University of Minnesota Press

University of Minnesota Press
Chapter Title: The Democratic Anarchy of Unexceptional Art
Book Title: Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism

Book Author(s): Arne De Boever
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (2019)
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4. The Democratic Anarchy of
Unexceptional Art
It seems that within the kind of art world that I have just
evoked, an art world that would not be built on aesthetic excep-
tionalism, the Toporovski affair with which I started this book is
nearly unthinkable. If I evoke such an art world, it is not because
I want to offer a plea for indifference in the debate about the orig-
inal and the copy or because I want to get rid of artists altogether.
Rather, it is because it seems to me—and I hope I have made this
clear along the way—that the Toporovski affair and the aesthet-
ic exceptionalism that produces it also point to an economic and
political exceptionalism in the arts that ought to be considered.
How close is the aesthetic preference for the original, for exam-
ple, and the aesthetic exceptionalism of such a preference—which
extends into the exceptionalism of the artist—to Schmitt’s theory
of sovereignty, and its politics? How close is it to the economic ex-
ceptionalism of art that lies at the basis of the art market—of art’s
exorbitant prices and of the use of art, even, as a contemporary
investment strategy?
Supposedly, the works from the Toporovski collection were re-
moved from the Museum for Fine Arts in Ghent on art historical and
pedagogical grounds, because questions had been raised about the
authenticity of the works and because the general public may have
been lied to about the works when they were exhibited in a public
(and publicly funded) institution. But one has to wonder whether
the public (and publicly funded) exhibition of forgeries is not also
unthinkable because such an exhibition would undermine the eco-
nomic and political order of the art world, if not Western thought
more generally? If that were to be the case—and I have suggested it
65
66 Ag a inst A est h etic E xcep tiona lism
is—what does the Toporovski affair tell us about the economic and
political order of the art world (and perhaps of the West more gen-
erally), and about how that world is in the last instance structured
by a certain kind of sovereignty and exceptionalism?
If the work of Carl Schmitt is a key reference in this conversa-
tion, I have also tried to nuance its role in it both by diversifying
our understanding of Schmitt and by pointing out that “Schmitt”
does not have the monopoly over the exception. It is possible to
distinguish different kinds of exceptionalisms. And perhaps it is
possible to stay within the limits of the Toporovski affair, to ac-
cept its condition (the attachment to the original), and mobilize
such an exceptionalism for democratic purposes. But it seems to
me that a democratic debate about aesthetic exceptionalism did
not take place in the context of this affair. In other words, at no
point was it asked whether, if the Toporovski collection consisted
of forgeries that were actually good paintings—an aesthetic judg-
ment that is obviously always up for debate, in excess of the is-
sue of originality—it would have been conceivable to show those
paintings at the museum.
Would it? Or would it not?
If not—and I expect that “No” would be the resonant answer—
then what is the aesthetic, economic, and political philosophy of
art that is upheld here? Can such a philosophy be called demo-
cratic? Or should it quite simply be recognized that the art world
is aesthetically, economically, and politically an oligarchic and
plutocratic environment—in other words, that it is profoundly
antidemocratic? This is one way of saying that when it comes to
curator Catherine de Zegher’s eye,1 it might have failed within a
Western perspective, within the logic of aesthetic exceptionalism
(the analysis of the works that were on display will have to pro-
1. I focus on the curator’s eye here because de Zegher herself has
brought it up. See gse, “De Zegher: ‘Ik Had Geen Argwaan Over Collectie
Toporovski.” De Standaard, March 6, 2018, http://www.standaard.be/cnt
/dmf20180306_03393143.
The Democratic Anarchy of Unexceptional Art 67
vide the evidence for this). But it also might not have failed from
that other point of view that I have sought to develop: it might not
have failed outside of aesthetic exceptionalism. In other words, the
works shown at the museum were perhaps not what they were
presented to be, and of course that ought to be corrected. But they
might be interesting works, still. Is it a democratic element in art
that makes the latter judgment impossible? Or something else?2
In her own account of the Toporovski affair, de Zegher con-
cludes that she speaks for those who love beauty and truth.3 But
the latter—truth—is not necessarily tied to the former—beauty.
Part of the issue is how the two come together in a scientific aes-
thetic institution like a museum, where one expects to encounter
both the beautiful and the true. Even if the works in question turn
out not to be true, they can still be beautiful, and therefore could
still conceivably be worthy of exhibition in a scientific institution,
as long as they are presented truthfully. Can we imagine this open-
ness in the museum? If not, what does this tell us about the eco-
nomics and politics of the museum as an institution?
Byung-Chul Han does not draw political conclusions from
his work on Chinese deconstruction, but his thought about de-
creation can be developed in such a direction. In the “final” vol-
ume of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer
series, which lays bare the fundamental biopolitical operation of
sovereignty (its internal exclusion or exception of what Agamben
after Walter Benjamin calls “bare life” within the limits of the
polis, thus turning the polis into a camp4), Agamben describes a
kind of power—or perhaps better, potential—that he dubs “des-
2. To be clear, I don’t doubt that de Zegher decided to include the

works for exceptionalist reasons, because she thought they were originals
by the Russian avant-garde artists that the exhibition sought to celebrate.
3. See de Zegher, “Fake Art.”
4. On this, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1998).
tituent.”5 With this notion, Agamben wants to take on precisely

the sovereign exceptionalism that I have associated with Schmitt.
In the earlier volumes of his project, Agamben had traced such
an exceptionalism back to the fact that the Greeks, in his analysis,
had two words for life: zoe, or the simple fact of living shared by
animals, humans, and gods; and bios, which refers to the quali-
fied life of an individual or group—ethical or political life. The
tragedy of Western power, as Agamben sees it, is played out in
the dynamic between those two notions of life, with for example
political protection being granted to living subjects as an addition
to their zoe, thus including zoe within the sphere of bios only by
virtue of its exclusion.
Agamben understands this internal exclusion to be an excep-
tion, and refers to the general state in which such a political log-
ic is the case as “the state of exception.” Whereas the latter, in
Schmitt, tends to be associated with emergency situations, accord-
ing to Agamben it has become the rule in contemporary Western
societies. If the concentration camp is an extreme example of such
a state, where its underlying logic is unsparingly laid bare, mod-
ern political societies have in fact continued to operate accord-
ing to this rule, which is the rule of the exception. According to
Agamben, the only way out of such a situation is to neutralize the
vicious dynamic between zoe and bios, between the simple fact of
living and its form, life and the form of life. To accomplish this, he
develops in The Use of Bodies the enigmatic notion of form-of-life
(with the hyphens), which had already come up at various other
places in Agamben’s work.
If the separation between zoe and bios can be traced back to a
hylemorphic Aristotelian ontology (an ontology that is founded in
the distinction between matter and form), as Agamben convincing-
ly argues, form-of-life is meant to displace the basic opposition of
5. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford,

Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016), 263.
that ontology by “contract[ing] into one another in a peremptory

gesture” the notions of zoe and bios, thus “taking leave of classical
politics.”6 In Agamben’s view, this “points toward an unheard-of
politicization of life as such”:
The wager here is that there can be a bios, a mode of life, that is de-
fined solely by means of its special and inseparable union with zoe
and has no other content than the latter (and reciprocally, that there
is a zoe that is nothing other than its form, its bios). Precisely and
solely to the bios and zoe thus transfigured do there belong the attri-
butes of political life: happiness and autarchy.7
It is this new form of contract theory (as I have characterized it

elsewhere) that Agamben finds in form-of-life (with the hyphens
marking the contraction, visualizing it on the page).8
Exceptionalism, for Agamben, can thus be traced back to the
dynamic between zoe and bios. Translated into aesthetic excep-
tionalism, I want to propose an analogy with the dynamic between
the original and the copy, with the museum—in parallel to modern
Western states—emerging as what Agamben calls a camp, where
works (zoe) are only included by virtue of their being labeled orig-
inal and authentic (bios), an inclusion that truly operates as an in-
ternal exclusion or exception given that when works—even if they
are good works—are exposed to be forgeries, they will be removed
from the museum.9 Here, it becomes clear that the distinction
6. Agamben, 219.
7. Agamben, 219.
8. For Agamben, such a contraction is a Platonic gesture, but to un-
derstand this one must delve into his idiosyncratic reading of Plato, which I
will leave for another time.
9. Agamben comes closest to this analogy in his book The Man without
Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1999). Following this analogy, one must risk rewriting Schmitt’s famous dic-
tum about all significant modern concepts of the state as follows: all signifi-
cant modern aesthetic concepts (concepts of the museum and the gallery, if
you will) are secularized theological concepts. Doing so would then in turn
lead one to consider the residue of sovereignty, and monarchical sovereign-
ty in particular, in modern aesthetics.
between a good and bad work of art ultimately operates in a way

different from that between the original and the copy. Whereas
the former comes about by subjective determination, whether
individual or collective, the latter can be objectively determined.
As such the logic of exceptionalism is much more effective in the
latter than in the former, even if traces of the exceptional are of
course retained in any aesthetic judgment.10
A further analogy that can be made, looking back at my dis-
cussion of Alex Robbins’s “Complements” but also looking ahead
at the next part of this book (in which Agamben’s work will be
central), is to the dynamic between nudity and clothing, with zoe
being nudity and clothing, bios—something that I have laid out al-
ready in a different context.11
I want to underline with respect to the distinction between aes-
thetic judgment (good art versus bad art) and the question of the
original versus the copy, that there are other aspects of the work
10. I have already considered the complicities between Schmitt’s theo-

ry of the exception and Kantian aesthetics (specifically, Kant’s theory of the
sublime and of the genius) in chapter 1. It is within Kant, however, that one
finds the split between a Schmittian exceptionalism (of the sublime and of
genius) and a democratic exceptionalism. The latter I would associate, fol-
lowing a certain tradition of political thought, with the aesthetic judgment
of the beautiful. My proposal would be that aesthetic theory has tended
toward the sublime of the Schmittian exception rather than the democratic
exceptionalism of the beautiful. I will want to return to the beautiful and
the trace of exceptionalism it maintains in the next chapter. The split in
Kant between the sublime and the beautiful can be said to mirror, more
generally, the split between argument and obedience in, for example, Kant’s
classic text “What Is Enlightenment?” (see Boever, Plastic Sovereignties,
chapter 5), or more generally the split between his moral theory and his
theory of aesthetic judgment that Hannah Arendt in her reading of Kant has
drawn out. Arendt’s difference on this count from other readers of Kant is
enabled by precisely this split. On this second, Arendtian point, see Martín
Plot, The Aesthetico-Political: The Question of Democracy in Merleau-Ponty,
Arendt, and Rancière (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 71–74. On another oc-
casion, I would like to consider Schmitt’s Political Romanticism (trans. Guy
Oakes [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986]) in this context.
11. Boever, Plastic Sovereignties, 25.
of art that operate like the aesthetic judgment in relation to aes-

thetic exceptionalism—in other words, other aspects of the work
of art that unwork aesthetic exceptionalism. For example, in his
auto-fictional novel 10:04, Ben Lerner takes inspiration from Elka
Krajewska’s “Salvage Art Institute” to create a character called
Alena who with an artist friend called Peter has started an institute
that collects and intends to display for public viewing “totaled” art,
i.e., art that has somehow been damaged and, as a result, has been
declared to have “zero value.”12 In some cases, the damage is visible,
even to the untrained eye. But in others—and those will turn out
to be the cases that most interest the novel’s narrator, as Nicholas
Brown has pointed out13—it is not. That begs the question of what
exactly caused the artwork to be labeled as “damaged.” Whatever
the case might be, “totaled” artworks are works that “were formal-
ly demoted from art to mere objecthood and banned from circula-
tion, removed from the market.”14
It is probably no coincidence that when 10:04’s narrator vis-
its Alena’s institute, he is handed “the pieces of a shattered Jeff
Koons balloon dog sculpture.”15 “It was wonderful,” he notes, “to
see an icon of art world commercialism and valorized stupidity
12. Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Faber & Faber, 2014), 129. The
discussion of 10:04 that follows is taken from my book Finance Fictions:
Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2018). I would like to thank my editor Tom Lay as well as
Fordham University Press for permission to republish this discussion here
in an adjusted form.
13. Nicholas Brown, “Art after Art after Art.” Nonsite.org, no. 18 (2016):
http://nonsite.org/feature/art-after-art-after-art.
14. Lerner, 10:04, 130.
15. Lerner, 131. Stories about broken Jeff Koons sculptures have
popped up occasionally, and one in fact appeared while I was preparing
this book. See Golden Darroch, “From Gazing Ball to Crazy Paving: Koons
Sculpture Goes to Pieces in Amsterdam Church.” Dutchnews.nl April 9,
2018: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/04/from-gazing-ball-to-crazy
-paving-koons-sculpture-goes-to-pieces-in-amsterdam-church/.
shattered.”16 When Alena picks up one of the smaller pieces from

the narrator’s hand “and hurled it onto the hardwood, where it
shattered,” she hissed “It’s worth nothing.”17 The declaration gains
part of its power from the fact that Koons is one of the most ex-
pensive living artists. The visit to the Institute for Totaled Art has
a profound effect on 10:04’s narrator. Contemplating a Cartier-
Bresson that is part of Alena’s collection, he notes:
It had transitioned from being a repository of immense financial val-
ue to being declared of zero value without undergoing what was to
me any perceptible material transformation—it was the same, only
totally different. This was a reversal of the kind of recontextualiza-
tion associated with Marcel Duchamp, still—unfortunately, in my
opinion—the tutelary spirit of the art world; this was the opposite
of the “readymade” whereby an object of utility—a urinal, a shovel—
was transformed into an object of art and an art commodity by the
artist’s fiat, by his signature. It was the reversal of that process . . . 18
Koons is the primary target of that process, but the novel also
mentions Damien Hirst.19
The reference to Duchamp is worth pursuing given my discussion
of Duchamp in the previous chapter. For we gain here a deeper under-
standing of what Robbins is doing with Duchamp in “Complements”:
if Duchamp’s readymades, according to Lerner’s narrator, were about
putting an object of utility in the museum and thereby transforming
it into an art object, the Institute for Totaled Art is about turning an
art object into an object of utility, thereby opening up its monarchic
form onto democratic use. I am not sure I agree with Lerner’s nar-
rator’s assessment of Duchamp. It seems doubtful, based on what
I said about Duchamp in the previous chapter, that his project was
indeed to turn utility objects into art. The goal was never to make an
original and to get an original into the museum, to get it recognized
16. Lerner, 131.
17. Lerner, 132.
18. Lerner, 133.
19. Lerner, 133.
as art. Instead, especially in view of Duchamp’s later assessment of

the readymades as always already a replica, it seems that Duchamp’s
basic gesture was always already what Lerner’s narrator considers
to be a reversal. Duchamp was always already reversing; as a home
for his work, there was never anything other than the Institute for
Totaled (which I would read as “deconstructed” rather than “de-
structed,” as per my discussion of Derrida previously) Art.
Clearly, what fascinates 10:04’s narrator is not so much the val-
uation of the artwork but its devaluation, or better (as will become
clear in a moment) revaluation: how can the artwork be removed
from the art market? It’s worth noting that the author captures
those questions in capitalist terms. He describes the artwork’s re-
moval from the art market as an artwork no longer being “a com-
modity fetish; it was art before or after capital”20—that is part of
his fascination with it. He also explicitly gives this before or after
a messianic dimension: in Alena’s project, art is “saved from some-
thing” “in the messianic sense,” “saved for something”:
An art commodity that had been exorcised (and survived the exor-
cism) of the fetishism of the market was to me a utopian readymade—
an object for or from the future where there was some other regime
of value than the tyranny of price.21
The author is overwhelmed by the genius of this revaluation, of

this other regime of value. Ultimately, Alena’s art and what it ac-
complishes are associated with the alternative messianism that
the author finds in Benjamin: everything will be as it is now, just
a little different.22 As Lerner himself makes clear in his acknowl-
edgments, this is a line from Benjamin that Lerner actually comes
in across in the work of . . . Giorgio Agamben.
Everything operates here, in other words, within the sphere of
Agamben’s thought and the movement toward form-of-life that
20. Lerner, 134.
21. Lerner, 134.
22. Lerner, 135.
would break down the dynamic between zoe and bios. Lerner en-
ables us to see one way in which such a movement can already be
found within the existing art world, through his engagement with
the Institute for Totaled Art. It may just as well have been called
the Institute for Unexceptional Art: it’s art still, and it clearly re-
tains a trace of the exceptional. But within the aesthetic exception-
alism that structures the art market, it is profoundly unexceptional.
And it is of course as such that Lerner’s narrator finds it interesting:
as unexceptional art that stands outside of the art world’s aesthetic
and economic logic.
With Agamben—but this partly lies concealed in Lerner as well,
whose novel is generally considered to be about the contempo-
rary neoliberal moment23—we are propelled toward a political
reading of such an “outside.” The unexceptional would need to be
conceived, in Agamben’s terms, as a kind of “destituent potential”
that would unwork the Aristotelian ontology underlying Western
politics—an ontology that is very much present in the valuation of
the original over the copy that structures the Western art world, its
aesthetics, economics, and politics. For Agamben, it is “destituent
potential” that unworks political exceptionalism of the kind that
can be found in Schmitt. This involves, he suggests, “think[ing] en-
tirely different strategies”: it is not about “revolutions, revolts, and
new constitutions,” the dynamic between constituting and consti-
tuted power.24 When it comes to bringing “destituent potential” in
conversation with an already existing political name, the closest
Agamben comes to that is in his turn toward “anarchy,” toward an
“anarchist tradition” that has “sought to define [destituent power]
23. See, for example, Hari Kunzru, “Impossible Mirrors,” review of

Ben Lerner, 10:04, New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 7, 2014;
Pieter Vermeulen, “How Should a Person Be (Transpersonal)? Ben Lerner,
Roberto Esposito, and the Biopolitics of the Future.” Political Theory 1, no.
23 (2016): 1–23.
24. Agamben, Use, 266.
without truly succeeding in it.”25 In a way, Agamben can be con-

sidered to be taking up that anarchist project, even if in the clos-
ing pages of The Use of Bodies that particular challenge ultimately
remains undeveloped. Indeed, the book reads not so much as a
concluding volume to a series but as a text in which the project of
the series is “abandoned,” as Agamben puts it in a prefatory note.26
In order to pursue this suggestion of an “anarchist” politics
a little further, let me loop back to the political references that
were used at the beginning of this book. Schmitt, and by associa-
tion a thinker like Badiou, is inconceivable within what Han calls
“Chinese thought” (no matter Badiou’s love for Mao). However,
and this is where I would counter the reading that Steven Corcoran
provides of his thought (see chapter 1), Rancière could perhaps still
fit, given that he claims to reconceptualize the exception precisely
not as Badiou’s grand rupture. Possibly recognizing the potential
problems of Badiou’s thinking on this count, Rancière has in an
interview insisted that if there is an exception in his theory, it is
different from Badiou’s theory of the event: for him the exception
is always ordinary, he insists, coming “not out of a decision or out
of a radical rupture” but out of a “multiplicity of small displace-
ments.”27 This resonates with the work of Bonnie Honig and the
exceptionalism of the ordinary that she defends. Rancière’s theory
of transformation marks, in that sense, a “Chinese” or “Buddhist”
unworking of a Western theologico-political thought of rupture.
It is interesting how the notion of “anarchy” appears in this
context.28 When in his “Ten Theses on Politics” Rancière seeks to
characterize “democracy,” he mentions Cleisthenes’s famous dem-
ocratic experiment, wherein “democracy is characterized by the
25. Agamben, 275.
26. Agamben, xiii.
27. Abraham Geil, “Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview
with Jacques Rancière.” Novel 47, no. 2 (2014): 301–10.
28. This paragraph as well as the following are taken from my “Art and
Exceptionalism.”
drawing of lots, or the complete absence of any entitlement to gov-

ern. It is the state of exception in which no oppositions can func-
tion, in which there is no principle for the dividing up of roles. . . .
Democracy is the specific situation in which it is the absence of
entitlement that entitles one to exercise the archè.”29 Rancière
takes this exceptionalist understanding of democracy from Plato’s
Laws, in which Plato “undertakes a systematic inventory of the
qualifications (axiomata) required for governing and the correl-
ative qualifications for being ruled.”30 Plato retains seven, four of
which (Rancière notes) are based on “natural difference, that is,
the difference of birth.”31 “The fifth qualification . . . is the power
of those with a superior nature, of the strong over the weak.”32 The
sixth, which Plato considers most worthy, is that of “the power of
those who know over those who do not”33—hence, his preference
for philosopher-kings. But, Rancière notes, Plato adds a seventh
qualification that produces what he considers a “break in the logic
of the arkhè.”34 Plato calls this seventh qualification “the choice of
God” or “the drawing of lots.”35
This is how Rancière arrives at his understanding of democracy
as “the state of exception.” If such a democratic state is “anarchic,”
this is not because of its total absence of archè, but because it pro-
duces a break in the logic of archè, in that it turns the absence of the
entitlement to rule into the entitlement to rule—into a “commence-
ment without commencement, a form of rule (commandement)
that does not command.”36 In other words: there is rule, but not
as before. This is a state of exception, as Rancière sees it, but one
29. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans.

Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 31.
30. Rancière, 30–31.
31. Rancière, 31.
32. Rancière, 31.
33. Rancière, 31.
34. Rancière, 31.
35. Rancière, 31.
36. Rancière, 31.
“that more generally makes politics in its specificity possible.”37

This is why democracy for Rancière is not so much a political re-
gime but the name of politics as such. Democracy, like politics,
is what produces a break within the logic of ruling as such. This
has something to do with the particular anarchy that it brings.
Anarchy, then, does not so much refer to the absence of all rule
but to the democratic break in the logic of a rule that is exercised
by one “determinate superiority” over “an equally determinate
inferiority.”38 It refers to the rule of equality.39 In other words:
Rancière claims democracy as anarchic and in that sense as poli-
tics due to its rule of equality, its rule that is based on the absence
of any entitlement to rule. While such a position obviously marks
a kind of shock, and an exception in this sense—it does, after all,
accomplish a break in the logic of the arkhè—it is worth noting that
such a shock or exception does not do away with all rule. Indeed, it
is folded back within the rule—a wholly transformed rule.
It is no wonder that Agamben has revealed himself to be rath-
37. Rancière, 31.
38. Rancière, 30.
39. This understanding of anarchy is clear throughout Rancière’s
work, from his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation (trans. Kirstin Ross [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1990]) onwards. In the first chapter of that book, for example,
Rancière develops a criticism of the “archè” of “explication.” This is clear
from the fact that he distinguishes the following two dimensions of expli-
cation: “On the one hand, [the explicator] decrees the absolute beginning”
(6)—“archè” in the sense of “beginning.” “On the other,” he continues, the
explicator “appoints himself to the task of lifting” “the veil of ignorance
[that s/he has cast] over everything that is to be learned]” (6–7). This is
“archè” in the sense of “rule”—the master rules through appointing her-/
himself this task. This is what Rancière later calls the “hierarchical” setup
of explication. Of course, by making the case for an ignorant schoolmaster,
Rancière seeks to intervene in this. But how exactly? He proposes a kind
of an-archy, but not the loose sense of anarchy that gets rid of the master
altogether—it’s an an-archy that is “not . . . without a master” (12), as he
points out. This is the anarchy of an emancipatory teaching situation, of an
equality and democracy of intelligences, freed from the hierarchy of archè—
or rather, operative after a radical transformation in the logic of archè.
er critical of Rancière given that, first of all, Rancière is still an

exceptionalist thinker and, second, he is ultimately attached to
some form of constituted power.40 While everything political in
Rancière challenges constituted power, which Rancière associates
with the police, politics also always moves in the direction of a
newly constituted—more equal—order. With the notion of destit-
uent potential, Agamben is precisely trying to steer clear from this.
In his thought about anarchist democracy, which is part of his
thinking against the monarchical that I discussed at the end of
the previous chapter, Stathis Gourgouris may have drawn the
right conclusion on the basis of Rancière’s central idea. If in an
anarchist democracy as Rancière describes it everyone is equally
entitled to govern, Gourgouris argues, then anarchist democra-
cy is precisely unexceptional—for everyone, without exception.
Following Emily Apter,41 he embraces the notion of an unexcep-
tional politics:
I favor this notion because for me democracy is precisely the regime
that does not make exceptions, if we are to take seriously Aristotle’s
dictum of a politics where the ruler learns by being ruled, making
thus the ruled simultaneously the rulers, in a determinant affir-
mation of an archè that has no precedent and no uniqueness but is
shared by all. No exceptions. The obvious politics of partiality and
discrimination or exclusion in so-called modern democracies testi-
fies to their fraudulent use of the name. Contemporary democratic
states are no more than liberal oligarchies.42
As Gourgouris sees it, unexceptional politics goes against the the-

ologization of politics (which he associates with Schmitt):
40. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on

the “Letter to the Romans,” trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 57–58.
41. Apter, Unexceptional Politics.
42. Stathis Gourgouris, “The Question Is: Society Must Be Defended
against Whom? Or What?” New Philosopher, May 25, 2013: http://www
.newphilosopher.com/articles/the-question-is-society- defended-against
-whom-or-what-in-the-name-of-what/.
I am interested instead in a politics where nothing is miraculous,
where indeed nothing is sacred, where there is no Homo Sacer [this
is a reference, obviously, to Agamben’s project]. This would be an
unexceptional politics, an untheologized politics. It would have to be
necessarily an anarchic politics, as democratic politics is at the core,
insofar as archè is unexceptionally shared by all and therefore lapses
as a singular principle. Anarchy as a mode of rule—democratic rule
par excellence—raises a major challenge to the inherited tradition of
sovereignty in modernity.43
When it comes to politics, many artists would be ready to embrace

this. They would be ready to embrace the unexceptionalism of
such an anarchist democracy. However, when it comes to art, the
situation appears to be very different. Unlike “unexceptional pol-
itics,” “unexceptional art” receives a much less warm embrace, if
it is welcomed at all. People, in particular artists, tend to find “un-
exceptional art” offensive. To think of art as unexceptional—now
that goes against the very core of what we believe art is!
But that difference in reception leads to the strange situation
that in art we praise what in politics we find dubious. To be fair,
art and politics are different—so perhaps it is just fine to find du-
bious in politics what we praise in art. Perhaps we can pursue in
art what we think can’t be pursued in politics, and perhaps it is
better to pursue those things in art rather than in politics. Perhaps
art is where we can exorcise the demons by whom we’d prefer not
be haunted in politics. But to the extent that both art and politics
operate in the imaginary, and in that sense mutually support each
other (with artistic imaginaries passing into politics, and political
imaginaries into art), art is not separate from politics—and vice
versa. In part, that means one can expect some consistency be-
tween the two realms. When it comes to exceptionalism, it seems
there is none: exceptionalism is treated as suspicious in politics,
but loved in art. I have tried to nuance both claims, the former
by pointing out multiple exceptionalisms in politics (some more
43. Gourgouris, “The Question Is.”
dubious than others) and the latter by questioning the dubious ex-
ceptionalisms that structure the art world: aesthetically, econom-
ically, politically.
“Fine,” you will say. “I am convinced. Now show me some un-
exceptional art.”
“Durant’s Scaffold doesn’t make the cut, because you’ve pre-
sented it here as a work of monarchic art around which a demo-
cratic exceptionalism came into being. That’s exceptionalisms all
around.”
“The only example of unexceptional art you have given is
Robbins’s series ‘Complements,’ which is nice but not enough.”
“We want more.”
To this one must respond that unexceptional art is not an index-
ical notion. By this I mean that one cannot point at some art and
say it is unexceptional, and then point at some other art and say it
is not. As opposed to an ontology of unexceptional art, as opposed
to a metaphysical definition that would capture its essence, one
should think of the unexceptional as a concept naming a proce-
dure or operation that unexceptionalizes the Schmittian excep-
tionalism constituting the art world. The unexceptional is in that
sense a negative concept that cannot be positively defined.
However, there are certain people and realms in which the
force of the unexceptional is potentially strong. Whereas aesthetic
exceptionalism exists first and foremost on the side of the specta-
tor, who takes in and fetishizes the work of art, the procedure or
operation of the unexceptional takes place first and foremost with
artists themselves, with those who make the work and know how
the work was made; it also takes place with the art handlers, those
who pack up and ship the work and install it in galleries, muse-
ums, or private homes. It takes place with those who sell artwork.
It takes place with those who own artwork. It takes place with
those who work in art environments (not only galleries or muse-
ums but also art schools, for example) and encounter art while it
is being made, before it goes on show, and after the show is taken
down. It appears, however, that the aesthetic exceptionalism asso-
ciated first and foremost with the spectator has pervaded all of the
above, in a kind of spectator-ization (to follow a famous analysis)
of the artworld.44 Such a becoming-hegemonic of the spectator’s
experience of art as exceptional has undone the unexceptionalism
of art on all fronts.
To be close to art, however, is to be in proximity to the unex-
ceptional. This does not require connaisseur-ship, at least not of
the kind associated with aesthetic exceptionalism. It requires
a kind of knowing, to be sure, a kind of connaître or savoir, but a
knowing whose verticality has been thoroughly unworked, even
if traces of it remain. It is to be hoped that, in a reverse move, the
unexceptionalism of such a knowledge will one day take over the
experience of the spectator, unworking their exceptionalism into
the unexceptional, so that they will be able to see art for what it is:
just art. There is something “secular” about this, in Edward Said’s
sense of the term, in that it asks us to acknowledge first and fore-
most art’s worldliness.45 In the end, the artist at work is just that:
at work in the world, doing what they do every day. Their art is just
that: the unexceptional, worldly—secular—product of their labor.
The rest is aesthetic exceptionalism.
44. In The Man without Content, Agamben points out that this was
precisely the issue that Nietzsche had with Kant. Kant’s theory of aesthet-
ics, Nietzsche argued, operated from the point of view of the spectator. It
is of course in Kant’s time that many of the issues I have discussed here
are born. Nietzsche responds to all of this—the institution of the excep-
tional realm of art in the eyes of the spectator—with an exceptionalism of
the artist. But this did not solve the core of the problem he had identified.
Nietzsche, too, is within the realm of aesthetic exceptionalism—but from
the artist’s side.
45. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and The Critic (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

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Chapter Title: The Democratic Anarchy of Unexceptional Art

Book Title: Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

2. To be clear, I don’t doubt that de Zegher decided to include the

tituent.”5 With this notion, Agamben wants to take on precisely

5. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford,

that ontology by “contract[ing] into one another in a peremptory

It is this new form of contract theory (as I have characterized it

between a good and bad work of art ultimately operates in a way

10. I have already considered the complicities between Schmitt’s theo-

of art that operate like the aesthetic judgment in relation to aes-

shattered.”16 When Alena picks up one of the smaller pieces from

as art. Instead, especially in view of Duchamp’s later assessment of

The author is overwhelmed by the genius of this revaluation, of

23. See, for example, Hari Kunzru, “Impossible Mirrors,” review of

without truly succeeding in it.”25 In a way, Agamben can be con-

drawing of lots, or the complete absence of any entitlement to gov-

29. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans.

“that more generally makes politics in its specificity possible.”37

er critical of Rancière given that, first of all, Rancière is still an

As Gourgouris sees it, unexceptional politics goes against the the-

40. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on

When it comes to politics, many artists would be ready to embrace

43. Gourgouris, “The Question Is.”

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