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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Aesthetic Political Thought: Benjamin and Marker Revisited

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The complexity of contemporary political life has challenged traditional political theory in several Western democracies. With the emergence of new approaches to the interpretation of political praxis, we are forced to confront issues such as the New Right, the Christian Right, communitarianism, post-liberalism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism, feminism, globalization, and green thought. Many of these approaches continue to both reflect and critically challenge major ideological movements dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Since alterations to earlier theories are commonly the result of changes in political, cultural, and social conditions, new approaches to understanding political reality are also signs of transformations in the terms in which the political is now understood. Where traditional or classic political theory has tended to express the claims of established political institutions, parties, and ideologies, alternative ways of understanding the political have increasingly exceeded these boundaries. Chantal Mouffe, for example, notes that "the political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition."' Although Mouffe's critique is focused specifically on political liberalism, she refers to a broad understanding of the political. The political, understood as being inherent to "every human society" and thus extending from institution to human condition, signifies a move toward new spheres of the conceptualization of political thought and praxis. In his book Aesthetic Politics, Frank Ankersmit claims that the contemporary "brokenness" of political reality refers, in fact, to the actualization of politics. Through this claim, Ankersmit attempts to redefine politics in terms that refrain from reducing it to ethics, economics, public interest or technological determinism. In this respect, Ankersmit follows a perspectivist idea of political reality in terms already sketched by Machiavelli, in which there is no perspective that is uniquely privileged above all others in discovering and defining political truth. (2) In other words, the chosen perspective on political truth or its ethical background is, in itself, a political matter. One result of this specification of the complexity of political reality led Ankersmit to rethink politics in aesthetic terms. In this article, the terms aesthetic and difference are characteristic of my ways of understanding some of the core elements of the political. Consequently, the diversity of contemporary aesthetic, political, and historical representation, and even the diversity of existing ideas and theories, is understood here not as a confusing but as a creative force within the contemporary understanding of politics. As part of this creativity, I seek to inspire new ways of discussing aesthetic forms of politicization, political representation, and action. Through my examples, I will focus on questions about the representation of history, politics, and memory. First, I will discuss Walter Benjamin's idea of representing history as a "montage." (3) This is equally an historical, political, and aesthetic montage, portrayed both through textual and visual representation. Instead of offering an homogeneous image of reality, Benjamin's notion of an historical montage combines the individual with the collective, conciliatory with contradictory elements of history. The idea of montage also plays a significant role in the examination of how the heterogeneity of historical knowledge forms an active background for constituting political knowledge. Hence, the idea of montage brings forth the uniqueness of different moments that each in their own way participates in constituting images of history and politics. Second, I will discuss "cinematic politics" (4) in relation to the various aesthetic works of Chris Marker. …