Atrocity Exhibition by Brad Evans

Author:Brad Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in somewhat different form in TruthOut.

Facing the Intolerable

Brad Evans

Tuesday, 11 November 2014

JACQUES RANCIÈRE’S Figures of History is the latest instalment from a serious thinker whose pioneering work engages with the politics of aesthetics in an attempt to reimagine the political as an art form. In Figures of History, Rancière offers an accessible introduction to the links between aesthetics and various regimes of power and the ways aesthetics is integral to thinking about who we are as people. He also provides a nuanced framing of the modern history of art, wrestling out the silenced and invisible from figurative enslavement. As Rancière writes,

If there is a visible hidden beneath the invisible, it’s not the electric arc that will reveal it, save it from non-being, but the mise en scène of words, the moment of dialogue between the voice that makes those words ring out and the silence of images that show the absence of what the words say.

Rancière’s Anglo-American appeal is evidently on the rise: translations of his works are proliferating and his audience is growing in a broad set of academic disciplines. This has placed him in direct confrontation with two notable contemporaries: Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou. Rancière and Badiou both studied under the tutelage of Louis Althusser, and they both have affinities and animosities with Gilles Deleuze, although different ones. Badiou, for instance, largely rejects Deleuze’s intellectual corpus, especially concerning the idea of “the event,” which Badiou universalizes through his notion of fidelity to truth, including the truth of art, whereas Rancière does not. Deleuze, in fact, remains instrumental for Rancière in terms of his ongoing thinking of the political function of art through what he terms the “distribution of the sensible”: aesthetics, for Rancière, is integral to the delimitation of spaces and times, including what is perceived as proper to thought.

Rancière’s Figures embodies the tragedies of modernity. Our first glimpse of this appears on the cover, which features Larry Rivers’s Erasing the Past II. Rivers’s subtle erasure of the image of a Holocaust survivor (invoking all-too-evident connections with the cover art of the Abacus edition of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man/The Truce) captures the author’s contention that we must approach all representations of historical events with scepticism — questioning what is memorialized, what is erased, what is being shown, what is being slowly forgotten. History, he claims, should be rethought by attending to the hidden traces. Rancière writes, “history isn’t done yet with turning itself into stories,” drawing upon a range of compelling examples from Francisco Goya, Otto Dix, Claude Lanzmann, and Zoran Mušič in order to draw particular attention to the victims of historical forces. This allows him to explain how “figures” represent the overt politicization of the truth of history while providing figurative displacements that allow for novel interpretations and the recovery of more complex narratives concerning histories of violence.

Every war produces its casualties. While these are often measured along some crude atrocity scale, as societies try to make statistical sense of the quantifiable levels of destruction (i.

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