Space as a Mode of Political Thinking

This book explores the spatial and aesthetic dimensions of politics. What interests me in particular is the theoretical work space does for conceptualisations of politics. Focusing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière, I pay attention to what animates them in engaging with space in theorising politics. Why does space have such a strong appeal in their theories? What does their recourse to spatial terms tell us about the nature of politics and space as they conceive them? Attending to the spatial aspects of their conceptualisation of politics allows me to discern their central spatial assumptions and paradigms, and to consider what ‘space’ theoretically does for them. None of them equates space with politics in a straightforward manner, but their conceptualisation of politics, in their different ways, implies some form of generative spatial rupture in the established order of things, creating new relations and connections. Politics inaugurates space, and spatialisation is central to politics as a constitutive part of it.

This emphasis on space connects to the main argument of the book: that politics is about forms of perceiving the world and modes of relating to it. How this world is constructed, disclosed and disrupted is a matter of politics. Making sense of the world requires aesthetic forms, ‘aesthetic’ understood as perception by the senses (aisthesis), rather than matters of art and beauty. Space not only gives form to and orders how this world appears, but also allows distinctive gatherings of beings – things and people – that establish relationality and open new spaces. This implies an understanding of space as a form and mode of apprehending the world and worldly relations, departing from a conception of space as something already given, a background for relations between things, a fixed and inert ‘container’. Space becomes a form of appearance and a mode of actuality, making manifest established orders, generating particular relationships to them, and providing relational domains of experience for the constitution of political identities.