It has now been some fifteen years that Jacques Rancière has been developing his meticulous research on the aesthetic revolution that has deeply marked the last two centuries. His work testifies to a remarkable originality insofar as it opposes the modernist discourse that obstinately dominates debates on art history by trafficking in simple and reductive conceptual schemes: classical art and modern art, art theory and artistic practice, art for art's sake and committed art, the non- or anti-representative rupture, the intransitive turning point, and so on. Rancière's method, moreover, consists in integrating all of those who have been seduced by these schematic representations into his own historical project, turning them into pieces on his chessboard, via what I propose to call explanatory and synthetic polemics. His work also has the particularity of breaking with the dominant categories for thinking the relationship between art and politics, whether those of the Marxist tradition, those of the sociology of art, or those of the post-structuralists. In proposing the notion of a distribution of the sensible common to art and politics, he masterfully analyses their consubstantiality by showing that art, to the extent that it distributes and redistributes the categories of the sensible world (the visible and the invisible, the expressible and the inexpressible, the possible and the impossible, etc.), is already political. In the case of the aesthetic regime of art, he foregrounds, moreover, the proximity between the aesthetic revolution of the last two centuries and the egalitarian politics of democracy, without however confusing the two.

Given the unequalled rigour of Rancière's research, the originality of the positions he takes, and all of the methodological innovations that he introduces, his reader cannot but be surprised that he only rarely broaches a question that nonetheless appears essential to his project, namely that of historical causality: why did the aesthetic revolution, in the specific form that it takes in Rancière's work, begin near the end of the eighteenth century? Why did it develop in such an intimate, but often conflictual, relationship with modern democracy? Rancière sometimes refers to a few key events of the modern age, be it the French Revolution, the revival of Christianity, the emergence of the social sciences, the democratic surge of the nineteenth century, or sometimes the birth of the museum and the circulation of novels.