As we have entered a world beyond the limit of structural violence, Balibar wonders whether our politics can be thought of as heteronomy of heteronomy, constituted by the fusion of the problem of violence and the problem of identity. The politics which takes as its object the violence of identities he terms ‘civility’, and he posits three theorems on identity in response: all identity is transindividual; we should speak of identifications rather than identity; and, every identity is ambiguous.
I’m curious about the potential connections to be made between these three theorems relating to identity and the three ways of distributing the sensible as forms of art and forms that inscribe a sense of community—the surface of depicted signs, the split reality of the theater, and the rhythm of a dancing chorus—posited by Rancière. The transindividuality of identity positions it in bonds validated among individual imaginations: is this like a sort of economy of ‘depicted’ (or, ‘embodied’) signs? “The aesthetic regime disrupts the apportionment of spaces in favor of immanence of thought in sensible matter”: as the apportionment of spaces makes “double beings” out of the worker, could ‘identifications’ be a pathway towards a disruption of current modes of doing and making? How is the rhythm of a dancing chorus bolstered by the ambiguity of individual identity? Mouffe posits that artistic and cultural practices can offer spaces of resistance: can the connections between identity and the distribution of the sensible be articulated as agonistic interventions within the context of counter-hegemonic struggle?