Albertine And The Refusal Of The Excluded: A Reply To Jacques Rancière'S Politics Of Appearance

In a well-known essay by Jacques Rancière, "The Putting to Death of Emma Bovary," he transforms the question of the cause of Emma's suicide—debt, disillusionment, unhappiness—into a question of the writer's motivation for killing off his character. "Before the trial the right-thinking put the writer on," writes Rancière, "there is the trial the writer puts his character on" (2011, 53–54). Characters such as Emma must be punished for their aestheticization of daily life in order to differentiate between the right and the wrong way of negotiating the blurred line between art and life that, for Rancière, is the defining problem of what he calls the aesthetic regime of art. He offers a similar reading with respect to Proust:

Proust would get stuck into high society by putting on trial those aesthetes who require art to light up their lives, to mark time to their love affairs or decorate their interiors. And he will invent all kinds of sentences to punish their crimes against literature and art: he will marry Swann off to the cretinous demi-mondaine he loves for her resemblance to one of Botticelli's figures; he'll send Saint-Loup to death on the battlefield as the price for his dreams of a new epic; and he'll chain Charlus, the man who treats works of art as souvenirs of nobiliary glory, to the "rock of sheer matter," in Jupien's brothel.

(2011, 59)

Rancière insists that the various fates of these characters be understood as punishment by their authors because, for him, the very status of art's particular politics is stake in this differentiation between the right and the wrong identity between art and life. The Emma Bovaries, Swanns, and Saint-Loups of literature must die precisely because, in turning art into mere decoration, they betray the capacity that it shares with politics—to transform the sensible.

To appear and be heard, such is the dual imperative of Rancière's politics. When the marginalized, excluded from the benefits and recognition of a shared community, rend the norms of perceptibility in order to make an appearance, they enforce a claim of equality that, in Rancière's account, is the very substance of politics. Similarly, art is political not because of any secondary affiliation that would join these two seemingly separate realms, but because it shares this capacity to intervene in what he calls the distribution of the sensible, that is "the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it" (2004, 12). As Rancière explains, "the arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the visible and the invisible" (2004, 19).

Works of art have their own particular means of intervening in the distribution of the sensible. They do not "give a collective voice to the anonymous," but rather "help to create the fabric of a common [impersonal] experience in which new modes of constructing common objects and new possibilities of subjective enunciation may be developed" (2010, 142). By rendering the sensory fabric of a common world susceptible to the interventions of the excluded, works of this kind ultimately coincide with the Rancièrian imperative of appearance, opening the way for an entrance into perceptibility and intelligibility on the part of those who are excluded.

In claiming that "appearance is not the mask of a given reality. It is an effective reconfiguration of the given, of what is visible, and therefore what can be said about it and done with respect to it," Rancière saves art from the accusation of trifling in mere appearances (2010, 207). But is it always necessarily in appearing that the excluded stake their politics? It is Proust's Albertine who, nearly...