‘Politics for Rancière … begins with an act of aesthetic impropriety.’Such an act proceeds as a partaking of sensibilities and modes of participation by an individual or group that has not been given the right to do so within a given temporal, spatial and relational distribution. Politics, then, as the aesthetic practice of dissensus that reveals how the conditions of existing configurations determine what is sensible and how, is in every event an action or constellation of actions that exists only in the staging of a singular scene. This is what makes politics aesthetic. While its singularity disallows a fully transferable or generalisable ‘Rancièrean theory’ of political action, it also brings into relief the affective relationality of any given event in terms of the movements of affective forces that reconfigure and newly constitute bodies (human and otherwise) in new relational dispositions. It is only in the enactment of an individual act, the staging of a singular scene, that politics unfolds.

Rancière insists, therefore, that politics occurs only rarely.