A CONTEMPORARY CONTRIBUTION TO UTOPIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT: JACQUES RANCIÈRE’S AESTHETIC HETEROTOPIA

Date

2025-9-30

Author

Durdu, Nisa

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This thesis aims to answer the question how to reclaim utopia as an emancipatory concept in our contemporary era, which constitutes a crisis of political imagination due to the dominance of dystopian narratives. As its main argument, the study offers Jacques Rancière’s philosophy, particularly his concept of aesthetic heterotopia, as a form of “enacted utopia” that presents a significant contemporary contribution to utopian political thought. Rancière’s framework for aesthetic heterotopia synthesises the process-oriented qualification of iconoclastic utopias with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia in a refined way that emphasises temporality. An aesthetic heterotopia presents not a distant ideal but a temporary event when and where aesthetic-political acts create a dissensus, a rupture in the dominant “police order” that governs the “distribution of the sensible”. This rupture provides the reconfiguration of this sensible order – of what can be perceived and said – that allows for new political subjects to perform equality in the here-and-now. The thesis investigates the evolution of utopian political thought, scrutinises Rancière’s philosophy, and identifies aesthetic heterotopia’s key functions: aesthetic rupture in the sensible order, juxtaposition of incompatible elements, counter-emplacement of political subjectivation, and heterochronia, or disruption of time. Ultimately, the study explains that Rancière’s concept of aesthetic heterotopia posits how radical politics are enacted through aesthetic ruptures in the here-and-now as a response to today’s dystopic despair.

Subject Keywords

utopia, aesthetic heterotopia, Jacques Rancière

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116116

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis