Everyday temporalities, deviant reveries and interval territorialities in Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Rancière’s thought

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present a possible articulation between Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Rancière’s approaches regarding the creation of interval territorialities that enable the inauguration of new temporalities. Although through different reflective paths, both authors identify in reverie, or in flânerie, a power capable of enabling attentive observation of everyday life, creating possibilities for the manifestation of inventive and deviant actions. The deviant gesture promoted by the rupture with schemes and expectations that should guide behaviors and ways of life, are capable of reworking the coordinates of the “real” experience allowing liminal spatialities and temporalities to emerge and coexist. We highlight how the authors propose to subvert chronologies or police orders in the search to make new perceptions, criticisms, characters and discourses emerge through “thinking through montages” or scenes of dissensus. We argue that interval operations in the sensible create a gap, an opening for new experiments that, when associated with different territorialities and temporalities, become the source of an operation that seeks to rearticulate the elements of the world through empiricism and inventiveness.