19. Mai |  19:00   |  Eric Alliez (London)

Diagrammatic Regime versus Aesthetic Regime of Contemporary Art. Or, How to Make It a Body without Image (the Ernesto Neto's Case)

It is in a critical relation to Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic image that I propose, in this lecture, to develop the idea of a diagrammatic regime of contemporary art.

Rancière has been associated with the most significant modality according to which the aesthetic has recently seen its objects and its stakes redeployed. His aesthetic image expresses the de-figuring of any representative relationship between the sayable and the visible in the free play of signs-forms or images-phrases whose discourse defines forms of visibility as much as modes of intelligibility. To this dialectical play of textual excess with regard to the life of forms, the name »aesthetic regime« has been given, in so far as it participates in a real-imaginary metaphorics that is twice superior (according to the Schillerian principle of a logos identical to a pathos, etc).

Undoing the metaphoric regime of the aesthetic image will involve what I will call, after Deleuze and (after all) Guattari, a signaesthesia whose reality conditions will be defined through a clinical investigation of Ernesto Neto’s most important (counter-)installation: Leviathan Thot [Panthéon, Paris, 2006].