The work of Jacques Rancière is concerned with the sublime, but in a negative sense. He hates it. And as well, he hates the way thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard (and in fact them in particular, his colleagues in the Philosophy department at Paris VIII) have constructed both an aesthetics and an ethics from it. And as well, how this sublime aesthetics draws upon a politics (which is also an ontology) of otherness. In fact, he is even going to accuse Derrida of this, although without roilling him up with the problems of the sublime. So Rancière is going to be very useful to us as a critical reflection on those who have gone before, but as well he will because he is the one who speaks most about contemporary art. But his place here is not entirely negative, despite his constant and methodological disagreements. Rancière also offers an aesthetics based upon Kant's Third Critique, but one that begins from the beautiful rather than the sublime. This will be a useful addition to the aesthetics we have already examined that emerge from Kant's work, and another possible way to understand its political possibilities.

HE DISAGREES WITH DERRIDA …

Rancière was taught by Derrida, but denies being his disciple (2007b: 84) and so unsurprisingly he has inherited some of Derrida's methods and rejected others. On the one hand they share a commitment to a linguistic epistemology, a deconstruction and deferral of clear oppositions, and a belief in the power of art to generate performative and aleatory events. On the other, however, and as Rancière puts it: ‘I have read Derrida with interest, but from a certain distance’ (2003: 208). This distance– one approaching disavowal– is clearly stated in ‘Does Democracy Mean Something?’, a lecture given by Rancière as part of a series celebrating Derrida after his death: ‘I was never a disciple of Derrida or a specialist on his thought’, Rancière begins, justifying, perhaps, presenting a lecture on his own work containing only a few asides comparing it to Derrida's (2007b: 84).