“Rosalyn Deutsche has argued that the public sphere remains democratic
only insofar as its naturalized exclusions are taken into account and made open to
contestation: “Conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the democratic
public sphere; they are conditions of its existence.” Deutsche takes her lead from
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics. Published in 1985, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony is one
of the first books to reconsider Leftist political theory through the lens of post-
structuralism, following what the authors perceived to be an impasse of Marxist
theorization in the 1970s. Their text is a rereading of Marx through Gramsci’s the-
or y of hegemony and Lacan’s under st anding of subject ivit y as split and
decentered.”
“Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of the Marxist idea of community as communion in The Inoperative
Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) has been crucial to my consideration of a counter-model to relational aesthetics. Since the mid-1990s, Nancy’s text has become an increasingly important reference point for writers on contemporary art, as seen in Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions; chapter 4 of Pamela M. Lee’s Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); George Baker, “Relations and Counter-Relations: An Open Letter to Nicolas Bourriaud,” in Zusammenhänge herstellen/Contextualise, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Cologne: Dumont, 2002); and Jessica Morgan, Common Wealth (London: Tate Publishing, 2003).”
Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, Claire Bishop.
Divina proportione, written by Luca Pacioli.
