165
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XL | Number 1 | 2019 | 165–182
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy
Rok Benčin*
Art Between Affect and Indifference in Hegel, 
Adorno, and Rancière
1
When
1
Hegel asserts fine art in its autonomy as the proper object of aesthetics, 
he takes great care to unbind the understanding of art’s self-determination from 
any kind of affective heteronomy. The introduction to his Lectures on Aesthetics 
makes it clear that the philosophy of art should not be interested in the way art 
stimulates, expresses, or represents feelings or affects. Art should rather be dis-
cussed in terms of “its free independence,” which allows it to convey “the most 
comprehensive truths of the spirit.”
2
 Even though these truths are indeed meant 
to be felt (art presents them primarily “to feeling,” die Empfindung
3
), they are in-
dependent of what the contingencies of subjective feelings might make of them. 
Hegel’s point, however, is not that our experiences of artworks should thus be 
characterised by Kantian disinterestedness. It is rather the artwork that is indif-
ferent in itself, with indifference being the crucial characteristic of its free, inde-
pendent form of appearance. Artistic autonomy thus radiates the indifference of 
a self-sufficient divinity: “The ideal work of art confronts us like a blessed god.”
4
Since Hegel, the autonomy of art has been contested from a variety of positions 
that have uncovered different kinds of hidden economies – affective or other-
wise – beneath the indifferent surface of aesthetic appearance or challenged 
art to step down from its ivory tower to tackle the social realities it is entangled 
with. What we will be interested in, however, are the ways in which such con-
cerns have been addressed by two thinkers who have – in the context of aesthet-
ic theory of the last 50 years – perhaps most strongly reaffirmed the autonomy 
1
 This article is a result of the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy” and the research project J6–9392 “The Problem of Objectivity 
and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research 
Agency.
2
 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford University 
Press, Oxford 1988, p. 7.
3
 Ibid., pp. 8, 101.
4
 Ibid., p. 157.

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rok benčin
of art along with the indifference of its form of appearance, namely Theodor 
W. Adorno and, more recently, Jacques Rancière. Both have, in their own ways, 
reaffirmed artistic autonomy precisely by acknowledging its immanent moment 
of heteronomy. I will focus on what this entails in terms of the affectivity related 
to the artistic form of appearance. For Adorno, as we will see, aesthetics should 
still focus on the truths conveyed by artworks, although the truths in question 
can no longer be defined by their free independence. Any truth should now be 
understood historically as an expression of suffering caused by social antago-
nisms. Yet the only means art has of expressing this suffering is the autonomous 
aesthetic form, which is ultimately indifferent to (and even complicit in) suf-
fering. This presents us with a fundamental antinomy of art. Rancière, on the 
other hand, fully reaffirms the indifference of artistic appearance. He does not, 
however, set this indifference in opposition to social suffering, but presents it 
precisely as the displacing power of art to intervene in the politically charged 
field of sensible experience (in what he calls “the distribution of the sensible”). 
In this way, the indifference of appearance can be seen precisely as the properly 
artistic power to affect.
These considerations allow us to recalibrate the terms of the discussion. Instead 
of thinking art as placed between affective heteronomies and indifferent auton-
omy, we can now observe not only how a moment of affective heteronomy is a 
crucial part of the dialectics of artistic autonomy, but also how the indifference 
of artistic appearance is itself affective. Returning to Hegel, we can now notice 
that the divine indifference of the artwork is not to be understood as the absence 
of any affect, but precisely as a specific affected state: the ideal artwork exists 
as “sensuously blessed in itself, enjoying and delighting in its own self.”
5
 This 
raises the question of whether beyond the affects involved in the creation, re-
ception, and content of artworks there is an affectivity related to art itself, to the 
very form of its indifferent appearance.
Below, I will first discuss the ambiguous role Hegel assigns to indifference in 
his Lectures. What is the difference between the divine bliss of indifference that 
he so vehemently affirms and the indifference of subjective feeling he initially 
denounces? I will then discuss the dialectics of artistic autonomy in Adorno’s 
Aesthetic Theory through the antinomy of expression (of suffering) and the (in-
5
 Ibid.

167
art between affect and indifference in hegel, adorno, and rancière
different) form it takes. We will see how despite his belief that form neutralises 
suffering, he nevertheless identifies two affective states immanent to form itself: 
its melancholy and its promise of happiness. Finally, I will discuss Rancière’s 
reaffirmation of indifference (which is partly derived from his reading of Hegel) 
and the way he describes its affectivity and effectivity in what he calls “the aes-
thetic regime of art.”
The bliss of indifference
On the very first page of his Lectures we find Hegel expressing his doubts regard-
ing the way the relatively new philosophical discipline of aesthetics has been 
established. As a science of sensation and feeling, aesthetics was invented “at 
the period in Germany when works of art were treated with regard to the feelings 
they were supposed to produce, as, for instance, the feeling of pleasure, admi-
ration, fear, pity, and so on.”
6
 If we are to properly establish aesthetics as the 
philosophy of art, as Hegel intends to, the way art affects us should not be con-
sidered essential – art should rather be thought of as independent in its end and 
means. Neither should we consider the proper content of art to be “the whole 
gamut of feelings which the human heart in its inmost and secret recesses can 
bear,” for this only gives us an “empty form” for any kind of content.
7
 Even as 
the origin of the creative act, feelings are denied their importance since artistic 
expression originates in man as “a thinking consciousness.”
8
Why is it that feeling in terms of creation, reception, or content cannot be con-
sidered important by the philosophy of art? Hegel describes feeling as “the in-
definite dull region of the spirit.”
9
 As such, feeling is no guarantee of concrete-
ness or authenticity. On the contrary, it is an affair of subjectivity in its most 
abstract, empty form. Feelings depend on the specificities of each individual 
subject and have nothing to do with the thing itself – in this case, art: “Feeling 
remains a purely subjective emotional state of mind in which the concrete thing 
vanishes, contracted into a circle of the greatest abstraction.”
10
 In short, feeling 
is all subjectivity and no substance.
6
 Ibid., p. 1.
7
 Ibid., pp. 46–47.
8
 Ibid., p. 31.
9
 Ibid., p. 32.
10
 Ibid., p. 33.

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Philosophy is rather concerned with art in its freedom and the truth it imma-
nently conveys. As such, art belongs to the highest region of the spirit and 
touches upon substance itself. Having “the absolute Idea” as its content, art is 
the “sensuous presentation of the Absolute itself.”
11
 In contrast to religion and 
philosophy, the other two forms of presenting the Absolute, artistic presentation 
nevertheless still operates in the realm of appearance and remains aimed at our 
capacity to sense and to feel.
12
 Art presents the Idea as appearance, but this is “a 
special kind of appearance,” of Schein, which goes beyond the immediacy of the 
external world of the senses and the internal world of feelings.
13
 This is a form 
of appearance that is “itself essential to essence,” since it shows how essential 
it is for the truth to appear.
14
 Art thus has the task of delivering adequate sensu-
ous presentations of the absolute Idea – presentations in which the Idea and its 
appearance are one. Artistic beauty or “the Ideal” will thus be defined by “the 
immediate unity and correspondence” between “the Idea and its configuration 
as a concrete reality.”
15
The story of the conceptual and historical development of art that Hegel pre-
sents in his Lectures is the story of the establishment and dissolution of the Ideal 
through different forms of art: in the symbolic form of art, the relation between 
the Idea and its appearance is still external; in the classical form, the corre-
spondence between the two is then fully achieved; finally, in the romantic form, 
their unity disintegrates, which signals the infamous “end of art.” How, then, 
does the fully achieved Ideal appear? Following Schiller, who in his Letters on 
the Aesthetic Education of Man modelled the aesthetic form of free appearance 
on an ancient statue of the Roman goddess Juno, the serenity of ancient gods 
carved in stone also serves Hegel as the perfect embodiment of the Ideal, i.e. 
the aesthetic appearance adequate to the absolute Idea. After having banished 
feelings from aesthetics, Hegel nevertheless describes the artistic Ideal in terms 
of the affective state radiated by ancient statues of Olympic gods. What charac-
terises their ideality is first and foremost a certain kind of affective indifference: 
“In this respect, amongst the fundamental characteristics of the Ideal we may 
put at the top this serene peace and bliss, this self-enjoyment in its own achiev-
11
 Ibid., p. 79.
12
 See ibid., p. 101.
13
 Ibid., p. 8.
14
 Ibid.
15
 Ibid., p. 73.

169
art between affect and indifference in hegel, adorno, and rancière
edness and satisfaction.”
16
 The gods are withdrawn into themselves, indifferent 
to the interests and concerns related to the particularities of the finite world. 
This allows them their tranquillity, which, however, is not defined as the ab-
sence of affect. On the contrary, it is their indifference itself that they enjoy. The 
affect proper to art itself, objectively inscribed in the artistic form of appearance, 
would therefore be this bliss of indifference.
With the disintegration of the classical form of art, however, “the serenity of 
the Ideal is lost,” meaning that in the romantic form that succeeds it “the dis-
traction and dissonance of the heart” prevail.
17
 The subjective feeling in its dull 
indefiniteness returns as part and parcel of art itself and thus has to be account-
ed for by aesthetics. In the early forms of romantic art, the portrayed “suffering 
and grief” could still be transformed into a kind of “delight in agony,” which 
came close to the Ideal.
18
 As romantic art developed further, however, the feel-
ings became unrestrained and intensified towards romantic irony, in which 
empty subjectivity reigns supreme. For the ironic ego, “nothing is treated in 
and for itself”; everything is drawn into the sphere of subjective moods, where 
it “proves to be inherently dissoluble.”
19
 As an artistic principle, irony brings 
the “annihilation [of] everything inherently excellent and solid,” which means 
that the basic requirement for the Ideal, the “inherently substantive content,” 
is now lost to complete indifference.
20
At this point, the question of the difference between the blissful indifference 
of the Ideal and the dissonant indifference of irony arises. It turns out that the 
ironic ego, “for which all bonds are snapped,” can – just like a Greek god – “live 
only in the bliss of self-enjoyment.”
21
 Hegel himself notices the uncanny prox-
imity of this ironic subjective annihilation of the outside world to the Ideal’s 
own self-enjoyment and indifference towards anything external. Just as “irony 
implies the absolute negativity in which the subject is related to himself in the 
annihilation of everything specific and one-sided,” it is also true for the Ideal 
16
 Ibid., p. 157.
17
 Ibid., p. 158.
18
 Ibid.
19
 Ibid., pp. 64, 595.
20
 Ibid., p. 160.
21
 Ibid., p. 66.

170
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that “everything purely external in it is extinguished and annihilated.”
22
 Of 
course, Hegel’s dialectical arsenal has the means to resolve this difficulty: the 
Ideal is based on “inherently substantive content,” while irony dissolves any 
substantiality; it can achieve its outer determinacy, while irony wallows in the 
indeterminate; and it only negates the pure externality of the particular in or-
der to manifest its own substantiality, while the ironic ego becomes “hollow 
and empty.”
23
 For the Ideal, negativity is only a moment in the dialectical pro-
cess, while for irony it is confused with the whole.
24
It is therefore the substantiality of content that provides legitimate grounds for 
indifference, and gods, indeed, provide plenty of it. The affectivity of the artis-
tic form of appearance is thus put in relation to its subject matter. The ironic 
dissolution of substantiality also entails the downfall of the Ideal as the ro-
mantic form of art brings about the “complete contingency and externality of 
the material which artistic activity grasps and shapes.”
25
 The romantic artist 
is absolved of any substantiality of content, which means that “every material 
may be indifferent to him.”
26
Indifference, however, again turns out to be involved on both sides of the fence. 
The indifference toward the subject matter not only brings about the dissolu-
tion of the substantive content required by the Ideal, but it also proves to be 
the Ideal’s condition of possibility. Hegel claims, astonishingly, that the special 
kind of appearance that allows art to present the Absolute – the spiritually pro-
duced appearance as distinguished from the immediate appearance of natural 
materiality – is best observed where art takes as its subject matter the most 
irrelevant things:
In contrast to the prosaic reality confronting us, this pure appearance, produced 
by the spirit, is therefore the marvel of ideality, a mockery, if you like, and an 
ironical attitude to what exist in nature and externally. […] Now, consequently, 
22
 Ibid., p. 160.
23
 Ibid., p. 66.
24
 See ibid., p. 69.
25
 Ibid., p. 594.
26
 Ibid., p. 605.

171
art between affect and indifference in hegel, adorno, and rancière
through this ideality, art at the same time exalts these otherwise worthless objects 
which, despite their insignificant content, it fixes and makes ends in themselves.
27
To illustrate his point, Hegel refers to 17
th
 century genre painting in which such 
insignificant objects are on marvellous display. The indifferent appearance that 
is coupled in the classical form of art with the substantiality of the content to 
constitute the aesthetic Ideal thus seems dialectically subverted from two sides. 
On the one hand, as it turns out, the precondition for the Ideal is the emergence 
of the ironic appearance essentially unchained from any substantiality of con-
tent. On the other, the purity of appearance can best be shown on an example 
taken deep from the romantic form of art: the style of painting that fully em-
braced precisely “the complete contingency and externality of the material,” in 
which Hegel in other sections sees an indication of the end of art.
Furthermore, it is among the otherwise worthless things portrayed by genre 
painting that Hegel rediscovers precisely the gods of Olympus. The indifference 
of the subject matter takes us back to what is most substantial: appearance af-
fected by the bliss of its own indifference. In a passage brought into the spot-
light by Rancière,
28
 Hegel expresses his enthusiasm for a couple of paintings by 
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo that he saw at the Central Gallery in Munich. These 
genre paintings portray beggar boys, who, despite being “ragged and poor,” are 
“almost like the gods of Olympus”:
But in this poverty and semi-nakedness what precisely shines forth within and 
without is nothing but complete absence of care and concern – a Dervish could 
not have less – in the full feeling of their well-being and delight in life. This free-
dom from care for external things and the inner freedom made visible outwardly 
is what the Concept of the Ideal requires.”
29
Against the grain of his own grand scheme, Hegel rediscovers the bliss of indif-
ference far from the ancient statues of Olympic gods, deep in the romantic form 
of art, just when it gives up all substantiality of content in favour of the complete 
contingency of the subject matter. This entails a major doubt in “the substanti-
27
 Ibid., p. 163. (My emphasis.)
28
 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul, 
Verso, London and New York 2013, pp. 21–37.
29
 Ibid., p. 170.

172
rok benčin
ality of content,” which was supposed to separate the divine indifference from 
the ironic one. It seems that the bliss of indifference as the affect objectively in-
scribed in aesthetic appearance can thus be evoked by any represented subject 
matter whatsoever and can as well become compatible with a variety of moods 
opened up by the romantic “dissonance of the heart.”
The silencing echo
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory remains an heir of the Hegelian philosophical con-
ception of aesthetics by focusing on the “truth-content” (der Wahrheitsgehalt) 
of art in its autonomy. On the other hand, his aesthetics also has to be under-
stood within the wider frame of his reconsideration of the further possibility 
of philosophical speculation after the political events of the mid 20
th
 century –  
the project of “negative dialectics” that Adorno sets up in contrast to “the over-
ly positive Hegelian one.”
30
 Without entering into the complicated matter of 
Adorno’s reading of Hegel, I would like to draw attention to what this implies 
in terms of the relation between affect and truth. For Adorno, there is an affec-
tivity that does not pertain to the empty form of subjectivity, but rather gives 
subjectivity its substance, something objective: the suffering that the subject 
faces in an antagonistic society. In the introduction to Negative Dialectics we 
thus read: “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For 
suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experi-
ence, its expression, is objectively conveyed.”
31
 If art is to be considered capable 
of conveying truth, the expression of (social, historical) suffering should be rec-
ognised as the condition of this truth.
It is not, however, its only condition. For what makes art art is not just any kind 
of expression, but the specific form this expression takes – the specific form of 
Schein, of appearance or semblance.
32
 The form of appearance that defines art 
is autonomous – it is art’s very separation from empirical immediacy.
33
 Contrary 
30
 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, Routledge, London and New 
York 1973, pp. 15–16.
31
 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
32
 While T. M. Knox translates “der Schein” in Hegel’s Lectures as “pure appearance,” R. 
Hullot-Kentor uses “semblance” in his translation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.
33
 See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Continuum, Lon-
don and New York 1997, p. 103.

173
art between affect and indifference in hegel, adorno, and rancière
to what some commentators have claimed, Adorno’s point is not to subvert au-
tonomous aesthetic form in the name of affective heteronomy.
34
 The aim of aes-
thetics for Adorno – and “the legitimation of [art’s] truth depends on this” – is 
rather “the redemption of semblance,” of the autonomous form of appearance.
35
 
If we want to preserve art’s capacity for truth, therefore, the reaffirmation of aes-
thetic appearance is just as necessary as expressing suffering.
The Hegelian autonomy of artistic appearance is at once materialistically sub-
verted and idealistically reaffirmed by Adorno. The materialist subversion of 
art’s autonomy starts by identifying its emergence and complicity in an antag-
onistic society. It should be understood as historically produced in the context 
of the rise of capitalism and the domination of the bourgeoisie: “The artwork’s 
autonomy is, indeed, not a priori but the sedimentation of a historical process 
that constitutes its concept. […] The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autono-
my, was shaped by domination, which it universalized.”
36
 Its idealist reaffir-
mation, on the other hand, starts by acknowledging how the illusory aspect of 
artistic appearance has the capacity to subvert its real origins and provide the 
expression of what domination represses: “Without the synthesis, which con-
fronts reality as the autonomous artwork, there would be nothing external to 
reality’s spell.”
37
 If we let its autonomy vanish, art surrenders to the immediate 
social reality it is supposed to protest against, succumbing to its demands of to-
tal identity and communicability. Art’s capacity for truth, its ability to express 
suffering, should therefore not be sought by challenging art’s autonomy, infus-
ing it with social content, or making it serve political purposes. It is only made 
possible by the further development of what in art is its autonomous element, 
34
 I specifically have in mind here the view of Alain Badiou, who claims that Adorno’s aes-
thetics is all about renouncing form in the name of affect. (See Alain Badiou, Five Les-
sons on Wagner, trans. S. Spitzer, Verso, London and New York 2010, pp. 27–54.) Badiou, 
however, misses the crucial role form has for Adorno in establishing the truth-content of 
art. For a comparative reading of Badiou’s and Adorno’s accounts of artistic form, see my 
chapter “Form and Affect: Artistic Truth in Adorno and Badiou”, in: J. Völker (ed.), Badiou 
and the German Tradition of Philosophy, Bloomsbury, London 2019, pp. 197–216.
35
 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 107.
36
 Ibid., p. 17.
37
 Ibid., pp. 234–235.

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namely its form: “Only in the crystallization of its own formal law and not in a 
passive acceptance of objects does art converge with what is real.”
38
In order to distil its form of appearance, however, the autonomy of art needs to 
be understood dialectically, acknowledging social and affective heteronomy as 
its immanent moment. As expression, affect becomes immanent to art – and “ex-
pression is scarcely to be conceived except as the expression of suffering.”
39
 As 
such, expression is art’s own “rebellion against semblance, art’s dissatisfaction 
with itself.”
40
 In line with the “negative” character of Adornian dialectics, the 
opposed terms do not find reconciliation in a final synthesis, but remain caught 
up in an antinomy. The two conditions of art’s capacity for truth should thus 
be understood as irreconcilable: “Expression and semblance are fundamentally 
antithetical. […] [E]xpression is the element immanent to art through which, as 
one of its constituents, art defends itself against the immanence that it develops 
by its law of form.”
41
 The expression of suffering thus functions as the immanent 
transcendence of art: it is the heteronomous element within its autonomy. The 
question is not simply how to find an adequate aesthetic appearance for the 
expression of suffering – it is the very form of artistic appearance that is funda-
mentally indifferent to suffering:
[A]esthetic autonomy remains external to suffering, of which the work is an im-
age and from which the work draws its seriousness. The artwork is not only the 
echo of suffering, it diminishes it; form, the organon of its seriousness, is at the 
same time the organon of the neutralization of suffering. Art thereby falls into an 
unsolvable aporia.
42
Being indifferent to the very thing it is supposed to give expression to, the artis-
tic form of appearance is the silencing echo of suffering.
From this perspective, it might almost seem as if autonomous appearance is the 
only and therefore the unavoidable – if undesirable and completely unfitting –  
38
 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen, Columbia Uni-
versity Press, New York 1991, p. 224.
39
 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 110.
40
 Ibid.
41
 Ibid.
42
 Ibid., p. 39.

175
art between affect and indifference in hegel, adorno, and rancière
form of the artistic expression of suffering. Yet this would go against the “re-
demption of semblance” that Adorno states as the goal of his aesthetic theory. 
The autonomous appearance is also the form of expression that suffering de-
serves. It is a way to “break the spell” of identity and domination that society 
imposes. The artistic form of identity actually “seeks to aid the nonidentical, 
which in reality is repressed by reality’s compulsion to identity.”
43
 But how can 
it do that if it is completely indifferent? How can it be completely external to any 
affectivity if it is an “image” of an affect and “the organon” for transmitting its 
seriousness? It seems that just as in Hegel, affectivity returns in Adorno from 
within the very indifference of the artistic form of appearance. In Adorno, how-
ever, this affectivity proves to be deeply ambivalent, since the relation of artistic 
form to its material is a relation to something lost or non-existent. On the one 
hand, form is endowed with melancholy, while on the other, it becomes the car-
rier of a Stendhalian promesse de bonheur.
44
According to Adorno, form should be understood as a process of formalisation, 
of form-making. Not only does he place the invention of autonomous aesthetic 
form within the social antagonisms of a certain historical moment, Adorno also 
understands form itself, in its ideality, as a process that proceeds in a dissonant 
relation to what it forms. This is where what he calls “the melancholy of form” 
comes into the picture:
Form inevitably limits what is formed, for otherwise its concept would lose its 
specific difference to what is formed. This is confirmed by the artistic labor of 
forming, which is always a process of selecting, trimming, renouncing. Without 
rejection there is no form, and this prolongs guilty domination in artworks, of 
which they would like to be free.
45
The Hegelian process of establishing the aesthetic Ideal required the annihila-
tion of everything purely external. The same goes for form in Adorno, although 
this process is now seen as full of irresolvable mourning and guilt. Since form 
is guilty of enforcing identity on the heterogeneous material, the desired free-
dom is never fully achieved. Nevertheless, as we have already seen, form is also 
43
 Ibid., p. 4.
44
 I analyse this aspect in more detail in my chapter mentioned in footnote no. 34.
45
 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 144.

176
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the only means art has of striving for freedom, of aiding the nonidentical. Form 
should thus not be denounced despite the suffering it reproduces: “Spirit does 
not identify the nonidentical: It identifies with it. By pursuing its own identi-
ty with itself, art assimilates itself with the nonidentical.”
46
 Even though the 
production of aesthetic form is itself an act of identification, it does not merely 
produce the loss of everything that does not fit within an identity, but manages 
to identify directly with what is lost – with the nonidentical itself. 
Even though Adorno makes no reference to it, “the melancholy of form” thus 
brings us close to Freud’s famous definition of melancholia as identification 
with a lost object. What distinguishes melancholia from mourning, according 
to Freud, is the unconscious character of the loss and thereby the unidentifiable 
nature of the lost object.
47
 It can never be made clear what it was that was actual-
ly lost and therefore there is no closure to the work of mourning. The lost object 
of the melancholic is, strictly speaking, something nonidentical. Going back to 
Adorno, the loss form produced in the act of forming – “the process of select-
ing, trimming, renouncing” – could still be considered as the identifiable loss 
acknowledged by the work of mourning. Its identification with the nonidentical, 
on the other hand, gives a properly melancholic aspect to artistic form – the un-
surpassable identification with a lost but unidentified object. It also reveals the 
truly immanent aspect of such affectivity. The melancholy of form is no longer a 
question of the relation between form and the material that it forms, but rather 
concerns form’s identity to the nonidentical – its other that the process of for-
malisation itself produces.
With this in mind, we can understand how form is not only a violator, but also 
a protector. By assimilating itself with the nonidentical, artistic form provides 
the appearance of the latter – of something that cannot exist in a world ruled 
by identity and domination. And with appearance, Adorno claims, also comes 
a promise of realisation: “By its form alone art promises what is not; it registers 
objectively, however refractedly, the claim that because the nonexistent appears 
it must indeed be possible.”
48
 By making what cannot exist appear, art’s prom-
46
  Ibid., p. 134.
47
  Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in: The Standard Edition of the Complete 
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, trans. James Strachey, Hogarth Press, Lon-
don 1957, p. 245.
48
 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 82.

177
art between affect and indifference in hegel, adorno, and rancière
ise is “bound up with the sensual” and “fused with an element of sensuous 
happiness.”
49
 Adorno thus expands Stendhal’s definition of beauty as the prom-
ise of happiness to artistic appearance as such. The promise does not, however, 
delay happiness – art as promise is itself an “image of bliss” and therefore im-
mediately affective.
50
 
Adorno’s introduction of affective heteronomy thus goes hand in hand with a 
reaffirmation of artistic autonomy. The antinomy of expression and semblance 
ends up drawn into the dialectics of autonomy itself. Even though Adorno first 
sets the need to lend a voice to suffering in opposition to the indifference of the 
autonomous form of artistic appearance, it turns out not only that it is precise-
ly such form that has the ability to lend the voice, but also that this ability of 
form stems from it being immanently affected. It is finally its very indifference, 
its very separation, that immanently affects form and thereby makes indifferent 
semblance the organon of affective expression.
From indignation to curiosity
Compared to Adorno, Rancière’s work provides a different view of the formation 
and destiny of aesthetic autonomy. Even though he would agree that autonomy 
cannot be properly understood if we miss the element of heteronomy that cuts 
through it, for Rancière the issue is not confronting autonomy with heteronomy. 
Rather it is artistic autonomy itself that is established precisely as the heter-
onomisation of art. Instead of developing a dialectics of their intertwinement, 
Rancière thus posits their relation as a direct unity of opposites: “In sum, the 
aesthetic autonomy of art is only another name for its heteronomy. The aesthet-
ic identification of art is the principle of a generalized disidentification.”
51
 Art 
became autonomous in a moment when it could no longer be clearly defined by 
the specificity of its practice and its objects, when the dividing line between fine 
and applied arts became blurred, and when the distinction between substantial 
49
 Ibid., p. 277.
50
 Ibid. Such bliss can, however, no longer really be enjoyed since the culture industry start-
ed to exploit it. An element of falseness clings to all images of happiness in an antagonistic 
society, which is why art must avoid producing them and therefore “break its promise in 
order to stay true to it” (Ibid., p. 311).
51
 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Polity, Cambridge 
and Malden 2009, p. 67.

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and insignificant subject matter collapsed. The paradox of autonomous art is 
that it is only “recognisable by its lack of any distinguishing characteristics – by 
its indistinction.”
52
 It is no longer clear how it is supposed to be produced and 
who or what may or may not take part in it.
The establishment of the autonomy of art was a part of the “aesthetic revolu-
tion” that from the end of the 18
th
 century onwards introduced new ways of iden-
tifying, perceiving, understanding, and making art, i.e. what Rancière calls “the 
aesthetic regime of art.”
53
 The revolution subverted the principles of the previ-
ously dominant “representational regime,” which defined various representa-
tional forms of producing certain kinds of objects specific to individual arts. This 
regime also presupposed a range of distinctions and hierarchies between noble 
and base subject matter and the adequate forms of their artistic representation. 
In contrast to this, the aesthetic regime identifies artistic objects and practices in 
terms of a specific form of sensible experience they give rise and belong to – the 
kind of free, autonomous appearance acknowledged and theorised by the likes 
of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. On the one hand, this autonomous “sensorium,” 
personified by Schiller’s and Hegel’s accounts of the idleness and indifference 
of the gods, is “foreign to the ordinary forms of sensory experience.”
54
 On the 
other hand, art only exists “as a separate world since anything whatsoever can 
belong to it,” affirming the intrusion of “the prose of the world” and its indiffer -
ence rather than distinguishing something substantial as its proper content.
55
 
While the representational regime relied on the correspondences between vari-
ous subject matters and adequate forms of their artistic representation, with the 
aesthetic regime anything can, in principle, be the subject matter of art, with the 
manner of representation becoming a matter of invention rather than a matter 
of adequacy. The aesthetic indifference is thus also defined by Rancière as “the 
rupture of all specific relations between a sensible form and the expression of an 
exact meaning.”
56
 What for Hegel was a sign of art’s demise – the indifference of 
the subject matter no longer in unity with its form of representation – is actually 
the emergence of a new regime of art according to Rancière. And yet Rancière 
52
 Ibid., p. 66.
53
 Ibid., p. 10. See also Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution”, Maska 32 (185–186/2017), 
pp. 24–31.
54
 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, p. 27.
55
 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis, p. x.
56
 Ibid., p. 18.

179
art between affect and indifference in hegel, adorno, and rancière
assigns to Hegel an important place in the genealogy of the aesthetic regime. In 
Aisthesis, he dedicates a chapter to Hegel’s rediscovery of the aesthetic Ideal in 
Murillo’s paintings: the beggar boys appear as “little gods of the street” calling 
for a future in the midst of what is, for Hegel, art as a thing of the past.
57
According to Rancière’s view, it is a misunderstanding to set the indifference of 
the artistic form of appearance in opposition to the substantiality of the con-
tent it is supposed to present or express – be it the Hegelian Absolute or the 
Adornian objective suffering. The aesthetic appearance is free precisely because 
it “suspends the ordinary connections not only between appearance and reality, 
but also between form and matter, activity and passivity, understanding and 
sensibility.”
58
 Rather than the imposition of form upon matter, it is the suspen-
sion of this very imposition. It is a form of experience that opens up to the prose 
of the world – again, just as Hegel feared.
Far from making art apolitical, however, it is precisely “as an autonomous form 
of experience that art concerns and infringes on the political division of the sen-
sible.”
59
 It is therefore in its separation and indifference and not in its content 
or commitment that the politics of art resides. Rancière explains how Schiller, 
long before Adorno, recognised how the aesthetic “power of ‘form’ over ‘mat-
ter’ is the power of the class of intelligence over the class of sensation, of men 
of culture over men of nature.”
60
 Its suspension therefore implies for Schiller 
a revolution of experience that could go further in the direction of abolishing 
domination than the French revolution could. In its separation as an autono-
mous sphere, the aesthetic sensorium thus threatens to revolutionise what it 
separated itself from.
There is thus a (meta)politics of indifference inscribed in the artistic form of 
appearance via its very separation from the social world. This explains why the 
work of an author such as Gustave Flaubert, by no means a revolutionary, whose 
ideal was to write a book about nothing, a book made of absolute style from the 
standpoint of which the subject matter becomes a matter of indifference, could 
57
 Ibid., pp. 21–37.
58
 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, p. 30.
59
 Ibid., p. 32.
60
 Ibid., p. 31.

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be accused by his contemporaries of being overly democratic. Rancière explains 
how, due to their indifference, his novels achieve a democratisation of senso-
ry experience: “The work that desires nothing, the work without any point of 
view, which conveys no message and has no care either for democracy or for an-
ti-democracy, this work is ‘egalitarian’ by dint of its very indifference, by which 
it suspends all preference, all hierarchy.”
61
 For Rancière, this implies that the 
autonomous artwork is political, but not in the same way as it was for Adorno, 
since there is no social disharmony to express and no promises to keep. What 
the artwork achieves politically, it achieves in the immediacy of its displace-
ment of the relations that permeate the established forms of sensory experience.
Does this mean that the only true political art is the apolitical one – the position 
taken by Adorno? Just as Rancière does not simply repoliticise art, but acknowl-
edges a politics of its indifference, so too he does not dismiss political art. If 
there is a politics of the indifferent, we may ask ourselves what its implications 
are for art that actually touches on the political, that gives explicit expression 
to social suffering, and that aims to affect its spectators or readers. According to 
Rancière, the problem of political art – i.e. art that evokes its capacity to affect 
the audience politically – is that it cannot do away with the indifference of the 
artistic form of appearance. The question is rather how it engages with it. The 
classical strategy of political art is based on “a straight line between perception, 
affection, comprehension and action,” the assumption that the expression of 
suffering will affect spectators in a way that will make them aware of the situa-
tion and motivate them to change it.
62
 But over time, a weakened belief in this 
causal chain led to a reversal of the critical discourses surrounding art: expres-
sions of suffering were now understood in the context of the spectacle of images 
imposed on us by society. According to this new understanding, perception still 
leads to affection, but actually diverts us from comprehending and acting. What 
we should thus be aware of is finally that extreme suffering cannot and should 
not be represented and that it is this shock of unrepresentability that art should 
ultimately try to evoke.
63
61
 Ibid., p. 40.
62
 Rancière Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, London and 
New York 2009, p. 103.
63
 In this context, it is interesting to have a look at Rancière’s intervention in the debates 
on the unrepresentability of suffering, related specifically to concentration camps and 
Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. According to Rancière, it was the old, representational 
regime that defined the limits of what is representable and what kind of representation 

181
art between affect and indifference in hegel, adorno, and rancière
For Rancière, the problem of such forms of artistic politics is that they try to 
“sidestep the incalculable tension between political dissensuality and aesthetic 
indifference.”
64
 While the classical form of artistic politics calls for art to step 
down from its ivory tower to a make a difference, its critical reversal draws its 
strength from shattering art’s indifferent form of appearance against the unrep-
resentable. Yet the aesthetic regime of art offers another way of understanding 
the political capacity of art, one that passes through the aesthetic indifference 
itself: “the aesthetic rupture arranges a paradoxical form of efficacy, one that 
relates to a disconnection.”
65
 The line is neither straight nor broken; it is simply 
disconnected or interrupted. Rancière thus draws our attention to artworks and 
artistic practices that make use precisely of the irreducible tension between dis-
sensus and indifference.
One such work Rancière presents is a photograph by the French artist Sophie 
Ristelhueber. The photograph from her 2005 WB series shows a figureless rocky 
landscape crossed by a straight country road. What draws our attention, how-
ever, is not the road itself and the abstract composition it instils, but a pile of 
rocks that blocks it and suggests, at the same time, the continuity with the sur-
rounding landscape and the discontinuity of the road that crosses it. On the one 
hand, the pile is thus “harmoniously integrated into an idyllic landscape”
66
 and 
thereby into the artistic form of appearance in all its indifference. On the other 
hand, the indication of a disturbance within this harmony that the rocks present 
is enhanced by the meaning they gain in the context of Ristelhueber’s series of 
photographs. WB stands for West Bank, which is also the location where the 
photograph was taken: the pile of rocks on the road turns out to be an Israeli 
is adequate to a specific subject matter. In the aesthetic regime, however, there are “no 
longer any inherent limits to representation” and therefore nothing is inherently unrepre-
sentable. (Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, London 
and New York 2007 , p. 137 .) Artistic representations of the Shoah, Rancière shows, actually 
rely on the fictional means invented within the aesthetic regime (ibid., pp. 123–130). The 
problem is not whether such events can be represented by images and fictions, but how 
such images and fictions configure or reconfigure the “relations between the visible and 
the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid,” etc. (Jacques Rancière, The 
Emancipated Spectator, p. 102.)
64
 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran, 
Continuum, London and New York 2010, p. 151.
65
 Ibid., p. 139.
66
 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 103.

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roadblock on Palestinian territory. Instead of representing suffering or relying 
on the recognisable emblems of the Middle East conflict, the artist focused on 
the traces the conflict leaves on the landscapes. The result is an image fully in-
scribed in the indifferent aesthetic form of appearance, which entails that its 
“meaning or effect is not anticipated” by the image itself.
67
 Even the object that 
draws our attention by indicating a difference – the interruption of the straight 
line of the road – does not introduce political heteronomy to the image, but itself 
takes place within the same aesthetic apparatus of appearance.
What Ristelheuber thus achieves, according to Rancière, is “a displacement of 
the exhausted affect of indignation to a more discreet affect, an affect of indeter-
minate effect – curiosity, the desire to see closer up.”
68
 Instead of relying on the 
affect provoked by inscribing suffering in the image, the photograph makes use of 
the indeterminacy of aesthetic appearance, which makes us confused but curious 
as to what exactly it is that we are looking at and how to understand it. Moving 
from suffering to indifference does not neutralise the politics inscribed in the im-
age, but rather suggests another kind of politics, one “based on the variation of 
distance, the resistance of the visible and the uncertainty of effects.”
69
 The indif-
ference of artistic appearance thus also constitutes its specific form of efficacy.
While both Hegel and Adorno affirmed the autonomy of the artistic form of ap-
pearance in its indifference, they also attempted to ground it in some kind of sub-
stantiality. In Hegel, the appearance of the Absolute manifests its substantiality 
by enjoying its own indifference. In Adorno, indifferent form earns its truth-con-
tent in a dialectical confrontation with objective suffering. We have seen, howev-
er, that the self-enjoyment of the Absolute can flourish just as well among child 
beggars as it does among Olympic gods. We have also seen how, in the final in-
stance, it is its immanent affectivity that enables indifferent form to accommodate 
suffering in the medium of its neutralisation. What these findings entail – and we 
have found some of these consequences already laid out in Rancière’s work – is 
that instead of looking for something that would redeem the aesthetic form of 
appearance from its frivolity, we should rather take seriously its very indifference. 
It is there that the affective capacity of aesthetic appearance ultimately resides.
67
 Ibid.
68
 Ibid., p. 104.
69
 Ibid., p. 105.