Space, Politics and Aesthetics

This book explores the relationship between space, politics and aesthetics through an engagement with Arendt, Ranciere and Nancy. This book explores the political force of aesthetic experience and the role space plays in politics. It argues that politics is about forms of perceiving the world and modes of relating to it. How this world is constructed, disclosed and disrupted are matters of politics, and so Space, Politics and Aesthetics offers an understanding of politics based on apprehension and revelation. This implies a particular relationship between space and politics; rather than a given background for relations between things, space here implies a capacity for things to appear and exhibit relations of simultaneity and order. This book argues that space is a form of appearance and a mode of actuality, and the disruption of such forms and modes is the sublime element in politics. It explores the political aesthetic of Arendt, Ranciere and Nancy, focusing on their Kantian legacies. It proposes new ways of conceptualising space and thinking about the relationship between space and politics.