aesthetic unconscious

is a conjunction of competing conceptions of the unconscious which1 represent meaning on the one hand as decipherable (like language) and on the other, indecipherable (like silence).

Coextensive with the aesthetic regime of art, the aesthetic unconscious is paradoxically polarized between the two extremes that characterize silent speech. On the one hand, meaning is inscribed like hieroglyphics on the body of things and waits to be deciphered. On the other hand, an unfathomable silence that no voice can adequately render acts as an insurmountable obstacle to signification and meaning. This contradictory conjunction between speech and silence, logos and pathos, is not equivalent to the Freudian unconscious or other later interpretations. It is, in fact, the historical terrain upon which competing conceptions of the unconscious have emerged' (Rancière 2000: 82). Rancière, Jacques. 2000. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Continuum: New York

aesthetic unconscious, n.All

aesthetic unconscious