"Lo scandalo dello spettatore. Teatro e democrazia secondo Jacques Ranciere"

[Machine translation] The essay presents and discusses the theses of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière about the “emancipated spectator”, contextualizing them in a contemporary landscape that is about to overcome the historical paradigm of theatrical spectatorality in favor of a more general call to participation and collaboration. This is an 'activist' paradigm that extends from the performer to what the spectator had been. While Rancière intends to demonstrate that this offer of democratic emancipation, far from new in modern Western theater, is suspicious, since it presupposes a priority passivity or at least a subordinate degree of activity, the essay proposes a survey of the “partitions” and aesthetic-political divisions that mark the difference between performer and spectator on the basis of other Rancière texts. In particular, the theater scandal could be identified in the spectator as' Demos', an instance that bursts into the theater, bringing you any of its unexpected anonymity. The interest in the spectator's destiny and in his paradoxical political subjectivity brings us back in a radically unexpected way to the democratic scandal: a power given to those who have no preventive right to exercise it. Just as Demos is the scandal of democracy, so is the spectator in the theater.