What Dikeç conjures from his conjoined conversation with Rancière, Arendt, and Nancy is a faith that ordinary people, acting in concert, have an on-going and ultimately irrepressible ability to perturb the spatial orderings through which they are positioned and constrained. Not so much a matter of empirical verifiability, this foregrounding of a capacity to remake social space, following Rancière, is more of a wager.

What Dikec’s account does do, however, and rather wonderfully, is offer a sustained meditation on space, spaciosity, spatiality—that is, on forms of distribution and organization—and why they matter.

The book is composed of a detailed and ambitious engagement with the ways in which space, politics and aesthetics function in the in the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. This approach is animated by a concern with the permanent possibility of politics, a concern which is shaped by a distinctive and productive mobilisation of the distinction between “politics” and “the political.”

I am grateful to my colleagues for taking the time to respond to Space, Politics, and Aesthetics. Their supportive comments are encouraging, and criticisms testing. Their more critical comments suggest that there are a few issues that I should have explained more clearly in the book. I will, therefore, take this opportunity to clarify better what I tried to do in the book, focusing on the following themes: focus and scope of the book, its engagement with Kant, its worldly inspirations, and its arguments concerning space and politics.

Mustafa Dikec’s new book, "Space, Politics and Aesthetics", makes an important contribution to Edinburgh University Press's excellent Taking on the Political series, and to broader debates on the nature of politics and the political. Focusing on the relation between space, politics, and aesthetics in the work of Arendt, Nancy, and Ranciere, Dikec argues that politics is a form of spatial rupture in the organization of perception.

Aesthetics seems increasingly popular amongst critical geographers. Everywhere, that is, where geography seeks to interrogate its generative and political conditions. The reason is simple. Critique must seek, relentlessly so; critique demands unyielding attention to the reflexive conditions for making claims upon each other and the world.