Rethinking Representation in Ontology and Aesthetics via Badiou and Rancière

Introduction

This essay addresses a specific connection frequently made in 20th-century philosophy between ontology and aesthetics based on the critique of the notion of representation. From Heidegger to Deleuze, the critique of representation was necessary if philosophy was to find answers to two of its crucial questions, namely, how to think being beyond its identification with reality and how to think art beyond its representation of reality. The connection between these two questions was established on the assumption that representation is not merely a matter of resembling, imitating or standing in for reality, but the principle of the very construction of reality. If there is truth to be found in art, it is not on the merit of adequate representation of reality, but on the assumption that art presents or expresses something real that is excluded by the representational construction of reality itself. The problem of representation is therefore as much an aesthetical as it is an ontological one, implying that art can help guide philosophy to the other side of the ontological difference. Considering that representation is called into question in the name of giving voice to something that it excludes, it is clear that the problem also has an inherently political dimension, even though it is not directly formulated in terms of the topos of representation within political philosophy.

The central aim of this essay, however, is to show how this still highly influential conceptual constellation has been challenged and transformed from within by certain current developments in contemporary philosophy, namely Alain Badiou’s ontology and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics. While both are still partly based on the critique of representation, they significantly transform the assumptions and outcomes of this critique. What makes both authors particularly interesting from this perspective is that while their versions of the critique of representation make them rightful heirs of the line of argument outlined above, they dispute the very link between ontology and aesthetics that has been at the heart of it. From the ontological side, Badiou’s ‘subtractive’ approach suggests that there is no ‘poetic’ expression of being to be found beyond the veil of representation. Instead, philosophy’s notion of truth is defined as a procedure of subjectivation enabled by a supplementary ‘representative without representation’. From the aesthetical side, Rancière redefines artistic modernity so that it is no longer characterized by a passage from representation to pure ontological presence or material presentation. His notion of ‘the aesthetic regime of art’ is not based on the break with representation per se, but rather by a break with a set of principles that restrict it. The aesthetic regime of art thus operates in the field of unlimited, unrestricted representation. Following these leads, it seems that representation cannot be opposed by the pure presentation of what it fails to take into account, but by a surplus representation that subverts a given regime of representation.

This unique position Badiou and Rancière have of simultaneously continuing and discontinuing the onto-aesthetic conceptual constellation described above will allow us to grasp more clearly what is at stake in the critique of representation in contemporary theory. While both thinkers were intellectually formed in the milieu of 1960s’ Paris and share many theoretical and political concerns, reading them side by side should nevertheless take into account the differences between their philosophical thought, which are great and widely acknowledged, even in the form of direct and often harsh critiques of each other’s work. ¹ In this essay, I do not intend so much to trace the similarities and differences between their methods of thinking, their aesthetics or their politics, but rather to bring them together at a point where comparison is hardly possible. While there can indeed be no comparison between Badiou’s and Rancière’s ontology, since Rancière quite simply does not have one of his own, and while there are irreconcilable differences in the way they approach aesthetics, my endeavour is based on the assumption that Badiou’s ontology and Rancière’s aesthetics share an effort to disentangle the knot between ontology and aesthetics that dominated 20th-century continental philosophy, and can therefore be read in conjunction. Their juxtaposition is further justified by the fact that their respective efforts in this regard both prove to be somewhat one-sided. While Badiou proposes an alternative ontology, his aesthetics remains partly tied to the onto-aesthetic constellation. Rancière, on the other hand, proposes an alternative aesthetics, but still relies on the said constellation in terms of ontology. Only when read together, therefore, is the full extent of their efforts revealed.

In what follows, I will first discuss the aesthetical, ontological, and political aspects of the critiques of representation in Heidegger, Adorno, and Deleuze. It should be noted, however, that Adorno himself is only partly engaged in this process against representation. Some aspects of what is later developed by Badiou and Rancière can already be identified in his work. I will then move on to discuss Badiou’s ground-breaking approach to ontology and Rancière’s novel take on aesthetics in some detail. In conclusion, I will assess and develop the implications of this shift in conceptualizing the notion of representation by reversing the Leibnizian conceptual metaphor Adorno used to describe modern artworks, replacing ‘windowless monads’ with what I call ‘monadless windows’.

Poetic Ontologies and Onto-Poetics in Heidegger, Deleuze and Adorno

In the introduction to Being and Event, Badiou presents his new way of thinking being as a challenge to Heidegger’s domination in the field of ontology. Badiou (2005a: 9) describes the dominant type of ontology as ‘poetic’, characterized by ‘the figure of being as endowment and gift, a presence and opening’. As is well known, Badiou’s alternative to poetic ontology is a meta-ontological identification of ontology with mathematics or, more precisely, with set theory. The most important implication of this move is to replace ‘poetic proximity’ with ‘the radically subtractive dimension of being, foreclosed not only from representation but from all presentation’ (Badiou, 2005a: 10). Years later, Badiou (2000: 3) reveals that he eventually came to realize that his real aim in Being and Event was actually to present an ontology of multiplicity (based on set theory) that would rival the (‘vitalist’) one developed by Deleuze. In any case, Badiou’s critique implies that poetic (or vitalist) ontology only abolishes representation in order to discover a more immediate presentation of being beyond it. A truly subtractive ontology, on the other hand, would have to claim that being is also absent from its presentation itself.

Before examining the implications of Badiou’s alternative, we should take a closer look at the issue that both his philosophical foes have with representation. For Heidegger, representation is a key element in the metaphysical definition of truth as an adequate representation of reality. A post-metaphysical philosophy that Heidegger argues for (1998: 288, 286) should ‘attempt to make a transition from the representation of beings as such to recalling the truth of Being’, since representation is ‘inappropriate to that which is to be thought’. Metaphysics, being confined to representation, merely ‘speaks of Being’, but it ‘does not induce Being itself to speak’ (Heidegger, 1998: 280).

For Deleuze (2001: xi) as well, a break with representation is what defines the task of a truly contemporary philosophy: ‘modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical’. Instead of representing identities, philosophy should venture into the underworld where ‘pre-individual and nonpersonal singularities speak’ and where the ‘Voice’ of being is heard (Deleuze, 1990: 73, 179).

In both authors, representation is the principle that presents being merely through beings, i.e. through the identities that constitute what is perceived as reality. Therefore, representation is not a matter of the artistic redoubling of reality, but the principle by which reality itself is constructed. The task of philosophy is to undo this construction and let being speak for itself. What can indeed be labelled as poetic within this type of ontology is that being presents itself by means of self-expression.

Both Heidegger and Deleuze consider art to be one of the most important fields in which such non-representational expressions of being can be found. I argue that poetic ontology thus directly entails an onto-poetics. To be able to discern such self-expressive presentations in artworks, philosophy must abandon its classical definition of art in terms of the representation of reality. For Heidegger, traditional philosophical aesthetics belongs to the metaphysical thinking that should be overcome. Overcoming aesthetics, Heidegger writes in the Beiträge manuscripts (1999: 354), demands ‘overcoming a certain conception of beings as what is objectively representable’. It is important to note that this does not merely entail a shift of philosophical perspective that would now invest artworks with ontological propositions. As Heidegger claims in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1993: 187), it is being itself that seeks art as a field of its self-expression: ‘Because it is in the essence of truth to establish itself within beings, in order thus first to become truth, the impulse toward the work lies in the essence of truth as one of truth’s distinctive possibilities, by which it can itself occur as being in the midst of beings’ (emphasis in original). This impulse towards the work is what defines truth as the self-expressive presentation of being in art, but also in politics, namely in ‘the act that founds a political state’ (1993: 186).

Deleuze (2001: 68–9) argues that in traditional aesthetics, the categories of representation dictate a very limited determination of the conditions of possible experience. Artworks, on the other hand, are able to convey ‘real experience’, deemed impossible by the categories of representation. To this end, philosophy must follow ‘the modern work of art’, which ‘indicates to philosophy a path leading to the abandonment of representation’. Once again, it is the self-expressive presentation of being beyond representation that is to be sought, ‘the point where the being of the sensible reveals itself in the work of art’. Painting thus ‘directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation’, while literature is able to ‘engender new and extraordinary figures that are revelations of Being’ (Deleuze, 2003: 51–52; 1998: 19). The effects of these presences are not limited to art, however, as the singularities found beyond representation are ‘disturbing reality, morality, and the economy of the world’ (Deleuze, 1990: 60).

According to what I refer to as onto-poetics, therefore, the artwork does not represent the world, but rather expresses its very being. This implication of the critique of representation is precisely what is rejected by Rancière. For Rancière (2010: 182), the real experience that art conveys does not rely on an ontological difference: ‘the sensible difference which institutes art can be taken as a difference without ontological consistency, a difference remade each time in the singular work of impersonalisation specific to a particular artistic procedure’.

Before turning to Badiou and Rancière, another key figure of 20th-century philosophy and aesthetics deserves attention in this context. Can Adorno be viewed as a poetic ontologist and an onto-poeticist? There is definitely an argument to be made in favour of this, considering Adorno’s claims (1997: 18) that there is something real beyond the veil of reality, something that finds its expression in art: ‘If thought is in any way to gain a relation to art it must be on the basis that something in reality, something [behind] the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively demands art, and that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides’. Art’s ability to give what lies beyond the veil a proper expression, however, is not based on simply denouncing representation but rather by dialectically transforming it:

As an aesthetic category, imitation cannot simply be accepted any more than it can simply be rejected. Art objectivates the mimetic impulse, holding it fast at the same time that it disposes of its immediacy and negates it. … By wanting to make itself like the objectivated other, the artwork becomes unlike that other. But it is only by way of its self-alienation through imitation that the subject so strengthens itself that it is able to shake off the spell of imitation. … It was by way of imitation, not by avoiding it, that art achieved its autonomy; in it art acquired the means to its freedom. (Adorno, 1997: 285)

The artwork’s autonomy and its ensuing alienation from the world does not, however, imply an ivory tower type of artistic seclusion. Rather, its paradoxical non-relation to the world is that of Leibniz’s monad. While being completely sealed off from other monads and therefore the world, each monad in isolation nevertheless reflects the pre-established harmony of the world. According to Adorno’s inverted Leibnizianism (1997: 5), the artwork’s alienation from the world is the condition of its ability to convey its truth – not the pre-established theological harmony, but the socially determined disharmony: ‘That artworks as windowless monads “represent” what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it’. Leibniz’s concept allows Adorno to propose a dialectical model of representation as resemblance without imitation that indicates a way beyond onto-poetics. Art’s monadically representative structure enables it to give shelter to what lies behind the veil but cannot be directly expressed. Thereby, artwork as monad makes a Stendhalian promesse that can only be kept beyond closed windows as a strict demonstration of its unrealizability within the world as it is.

Representation without Representation in Badiou’s Being and Event

Badiou’s exploration of the ‘subtractive dimension’ of being suggests not only that being-qua-being eludes representation, but that it is also exempt from its own presentation. On the one hand, being is inapproachable through any kind of experience; there is therefore no poetic proximity of an unconcealment. On the other hand, it is not completely concealed either, since its presentation is graspable via the ‘deductive consistency’ offered by mathematics (Badiou, 2005a: 10). While we cannot know or experience being itself, set theory offers a way of thinking its presentation as a pure multiplicity. In set theory, ‘every “object” is reducible to a pure multiplicity, itself built on the unpresentation of the void’ (Badiou, 2005a: 14), which makes it a perfect fit for thinking being, which is itself – as Badiou declares against the traditional philosophical understanding of being as one – presented as a multiplicity and structured around the void of being-qua-being itself, which is subtracted from its own presentation.

The subtractive approach also implies a displacement of the ontological difference, which no longer (as it did in poetic ontology) searches for the truth of being in its self-expressive presentation beyond its mere representation in ontical beings. The line between the ontological and the ontical now crosses the level of presentation itself, from which being has always already been subtracted. On the ontical level, multiplicity is structured within ‘situations’, in which a consistent multiplicity is constituted and conceived as a multiplicity of units (‘several-ones’). The ontical oneness, however, is merely a result of an operation that unifies the multiple, namely the ‘count-as-one’ that gives structure to the ontological inconsistent multiplicity within a particular situation. Ontologically speaking, therefore, there is no one, only an inconsistent multiplicity, wherein every multiple is a multiple of multiples (Badiou, 2005a: 24–9).

By merely displacing the ontological difference, however, Badiou’s ontology might still be considered poetic in the sense that it affirms an expression of being as the ‘original’ inconsistent multiplicity: ‘Inasmuch as the unfathomable depths of what is present is inconsistency, a truth will be that which, from inside the presented, as part of this presented, makes the inconsistency … come into the light of day’ (Badiou, 1999: 106, emphasis in original). Such statements could lead to the conclusion that the core of the poetic structure remains in place, namely that what we are after is a pure presentation of being as inconsistent multiplicity, otherwise obstructed by a veil of (re-)presentation. Such a reading, however, would be strongly opposed by Badiou (2005a: 54):

It must certainly be assumed that the effect of structure is complete, that what subtracts itself from the latter is nothing. … In an indeterminate situation there is no rebel or subtractive presentation of the pure multiple upon which the empire of the one is exercised. Moreover, this is why, within a situation, the search for something that would feed an intuition of being qua being is a search in vain.

And yet, the correlate thesis also imposes itself: that there is a being of nothing, as [a] form of the unpresentable. The ‘nothing’ is what names the unperceivable gap, cancelled then renewed, between presentation as structure and presentation as structured-presentation, between the one as result and the one as operation, between presented consistency and inconsistency as what-will-have-been-presented.

This also entails that the operation of oneness is at the same time the principle of its undoing: ‘The one is assigned to the sign ∈ alone, that is, to the operator of denotation for the relation between the “something” in general and the multiple. The sign ∈, unbeing of any one, determines, in a uniform manner, the presentation of “something” as indexed to the multiple’ (Badiou, 2005a: 44–5). If a multiple has no being before being counted as one by another multiple, then the two sides of the ontological difference, i.e. the inconsistent and the consistent multiplicity, are the two sides of the Mobius strip of the count-as-one. ² From this perspective, multiplicity is nothing but a self-deconstructing oneness. In other words, multiplicities are not monads structured into a world; there is only the operation of presentation (∈) as what I would call a ‘monadless window’, a frame that precedes that which is being framed.

According to Badiou, the instability of consistent presentation (since what constructs oneness is also what deconstructs it) requires an additional layer of oneness. The redoubling of the count-as-one is mathematically grounded in the relation of inclusion (which is, however, derived from belonging, and is therefore not an additional operation – there is therefore no dualism of the count) and is meta-ontologically referred to as representation (Badiou, 2005a: 94). While belonging counts the elements of a set, inclusion counts its subsets. The subsets, however, outnumber the elements themselves, marking an irreducible ‘point of excess’ of representation over presentation (Badiou, 2005a: 84–5). While poetic ontology relies on the supposition that there is a repressed yet potentially expressible excess of presentation that representation cannot account for, in subtractive ontology there is nothing that escapes the excess of representation, except for this unpresentable ‘nothing’ itself.

If there is nothing beyond the window of (re)presentation but the window itself, no poetic expression or experience, how can inconsistent multiplicity come ‘into the light of day’, as Badiou puts it? This is where the true stake of Badiou’s philosophy comes into play (2005a: 15): a doctrine that ‘un-binds the Heideggerian connection between being and truth and institutes the subject, not as support or origin, but as fragment of the process of a truth’. Truth as a subjective process is not directly related to being, but rather established as the fidelity to an event. An event is not an expression of being; on the contrary, as a pure rupture it has no ontological existence and is characterized precisely as ‘that-which-is-not-being-qua-being’ (Badiou, 2005a: 184). The project of Being and Event is thus based on a radical separation between both of its main terms: the event is a contingent occurrence that cannot be accounted for by the count-as-one that gives structure to the situation. It thus undermines the consistency of the presented situation: ‘The event will be this ultra-one of a hazard, on the basis of which the void of a situation is retroactively discernible’ (Badiou, 2005a: 56). By its very occurrence, the event indicates the inconsistent multiplicity, but is in no way its effect or expression.

Having no being of its own, the event disappears as soon as it takes place. This is why it takes a subject to declare that the event has indeed taken place within a situation. The subject’s fidelity to the event in a truth procedure will consist of the efforts to transform the situation, since the event ‘is only recognized in the situation by its consequences’ (Badiou, 2005a: 207). In its inaugural intervention in the situation, the subject names the event, thereby affirming its existence. Badiou (2005a: 206) calls this first consequence of the event – its name – ‘a representative without representation’. It is a representative, since the event can have no immediate being of its own within the situation; it is without representation because it defies and challenges the regime of representation that structures the situation. By its very existence, the event marks the failure of the count-as-one and indicates the inconsistency of the situation. By naming the event, the subject thus introduces a term that represents the void of the situation: ‘It is only for the event, thus for the nomination of a paradoxical multiple, that the term chosen by the intervenor represents the void’ (Badiou, 2005a: 206, emphasis in original). The inconsistent multiplicity can never be presented; it can only be retrospectively alluded to from the perspective of an event and can therefore only be represented (by the consequences of the event). The excess of (re)presentation cannot be challenged by what escapes it (a pure presentation), but only by an additional representation, a ‘risky supplementation’ (Badiou, 1999: 106–7) that rivals the dominant regime of representation. The subject’s task is then to transform this regime according to the implied consequences of the event.

While Being and Event does not deal with politics directly, Badiou still offers a political ‘illustration’ of his meta-ontological design as it applies to historical situations (2005a: 104–11). Badiou explains the latter in Marxist terms: the ruling class is a ‘normal’ term of a historical situation since it both belongs to and is included in the situation (it is presented as well as represented). The working class, on the other hand, is a ‘singular’ term since it belongs to the situation without being included in it; it is presented, but not represented politically. The reason for this is the state and the regime of representation it embodies. The state is an ‘excrescent’ term, the pure excess of representation without grounding in presentation. The Marxist description is correct, claims Badiou, but the dialectics of emancipatory politics it presents is not entirely accurate. Marxist politics affirms the singular term against the excrescence, that is to say, pure presentation against the excess of representation. The problem, according to Badiou, is that the presentation of a term, excluded from the given regime of representation, is on its own not enough to overthrow this regime, as historically proven by the failure of the ‘withering away of the state’. Emancipatory politics should therefore find ways to establish ‘a relation to both the void and excess which is essentially different from that of the State’ (Badiou, 2005a: 110). Without going further into how it fits in Badiou’s politics more generally, this illustration – a call for ‘poetic’ Marxism to make way for a ‘subtractive’ one, so to speak – still offers some indication of the political stakes implied by Badiou’s ontology.

Finally, how does Badiou’s alternative to poetic ontology translate to poetics itself? With his concept of ‘inaesthetics’, Badiou (2005b: xii) renounces ‘aesthetic speculation’ and limits philosophy to describing philosophical implications of the truths produced autonomously by art. In this way Badiou (1999: 66) rips the Heideggerian ‘suture’ of philosophy to poetry. The truth of an artwork should now no longer be defined as an anti-representative unveiling of being. And yet, Badiou (1999: 69–77) admits that Heidegger’s glorification of poetry was historically justified by the so-called ‘age of poets’ from Hölderlin to Celan, the age when poets actually were thinkers in the philosophical sense. Even though Badiou declares this age to be over, his own readings of poetry are almost exclusively dealing with this very age. The traces of onto-poetics are thereby preserved in Badiou. ‘The modern poem’, he writes, ‘is the opposite of a mimesis’, while Mallarmé’s poetry, specifically, ‘rescues pure being’ (2005b: 21; 2008: 67). Similarly, Badiou reads Beckett’s prose as a ‘shorthand of the question of being’ (2005b: 90). As noticed by Rancière himself (2007: 215–25), Badiou’s readings of Mallarmé are devoted to ‘tracing the event’ and discovering the ‘lyricism of being’ in his poems. Even if the ontology being read into poetry is of a different kind, the philosophical ontologization of art is still to a certain extent active in Badiou. ³

A more detailed philosophical conceptualization of the artistic truth procedure is later developed in Logics of Worlds, where Badiou defines it in formalist terms. Unlike artistic ‘academicism’, which promotes following established formal principles, a true artistic event is defined by a break with the established regime of formalization. Artistic subjects, being faithful to the event (e.g. cubism in painting or serialism in music), develop ‘the consequences of the new capacity to inform the sensible’ (Badiou, 2009a: 73). The infinite capacity of form thus replaces the anti-mimetic presentations of being as the guarantee of artistic truth.

Unlimited Representation in Rancière’s ‘Aesthetic Regime of Art’

Rancière’s aesthetics is not philosophical in the sense of being integrated into a system reliant on a set of ontological propositions. Instead, his writings are investigations of historical regimes of the identification of artistic practices; regimes that have defined the ways art is produced, presented, experienced, and understood. His focus (Rancière, 2013: ix) is on the revolutionary transformations that produced the ‘aesthetic regime of art’, i.e. the ‘sensible fabric and intelligible form’ of what has, since the end of the 18th century, constituted ‘Art’ as a specific sphere of sensible experience.

The new regime of art establishes the autonomy of the sphere of aesthesis in line with the ‘free appearance’ that Schiller attributed to the Greek statue of Juno (Rancière, 2009a: 27). Now that art is defined by a sphere of sensible being (aesthesis) rather than as a way of doing (poiesis), however, there are no longer any proper criteria to distinguish artistic from non-artistic products. Furthermore, the aesthetic revolution brings about ‘the rupturing of the model of adequation between poiesis and aesthesis’ (Rancière, 2009a: 10), which means that there are no longer any pre-give criteria of how artistic appearances should be produced and what they should represent. This is why art’s autonomy is, paradoxically, only achieved by way of its heteronomy: ‘art is henceforth recognizable by its lack of any distinguishing characteristics’ (Rancière, 2009a: 66).

Rancière seemingly joins the onto-poeticists in defining artistic modernity as a break with representation. According to Rancière (2009a: 7), mimesis was the central characteristic of what he calls the representational regime of the arts that defined the products of fine arts and distinguished them from other types of products: ‘The fine arts were so named because the law of mimesis defined them as a regulated relation between a way of doing – a poiesis – and a way of being which is affected by it – an aisthesis.’ The emergence of the aesthetic regime then abolished the plurality of fine arts in favour of a singular notion of art. However, the aesthetic regime’s break with representation does not entail a break with representation per se; rather, it dismantles the normative set of divisions, hierarchies, and conventions that regulated representation. Previously, representation was restricted by the subordination of sensation to narration, passive matter to activity of form, etc., as well as being subjected to the pre-established criteria that distinguished between noble and lowly subject matters and designated the adequate forms of their representation. In the aesthetic regime, however, there ‘are no longer rules of appropriateness between a particular subject and a particular form, but a general availability of all subjects for any artistic form whatsoever’ (Rancière, 2009d: 118). Instead of abolishing representation altogether, the aesthetic revolution simply implies that ‘there are no longer any inherent limits to representation’ (Rancière, 2009d: 137). Unlimited representation opens up the sphere of aesthesis as a sphere of sensible exceptions in which representations are a matter of singular invention.

The aesthetic regime thus emerged at least a century before what is usually considered as the advent of modern art. Modernism, for Rancière (2009a: 68), understood as a break with representation that affirms the pure presentation of artistic medium, misses the mark since it fails to see how art’s autonomy was only established through heteronomy. With regard to literature, the famous aesthetical quarrel concerning realism vs. modernism (involving Lukács, Brecht, Adorno, and others) is thus settled in favour of realism being seen as the beginning of ‘modern’ literature (in terms of the aesthetic regime). Realist novels, which are supposed to be the summit of representational literature, thus become the hallmark of its end. Rancière (2004: 14; 2017b: xxvii–xxviii) backs these claims by referring to Flaubert’s contemporary critics who have accused him of ‘democratic’ indifference in his depiction of subject matter, which also entails a lack of any proper message or narrative structure in his novels. Indifference, however, is a crucial characteristic of the free appearance constitutive of aesthetic autonomy. According to Rancière (2011: 121, 118), Flaubert indeed subverted the representational primacy of narration over description and achieved a ‘metaphysics of anti-representation’ in which narrative structure is dissolved in the ‘dance of atoms carried along in the great river of the infinite, the power of unbound perceptions and affections’. The realist descriptions are not there to represent reality; they are passive intrusions into narrative action, thereby enabling ‘the construction of another narrative chain: a sequence of sensible micro-events’ (Rancière, 2009c: 123–4) that overturns representational hierarchies of subject matter and corresponding forms.

Flaubert’s famous letter to Louise Colet, in which he affirms his ideal of writing ‘a book about nothing’, can thus be read as the manifesto of the aesthetic revolution in literature. A book about nothing, Flaubert writes (1980: 154), would be ‘a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.’ The form achieved by such style would be a form that ‘leaves behind all liturgy, rule, measure’. Flaubert even goes on to explicitly express the aesthetic abandonment of the hierarchies of subject matter: ‘It is for this reason that there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects; from the standpoint of pure Art one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject – style in itself being the absolute manner of seeing things.’

While Rancière takes no interest in developing an ontology that would account for this egalitarian dance of sensible atoms, he nevertheless links it to Deleuze’s molecular equality of pre-individual singularities and the multiplicity of sensible events (Rancière, 2007: 35). Even though the dance of the atoms is fictional, rather than ontological, Rancière still considers Deleuze’s ontology to provide an adequate model of understanding it. If my assessment of onto-poetics is correct, however, Deleuze’s ontology is an awkward match for Rancière’s aesthetics. Alternatively, one could link the Flaubertian metaphysics of literature to what I extracted from Badiou’s subtractive approach to ontology. On the one hand, there is the void of subject matter, and on the other, style as a surplus representation. This surplus representative without representation leaves behind its ‘measure’ to enable ‘the absolute manner of seeing’ through what I have called a monadless window.

Be that as it may, the ‘free appearance’ of the aesthetic regime also has an inherently political dimension for Rancière. The divisions and hierarchies of the representational regime were a part of the division of the sensible that produced effects of inequality within the social order. For example, the division between the fine and applied arts historically corresponded to the different coordinates of sensible experience assigned to noble men who had the time to engage with the former and the workers who made a living doing the latter. These aesthetic divisions determine ‘a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience’ (Rancière, 2004: 13). The aesthetic democratization of the sensible thus intervenes in the same sensible reality that constitutes political divisions and narratives. The excess of representation is thus not an illusionistic spectacle but has very specific political implications.

Rancière’s (1989) work on aesthetics is a continuation of his early writings on workers’ emancipation. The division of the sensible that denied workers the ability and the time to produce anything beyond their work and own reproduction was challenged by those 19th-century workers who reclaimed the time to indulge in intellectual and artistic activities, thereby reinstating the universality of these supposed privileges. Emancipation is therefore not a matter of resisting false ideological representations, nor is it a matter of expressing true identities: ‘“Proletarian” political subjectification … is in no way a form of “culture”, of some collective ethos capable of finding a voice. It presupposes, on the contrary, a multiplicity of fractures separating worker[s’] bodies from their ethos and from the voice that is supposed to express the soul of this ethos’ (Rancière, 1999: 36). A subjectivation implies a disidentification induced by taking on an additional and ‘false’ representation that endows bodies with previously unidentifiable capacities.

Aesthetic fictions are thus not limited to inventing imaginary worlds, nor are they evoking an expression of the real beyond the construction of reality. ⁴ Rather, they are involved in ‘the construction of a framework within which subjects, things, and situations can be perceived as coexisting in a common world’ (Rancière, 2017a: 13). The emancipatory potential no longer resides in the monadic seclusion of the Adornian unrealizable promise. Instead, it consists of an intervention in the given regime of representation. Transformations in the field of aisthesis thus construct a sphere of aesthetic equality in which the sensible fabric that constitutes the common world is reframed. However, the sensible micro-events that interrupt the representational narrative logic also interrupt the logic of causes and effects that would allow art to have a direct political impact. While the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics operate in the same sensible field, forms of aesthetic equality do not immediately translate into forms of political equality.

Conclusion: Monadless Windows

The windowless monad, Adorno’s conceptual metaphor, was indicative of philosophy’s search for objects, events, and experiences that escape the representational construction of reality and express a truth from the other side of the ontological difference. As discussed above, such poetic ontology results in an onto-poetics that perceives the artwork as a self-expressive presentation of being. This essay explored Badiou’s ontology and Rancière’s aesthetics as two very different and partial, but nevertheless complementary, projects that set out to dismantle this onto-aesthetic conceptual constellation from within. While both projects are still based on a critique of representation, the stakes of this critique are substantially transformed. Rather than seeking a revelation of being beyond representation as such, both look for surplus representations that undermine the given representational regime. As noted in the introduction, however, a more direct comparison between Badiou and Rancière on these matters proves to be difficult since Rancière does not develop an ontology to be compared to Badiou’s while Badiou’s writings on art as a truth procedure do not include an aesthetics in a strict sense – it is, after all, an ‘inaesthetics’ that he is after, denouncing ‘aesthetic speculation’.

While at first sight there seems to be no inherent need for an ontology within his thought, as we have seen, Rancière nevertheless borrows Deleuze’s ontological model, which he otherwise denounces, to theorize the non-ontological, purely sensible difference made by the aesthetic regime. The question therefore lingers if this points to an unresolved remainder of onto-poetics in Rancière’s work on aesthetics, or does his work actually imply a more subtractive ontological model, closer to Badiou than to Deleuze? Badiou’s conception of inaesthetics, on the other hand, is targeted by Rancière (2009a: 63–87) for his over-estimation of anti-representational artistic autonomy, which he paradoxically pairs with a re-discovery of his core philosophical ideas of being and event in his readings of artworks. For Rancière, this demonstrates a regression with regard to the aesthetic regime, which is based precisely on the convergence of aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy. While, for Badiou (2005b: 9), the truths found in art are immanent and singular, i.e. internal and specific to art, the aesthetic revolution, according to Rancière (2013: xi), established art as a distinct sphere of sensible being and experience precisely by blurring the boundaries that separate it from other types of thought and practice. In a sense, as Rancière notices (2009: 228–9), the very practice of inaesthetics would be impossible if artistic truths would indeed be completely autonomous. ⁵

At the point where Badiou nevertheless indulges in aesthetic speculation and proposes a definition of artistic truth procedure in terms of form, another divergence from Rancière’s aesthetic regime is revealed. While Badiou insists on the artistic power to impose form on the chaotic formlessness of the sensible, Rancière’s aesthetic regime is based on the Schillerian subversion of the primacy of the active form over the supposed passivity of sensible materiality. Rancière even claims (2009a: 75) that Badiou’s aesthetics is actually an attempt at delimitation from the field of aisthesis itself, professing ‘the Idea as pure subtraction, as a pure operation of the integral disappearance of the sensible’. If Rancière is right, Badiou’s pure formalism not only eradicates onto-poetics but poetics itself, losing any relation to the sensible.

Perhaps it is again Flaubert’s famous letter that can provide some clarity here. Is not the absolute manner of seeing an absolutized form that does not, however, eliminate its relation to the sensible but rather relates to it precisely through its indifference to it? It does not provide a revelation of being, but relates to the sensible in a subtractive way. Flaubert’s aesthetic ideal of a book about nothing can therefore be read both in terms of Badiou’s ontology and Rancière’s aesthetics, avoiding the paradoxes of Badiou’s inaesthetics and Rancière’s borrowed and disavowed (Deleuzian) ontology.

Produced as an absolute way of seeing, the artwork morphs from a windowless monad into a monadless window. Based on this reversal, philosophy no longer seeks the truth of the artwork behind the veil of representation, where an expression of being itself is supposed to leave its mark. There is nothing to express beyond representation, and this nothing can itself only be represented. What is excluded from the representational constitution of reality cannot be immediately expressed but only represented by the groundless, surplus representation of the monadless window. Ontologically, this shift implies the subtraction of being from its indifferent multiplicity, finding truth in the event as a ‘risky supplementation’ rather than in the expression of being. In the context of the philosophy of art, it implies a move from the aesthetics of being to the aesthetics of the sensible event. What philosophy thus looks for in an artwork is not the being it reveals, but rather the way in which it manages to reframe the transcendental coordinates of sensible experience. Unlike the Heideggerian unconcealment or Deleuzian becomings that release something ontological from the ontical frame of representation, monadless windows rely on the productivity of the frame itself that no longer mirrors the representative construction of reality but challenges it through singular reframings. Monadless windows are such surplus frames that demand a Flaubertian absoluteness: suspended in the void of the subtracted being, they depend on nothing external for their support.