Art and Anarchism: Equality between dispute and misunderstanding

Catherine Malabou’s practice engages in the relationship between philosophy, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, as well as contemporary feminist subjects.

Her new book, Au Voleur! Anarchism and Philosophy [Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy] (University Press of France, PUF), questions the reasons why major figures in philosophy have ignored the notion of anarchism, even though many of their concepts are inspired by it.

According to Malabou, ‘…An outstanding debate on the relationship between art and philosophy in recent decades can be epitomized by the debate between Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Rancière on the question of the political role of art. For Lyotard, it is paradoxically in the unpresentable that the political dissent manifests itself […]. Therefore, equality can neither be represented nor materialize. Rancière, on the contrary, affirms that experience itself unfolds through artistic forms. Art, as a displacement of political discord, allows to repair the social apparatus and to think of equality as a form of offerring to spectators the possibility of emerging on the political scene by emancipating themselves. Starting by this opposing argumentation, both Lyotard and Rancière arrive to the conclusion of a definition of art as an anarchist device. Where are we today?’