For Jacques Rancière, politics is not primarily the exercise of, or struggle for, power, but the institution of a certain type of space and time, a mode of visibility and intelligibility that creates a tear in the consensual fabric of a given form of collective life. Art institutes just such a space and time, in which the fundamental polarities of experience – activity and passivity, form and matter, appearance and reality – are suspended and transformed.

The questions forming the horizon of this collection are therefore: What would it mean to propose a new aesthetic education of humanity today? How would the resurrection of this concept transform the current concepts of art, politics, and pedagogy? And to what extent is it necessary to return to the founding moments of aesthetic theory to rearticulate the relation between art and politics today.

Published with Art Center Graduate Press, Pasadena.