The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge
The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge
复制标题
审美维度：美学、政治、知识
作者：
Jacques Rancière
我们应该如何理解我的标题的语法？显然，这不是一个要求政治或知识必须具有美学维度的问题，也不是要求它们必须建立在理性、感觉或感性的基础上的问题。这甚至不是说它们是以感性为基础的，或者感性本身就是政治性的。美学所指的不是感性的东西。更确切地说，它是感性的某种形态，某种分布。这种表达可以被理解，至少在最初，通过转向构建美学空间的文本，尽管这个术语从未在那里被用作实质性的。当然，我指的是康德的《判断批判》，我将把它作为一个指导线索，来构建一个试探性的更全面的美学概念。现在，我只想从这篇文章中引出构成我所谓的感性分布的三个基本要素。首先，有某种给定的东西，一种由感官提供的形式，例如，康德文本第二节中所描述的宫殿的形式。第二，对这种形式的理解不仅是一种感觉；相反，感觉本身是双重的。这种理解在康德所称的官能之间，即在提供给定物的官能和从给定物中制造出某种东西的官能之间，发挥了某种关系。对于这两种能力，希腊语言只有一个名字，即审美，即感觉的能力，即感知给定事物和理解它的能力。康德告诉我们，理解给定的意义有三种方式。三种方法中的两种定义了等级顺序。在第一种情况下，意指能力支配着传递感觉的能力；知性利用想象的服务来服从
How should we understand the syntagm of my title? Obviously it is not a question of claiming that politics or knowledge must take on an aesthetic dimension or that they have to be grounded in sense, sensation, or sensibility. It is not even a question of stating that they are grounded in the sensible or that the sensible is political as such. What aesthetics refers to is not the sensible. Rather, it is a certain modality, a certain distribution of the sensible. This expression can be understood, at least initially, by turning to the text that has framed the space of aesthetics, though the term was never used there as a substantive. I mean, of course, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which I will use as a guiding thread in the construction of a tentatively more comprehensive concept of aesthetics. For now I only wish to draw from this text the three basic elements that make up what I call a distribution of the sensible. First, there is something given, a form that is provided by sense—for instance, the form of a palace as described in section two of Kant’s text. Second, the apprehension of this form is not only a matter of sense; rather, sense itself is doubled. The apprehension puts into play a certain relation between what Kant calls faculties: between a faculty that offers the given and a faculty that makes something out of it. For these two faculties the Greek language has only one name, aesthesis, the faculty of sense, the capacity to both perceive a given and make sense of it. Making sense of a sense given, Kant tells us, can be done in three ways. Two of the three ways define a hierarchical order. In the first of these, the faculty of signification rules over the faculty that conveys sensations; the understanding enlists the services of imagination in order to subordinate