Immigrants, Banlieues, and Dangerous Things: Ideology as an Aesthetic Affair

This paper engages with the notion of ideology, bringing together Laclau's theorisation of the specificity of the ideological, and Rancière's notion of aesthetic regimes. Ideology, I argue, works through what it makes available to the senses and what it makes to make sense. It is in this sense that it is an aesthetic affair. This argument is illustrated with an account of the so-called “securitarian ideology” in France that characterises the repressive policies of the recent governments.