Jacques Ranciere’s Freudian Cause

I believe…that I have introduced something that will occupy the minds of men for a long time.

— Freud¹

What is to be done, when you are invited to the Ecole de Psychanalyses in Brussels, when you are the author of a considerable body of work demonstrating original thought, and when you announce from the beginning that you have “no competence to speak from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory”? (L’inconscient esthétique, 9). Jacques Rancière, thus solicited in January 2000, responds by inventing a new formula of the unconscious. Or rather, he discovers what was already there, waiting to be described and named, and which will thereafter be called Jacques Rancière’s “aesthetic unconscious.” This concept, linked at its foundations to the unconscious theorized by Freud, will nonetheless play the role of an agitator-concept, ever constitutive of the aesthetic genesis “buried” in psychoanalysis. It is rare and unforeseeable that an external circumstance should thus become an essential milestone in a conceptual creation, that an original thought, challenged by something foreign—by its “other” that is psychoanalysis— should produce such a concept. Every creator must be able to summon his interlocutors onto his own terrain—in this case, for Rancière, that of the aesthetic. Further, he must know how to separate from himself, to distance himself from his own system of thought, and play with it, put it into a “fictive” relationship with another, in a new “theoretical scenography.”²