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What does it mean to think politics and aesthetics under the concept of dissensus? 1 Obviously dissensus is not only the concept of what politics and aesthetics are about. This notion also sets up the theoretical stage on which politics and aesthetics themselves are thinkable and the kind of relations that tie their objects together. At the most abstract level, dissensus means a difference between sense and sense: a difference within the same, a sameness of the opposite. If you assume that politics is a form of dissensus, this means that you cannot deduce it from any essence of the community, whether you do it positively in terms of implementation of a common property such as communicative language (Aristotle) or negatively in terms of a response to a destructive instinct that would set man against man (Hobbes). There is politics because the common is divided. Now this division is not a difference of levels. The opposition between sense and sense is not an opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Political dissensus is not the appearance or the form that would be the manifestation of an underlying social and economic process. In reference to the Marxist conceptualization, class war is the actual reality of politics, not its hidden cause. Let us start from the first point. In Disagreement I re-examined the old Aristotelian definition of the political animal as a speaking animal. Some critics saw it as ‘a return to the classics’, which also meant to them a return to an old view of language and an old theory of the subject that would ignore Derrida’s deconstruction or Lyotard’s differend. But this view is misleading. Starting from the Aristotelian ‘speaking animal’ does not mean