at one point


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(“If one starts deploring the inadequacy of language to reality . . . onemakes oneself an accomplice of the enemy” [Sartre, 210]). Against this,Rancière will argue that there is no longer any basis for according trans-parent representational powers to any form of art—literature included.“The collapse of the representational paradigm,” as Rancière says,“means not only the collapse of a hierarchical system of address. Itmeans the collapse of a whole regime of meaning” (Rancière 2004b,16).5 It is Rancière’s view, in fact, contrary to Sartre’s understanding,that what we term “literature”—a mode of writing that arose duringthe nineteenth century and whose canonical form is the novel—bearswitness to an event that fundamentally shatters the idea of writing asthe supplement of a speech act. In its place we Wnd, as Rancière pro-poses to call it, “the democratic disorder of literariness.” LiterarinesssigniWes the “democracy of the mute letter, meaning the letter thatanybody can retrieve and use in his or her way” (15). The notion ofcommitment, which is so eloquently and passionately defended inWhat Is Literature?, simply belies, as Rancière sees it, the profound fail-ure on the part of Sartre to acknowledge the occurrence of a radicalhistorical shift in the speciWc epistemic conditions determining notjust the production and reception of art—but, as Rancière says, of thevery “partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, whichallows (or does not allow) some speciWc data to appear” (10). WhatSartre consequently fails to see is how the aesthetic transformation ofart precludes the very possibility of the art work as effective politicalutterance (10). The corollary of this, as Rancière will point out, inanother context, is that “aesthetic education and experience do notpromise . . . to support the cause of political emancipation with formsof art” (Rancière 2009, 33).

Accordingly, if art is dominated by, as Rancière puts it, “regimes ofthe image”—“a priori forms of historical sensibility” (Rancière 2005,13)—and if, according to this analysis, the current regime of the imagesees art today governed by the aesthetic disposition, then the idea ofcommitment is axiomatically undermined by what this regime inaugu-rates: the alienation of art from the assumptions of communicativerationality. In de facto terms, the speciWc historicity of the work of arttoday witnesses a break with the classicist schema, a break in the rela-tion whereby form was subsumed to function, which is the foundingprinciple of mimesis (“the adaptation of expression to subject matter is

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a principle of the representative tradition that the aesthetic regime ofart has called into question” [Rancière 2004a, 61]). As a result, one nolonger has any automatic right to proclaim the effectiveness of the workof art as the bearer of a univocal message—and not least because theaesthetic regime, if this is correct, must already have reconWgured orrecast “a priori” the fundamental conditions of sensible understanding,turning it away from the reception of the terms of a message toward, asBourdieu once thought to call it, an “aesthetic perception” in which weWnd a “practical negation of the objective intention of a signal” (29).Hence, Rancière asserts: “The core of the problem, is that there is nocriterion for establishing an appropriate correlation be tween the pol-itics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics” (Rancière 2004a, 62).

But now, at least if we are to follow Rancière along this path, itseems the very lack of a criterion that could assert the self-certaintyof a political intention through the work of art is to be identiWed withthe emergence of a fundamental paradox,6 which detains the currentepoch and holds it captive to the opacity of the Sign. To begin with,we can locate in the origins of the aesthetic regime an emancipatorymoment, as enunciated in Kant’s third critique and then later devel-oped in Schiller’s “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in which artis rendered autonomous from the functionalist representationalismof the categories of understanding.7 On the other hand, Rancière noteshow this autonomy very rapidly produces a new pathology that assailsart, and which is betrayed through certain symptoms characterizingthe fate of art with increasing severity up to the present period. Theprincipal symptom takes the form of a crisis at the level of the aes-thetic. The attempt to assert the singularity or autonomy of art simul-taneously induces a state in which we Wnd the dissolution of the verydistinction of art from other forms of “doing and making.” Not onlydo we thus witness a collapse of the mimetic order, we also witness acollapse of the hierarchy of aesthetic practices. What ensues is a per-petual state of “aesthetic exception.” This means that what deWnes thepolitical dimension of art within the prevailing epoch of Rancière’s“aesthetic regime” is a fundamentally negative disposition, whichexpresses itself through dissent from any aesthetic norm. The state of“aesthetic exception,” as I have called it—the refusal of an aestheticnorm—suspends indeWnitely the principle of adequation that was thelocus standi of the mimetic ideal of classical poeisis.8 With its suspension,


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the relation of art to politics is rendered doubly ambiguous, since whatbegins with an “emancipatory” gesture soon manifests an underlyingsocial contradiction, which we must now begin to specify more accu-rately. First, the aesthetic revolution constitutes a process in whichthe normative distinctions that structured and divided the classicalworld are “delegitimized”: “The break with mimesis . . . meant thatthere was no longer any principle of distinction between what be -longed to art and what belonged to everyday life” (Rancière 2005, 21).Not only do we Wnd a transformation in the forms of thought aboutpolitics, but the abruption of the aesthetic itself corresponds to ademand for a new political paradigm, rejecting the repressive hierar-chies of the old oligarchic state. Second, however, to the extent thatthe “new aesthetic regime of art and its politics” threatens to unleash“the disease of literarity,” which is to say, political and social disor-der (and speciWcally through an increasing demand for equality, “ex -pressed in its political form,” as Marx was to proclaim, “as the emanci -pation of workers” [Marx, 299]) it gives rise to an equally radical remedythat is itself made possible only through the aesthetic turn:

In the old representational regime, the frame of intelligibility of humanactions was patterned on the model of the causal rationality of volun-tary actions, linked together and aimed at deWnite ends. Now, whenmeaning becomes a “mute” relation of signs to signs, human actions areno longer intelligible as successful or unsuccessful pursuits of aims bywilling characters. And the characters are no longer intelligible throughtheir ends. They are intelligible through the clothes they wear, the stonesof their houses or the wallpaper of their rooms. (Rancière 2005, 19)

Where at Wrst the aesthetic revolution made possible the radicalliterature of Flaubert—that is, provided the circumstances for a gen-uinely egalitarian form of writing—the selfsame descriptive techniquesthat had overturned the representational and dramatic paradigm (byvigorously dismissing the priority classicism gave to action over life)fashioned in turn the epistemic condition that would inexorably leadto the sociological suppression of “literarity.” The emergent hegemonyof the aesthetic produced, in short, sociologistic modes of descriptionthat served to reinscribe social distinction across the mesh of socialpractices. Sociology then through its method of deciphering and dis-playing everyday life and its symptoms, and without being able to alterthe underlying fatalism of its approach one iota, simply condemned

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at the level of theory those whom it selected for observation to theever-increasing entrenchment of the modes of production and domi-nation it claimed to diagnose. Hence Rancière’s objection to Bourdieu’sstructural hermeneutics of distinction, which produces, as he describesit in The Philosopher and His Poor, “a science of rankings, setting indi-viduals in their proper places and reproduced in judgments” (Ran-cière 2003, 167). It is this perplexing contradiction at the heart of theaesthetic regime that induces for Rancière genuine skepticism con-cerning the fate of an expressly political or “emancipatory” ambitionwithin art. But also it shows how the new politics reverts, in the lastinstance, to the old politics; that is, reverts to a mode of the politicalthat seeks the total suppression of the radical democratic impetus;that seeks, in a word, the suppression of “politics.”9

And so, it is against the historical emergence of the state of aes-thetic exception that we can and must understand the skepticismimplicit in Alÿs’s question over the role of art as an effective means ofconducting militant politics today. Indeed, any engagement of art inthe politics of commitment might well strike us as naïve given thetwo broad paradoxes enumerated in the discussion outlined above.One would demonstrate, in the case of so-called political art, if notobtuseness, at the very least a profound lack of appreciation of thedisruptive effects of the state of aesthetic exception on the transmis-sibility of a message; the suspension of the presupposition of the trans-parency of representation. The other paradox, which discloses thecontradictions at play in the revolutionary shift in aesthetic practicesover the past two hundred years, warns us that the emancipatoryaspirations of art are founded on the very regime that has come todominate and administer ever-more thoroughly the democratic im -pulse that it once promised to unleash. Certainly, art discovers theeveryday but at the very same time that a sociologizing mode of pol-itics subjects everyday life to what Foucault would call the “inspec-torial eye of power,” and Rancière the parapolitics of a “police order.”10

TOWARD ANOTHER POLITICS OF THE AESTHETIC

Given the state of aesthetic exception, then, that marks out the aes-thetic regime as contradiction, what sense can we give at this juncture


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to Alÿs’s original question of how a work of art can be political with-out engaging in politics?

There is a reXex answer to this question, of course, which is notwithout a certain appeal and which must be considered. It correspondsbroadly to Bourdieu’s sociological reduction of art to the abstractcondition of the habitus. But not only does this argument regress tothe depressing and, dare I say, rather trivial notion that all art is polit-ical just by virtue of the fact that all art belongs to a socially encodedsystem of “taste,” it blithely exchanges skepticism for pessimism. Inthis manner, even politics is condemned by the gaze of sociology to akind of structural impotence, which art makes manifest in sympto-matic form. Apolitical art becomes political by default regardless ofits being wholly incognizant and unconscious of the disposition towhich it panders. Its disavowal of politics, which amounts to the dis-avowal of the social condition of art, exempliWed notoriously by Théo -phile Gautier and the art for art’s sake movement, puts it, so to speak,in bad faith. Political art, by contrast, falls into bad faith as soon as itasserts a position for Bourdieu, if only because positionality can sig-nify nothing other than an entrenchment and repetition of those pre-determined coordinates conditioning the situation against which thepolitical artist claims, however earnestly, and with whatever degreeof integrity, to be protesting. Hence every position political art canadopt must “always already” have been assigned according to thesocial mechanics secretly at work in the prejudgments of taste. Hence,an indefatigable process of entrenchment indeed belongs to the logicof positionality that gives the lie to all so-called radical acts.

But there is an alternative to the pessimistic concoction that Bourdieu’s “blanket-theoretical” approach cooks up, and which Alÿsmanages to capture in the Green Line. To get a purchase on what thisalterna tive might be, it is worth taking note of what Rancière saysregarding, as he expresses it, the “dream of a suitably political workof art,” which is “in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship be -tween the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to usethe terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that wouldtransmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic ofmeaningful situations” (Rancière 2004a, 63). Let us ask, then, in whatway does Rancière’s notion of “rupture” help make sense of Alÿs’s

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otherwise paradoxical work of art, which is “political” but does notengage in politics?

Allow me to return momentarily to a remark made at the outsetregarding Dayan’s original act of inscription that, to recall, was saidto possess a certain allegorical signiWcance for Alÿs, the interpreta-tion of which is crucial to the way we understand this work. Whatthat signiWcance amounts to is this: the Green Line presents us with anallegory of the political. Or rather and more precisely stated, Alÿs’siterative and as he calls it “meaningless” act allegorizes the “greenline,” transforming it into a metaphor of the political. In this way, Alÿsdiverts our attention away from the preestablished facts of the situationto its founding moment; to the zero and null point of its constitutionin which a speciWc political distribution is brought into existence viaa sovereign act of power or “will.” That is to say, it brings into beinga certain “situation” and a certain “politics” of the situation. It is forthis reason that Alÿs’s act of walking the line can be said to be quiteliterally “meaningless.” It is meaningless in the strict and proper sensethat it is politically inscrutable, for although it makes reference to the“green line,” occupies it so to speak, it makes no direct or self-evidently“positional” investment in the situation. To be readable, by contrast,would be to assign one’s act a meaning, either wittingly or unwittingly,according to the pregiven logic of the situation; but it is precisely thissituational logic of identiWcation, in short, the circuits and relays ofidentity politics that Alÿs wishes to disrupt. His act thus opts for nei-ther one side nor the other. It is neither “for the Palestinians,” nor inopposition to the Palestinians is it “for the Israelis.” What the workrehearses is therefore not “politics” in the usual sense of positional-ity—taking up a position. What it rehearses is the performative eventthrough which the political act Wrst “opens up” a situation and, toborrow a phrase from Althusser, “takes hold.” What it rehearses, spe -ciWcally, is Dayan’s original performative act of determining and pro-ducing, through the inscription of a simple, almost childish line, acrossthe map of Palestine, the particular distribution of power whose effectis to divide and apportion the city of Jerusalem. What the work pointsto thereby is not “politics” but its strategic effects, whose spread de -termines the sociogeographic topos: the political logic of the situationas manifest in a concrete and material sense. What it speaks of vis-à-visthe situation is its authorizations and prohibitions on the movement


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of people; its displacements and its divisions; its possession of a “ter-ritory”—in reality the inverted logic of dispossession dressed up as aWeld of “defensive” maneuvering. What it resists in this way is thematrixing of the situation, which speciWes what is enactable accord-ing to the normative restrictions imposed by the legal, military, andideological apparatus that springs from it.

It is precisely so as to bring into question this prior and constitu-tive logic of the political and its grim effects, which we are more thanfamiliar with, that Alÿs does not engage in politics.

Here several questions immediately press themselves upon us:

1. What exactly is the “logic of the political” that is disclosedthrough this allegorizing and iterative act?

2. In what way does this performative act, which we describedearlier as a matter of “doing one thing in the act of becominganother,” inform us about the relationship between the politi-cal and the aesthetic?

3. What does this intervention within the situation of the greenline tell us about the founding act of political sovereignty?

4. What, in more general terms, does the Green Line reveal in termsof the tactics of “political” art under the state of the aestheticexception?

Allow me to put Xesh on the bare bones of these questions howeverbrieXy in the space remaining and by way of the example of the workitself. Now recall that Alÿs’s title, according to our third reading ofthe axiom earlier, initially called to mind two mutually reciprocal butreversible movements. The Wrst, sometimes doing something political canbecome poetic, is a movement from the political to the aesthetic. Thesecond, sometimes doing something poetic can become political, describes amovement from the aesthetic toward the political. To these two abstractmovements and their correlative polarities we can attach two corre-sponding concrete events. The Wrst event is historical: it is the originalact of inscription, a political performative, so to speak, which occurredin 1949 with Dayan’s drawing of the green line. The second “event,”occurring more recently in 2004, is Alÿs’s riposte to Dayan—the actof walking the line. With the event of Dayan’s inscription we accessthe Wrst movement, which reaches the aesthetic through the act of doing

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something political. By contrast, in Alÿs’s iterative act of “walking theline” we Wnd the second movement that, traveling contrariwise toDayan, reaches the political through the act of doing something “aes-thetic.” This second movement is by no means to be thought of interms of a simple inversion of the Wrst movement, and even less doesit accomplish anything as lofty as the dialectical work of sublation, asthough the line in this way could be “redeemed” or ennobled by anact that raised it to the status of “art.” Rather, the second movementsigniWes something closer to an act of perturbation; it is an inventiveresponse, on the part of Alÿs, designed to disturb and unsettle theunderlying logic motivating Dayan’s original act.

Let us now try to be more precise still. In the Wrst case we reachthe aesthetic dimension of the political. This is exempliWed but by nomeans restricted to the cartographic delineation of a territory, quite lit-erally through, as Michel de Certeau once expressed it, the “panopticpractice” of map-making: Xattening out the temporal and lived artic-ulation of place and transforming it by means of planar projection intoa specialized and strategic system of points. “Whence,” as de Certeauexplains, “the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can beobserved and measured, and thus control and ‘include’ them within itsscope of vision” (de Certeau, 36).11 Still in more general terms, the logicof the political can be said to determine the sensuous or “material”appearance of existing social reality—the “distribution of the sensi-ble,” as Rancière puts it (2004a, 9). In other words, the logic of the polit-ical expresses itself materially, determinately, and practically througha poeisis—the evental appearance, which is simultaneously the condi-tion of emergence, the grid of intelligibility, the prerequisite of thespeciWc modes of visibility, determining the sociopolitical topos, itsconWgurations of power, and related forms of subjectiWcation.12

In the case of the second movement, which is our primary con-cern here, we discover two things about the relation of art to the polit-ical. The Wrst is primarily negative and conWrms what we have alreadysaid. The political power of art has nothing to do with making a politi-cal statement, not least because if it did then we would have no meansof distinguishing between these two movements, and thus no meansof differentiating a work of art from a work of politics. On the contrary,the work of art would simply be at best a political act in an aestheticguise. At worst, the movement from the political to the aesthetic would


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deprive art of its power to disrupt the sensible order of the political.In this case, and because it already results from that “order,” art wouldbe deprived of any genuine way of unsettling it.

Nevertheless, as we discover in Alÿs’s Green Line, there is an alter-native possibility, one that does not subordinate art to politics—to thecontrary. In fact, we can discern in Alÿs what one could perhaps calla critical species of poeisis—a certain movement that has the power todisclose the logic of the political at the same time as it resists its grav-itational Weld, its heliotropic inXuence. More signiWcantly, because ofthis “resistant-disclosive power” we Wnd in art a means of disruptingthe aesthetic dimension that belongs to a given political conjuncture,and precisely because revealing the logic of the political amounts toa teleological suspension of its order (its politics). This “critical poei-sis” opens up in the second movement, described above, when artmoves by means of the aesthetic toward the disclosure of the aes-thetic dimension of the political. Critical poeisis is thus the disclosivemovement that reaches beyond the given distributions of the situationto grasp the political dimension as such. It is a critical poeisis becauseit accomplishes this disclosure not by doing politics but through theact of doing something “aesthetic,” and it is “critical” in the propersense of the term because it Wnds within this act the limit condition ofthe political as such.

Consider in this regard the act of “walking the line” and the actof “drawing the line.” Wherever and whenever one Wnds a line—andas we know, they are everywhere, both actual and metaphorical—oneWnds a means of demarcating both a border and the territory on eitherside of it. There one also Wnds a barrier, a system of inclusion andexclusion, a way of delimiting “home” and “alien,” a de facto meansof distinguishing between those who are and by deWnition are not“equal” to one another, who are awarded (or denied) rights, accord-ing to the speciWc law that authorizes and polices the line. But alsoone Wnds through the device of the line the means of determining therejectamenta of a situation and so of deciding upon those who shouldbe subject to a process of internal exclusion and sanction. This is whatthe line, so to speak, “represents.” But the line is not simply a sign rep-resenting a border or barrier or frontier, it is also—as we have said—apolitical performative. It enacts the division it institutes within andby means of a speciWc representational schema, a speciWc politics and

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thus a speciWc “aesthetics” of the political. When Moshe Dayan, forinstance, draws the line through Jerusalem, separating eastern andwestern parts of the city, he does not simply represent the division ofIsraeli and Palestinian, he brings it into being as a political division,and he does so through a sovereign act of power from which springsthe speciWc politics of the situation. This sovereign act, of course, oweseverything to the implacable logic that constitutes it and makes itwhat it is. It is the logic of antagonism that Carl Schmitt once codiWedin terms of his famous criterion of the political. It is the distinction of“friend” and “enemy” through which, he captured, inadvertently per-haps, what we might call the pathology of politics.13 Behind Dayan’sline, this pathology is visible enough. To acknowledge the line, to bea subject of the situation, is to be contained within the matrices of anenmity that forces one to remain within its logic and whose resolu-tion would not simply be the “elimination” of the enemy, as Schmittsays, it would signify one’s own extinction. Hence the pathogens atplay in the friend/enemy distinction: within that logic, in which theadversarial other is constituted as a power of negation, one is com-pelled to seek the destruction of the very “differential” that foundsone’s own identity.14

Nevertheless, if a border is a limit whose speciWc performativitycorresponds to the way in which it executes by means of the inscrip-tion of a line the speciWc distributions, the speciWc castings and par-titions that divide the political topos, it is also qua “line” a limit. Seenin this way, which is precisely what Alÿs’s work allows us to do, is topose the question—in fact, Benvenisti’s question—“what is the nor-mative status of the line?” Is it inside or outside the terms it institutes?Is it subject to the law? Is it a law prior to the law? Or is it altogetherextra-legal? Note, therefore, this is a quid juris problem. It pertains notto the fact of the line but to the formal condition determining the actfrom which it originates. To pose the question of the line in this wayis thereby to pose a question to the power that claims for itself theauthority to legitimate its effects, its distributions, and to decide, inthe name of that power, on the terms of the “settlement” of the situa-tion. In short, it is to put in question the authority that grants itselfthe sovereign power of inscription. Now no doubt there is a perfectlygood “Schmittian” response to this question, which indeed compels usto concede that the sovereign is extra-juridical. To paraphrase Schmitt:


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sovereign is he who decides in the absence of a norm.15 It is only thesovereign, by deWnition, who has the power to suspend the law, andwho can decide in the absence of any consensus on what needs to bedone in the face of a political crisis. But Schmittian decisionism doesnot get us out of the problem. On the contrary, it exempliWes the prob-lem of the line—for the power of suspending the law is only meaning-ful, even on Schmitt’s terms, in the act of guaranteeing the restitutionof political order—that is, precisely, in securing the possibility of thereturn of the rule of law.

I shall designate this as the problem of “the paradox of the line,”which can be posed as a question. How can the forceful assertion ofan act of sovereignty prior to the law establish the law? Or to put it interms of Alÿs’s act, when Alÿs walks the line he directs our attentionWrst to the ambiguous thickness of Dayan’s pencil and second to whatthat ambiguity signiWes—namely, that the contingent thickness of theline undermines the normative authority of the sovereign act of inscrip-tion, or rather, that it undermines what that sovereign act claims tofound. While Dayan’s line signiWes the restitution of political order,the cessation of hostilities, and thus a “return to the rule of law,” italso signiWes the limit of that law by returning it to its point of origi-nation, which is one of pure contingency. What we confront with theparadox of the line is consequently the paradox of the political.

The signiWcance of the paradox can be made vivid if we considerpolitics in its classical form and in which the ideal of politics is seento be isomorphic with the ideal of founding a normative order. Thisis the reason why Plato begins his discussion of political economy inthe Republic by explicitly posing the problem of politics, good gover-nance of the polis, as a problem of justice. It is also precisely why herejects Thrasymachus’s argument that what is just corresponds to “theadvantage of the established rule” (Plato, 983). Against this, Socrateswill oppose a notion of justice that seeks no advantage for itself, butsimply the advantage of (what is) good (agathon) as such; and that cor-responds, according to the argument of the Republic, although one alsoWnds the idea expressed in Aristotle, to the well-ordered state com-posed of equals (homoioi). Expressed in more contemporary terms, apolitical system is to be founded on the ideal of social justice. The idealof politics, today, in fact, is the ideal of imposing a normative orderfounded on an egalitarian principle of citizenship. It is unfortunate,

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therefore, that the act of sovereignty, which is to say, the act of impo-sition that would ensure that principle, and which would be the solepower capable of underwriting the normative order at the point atwhich it faltered, undermines and reveals its limits. This is the alle-gorical signiWcance of the green line. For how can a power be just ifat the point of constitution it reveals itself to be unconstrained by anynorm, if its power derives from nothing less than violence?16

To be sure, one might respond that this just is the condition ofpolitics, stripped of its ideality and utopian aspirations. Political powerreveals itself thereby, in the Wnal instance, to be precisely for the advan-tage of the established rule. But as a consequence it can no longer layclaim to an ideal of social justice. The problem is, however, that mat-ters are not resolved so simply—something that is again revealed inthe Green Line. After all, even if the paradox of the political could beresolved by denying the necessity of the principle of justice, the issuenevertheless returns to haunt the political situation in the form ofthat which has been constitutively “repressed” within its terms. Wehave arrived, in this way, surely and inescapably, at the threshold of anew paradox, which we shall designate the paradox of justice. In otherwords, if we are forced to concede that politics exists in the absenceof justice, this by no means gets rid of the problem of justice. On thecontrary, we will see that the condition of possibility of politics revealsitself, to express it in a somewhat Derridean fashion, precisely in thecondition of the impossibility of justice. It is because justice is not thatit is capable of providing a genuine political demand with its motive.Only because justice is not can it be that which is called for.17

What is more, because the paradox of justice is the Xip side of theparadox of the political, one cannot easily dismiss it as an arbitraryside effect of the logic of the political. This means the question of jus-tice is always already constitutive of a situation: it belongs to its struc-ture, so to speak. Hence if one wishes to speak of the effect this paradoxhas on the structure of a situation—for instance, that of the green line—it is always one of an implicit correlation. The lack of justice on oneside of the line produces what we might call an ethical deWcit on theother. Which is why Alÿs’s work is so compelling. It shows that be -yond the politics of antagonism, one can discern within the logic ofthe political the supplementary rationality of a demand that transcendsthe situation, but which is implicit in its structure. Above all, it can be


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discerned in the experience of an irreducible lack, which cleaves apartwhat the situation and its politics have attempted to suture into atotality. The name of this experience, which invalidates all claims tototality, is inequality. This then is perhaps what Alÿs can be said to bedoing in this work. In retracing the inscription of the line, Alÿs drawsour attention not just to the possibility but to the fact of the equipoten-tiality for “justice,” and he does this speciWcally by demonstrating aconvergence of the poetic and the political within a symbolic act thatstands for the very embodiment of the idea that in an overdeterminedsociopolitical structure one can apply pressure equally at any pointacross its topology precisely because what it lacks is actual justice.

This lack is itself revelatory of one of the deepest problematics ofthe political, which pertains to the very “event” of the political. OneWnds this problematic expressed in Rancière, when he speaks of the“law of chance,” where “politics begins” (2006, 40). But it is perhapsmost cogently expressed in the Wnal writings of his erstwhile mentor,Louis Althusser, in his reXections on what he called “aleatory materi-alism,” which is a philosophy of the “encounter” and of the “void.”Here Althusser tells us that the fact of power is always belied by an -other fact that it seeks to suppress. Namely, that political power isalways at heart the assertion of a “right” without right. It is an asser-tion of force, in other words, that mistakes the power of a fact—the“established fact” as Althusser puts it, or the “fact of history”—asjustiWcation for the system that is born with it, and through which itseeks, in juridical, cultural, and political forms of mystiWcation, thedignity and solidity of enduring authority, entitlement, and legitimacy.Althusser’s point is that behind the apparent necessity of a historicalsituation there lies a “void” (169), a state of radical contingency—an“Epicurean rain” (168), as he expresses it, that belies all claims to ratio-nal or teleological justiWcation within history, and whose mytho gemehistory itself Wnally exposes. “History here,” he writes, “is nothingbut the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by anotherindecipherable fact to be accomplished without our knowing in ad -vance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will comeabout” (174).

Thus, if one cannot dispute the fact of power, one can neverthe-less put into question the “power of the fact.” Or otherwise stated:What is disputable, at least according to this deWnition of history, is

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the claim of justiWcation after the fact through which every politicalformation strives to legitimate itself.18

It is precisely this act of “putting into question” the power of thefact that sometimes doing something political can become poetic . . . and some-times doing something poetic can become political performs. Resisting thepower of the fact—indeed, resisting the temptation to declare a polit-ical position—enables Alÿs to release the situation from the logic thatimmobilizes it. On this point we can defer to a remark made by Alÿshimself:

Poetic licence functions like a hiatus in the atrophy of a social, political,military or economic crisis. Through the gratuity or the absurdity of thepoetic act, art provokes a moment of suspension of meaning, a brief sen-sation of senselessness that reveals the absurd of the situation and,through this act of transgression, makes you step back or step out andrevise your prior assumptions about this reality. And when the poeticoperation manages to provoke that sudden loss of self that itself allowsa distancing from the immediate situation, then poetics might have thepotential to open up a political thought. (40)

CONCLUSION

Alÿs’s work the Green Line resists politics precisely in order to revealthe aesthetic dimension of the political and what it delimits. On theone hand, it reveals the limit, border, and threshold constitutive ofpolitical identities—a “pathological” logic of enmity, as we saw earlier.On the other hand, it exposes the supplementary rationality of thepolitical, which expresses itself in the twofold structure of an ethicaldeWcit on one side of the line and a compelling demand for justice onthe other.

But it also tells us something more generally about the nature andpossibility of “political art” under the state of the aesthetic exception,which brings us Wnally to our fourth question.

To be sure, we can agree with Rancière that there is no longer acriterion that can guarantee the correlation of the politics of the aes-thetic and the aesthetics of politics. Perhaps, however, we can venturethe following reXections in support of Rancière’s alternative “dreamof a suitably political work of art.” A politically motivated artist, onewho acknowledges the state of aesthetic exception, necessarily adopts


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a technique approximate to that of a tactician, rather than a strate-gist—to borrow de Certeau’s distinction. This artist will no longerstrive to assert him- or herself into the terms of a direct, confronta-tional position. The artist understands that the aim of the tactician, as de Certeau expresses it, is not conquest through full frontal attack;de Certeau’s tactician is rather more wily, his aim is to “make theweaker position seem the stronger” (de Certeau, xx). Alÿs accomplishesthis through a technique or tactic of “performative ironic instability,”if one can so designate it. By this is meant, Wrstly, that Alÿs is an iro-nist in the sense that Henri Lefebvre once had in mind when he re -marked that irony is a “kind of objectivity that goes deeper than theobjectivity of knowledge which considers itself pure and purports tocontain an absolute” (Lefebvre, 41). Alÿs is an ironist in the precisesense that he poses questions in order that those who are implicatedin them are compelled to ask them of themselves. This is the tactic ofthe Socratic ironist-cum-sophist, of course, whose power lies preciselyin the knowledge that to pose a question is to say that one does notknow—that is to say, who understands that the power of posing aquestion lies in the way it invites those who believe they know to revisitand challenge their pre-existing assumptions. Alÿs’s act, then, whichrestages, in an ironic gesture, the symbolic partitioning of Jerusalemas we have said performs Benvenisti’s question: “who owns the widthof the line?” We have noted that by asking this question, which takesno sides, Alÿs was able nevertheless to challenge the very logic of par-tition, precisely by making it visible as a logic.

This tactic of performative ironic instability, enunciating nothingother than the “open” possibility of asking a question, suggests thenthat the lesson we should draw from the state of the aesthetic exceptionis as follows: that political art today derives its power precisely from theknowledge it bears within itself—the power of dissent from any aes-thetic or established norm. On this basis, art represents a genuine coun-tervailing force to the speciWc aesthetic distributions of the political.

Notes

1. A full version of the map of Palestine before al-Nakba 1948 can be foundat http://www.PalestineRemembered.com/. Dayan’s line, of course, runs the fulllength of Palestine.

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2. The work as presented originates with this performance. In the gallery, it ispresented as a video installation documenting the walk, accompanied by the reXec -tions of commentators drawn from both sides of the line, Palestinian and Israeli.

3. On this earlier debate, essentially between the partisans of modernismand realism, see Adorno et al. The dispute Wnds its clearest expression in the anti-thetical positions of Adorno and Lukács. Of speciWc interest here are their respec-tive attitudes regarding the relation of art to pedagogy. While Lukács’s polemicalsupport for the writers of the Popular Front, and his related critique of Expres-sionism, would lead him to claim that “[whereas] in the case of the major realists. . . the broad mass of people can learn nothing from avant-garde literature” (57),Adorno, foreshadowing Jacques Rancière’s later critique of the pedagogical func-tion of art, would contend that “[t]he notion of a ‘message’ in art, even when polit-ically radical, already contains an accommodation to the world: the stance of thelecturer conceals a clandestine entente with the listeners, who could only be res-cued from deception by refusing it” (193). See also Rancière’s discussion of Schillerfor his similarities and differences with Adorno’s aesthetics (2009, 34–41).

4. See chapters 1 and 2 in Jacques Rancière’s (2003) The Philosopher and HisPoor for an extended discussion of the place of the artisan in the mimetic andpolitical economies of the Republic.

5. Adorno had also advanced, at least prima facie, similar criticisms ofSartre. However, it should be pointed out that the relationship between Rancière,Adorno, and Sartre is by no means clear cut. While Adorno and Rancière appearto share many points in common, substantive differences remain: “The modernistrigour of an Adorno, wanting to expurgate the emancipatory potential of art ofany form of compromise with cultural commerce and aestheticized life, becomesthe reduction of art to the ethical witnessing of unrepresentable catastrophe”(Rancière 2010, 201). And he goes on to conclude: “Breaking with today’s ethicalconWguration, and returning the inventions of politics and art to their difference,entails rejecting the fantasy of their purity. . . . This necessarily entails divorcingthem from every theology of time, from every thought of a primordial trauma ora salvation to come” (202).

6. He also writes, more explicitly, that there “is no criterion for the politicalevaluation of works of art” (Rancière 2004a, 65).

7. This is exempliWed most explicitly in Kant with the distinction in thethird critique between reXective and determinate judgments and in Schiller’srelated notion of the liminal dimension of the aesthetic, which occupies an inter-mediate region between two forms of necessity—rational and natural—andwhich manifests itself in the “leap to aesthetic play” (Schiller, 134).

8. It should be pointed out that by this formulation I do not mean to invokethe form of “archipolitics,” as Rancière calls it, which eliminates the possibility ofdissensus through a reduction of politics to “the global nature of an ontologicalcatastrophe” (Rancière 2009, 43) and in virtue of which a political theology might beconceivable or justiWed. The aesthetic exception signiWes, I would say, somethingquite to the contrary. It is the hiatus caused within the logic of the political by the


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democratic seizure of the political, signaling the perpetual disruption of any cri-terion capable of legitimating a hierarchical system based on putatively immutablelaws of quality or rank.

9. For Rancière’s deWnition of democracy, see Disagreement: “Democracy isnot the parliamentary system . . . [it is] the name of a singular disruption of thisorder of distribution of bodies as a community that we proposed to conceptualizein the broader concept of the police. It is the name of what comes and interruptsthe smooth working of this order through a singular mechanism of subjectiWca-tion” (1999, 99).

10. For Rancière’s deWnition of the police and his similarities with and dif-ferences from Foucault, see 1999, 28–29.

11. In recent years, theorists working within the history of cartography havearrived at similar conclusions. This is most prominent, perhaps, in work thatapplies lessons drawn from poststructuralism, which speciWcally critiques the con-stitutive nexus of power-knowledge operating within the production and use ofmaps. See, for example, J. B. Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map,” where he describesthe map as a “silent arbiter of power” (245). Harley distinguishes between twoways of relating power to an understanding of cartography. The Wrst he refers toas “external power,” the deployment of maps in support of the exercise of geopo-litical operations of power. The second is a form of power internal to and thusexercised by cartographic practice itself. This shift in perspective allows Harleyto distinguish between “the place of cartography in a juridical system of power[and] the political effects of what cartographers do when they make maps.” Thesecond thus correlates a speciWc production “of the sensible,” that is, that of themap itself, to the very constitution of territorial distributions of power, that is,producing by making visible that which is in fact conceptual—as Harley goes onto explain: “Cartographers [in making maps] manufacture power: they create aspatial panopticon” (244).

12. It should be noted that Rancière does not, at least as far as I can tell, rec-ognize the category of “the political” as such, perhaps because he sees within it,and no doubt with some justiWcation, a residue of political theology. Thus, Rancièretells us, “politics is not the exercise of, or struggle for, power” (2009, 24). Notwith-standing the limitations of this deWnition of politics, which would demand a morethorough treatment than I have space for here, I would argue, nevertheless, that itis hard to see how one can account adequately for the relationship between powerand politics if one excludes the concept of the political, which is to say, if oneexcludes a concept capable of making sense of the relationship be tween the exer-cise of power (sovereignty) and the speciWc forms of domination and resistancethat it produces.

13. Schmitt’s proposal reads: “The speciWc political distinction to whichpolitical actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy”(1996, 26).

14. See Ernesto Laclau’s chapter “Subject of Politics, Politics of the Subject”(47–65).

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15. See Political Theology: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 2005, 5).

16. Jean-Luc Nancy similarly writes that “if the sovereign exercises its power,it is entirely on the condition of the ‘state of exception’ where laws are suspended.The fundamental illegitimacy that is in this case the condition of legitimacy mustlegitimise itself” (103).

17. Derrida formulates this question explicitly in his essay “Force of Law”;for example: “Justice is an experience of the impossible: a will, a desire, a demandfor justice the structure of which would not be an experience of aporia, wouldhave no chance to be what it is—namely, a just call for justice” (244).

18. Althusser expresses the ontological signiWcance of the aleatoric en coun -ter thus: “instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an excep-tion to it, we must think necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter ofcontingencies” (194).

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W., Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and GeorgLukács. 2007. Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate withinGerman Marxism. London: Verso.

Althusser, Louis. 2006. Philosophy of the Encounter—Later Writings, 1978–1987.Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso.

Alÿs, Francis. 2007. “Interview with Russell Ferguson.” In Francis Alÿs, 8–55. NewYork: Phaidon Press.

Benvenisti, Meron. 1998. City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans.Richard Nice. London: Routledge.

de Certeau, Michel. 1988. Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Acts of Religion. Trans. Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge.Harley, J. B. 1992. “Deconstructing the Map.” In Writing Worlds. Ed. Trevor J. Barnes

and James S. Duncan, 231–47. London: Routledge.Laclau, Ernesto. 2007. Emancipation(s). London: Verso.Lefebvre, Henri. 1995. Introduction to Modernity. Trans. John Moore. New York: Verso.Marx, Karl. 1967. “Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844.” In Writings of Young

Marx on Philosophy and Society, 283–313. Trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H.Guddat. New York: Anchor.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Trans. FrancoisRaffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Plato. 1997. “Republic.” In Complete Works, 971–1223. Trans. G. M. A. Grube andRev. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett.


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Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2003. The Philosopher and His Poor. Trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, andAndrew Parker. London: Duke University Press.

———. 2004a. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum.———. 2004b. “The Politics of Literature.” SubStance 33, no. 1: 10–24.———. 2005. “From Politics to Aesthetics?” Paragraph 28: 13–25.———. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Verso.———. 2008. Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La fabrique editions.———. 2009. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press.———. 2010. Dissensus. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum.Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2001. What Is Literature? Trans. David Caute. London: Routledge.Schiller, Friedrich. 2004. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. Reginald Snell.

New York: Dover.Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.———. 2005. Political Theology, Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans.

George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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aesthetucs and the political. an essay on francis alys's green line

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