Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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precisely where one can best reveal the constitution of the Ideal that now makes up beauty. This is where its essential animating tension can be made manifest. This tension can be summarized simply: on the one hand, the freedom of the work signifies its indifference to its represented content. This freedom can thus appear purely negative: it relies only on the status of the works in museums where they are separated from their primary destination. Religious scenes or royal portraits, mythological compositions or domestic scenes, the paintings that yesterday were used to illustrate the truths of faith, to figure the grandeur of princes or to adorn aristocratic life, are offered in the same way to the gaze of anonymous visitors, ever less attentive to the meaning and the destination of the paintings. This indifference could mean that, from now on, painting is a simple matter of shapes and light, lines and colours. At first sight, the praise for Murillo’s little beggars or the Dutch or Flemish genre scenes seems to illustrate this idea. One must not misconstrue the ‘realism’ of the representation of the little beggar boys. It is itself the result of a process of abstraction. The child who lets himself be deloused is not simply the representation of everyday life in Seville. He is first a figure detached from another kind of painting, where he had a defined function: to illustrate the works of charity. On a painting hung on the walls of the Caridad hospital, the same Murillo depicted a very similar child. But it is Saint Isabella of Hungary who is busy cleaning his scabby forehead, while an old woman, like the attentive mother, appears as another patient in the hospital. The autonomy of painting is first and foremost the autonomy of its figures in relation to histories and allegories in which they had their place and their function. The representation of the destitute, people who have no importance on their own, allows for the upheaval of the illustration of subjects towards the pure potential of appearance. On the gallery walls, the light of the pictorial works shines indifferently on the quality of what it illuminates: ‘servants, old women, peasants blowing smoke from cutty pipes, the glitter of wine in transparent glass, chaps in dirty jackets playing old cards’.19 It is not the representation of these ordinary objects that makes for the value of the painting, but the glimmerings and reflections that animate its surface, ‘the pure appearance which is wholly without the sort of interest that the subject has’.20
This absence of interest is obviously not invoked by accident. It is the key word of the Kantian theory of aesthetic judgment. Hegel intends to show that this disinterestedness is not only the subjective property of judgment, but also the very content of painting, and especially the content of painting as such. Painting, in effect, is the art that does not merely describe things, as poets do, but makes them visible. But it is also the art that no longer concerns itself with filling space with volumes, analogous to the bodies it figures, as sculpture does. Rather, it uses its surface as the means to repudiate them: to mock their consistent solidity by making them appear through artificial means, but also illuminating their most evanescent aspect, closest to their shining and glittering surfaces, to the passing instant and the changing light. And it is also the art that manages to prove itself fully once it no longer serves any faith nor celebrates any self-perpetuating greatness: a village scene is something in which no social power seeks its image, it is thus what we look at for the pure ‘disinterested’ pleasure of enjoying the play of appearances. And it is this play of appearances that is the very realization of freedom of mind.
But a problem arises here: if the freedom of the painting consisted in this play alone, it would simply be identified with the virtuosity of the artist capable of transfiguring any profane reality. The Dutch painting would be privileged, since the very mediocrity of its subject shows that the virtuoso art of the maker of appearances is the only real content of painting, whatever its subject may be. But the relation between freedom of art and the indifference of subject does not allow itself to be resolved so easily; nor does the relation between profane life and artistic singularity. The freedom manifested by the insouciance of the characters depicted cannot simply be reduced to the freedom of indifference. The new concept of art demands – as a famous work by Kandinsky recalled in the next century – that it be the realization of content, of an inner necessary freedom. Hegel had already insisted as much: what is seen on the canvas is neither the life of the Golden Age peasant nor the dexterity of Teniers, Steen or Metsu. The play of appearances, light effects, and the jauntiness of the canvas must not arrive on top of the painting independently of the subject. They must reveal its true subject. The freedom incarnated on the canvas does not belong to the artist, but to the people able to domesticate hostile nature, end foreign domination, and gain religious freedom. Greek freedom was signified by indifference in the impassivity of the stone god. Dutch freedom was signified as the indifferent treatment of appearances in relation to the vulgarity of subjects. But this ‘indifferent’ treatment makes the non-vulgar, spiritual content of these subjects visible: the freedom of a people that gave itself its own way of life and prosperity, that can rejoice with ‘insouciance’ about the setting it gives itself after great pains, and rejoice in a disinterested way at the image of this universe, created by artifice, in the same way the child revels in the skipping of a stone skilfully thrown across the water’s surface. Hegel considers the child who throws pebbles to transform the natural landscape into the appearance of its own freedom as the originary figure of the artistic gesture, a figure itself inherited from the freedom that Winckelmann saw expressed in the indifferent movement of the waves. But the freedom of the child throwing stones is also the freedom that shaped him – that gave itself its own world by taming the sea and chasing the invader. Dutch liberty expresses itself in the modern art of painting which paints the reflection of light and water upon popular works and entertainments, as Greek freedom in classical art fashioned the serenity of gods.
Yet it not that easy to distinguish the joyful insouciance that characterizes the paintings of free Holland from the kind that spreads across the genre scenes of the Flemish people still under Spanish domination. It is even less simple to understand how the freedom of the heroic and industrious Dutch can be conferred upon the young beggars of Seville, these children of servitude, these children of the land of monarchy and superstition that had placed the Netherlands under its tutelage. It was necessary that they somehow find themselves in the Antwerp market, at the crossroads of Dutch freedom and Spanish servitude, integrated into the art of the people, in order to acquire their exemplarity. But on a deeper level, it was necessary that Dutch freedom, the freedom of an active people reflected on the polished surface of domestic objects represented by its painters, be identified with another freedom that could however seem to be its precise negation: that of the Olympic gods, that of the goddess celebrated by Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Like the Juno Ludovisi, the little beggars enjoy the beatitude of those who have neither worry nor will, those who remain at rest, without any desire to speak or act. The Greek people attributed this absence of worry to their gods, the poet wrote, because it was the very essence of its liberty. He was probably thinking of the famous speech Thucydides attributed to Pericles, affirming that the military heroism of the Athenians had its source in their carefree lives. But the identity of hard work and heroic action with the absence of all worry had been affirmed by Winckelmann, who found its supreme embodiment in a Hercules at rest, lacking a head able to will and limbs able to act. If the insouciance with which the little Sevillian beggars eat their melon, play cards, or let themselves be picked for lice while munching bread, can express the artistic Ideal, it is because it comprises both the freedom of the modern people that gives itself a world through will power and that of the antique god who neither wants nor does anything. This idea of Greek freedom as the conjunction of supreme activity and perfect idleness, shaped by the shoemaker’s son Winckelmann, would later, as we know, during the French affirmation of collective will and great communitarian festivities, nourish the idea of a true revolution for young people, named Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin – a revolution that would abolish the cold mechanics of the State and unite a philosophy that had become poetry and mythology with the sensible life of the people.
The author of the Lectures on Aesthetics stands on the other edge of the great revolutionary upheaval, when both the antique reconstitutions of the French revolutionaries and the dreams the revolution sparked in these young German philosophers and poets, now back to their senses, had subsided. And a few years earlier, in the same university, Professor Hegel, in his courses devoted to the philosophy of right, praised the formative influence of work and discipline, which left no room for reveries on the divine insouciance of these little beggars. But