Jacques Ranciere's Freudian Cause

I believe...that I have introduced something that will occupy the minds of men for a long time.

— Freud¹

What is to be done, when you are invited to the Ecole de Psychanalyses in Brussels, when you are the author of a considerable body of work demonstrating original thought, and when you announce from the beginning that you have "no competence to speak from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory"? (L'inconscient esthétique, 9). Jacques Rancière, thus solicited in January 2000, responds by inventing a new formula of the unconscious. Or rather, he discovers what was already there, waiting to be described and named, and which will thereafter be called Jacques Rancière's "aesthetic unconscious." This concept, linked at its foundations to the unconscious theorized by Freud, will nonetheless play the role of an agitator-concept, ever constitutive of the aesthetic genesis "buried" in psychoanalysis. It is rare and unforeseeable that an external circumstance should thus become an essential milestone in a conceptual creation, that an original thought, challenged by something foreign—by its "other" that is psychoanalysis— should produce such a concept. Every creator must be able to summon his interlocutors onto his own terrain—in this case, for Rancière, that of the aesthetic. Further, he must know how to separate from himself, to distance himself from his own system of thought, and play with it, put it into a "fictive" relationship with another, in a new "theoretical scenography."²

This fecund displacement onto the terrain of the other, which happens to be an "Ecole de Psychoanalyses," is not trivial.³ It signifies both the fundamental stakes of this encounter, and beautiful obsession of Jacques Rancière, for whom always and everywhere the only thing that counts comes back to a single and same cause—that of emancipation and its pedagogy. In this particular conjuncture, L'inconscient esthétique will free us from the consensual image of a Freud who is divided—on the one hand revolutionary in his science, and on the other, conformist in his artistic tastes and traditional in his aesthetic studies. This book will substitute for this image the powerful theoretical fiction of a Freud resolutely and deliberately classical, Rancière's objective ally in an intransigent struggle against all forms of nihilism.⁴ A fiction fomented by Rancière's "polemical Freudianism" that will give a rough time to contemporary "radical Freudianism" and its illegitimate claims to "correcting" Freud. In a complex and original maneuver that will overturn many points of consensus, Rancière will transform Freud's much decried "causality"—his obsessive search for explanations and causes—into a true trump card, into a symbol of a scientific and universal rationalism that will have welcomed poetry and mythology while never renouncing the ideals of liberty and emancipation through knowledge, no matter how tenuous these ideals might be.⁵

Such is Jacques Rancière's Freudian cause—a cause that is not psychoanalysts' "thing," but which concerns them nevertheless.⁶ It not only gives them back the aesthetic antecedents of the unconscious discovered by Freud, but even more fundamentally, it gives them a radical reactualization of the Freudian legacy, a way to remobilize it for an "aesthetics of politics" in a democratic regime.⁷ In order to understand the originality and the numerous implications of Rancière's Freudian cause, we would have to consider all the citations of psychoanalysis in his work, which is beyond the scope of this article, which proposes mainly to present L'inconscient esthétique. Nevertheless, the few elements proposed here can serve as an introduction to the complicated relationship that Rancière's work maintains with psychoanalysis, since on the one hand it relentlessly rejects certain fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, and on the other, it revalorizes others, while never ceasing to bring psychoanalysis into play—without, however, referring to it explicitly.

The Citation of Psychoanalysis in Rancière's Work

From the...