The Aesthetics of Displacement Dissonance and Dissensus in Adorno and Rancière

Aesthetics as sensory experience harbours the potential for triggering multiple forms of displacement - in subjective experience, the different fields of art, and across disciplines. Weaving together Jacques Rancière's writings on aesthetics and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and other works, the first section explores aesthetic experience's derangement of the fit between sensory experience and meaning, in particular through their engagement with Kant. In the second section, their readings of specific artworks are analysed to explore the destabilizing consequences of the aesthetics of displacement for the divisions between the arts. Returning to specific readings of artworks in the third section, and supplementing them with a more recent example (Hervé Guibert), the aesthetics of displacement's consequences for disciplinary thinking are explored. Moving between the general, particular and expansive dimensions of aesthetic experience across the three sections, the essay reframes the aesthetics of displacement from the perspectives of philosophy, aesthetic analysis and the critique of disciplinarity.