Aesthetics and Politics in Badiou’s "The Century" and in "Rancière’s Malaise dans l’Esthétique"

Abstract

Badiou and Rancière have formalized two interesting theories of Avant-gardes to understanding the relationship between Aesthetics and Politics. Badiou developed an original interpretation of Avant-gardes as «openprocess of formalization», from a re-lecture of some topics of Hegel’s Logic. The theme is to define the relationships between finite and infinite in artistic production. Rancière, on the contrary, criticized the Badiou’s hegelianism and speaks about a dialectic of regimes of visuality, quite different in historical Avantgardes and in the contemporary Art: the political character of contemporary Art differs from the political character of Surrealism or russian Constructivism; actually, Arts cannot be «didactical oriented», but must intent to explain the complexity of images and the necessity to re-define the forms of the «partition of the sensible».