Le consensus a pour finalité d’éliminer le conflit. Il aimerait pouvoir sacraliser de nouvelles normes dans une société en crise de rituel. Hélas, la réalité nous montre que l’étoffe du consensus est tissée de soumission librement consentie, de nécessités et de jeux de pouvoir très liés aux plaisirs immédiats. A force d’habitude, l’exigence de consensus change le remède en poison. Le consensus sonne le glas de l’éthique. En cherchant l’unité, le consensus diabolise le conflit et cherche expressément à l’éliminer du fait de son chaos apparent. Le dissensus, lui, en mettant la parole en tension, assure le lien fécond du vivreensemble. La dualité est la clef naturelle qui rationalise la sociabilité des contraires. Le dissensus privilégie l’association des différences pour assurer la représentation de chacune d’entre elles. Ce n’est qu’à partir d’une heuristique naturelle et holiste de l’altérité que le sujet peut se développer en tant que soimême et différent. De cette façon, un « double-je » se construit, capable à la fois de dire courageusement « me voici », face à la menace potentielle de l’autre mais surtout capable de ce même courage pour palier la vulnérabilité de cet autre quand ses forces de résistance l’abandonnent. Le dissensus signe l’émancipation et le dépli du sujet visant le dépassement de soi. La réussite de cette démarche d’ipséité se confirme quand la puissance de déploiement se met au service de la vulnérabilité d’autrui en termes de sollicitude. Ce travail essaie de proposer le dissensus comme un conflit sain et nécessaire, garant d’une éthique d’ouverture, une voie d’excellence pour ceux qui sont concernés par ce que l’homme peut offrir de meilleur : un soin / Finality of consensus is to eliminate conflict. It tries to sacrilize news Norms in a rituals crisis Society. Reality shows that consensus material is woven of submission freely agreed, of necessities and power games closely linked to instantaneous pleasures. By dint of habits, consensus demand substitute Poison for Remedy; consensus sounds Ethics kneel death. Consensus demonizes conflict by seeking unity, and explicitly seeks with elimination of it, regarding its visible chaos. A contrario, Dissensus assures ethics blow of the ‘living-together’ concept by fertile speech link. Duality is the natural solution, which rationalizes opposites’ sociability. Dissensus privileges differences coexistences, rather than weakest shakeout. Subject can build himself up by his self fulfillment, and as a different man, only from a natural and holist heuristic otherness. Thereby, a ‘double-I’ build itself, able to say courageously ‘Here I am’ to other one’s potential threaten, and especially able to face other one’s vulnerability with the same courage, when his resistance forces give-up. Dissensus signs subject emancipation and opening, aiming at going beyond of oneself. Displaying process goes thought an ipseity reasoning, which emerges from otherness, free itself from the latter, to finally return to it, in solicitude terms: live with, against and for other one. This work tries to show Dissensus as a sound and required conflict which guarantees an opening Ethics, an excellence way for the ones who are concerned by the best thing a human being can offer : a Care

This doctoral thesis examines the ways in which contemporary writers have adopted the critical dystopian mode in order to radically deconstruct the socio-political conditions that preclude equality, inclusion and collective political appearance in twenty-first century Britain. The thesis performs theoretically-informed close readings of contemporary novels from authors J.G. Ballard, Maggie Gee, Sarah Hall and Rupert Thomson in its analysis, and argues that the speculative visions of Kingdom Come (2006), The Flood (2004), The Carhullan Army (2007) and Divided Kingdom (2005) are engaged with a wave of contemporary dystopian writing in which the destructive and divisive forms of consensus that are to be found within Britain's contemporary socio-political moment are identified and challenged. The thesis proposes that, in their politically-engaged extrapolations, contemporary British writers are engaged with specifically dystopian expressions of dissensus. Reflecting key theoretical and political nuances found in Jacques Rancière's concept of 'dissensus', I argue that the novels illustrate dissensual interventions within the imagined political space of British societies in which inequalities, oppressions and exclusions are endemic - often proceeding to present modest, 'minor' utopian arguments for more equal, heterogeneous and democratic possibilities in the process. Contributing new, theoretically-inflected analysis of key speculative fictions from twenty-first century British writers, and locating their critiques within the literary, socio-political and theoretical contexts they are meaningfully engaged with, the thesis ultimately argues that in interrogating and reimagining the socio-political spaces of twenty-first century Britain, contemporary writers of dystopian fiction demonstrate literature working in its most dissensual, political and transformative mode.

Le consensus a pour finalité d'éliminer le conflit. Il aimerait pouvoir sacraliser de nouvelles normes dans une société en crise de rituel. Hélas, la réalité nous montre que l'étoffe du consensus est tissée de soumission librement consentie, de nécessités et de jeux de pouvoir très liés aux plaisirs immédiats. A force d'habitude, l'exigence de consensus change le remède en poison. Le consensus sonne le glas de l'éthique. En cherchant l'unité, le consensus diabolise le conflit et cherche expressément à l'éliminer du fait de son chaos apparent. Le dissensus, lui, en mettant la parole en tension, assure le lien fécond du vivreensemble. La dualité est la clef naturelle qui rationalise la sociabilité des contraires. Le dissensus privilégie l'association des différences pour assurer la représentation de chacune d'entre elles. Ce n'est qu'à partir d'une heuristique naturelle et holiste de l'altérité que le sujet peut se développer en tant que soimême et différent. De cette façon, un " double-je " se construit, capable à la fois de dire courageusement " me voici ", face à la menace potentielle de l'autre mais surtout capable de ce même courage pour palier la vulnérabilité de cet autre quand ses forces de résistance l'abandonnent. Le dissensus signe l'émancipation et le dépli du sujet visant le dépassement de soi. La réussite de cette démarche d'ipséité se confirme quand la puissance de déploiement se met au service de la vulnérabilité d'autrui en termes de sollicitude. Ce travail essaie de proposer le dissensus comme un conflit sain et nécessaire, garant d'une éthique d'ouverture, une voie d'excellence pour ceux qui sont concernés par ce que l'homme peut offrir de meilleur : un soin

This thesis aims to present a practical example of how art can become an instrument capable of investigating, showing and facing a social problem. For doing so, art can overcome communication issues; secondly, it can create a “common world” of shared values that leads to changes in society. The ethnographic example shown here is set among the theatrical company of the KulturParken association (Uppsala, Sweden), which works with people with disability. The fieldwork focuses on the development and staging of their theatrical show “Sagan om Liv och Lust” which deals with the problem of sexuality and disability. The thesis structure follows two main arguments: communication process and evolution in society. The arguments are framed and analysed through the embodied knowledge concept and Turner’s theory about ritual in theatre, as well as through Kester’s dialogical and relational aesthetic theory and Rancière’s Dissensus one. This thesis highlights how disability arts and a disability aesthetic allowed the members of the company to develop a personal awareness, leading them to overcome self-imposed barriers and those imposed by society. Moreover, it shows how the receivers of the theatrical message become active actors themselves, carrying forward the communicative process.

Exploring both political aesthetics and the politics of aesthetics to outline an environmental ruralism for art in public spaces, this practice lead research project postulates a “complemental practice”, outlining its methodology and contexts for operation, the rural, spaces of leisure and the public realm. It is a response to threats to spatial and environmental commons from heritage, place-making and nostalgia, psychological inhibition such as a sense of global contingency and widespread economic exploitation. Responses by artists to this situation can be characterised as a binary of dialogism (Kester, 2004) and relational antagonism (Bishop, 2004), i.e. consensual/collaborative or antagonistic/autonomous practices. Informing both is the work of Jacques Rancière who theorises an ethical and social turn in the arts. Through both commissioned and self-initiated projects this thesis offers an interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s conception of dissensus (Rancière, 2010) modulated through an application of the work of philosopher Slajov Žižek on environmental politics and complementarity - the inscription of the universal within the particular (Žižek, 2011). The thesis’ originality lies in this theoretical synthesis which sets out a complemental practice based on dissensus and the undecidability of subject and context, but which dismisses any inflexible schema of either aesthetic autonomy or ethico-political egalitarianism. In addition it suggests an approach to practice in this field and a situation for this - a dissensual infrastructure for the common public realm which is socially relational and evolutionary over time.

Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry.