\"Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,\" diacritics, vol. 42, no. 3 (2014), pp. 22-37.

CINEMA, SCENES, AESTHETICS AN INTERVIEW WITH JACQUES RANCIÈRE

MOZELLE FOREMAN BÉCQUER SEGUÍN

Mozelle Foreman: You claim that the time after of the films of Béla Tarr is a time of “pure, material events, against which belief will be measured for as long as life will sustain it.”1 This claim would almost seem to be a celebration of Béla Tarr’s realism as one that disallows a fear of disillusionment. That is, we should not fear to be disillusioned if what we hope for is in fact to survive to prove our beliefs against the material world. Did you choose to write about Béla Tarr from a place of optimism? Is your celebration of realism here also a celebration of the real? Jacques Rancière: Writing on Béla Tarr was not my own decision. It was the commission of the publisher, because there was a retrospective, Béla Tarr at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.2 And so they wanted to have available a short book on Béla Tarr and even the length of the text was decided by them. But, of course, I decided to write it, meaning I was interested. My first intention was not at all to look at Béla Tarr from an optimistic point of view. That was not my point. My point was only to try to spell out the reason for the emotion that I could feel in front of a film by Béla Tarr. So my first intention was not really to make any judgment but just to tell what happened on the screen from my point of view. For me this only means that the very quality of Béla Tarr’s images was linked to his refusal to follow a certain mood, a certain mood about the end of communism, the end of illusions, the end of history. But I think that part of the beauty of the shots was linked to his attitude toward his characters, which means, for instance, that, for me, also it’s a choice. I have some kind of revulsion toward a certain form of post-communist art as irony, parody, disenchantment. Of course, I tend to value the post-communist artists who don’t follow this mood. But the point is, if there is a choice it is my choice and it is true that my choice was to try to distinguish what happened on the screen from the mood of the stories that the film tells. This is why much of my book was about the relation between Krasznahorkai’s books and Béla Tarr’s films. Well, perhaps we will go back over this point later. So what about the real? Well, it means that what Béla Tarr does for me is turn issues of illusion and disillusion into issues of expectation, repetition, and change. And this is in a sense what realism is about. Realism is also about the fact of refusing to distinguish reality from illusion. I think there is a very false idea of realism as precisely sticking to the real and putting illusions aside. I think that’s not at all the case and I think that in this respect Béla Tarr’s work reminds me of the work of a novelist, namely, Joseph Conrad. And Joseph Conrad will insist on the fact that illusions and reverie—all this is real.3 So from a philosophical point of view you can say that the attempts of those people are always only illusions and swindle etc. etc. But that’s not interesting for a realist artist. For a realist artist, there is no opposition between the real and the imagination. The imagination of the characters, their fancies, are part of the real. And from the point of view of the filmmaker, what is on the screen is a kind of conflict between temporalities: the temporality of expectation—the rain penetrating the bodies and the soul—and the possibility of a sort of deviation from a circular, repetitive time to a time when you draw a straight line to move forward. So this is what realism means for me. And of course this means that realism is opposed to any kind of disenchantment and resentment. DIACRITICS Volume 42.3 (2014) 22–37 ©2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Mozelle Foreman is a PhD candidate in Romance Studies at Cornell University. Bécquer Seguín is a Mellon Sawyer Seminar fellow and PhD candidate in Romance Studies at Cornell University.

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MF: In your discussion of Béla Tarr’s “family stories” you describe the domestic space as one in which characters’ actions consist in inflicting wounds upon one another. Almanac of Fall is a privileged subject for you, as is the character Anna, who is able both to accommodate the sexual abuses of men and to transform these into opportunities to humiliate others. Not even the architectural details of the home in Almanac of Fall, as you describe them, would seem to accommodate some reverie that could interrupt this intrigue. It is clear that in your consideration this domestic sphere predicts and justifies Béla Tarr’s decision to shift his focus to the picaroon who “will be the incarnation of a pure possibility of change.”4 However, this chapter seems to take a rather negative view of the possibility of finding event in domestic (his)stories. Are there domestic (his)stories, and especially womencentered (his)stories that still offer event? JR: Well, it was not my intention to suggest that the domestic sphere was a kind of place of no exit in general. But the point is that it is not simply the domestic scene or the domestic sphere that is at issue in Almanac of Fall. It is a certain way of staging the domestic scene as the no-exit place: the apartment with no connection to anything outside it, meaning of course a certain staging of human relations as being confined in this space and being determined from the very beginning by this space. So this is a space sort of like the space of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis clos (No Exit) where the confinement of the space is precisely akin to the dramaturgy of the relations between the people. You cannot get out. And you react to the other persons’ comportment or attitude precisely from the point of view of this impossibility to move out. So in a way this is a specific staging of the domestic scene, it’s not at all a kind of necessity. I said that in the itinerary of Béla Tarr there is this first moment when he deals with domestic stories that at the same time are social stories about society and about communism and its problems, to say the least. I think there is this moment when there is a first disjunction between the social and the domestic. And with the disjunction of the social and the domestic there is the framing of the domestic sphere as the Sartrean hell, which also meant a confinement of the art of the filmmaker in a kind of really abstract atrocity: trying to fit this struggle with no exit. So in a way Almanac of Fall reaches back to a certain tradition of the domestic, of the domestic hell, perhaps going back to Strindberg through Sartre.5 I don’t think there was a decision, that Béla Tarr thought, “I cannot do this anymore.” But I think there is perhaps a certain moment in his work when there was a new kind of intertwinement between the domestic and the social. So, it’s true that in a way in Sátántangó the plot is not centered on the domestic and the domestic scene, but at the same time there is a kind of interaction between the domestic scene and this plot of change, of illusion, of swindle. I think it is how he found his way. So I have no personal idea about the possibility or impossibility of plots centered on the domestic scene. I just think that is how it happened. Which also means that there is a certain strong importance of women’s figures in his films, if I think of Estike, the young girl in Sátántangó, and also if I think of The Man from London. In a way the domestic hell at the same time is clearly not the same domestic hell. It is realism. The power of the masculine, male power. And on the other hand there is this

Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguín, with Jacques Rancière

female figure at the end of The Man from London, Mrs. Brown, who embodies a kind of figure of refusal. So I would say that from the inside of the domestic scene there is also a power of refusal, a power of refusing a certain law, which is of course the law of male authority but also the law of general corruption. So she is facing a world where corruption has become the law and she decides not to agree and the film ends with her refusal. She disappears from the screen into the white. I think there is this kind of displacement, as I’ve tried to say, after Almanac of Fall and, more specifically of course, after Damnation. There is this shift toward this plot, which is a plot of conflicting times and a plot also of conflicts between figures of swindlers and figures of idiots. And the idiot is the one who refuses. In a way, he/she is a victim of the swindler but at the same time he/she refuses the law of the swindler as the law of society, as the law of the rule. And the idiot can be embodied as well by a man or a woman and also the swindler can be embodied either by a man or a woman. I think that the sexual division has in a way been substituted by this division between two kinds of person and the possibility of exchange between positions and the sexes. MF: Writing on Damnation, you describe Béla Tarr’s “successful sequence shot.”6 This is a shot that prefers to represent the penetration of the film’s characters by the material world. I say “prefers,” because you make it very clear that this is not the only kind of shot that the film might have constructed. The consequence of this penetration, as you’ve heralded it, is that it might incite action, but only where characters’ actions are supplied with an “end.” Do you believe that the corrupt ends that you allude to in your discussion of Damnation, for instance, “winning,” pollute or in any way transform this sensible experience of penetration? And if so, how should we refer to it? Is a word like trauma useful in this instance? JR: I did not only, you know, connect the success of the sequence shot with mere penetration. Look at the case when I analyze the sequence shot with the young Estike under the rain. So the sequence shot is not only a story of penetration, it’s always the story of the girl moving forward in spite of the rain. The sequence shot is successful to the extent that at the same time it shows penetration and it shows the escape from penetration. It is quite obvious if you look at one sequence shot with the girl tired in the morning with all those clothes strapped on her body; at the same time she wears the weight of misery, the weight of the rain, etc. and she embodies a determination to move forward even with all this on her shoulders. This is to say that the success of the sequence shot is not only linked to the representation of the penetration of the rain into the body. This is the first point. And the second point: in the case of Damnation, I think that the corruption, the extreme corruption in the case of Karrer, is the fact that he doesn’t even pursue this end because there is this deviation that is proposed in going to pick up all of those unidentified goods, drugs or alcohol, we don’t know exactly. The point is that he doesn’t even want to seize this occasion or opportunity of deviating from the circle of the rain. And so, of course, it’s the old story of ethical corruption, but at the end of the film I would

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say that he, Karrer, is the most corrupt character among general corruption. Because he is a corrupt man who goes first to denounce corruption, but in doing this in a way he confesses his own inability to decide to make the slightest deviation. This is why at the end he joins the dogs. He becomes a dog. So I think the point is not so much about corrupt ends. The point is about the refusal to move. The corruption at the end of course is one thing, but it is not the most important thing. The most important thing in this case is not so much the end itself as it is one’s decision to move. And what is interesting in Sátántangó is the way in which first Estike, then the peasants, decide to move. And of course they move for a very bad end. But at the same time there is a kind of strength that goes with their walk that goes really with this kind of nonsensical movement, for what? In this sense they struggle against corruption while being the victims of corruption. And you see this does not happen with Karrer. MF: Your discussion of Béla Tarr’s films based on the novels of László Krasznahorkai suggests a non-relation of the operations of literature and the operations of film. That is, you make clear that these films, both of which are adaptations, never subject their picaresque subjects (criminals, idiots, and madmen) to organizing or sense-making effects. Rather, these films depend on the work of the camera to produce a fantastic effect. “Less than ever, then, is it a matter of opposing the real to illusion. It is a matter of inserting a fantastic element into the heart of the real, which cuts it in two.”7 This is one of the only instances that I am aware of in your work where you allude to the genre of the fantastic, which is interesting in and of itself. But I am even more interested in whether we should understand this allusion as part of a strategy to undermine the validity of what we might call “adaptation studies”? That is, the study of the adaptation of literature as film, which seems to be a type of study that you would formally oppose. JR: Well I think there are two different things about adaptation studies. While I always have some distance from the fragmentation of studies that, as you know, has happened in many American programs, at the same time I have always been interested in the relation and very often the gap between a book and a scenario, and the process on the screen. I’ve always been interested in the difference between the plot of the text, the plot as a narration, and the visual plot on the screen. Very often, I try, when I speak about a film, to look at the book or the novel or the story from which it has been adapted. Most of the time, such as in the case of Hollywood movies, the relation is really very slight, or quite minimal. But at the same time it is interesting. I did it with Hitchcock, with Vertigo.8 There is a way in which Hitchcock transformed the story of manipulation into a story of fascination, for instance. In this case, what is interesting is that on the one hand Béla Tarr follows often very strictly Krasznahorkai’s books. Not always, but for instance in Sátántangó really he is very close to the novel itself. It’s not exactly the same in Werckmeister Harmonies. But at the same time I try to show how there is always this kind of deviation from the logic of a Krasznahorkai novel, which is a very nihilistic, pessimistic view about the

Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguín, with Jacques Rancière

idiocies or the idiocy of people. And this is why I insisted on the figure of the idiot. Because the idiot is described by Krasznahorkai as an idiot in the ordinary sense of the word: first as a person that you can manipulate just as you like and, second, as also the person who thinks that there is some kind of reason in the story itself. And there is always this kind of irony on the part of Krasznahorkai toward the character. That is not the case with Béla Tarr. So I insisted on the figure of the idiot really as a kind of force going against the law of corruption, manipulation, swindling, etc. But this means that also of course I tried to escape the schema of reality versus illusion. And it is within this context that I speak about fantastic elements in Werckmeister Harmonies. But the fantastic is not produced by the film. It is not produced by the camera. The fantastic is a given of the story. So in the case of Werckmeister Harmonies, it is not a fantastic film. It is a film where there is an element of phantasmagoria that is introduced by the novel itself. But Béla Tarr seizes this precisely as a means of creating a distance between the idiots and the law of corruption, which at the same time crushes the idiots against that which they, at the same, rebel. The fantastic element in this case, the whale, is connected with Valuska’s attempt to create a world of harmony. But he doesn’t take into account the reality of corruption and so, for him, there is this world of celestial harmony. This is what interests him. And what interests him even in the case of the whale is not the whale as a symbol of evil. It’s not something like in Melville at all.9 It’s something fantastic, something prodigious. Valuska makes this remark about the wonder of nature, a new form of attestation of the cosmos as the wonderful universe, which denies the reality in which all those swindlers organize the life in the town. What is important is not so much the fantastic in and of itself as the fantastic as a tool to draw a kind of line. There are people who take the measure of the fantastic of the unknown and there are people who don’t want to take it into account or who use the unknown just as a means for manipulating people. This is, for me, the importance of the fantastic elements. This is why I said that you must not think of it as if we are defining a kind of genre, but as an element that allows Béla Tarr to construct the plot of conflicting worlds. Bécquer Seguín: Speaking of the figures of the idiot and the swindler, I wanted to ask you about those idle and useless parts of society in which you’re so interested. From your very early work on the nineteenth-century French working classes in Proletarian Nights through your contemporary work on the aesthetic regime of art in Aisthesis, you have remained very attentive to the place of leisure and idleness within society. One might attribute this emphasis to your antipathy toward certain strains of Marxism, which value labor and work-time as the only spaces for emancipation. But, beyond this, what do you find particularly important about the logic of leisure and idleness for questions of emancipatory practice? JR: My point of departure was not a kind of antipathy toward Marxism. My point of departure was really the place of the issue of labor in emancipatory practice. I remember my book Proletarian Nights, for instance. I started doing research on workers’

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emancipation with the idea that I would deal with workers’ struggles. What I thought was important was something different, not a kind of energy that would be common to work and struggle. On the contrary, what was important was an attempt at breaking a certain order of action with a certain order of time. I have often commented on some texts by the joiner Gabriel Gauny and the moment when there is a kind of escape.10 He’s still doing his work, but his gaze is outside and his mind is elsewhere. I was struck strongly by the importance of the moments of interruption, which, for me, doesn’t identify with some themes like Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy (1883). That’s not my point. My point is not laziness, but leisure. Leisure is a very strong concept, the concept of the division of time. I very often refer to Aristotle, to the opposition between rest and leisure.11 Rest is a moment of inactivity, the separation between two moments of the expenditure of energy in work. But leisure is the time of the free people, the time of the people who have no need to work to earn a living. So leisure is not entertainment. Leisure is a strong category in the distribution of the sensible, in opposing two ways of inhabiting and living in time. This is why I was so interested in this kind of negotiation, of workers trying to introduce leisure in their life (high culture, literature, verse poetry, etc.) not only as a kind of education, but also as a construction of another time. Leisure was important for me. I incidentally came upon Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) in a bookshop. I bought it. I read it. And I was struck by this kind of strong relation between what was theorized by Schiller after Kant under the issue of free play—a way of escaping the hierarchical distribution of the sensible—and the lived experience of the workers in search of emancipation. I thought there was something very important in this. But this has been more or less brushed aside by the Marxist tradition and the entire tradition that thinks in terms of activity versus passivity. As I was working on Aisthesis, I met the same problem. Very often modernity is described as a shift from representation to presentation or to direct action. I said no: if modernity means something, it is to the contrary. The old logic of action is more or less invaded by a logic of inaction, of reverie. This is why, of course, I insisted on the role of reverie in Rousseau and how it was taken up by Stendhal.12 I always insisted on the fact that in all the transformations of the aesthetic regime, there was very often this topic: novelty in art being really associated with the inclusion of a certain form of inaction. BS: You’ve organized Aisthesis into a series of fourteen scenes, which span from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Each scene, you write, “is a little optical machine that shows us thought busy weaving together perceptions, affects, names and ideas, constituting the sensible community that these links create, and the intellectual community that makes such weaving thinkable.”13 But these scenes are intentionally non-canonical from the perspective of art history. One can imagine the same book, like Auerbach’s Mimesis, dealing with the most canonical scenes in art history and still reaching the same conclusion you do. What do you think would have been lost from such a book? Put differently, what do you think Aisthesis gains from treating non-canonical sources?

Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguín, with Jacques Rancière

JR: The very notion of the canonical is an ambiguous one. Some moments have become canonical in a certain interpretative framework. Think, for instance, of Duchamp. It is obvious that Duchamp’s gesture in 1913 did not matter much in art history. It became a rupture only in the ’60s. It became a point of discussion between modernism and postmodernism. So, you think that some of the scenes I describe are peripheral, but they were crucial at that moment. For instance, Loïe Fuller was an icon of modern art, of new art, and Chaplin too. So, in fact, being canonical may mean different things. I insisted on some scenes that in a way were crucial or canonical at the moment, but have more or less been brushed aside because they don’t fit some interpretations of either modernity or postmodernity. It was not my intention to focus on scenes as canonical or non-canonical, but my interest was rather to focus on scenes where you could see an object or performance shift from the sphere of non-art, low art, popular art, to a paradigm of high art. This is the case with the Hanlon-Lees. You can think that it’s very peripheral, but at the same time in France, the two poets, Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville, who made the theoretical fortune of pantomime and those kinds of spectacles, were canonical poets. And, they were more or less embodiments of art for art’s sake. So, what interests me is this moment when so-called popular art became a model for art for art’s sake, precisely because it was performance for the sake of performance. So it’s important to choose some scenes that at the same time illustrate this shift from low art to high art. And, of course, I chose scenes that question the modernist doxa. BS: Because you’ve selected such peripheral moments for present art history—and, I think it’s important that you make this distinction between what art history would have included as canonical in the past from what is canonical for the present—I can imagine that many art historians today will not take your book seriously enough or might challenge it on the grounds that your analysis does not work for canonical scenes of the present. What if you were to rewrite Aisthesis with scenes that are considered canonical today? Would these canonical moments, like, say, the summer of 1911 when Picasso and Braque developed cubism in Céret, lead to similar conclusions? Or, would this have altered the entire project of Aisthesis? JR: Well, first, I’m not an art historian. Let’s say that I’m an archeologist of the aesthetic regime of art. What interests me is the constitution of a certain regime of experience. I’m not concerned with the transformation of painting techniques or things like that. I’m interested in the relation between some works of art as artistic performance and the whole network of perceptions, of judgments, that make them high art and artistic performances at all. I’m interested really in the relation of the work to an observer, to a commenter. Which also means that the structure of the scene is determined by the possibility of having a text from which it would be possible for me to unfold this whole system of transformations in forms of perception, affect, and other interpretative schemas. This is why I focused on some scenes that provided me with a significant

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textual network. Other scenes happened quite incidentally. For instance, I came to the Hanlon-Lees very late and through a bizarre detour. But when I found this text by Banville, I thought it epitomized all kinds of modes of perception that transformed the very idea of art, the relation between popular art and high art.14 I wanted to discuss a work that I love so much, Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884), but there exist no interesting texts. There are some texts by Félix Fénéon, which are not bad, but it was impossible for me to construct the event of the Grande Jatte from a text. I had to give up the idea of the Grande Jatte and take Rodin as a substitute because there was this extraordinary text by Rilke about Rodin.15 So, in a way, Rodin was substituted for impressionism because there was the possibility for constructing a set of possibilities for rethinking art through Rilke’s text. What happens is that painting is an art that has been drawn into such an ocean of comments, and comments, and comments that I cannot really deal with this kind of thing. If you think of Cézanne, for instance, the strange thing is that people think of him as the painter of the flesh of things. At the same time, most of the things that are said about Cézanne come from the so-called interview of Cézanne by Joachim Gasquet, which was mostly pure imagination by Gasquet himself.16 At the same time, MerleauPonty, Deleuze, etc. construct the figure of Cézanne from the text by Gasquet.17 It is true that precisely because painting was supposed to be the canonical art, it was supposed to be the art upon which you could identify the change, the rupture, the revolution. The huge amount of commenters makes the picture, in a sense, unintelligible for me. BS: Throughout Aisthesis you develop your idea of the aesthetic regime against the backdrop of the previous representative regime. But this doesn’t mean, of course, that the aesthetic regime is without certain logics of representation, that we find ourselves today in a world of unmediated objects, affects, and ideas. How would you characterize the reformulation of previous ideas of representation in the aesthetic regime? And, how have ideas of representation, characterized by the philosophical slippage between the German terms Darstellung and Vorstellung, changed over the course of the aesthetic regime? JR: I think that at a certain point in history there was this opposition, Darstellung against Vorstellung. And, I remember of course when I was a young student in charge of reinventing Marxism, reading Capital, and reinventing the true meaning of Capital, of course, I insisted on Darstellung. The idea was that the young Marx is ideological. It’s about Vorstellung. But, of course, the old Marx is the scientific Marx because he uses Darstellung. I’m not sure the opposition is so strong in the German language between Darstellung and Vorstellung. It has become a kind of canonical opposition because it can frame an idea of modernity, where we get away from representation, mimesis, figuration, etc. and move toward performance of the body as the core of art. I think that this is a rather weak description of the aesthetic revolution.

Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguín, with Jacques Rancière

It is true, at the same time, there is this attempt in the so-called artistic revolution to substitute a kind of direct performance for representation alluding to something outside. But I would say that representation, in the sense of a relation to an outside, always comes back. Think, for instance, in the description of the dance of Loïe Fuller by Mallarmé.18 This dance is a pure performance, there’s no story. But, at the same time, this performance is something like writing, corporeal writing, but it must be read. In a way, the part of mimesis has been transferred to the spectator. The spectator must constitute the mimesis. I’ve always tried to show that in the aesthetic regime there was always this kind of balance of opposite logics. This is what I tried to say in the case of film, for instance, in Film Fables (2001). I started from this will, in this case, spelled out by Jean Epstein, this pretension to substitute a kind of direct writing of light and movement for the old stories. But at the same time, what Epstein does is look at a film and tell a story, transforming film into a kind of pure sequence of moments and movement. I think that if representation means translation then it is still the art of the aesthetic regime. In a sense, what the aesthetic regime invented is a multiplicity of forms of translation in the case of cinema or in the case of the dance of Loïe Fuller. I think it is a reason for the importance of some arts like film. In the end, film becomes the most representative of the arts. In the beginning, it was supposed to be a new aesthetic art, doing away with plot, psychology of characters, etc. It happened exactly to the contrary. For me, what’s interesting is that film always witnesses these kinds of confrontations between two logics: when you have two shots that, at the same time, are part of a story. The spectator remembers just some shorts and reconstructs the film. Think, for instance, in what Godard did in Histoire(s) du cinema: reconstructing the history of film through some shots extracted from their context and from the story. I’m not at all saying that he’s wrong in doing this. In a way, this is the activity of the spectator. I think what’s interesting is that the logic of the aesthetic regime is this logic that invents new forms of translation, transposition, but it also gives to the spectator and the reader the task of taking the part of the mimesis. The idea of the mimesis was that there was some kind of natural harmony between the artistic work and the sensibility of the persons to whom the work was destined. What is interesting in aesthetic art is the kind of indetermination of the performance that asks the spectator to construct his or her own mimetic relation to the work. BS: Though you said you’re not an art historian, one might characterize your book as a philosophy of aesthetics. Indeed, in the second chapter of Aisthesis you identify Hegel’s reading of Murillo’s Beggar Boys as a pivotal moment in the aesthetic regime of art. Yet, throughout the book, you only briefly treat the discipline of the philosophy of aesthetics. Between the first chapter on Winckelmann and the second on Hegel, for example, there exists a gap of more than half a century during which Lessing, Kant, and Schiller published their major treatises on aesthetics. Why doesn’t the philosophy of aesthetics feature more prominently in Aisthesis? What has that discipline remained blind to? And, what kind of challenge do you hope to present to it?

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JR: I’m aware that many of my statements begin with “I’m not . . .” I will also tell you that I’m not a philosopher of aesthetics. I’m not doing aesthetics as a part of philosophy. I’m not interested in starting from Baumgarten, and going to Kant, to Schelling, to Hegel, etc. I’ve read all these authors. They’ve given me the background. Of course, Aisthesis would be impossible had I not read Kant, Schiller, and Hegel over and over. Basically, my point was not about aesthetic theory. It was about moments that can illustrate the birth of a new paradigm of art as I’ve explained. This is why, for instance, Hegel was present not as a philosopher who has constructed a whole system of aesthetics. He was present just through a very specific moment when he describes the Beggar Boys by Murillo because at this moment what we can really see is how Hegel puts to the fore this destruction of the hierarchy between genre painting and history painting, high and low art. This is the role played by Hegel. From his description it is possible to construct a whole historical situation, which is why I included the French Revolution and the new Louvre and all these works coming to Paris, after having been ransacked by the French Army. So, in this moment there’s precisely the constitution of a scene of painting as painting, the moment of the birth of the museum when painting was no longer judged with respect to its destination or to its presence in this or that genre of painting. In this case, Hegel provides the example. In another case, the same role is played by a poet—it may be Banville, Mallarmé, or Rilke. In other cases, it may be just an obscure critic, as in the case of the Alfred Stieglitz exhibition or Dziga Vertov’s film. But what really interests me is this point of shift when something or some performance gets into art. I’m not interested in aesthetic theories, though I’ve read a lot of them of course. What interests me really is the construction of the scene, as I said, like a kind of optical machine. I have nothing against aesthetics. I have nothing against aesthetic theories. My question is what does aisthesis itself mean as a regime of experience? I don’t think that is the kind of thing that an aesthetic philosopher can answer. Sometimes, of course, you can have a sense of it from some philosopher, it may be Schiller, it may be Adorno, but basically, aesthetic theory has constituted itself as a theory of art with the presupposition that art exists. The problem is how does art exist at all. BS: Though you’re not an art historian or a philosopher of aesthetics, your work has been very influential in the art world. Hal Foster has recently written critically about your notion of the “redistribution of the sensible,” calling it “a panacea, and, when pitted against the capitalist ‘transformation of things into signs,’ little more than wishful thinking, the new opiate of the art-world left.”19 Regardless of what you may think of Foster, his comment points to your sway within the art world with both critics and practitioners. You have almost become part of the institution you so passionately seek to elude in your work. How do you see your work on art, and in Aisthesis in particular, in relation to your institutional art historian peers? Has your work changed since you’ve been more exposed to talking to artists, practitioners, and art historians?

Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguín, with Jacques Rancière

JR: First, I must confess that I have not read this article by Hal Foster. I’m very often asked about what I think about Hal Foster’s text. Someday, I shall read it, but I have not yet done so. But, if I can just comment on your quotation, which has been commented by many people, by saying that the redistribution of the sensible is not at all a panacea because it is not a medicine. I don’t propose a kind of future saying for the politics of art. It is not a motto for a kind of flag for the political struggle of artists. So, it’s not wishful thinking. It’s just something I try to analyze in artistic practice, in interpretations of artistic practice. It is no more. I tried to think about the notions of modern and postmodern art and to construct a view of art today. And, of course, it is why I think some people like Hal Foster or people that have been art historians for a long time are angry to see an intruder come into the middle of the field. I’m perfectly aware at the same time that some words, “the redistribution of the sensible,” have become mere phrases. When curators invite me, they say, “I’m preparing this or that biennale and it is entirely influenced by your view of the redistribution of the sensible.” Most of the time, I know that it’s only a phrase. Very often it’s the same for artists who want a text for their catalogue and they say how far and deeply they’ve been influenced by the revolutionary practice of the redistribution of the sensible. I try to take it without illusion, but at the same time without shame. I just see how it circulates. It’s true that if my work gained a certain celebrity at the beginning of this century, it was done by curators and people of the art milieu and not by philosophers. So, I’m obliged to take the whole situation into account. When I was writing Aisthesis, my whole problem was with my sources and how to interpret my sources. At this moment, I’m very far from the artistic scene. At no moment in writing Aisthesis did I have a concern with what they would think of it. I think that probably they’re not so much at ease with Aisthesis because it doesn’t confirm the superficial idea they can have of the meaning of my work. BS: Have there been any particular artists or practitioners that you’ve exchanged with or dialogued with who have influenced you? JR: Well, I would say that there are a lot of artists who ask me to write texts for their exhibition or for their catalogue. I’ve written, for example, for James Coleman and several others. It’s true that I’ve had some dialogues with artists. I don’t think that these dialogues were very influential for me because most of the artists I was in touch with were coming very widely from the scene of conceptual art. This is not at all, of course, the scene from which Aisthesis comes. Which means that perhaps each time I have to discuss their art, I try to make a shift, like we discussed with Béla Tarr and Krasznahorkai. When you write about an author, a filmmaker, an artist, for me, the point is not to try to give reasons for why they did what they did, but rather what it means to me, which means that I feel free to give to the work of an artist another meaning than the one given by the artist him/herself.

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DIACRITICS >> 2014 >> 42.3

Notes This interview took place April 8, 2014, in Ithaca, New York. 1

Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 9.

2 “Béla Tarr: Rétrospective intégrale,” November 29, 2011–January 2, 2012, http://www.festival-automne. com/edition-2011/be-tarr-retrospective-integrale.

12 See Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker; and Stendhal, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. 13

Rancière, Aisthesis, xi.

14 See Banville, preface to Mémoires et pantomimes des frères Hanlon Lees; and Rancière, Aisthesis, 75–91.

3

See Rancière, The Politics of Literature, 136–37.

4

Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 24.

5

See Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, 78.

6

Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 35.

7

Ibid., 54.

8

See Rancière, Film Fables, 113–16.

17 See Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945) and “Eye and Mind” (1960), in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 59–75 and 121–49; and Deleuze, Francis Bacon.

9

See Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After, 53.

18

Mallarmé, Divagations, 135–37.

19

Foster, “Post-Critical,” 6.

10 See, for example, Rancière, Proletarian Nights, 76–91. 11

See Aristotle, Physics, 192b2–23.

15

Rilke, Auguste Rodin (1903).

16 See Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations (1921).

Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics >> Mozelle Foreman and Bécquer Seguín, with Jacques Rancière

Works Cited Aristotle. Physics, Books 1–4. Translated by P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1957. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954. Banville, Théodore de. Preface to Mémoires et pantomimes des frères Hanlon Lees, 5–18. Paris: Imprimerie Reverchon et Vollet, 1880. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Foster, Hal. “Post-Critical.” October, 139 (2012): 3–8. Gasquet, Joachim. Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoire with Conversations. Translated by Christopher Pemberton. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Lafargue, Paul. The Right to Be Lazy. Translated by Charles Kerr. Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1907. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Divagations. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Edited by Galen A. Johnson. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Rancière, Jacques. The Aesthetic Unconscious. Translated by Debra Keates and James Swenson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. ———. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul. London: Verso, 2013. ———. Béla Tarr, the Time After. Translated by Erik Beranek. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013.

———. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. New York: Berg, 2006. ———. The Politics of Literature. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. ———. Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Translated by John Drury. London: Verso, 2012. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Auguste Rodin. Translated by Daniel Slager. New York: Archipelago Books, 2004. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Translated by Russell Goulbourne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. In No Exit and Three Other Plays, 1–46. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Translated by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Stendhal. The Charterhouse of Parma. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Modern Library, 1999. ———. The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Catherine Slater. New York: Oxford World Classics, 2009. Tarr, Béla. Almanac of Fall. Öszi almanach. 1984. ———. Damnation. Kárhozat. 1988. ———. The Man from London. A londoni férfi. 2007. ———. Satantango. Sátántangó. 1994. ———. Werckmeister Harmonies. Werckmeister harmóniák. 2000.

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