This smart and ambitious book contributes to a growing body of work in political theory that attempts to illuminate the connections among politics, culture, theory, and aesthetics, thereby broadening our understanding of the kinds of phenomena that count as political in contemporary multicultural politics. The book offers “a genealogy of political reflection” (p. 10) that attends not just to the “regimes of perception” that inform common sense but also, crucially, to the interruptive force of sensation that can “puncture our received wisdoms and common modes of sensing” (p. 2). As a political theorist and cultural analyst of sensation in democratic politics, Davide Panagia “consider[s] sensation to be an experience of unrepresentability in that a sensation occurs without having to rely on a recognizable shape, outline, or identity to determine its value.” He argues that “such moments of interruption … are political moments because they invite occasions for reconfiguring our associational lives” (pp. 2–3).

In addition to exegetical chapters that draw out the insights of canonical political thinkers on sensation, perception, and judgment, the book includes fascinating chapters on contemporary aesthetico-political phenomena, including Italian piazza newsstands (or edicolas), practices of viewing in the film The Ring, and the Slow Food movement, with smart uses of Cézanne, Kandinsky, Caravaggio, and Bacon layered in as well. The Political Life of Sensation will be of great interest to political theorists and others intent on thinking beyond the ordinary politics of recognition, representation, and signification in order to explore the interruptive and democratic potential that percolates through popular culture and everyday practice.

Inspired by Jacques Rancière's thinking on the relationship between politics and aesthetics, the book starts from the assumption that “the first political act is also an aesthetic one” (p. 9). Panagia's studied deployment of Rancière's thought—including the central notion of politics as what Rancière called, in an interview with Panagia, “an activity of reconfiguration of that which is given to the sensible” (2000, quoted on p. 6)—should prove insightful to the Rancière specialist as well as the novice for the way that it blends sharp theoretical exposition with concrete analysis of aesthetic and cultural examples. More specifically, the author sets his focus on the interruptive force of sensation in the context of Rancière's ingenious rereading of Louis Althusser's famous scene of interpellation in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 1971). Instead of the police officer hailing the subject of ideology with a “Hey You!” as Althusser presents it, Rancière sees the police officer saying, “Move along! There is nothing to see here!”—thus contributing to the reproduction of accustomed ways of seeing and sensing. Indeed, Panagia explains that “Rancière's police officer guarantees the continuation of the organic correspondences that constitute our regimes of perception and the partitions of the sensible that make circulation possible” (p. 121). In contrast to such policing, Panagia is most interested in those sites where, and moments when, the ordinary circulation of the sensible is interrupted by a “sensation that disrupts our confidence in the correspondence between perception and signification” (p. 5), offering the possibility for reconfiguration.

In the first and most densely theoretical chapter, the author presents an intelligent reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment to build his case for the democratic life of aesthetic sensation. Examining Kant's analysis of how the “durational intensity of immediacy in [an] aesthetic experience” of beauty produces the “disinterested interest” of judgment (p. 28), Panagia concludes that “[t]aste is available, for Kant, regardless of privilege” (p. 31). The chapter goes on to offer “the triangulation of Kant on immediacy, Deleuze on indistinction, and Rancière on dissensus,” which together constitute “an exploration of sensation as a radical democratic moment in aesthetic judgment” (p. 17). This account serves to ground the author's welcome and sophisticated challenge to much contemporary political theorizing, bringing deliberative democracy, the politics of recognition, and identity politics into his sights. The first chapter, moving from Kant to Rancière, does an excellent job of making the case for a democratic politics of interruptive sensation by democratizing aesthetic judgment.

Like Patchen Markell's Bound by Recognition (2003), this book makes a worthy contribution to a growing body of scholarship in political theory that works to move beyond the limits of identity politics, the politics of recognition, and deliberative democracy. Incisively, Panagia contends that even though “multicultural politics is a politics of visuality,” both admirers and critics of multiculturalism pay little attention to “the regimes of perception that ensure the political valence of an image” or appearance (p. 6). Therefore, he argues, “One of the key challenges posted to contemporary democratic theory today is how to engage the image. The citizen subject is a viewing subject; but viewing is not limited to mere seeing” (p. 120). In this vein, and even more precisely and boldly, Panagia targets what he calls “narratocracy,” or “the privileging of narrative as a genre for the exposition of claims and ideas in contemporary political thought” (p. 12).

In the second chapter, entitled “The Piazza, the Edicola, and the Noise of the Utterance,” the author begins to cash out this critique of narratocracy as “the organization of a perceptual field according to the imperative of rendering things readable” (p. 12) by means of an examination of the Italian piazza generally and the edicola specifically as a site for the “art of democratic noise.” By taking seriously the noisy political utterance, such as the Italian chocolatiers who offered “an impromptu chocolate taste test” to protest new European Commission regulations on the composition of chocolate, the author mounts a direct challenge to the narratocratic model of deliberation that “eschews the element of play in language games by grounding communication in a barter economy where the energy expended must, in the last resort, always be productive (i.e., ‘meaningful’)” (p. 54). Alternatively, Panagia wants us to bring “the regimes of perception that govern our postures of attention” (p. 47) up for inspection such that we are open to expanding our perception of political phenomena when sensation strikes.

While The Political Life of Sensation constitutes a sophisticated challenge and necessary addition to contemporary political theory, it has a couple of limitations. On the one hand, in an argument consonant with his choice of the Brillat-Savarin epigraph “The number of the senses is not fewer than six,” the author rightly notes that “it seems worthwhile to ask ourselves whether only one mode of address should be given priority in political communication” (p. 48). Indeed, throughout the book, he attends to all the senses, and yet nevertheless seems to privilege the visual without fully justifying such privilege. It seems a worthy and even necessary privileging, but the argument needs to be made more clear relative to the other senses in order to be fully persuasive. On the other hand, the author's optimistic and critical attentiveness to the interruptive force of sensation suggests the need for an analysis that would also illuminate the ways in which power works to shore up existing regimes of perception. Perhaps emergent political theory needs to complement this work with the addition of some critical realism that would interrogate the cultural and aesthetic conditions and relations of power that contribute to the reproduction of existing regimes of perception. Nevertheless, this is a very important book that offers valuable ways to better comprehend the imbrications of politics, culture, and aesthetics in contemporary multicultural democracy.