Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Images (2003; French title Le destin des images) asks a fundamental question: who decides what can be seen and what can be said in art? For Rancière, art is always shaped by a “regime” — a system of rules that organizes the relationship between the visible and the speakable. This regime determines what can be painted, shown on stage, or narrated in literature, and what remains inappropriate or unrepresentable. In seventeenth-century French theatre, for example, the violence done to Oedipus’s eyes could not be shown on stage. Certain things had to remain outside visibility.

These regimes are not fixed; they change over time. Rancière argues that in the nineteenth century a major shift occurred. The older system based on mimesis — where art followed strict hierarchies about what was worthy of representation — gave way to what he calls the aesthetic regime. Under this new regime, anything could become the subject of art. No theme was too ordinary. Flaubert’s claim that “Yvetot is the equal of Constantinople” captures this shift: a small provincial town is as worthy of literature as an imperial capital. Art no longer followed rigid distinctions between noble and trivial subjects.

In The Politics of Images, Rancière explains that the connection between word and image is shaped by broader discourses — systems of thought that influence both literature and the visual arts. These discourses act as a form of power. They define what counts as meaningful, serious, or legitimate art. In this sense, Rancière continues the work of Michel Foucault, who described how discourse regulates what can be thought and expressed. Rancière applies this idea specifically to art.

Image politics, then, does not simply concern what artists choose to depict. It also concerns how critics, theorists, and institutions talk about art. Language frames interpretation. The way an image is described already places it within a particular order of meaning. Art may appear free, but it operates within structures that guide how it is produced and understood.

Rancière also engages Roland Barthes, especially Barthes’s Mythologies, which showed how popular images often mask ideology. Like Barthes, Rancière sees images as participating in systems of meaning larger than themselves. At the same time, he reflects on the modernist ambition to merge art and life — a project that sought to eliminate the distance between representation and reality. According to Rancière, this project has largely failed.

Today, he suggests, two tendencies dominate. One emphasizes art’s autonomy, treating it as self-contained and independent. The other tries to dissolve art into everyday life or political action. Both aim to overcome mediation — to collapse the distance between image and reality. Yet neither escapes discourse. Art continues to be shaped by systems of interpretation, by institutions, and by markets. Once art enters public circulation, it becomes subject to these forces.

Rancière does not entirely abandon the hope that art might resist its constraints, but he remains cautious. Even figures like Jean-Luc Godard, whom he often discusses, appear less as fully autonomous artists and more as participants in existing discursive structures. The idea that art could completely escape these regimes remains more aspiration than reality.

Rancière’s analysis suggests that images never stand alone. They are always caught within frameworks that govern how they appear and how they are understood. The politics of images lies not only in what they show, but in the invisible systems that determine their visibility in the first place.