Books by Jacques Ranciere

The Politics Of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible

by Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Ranciere

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relation between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance for contemporary experience. Here, Jacques Ranciere develops a critical aesthetic that goes far beyond the paradigms of modernism and modernity and their 'posts' which still haunt us.
Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, Critical Aesthetics ranges across art and politics, the uses and abuses of modernity, the role of visual technologies, the relationship between history and fiction, utopias, the avant-garde and the three aesthetic regimes which constitute the 'partitions of the sensible.'
Already translated into five languages, this English edition of The Politics of Aesthetics includes a new introduction by Slavoj Zizek and a new interview with Ranciere in which he situates his writing within the context of the work of, amongst others, Foucault, Barthes, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Derrida, Badiou, Balibar and Zizek.
Jacques Ranciere is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Paris VIII (St Denis) and a former student of Louis Althusser. His translated works include The Nights of Labour, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, The Names of History, On the Shores of Politics and Disagreement

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

by Jacques Ranciere

Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

by Jacques Ranciere

Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

The Emancipated Spectator

by Jacques Ranciere

The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.

In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?

The Emancipated Spectator

by Jacques Ranciere

The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.

In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?

The Future of the Image

by Jacques Ranciere

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, filmmakers such as Godard and Bresson, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Rancière shows that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies.

He argues that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarian ideals.

The Future of the Image

by Jacques Ranciere

Lauded by major contemporary artists and philosophers, Jacques Rancière’s work returns politics to its central place in understanding art.

In The Future of the Image,Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image incontemporary art, showing how art and politics have always beenintrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, filmmakers such as Godard and Bresson, andthinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard andGreenberg, Rancière shows that contemporary theorists of the image aresuffering from religious tendencies.

He argues that there is a starkpolitical choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy,or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never apure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarianideals.

Aesthetics and Its Discontents

by Jacques Ranciere

Translated by Steven Corcoran
Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed.
But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution.
Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation.
This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today?s calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.

The Aesthetic Unconscious

by Jacques Ranciere

This book is not concerned with the use of Freudian concepts for the interpretation of literary and artistic works. Rather, it is concerned with why this interpretation plays such an important role in demonstrating the contemporary relevance of psychoanalytic concepts.
In order for Freud to use the Oedipus complex as a means for the interpretation of texts, it was necessary first of all for a particular notion of Oedipus, belonging to the Romantic reinvention of Greek antiquity, to have produced a certain idea of the power of that thought which does not think, and the power of that speech which remains silent.
From this it does not follow that the Freudian unconscious was already prefigured by the aesthetic unconscious. Freud's 'aesthetic' analyses reveal instead a tension between the two forms of unconscious. In this concise and brilliant text Rancière brings out this tension and shows us what is at stake in this confrontation.

Disagreement: Politics And Philosophy

by Jacques Ranciere

“Is there any such thing as political philosophy?” So begins this provocative book by one of the foremost figures in Continental thought. Here, Jacques Rancière brings a new and highly useful set of terms to the vexed debate about political effectiveness and “the end of politics.”
What precisely is at stake in the relationship between “philosophy” and the adjective “political”? In Disagreement, Rancière explores the apparent contradiction between these terms and reveals the uneasy meaning of their union in the phrase “political philosophy”—a juncture related to age-old attempts in philosophy to answer Plato’s devaluing of politics as a “democratic egalitarian” process.
According to Rancière, the phrase also expresses the paradox of politics itself: the absence of a proper foundation. Politics, he argues, begins when the “demos” (the “excessive” or unrepresented part of society) seeks to disrupt the order of domination and distribution of goods “naturalized” by police and legal institutions. In addition, the notion of “equality” operates as a game of contestation that constantly substitutes litigation for political action and community. This game, Rancière maintains, operates by a primary logic of “misunderstanding.” In turn, political philosophy has always tried to substitute the “politics of truth” for the politics of appearances.
Disagreement investigates the various transformations of this regime of “truth” and their effects on practical politics. Rancière then distinguishes what we mean by “democracy” from the practices of a consensual system in order to unravel the ramifications of the fashionable phrase “the end of politics.” His conclusions will be of interest to readers concerned with political questions from the broadest to the most specific and local.

Figures of History

by Jacques Ranciere

In this important new book the leading philosopher Jacques Rancière continues his reflections on the representative power of works of art. How does art render events that have spanned an era? What roles does it assign to those who enacted them or those who were the victims of such events?

Rancière considers these questions in relation to the works of Claude Lanzmann, Goya, Manet, Kandinsky and Barnett Newman, among others, and demonstrates that these issues are not only confined to the spectator but have greater ramifications for the history of art itself.
For Rancière, every image, in what it shows and what it hides, says something about what it is permissible to show and what must be hidden in any given place and time. Indeed the image, in its act of showing and hiding, can reopen debates that the official historical record had supposedly determined once and for all. He argues that representing the past can imprison history, but it can also liberate its true meaning.

Politics and Aesthetics

by Jacques Ranciere, Peter Engelmann

In this book the influential philosopher Jacques Rancière, in discussion with Peter Engelmann, explores the enduring connection between politics and aesthetics, arguing that aesthetics forms the fundamental basis for social and political upheaval.
Beginning from his rejection of structuralist Marxism, Rancière outlines the development of his thought from his early studies on workers’ emancipation to his recent work on literature, film and visual art. Rather than discussing aesthetics within narrow terms of how we contemplate art or beauty, Rancière argues that aesthetics underpins our entire ‘regime of experience’. He shows how political relations develop from sensual experience, as individual feelings and perceptions become the concern of the community as a whole. Since politics emerges from the ‘division of the sensual’, aesthetic experience becomes a radically emancipatory and egalitarian means to disrupt this order and transform political reality.
Investigating new forms of emancipatory politics arising from current art practices and social movements, this short book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary art, aesthetics, philosophy and political theory.

The Edges of Fiction

by Jacques Ranciere

What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality – this was the thesis of Aristotle’s Poetics. The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted. Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness and ignorance into knowledge.

In the modern age, argues Rancière, this fictional rationality was developed in new ways. The social sciences extended the model of causal linkage to all spheres of human action, seeking to show us how causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations. Literature took the opposite path. Instead of democratizing fictional rationality to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed its principles by abolishing the limits that circumscribed a reality peculiar to fiction. It aligned itself with the rhythms of everyday life and plumbed the power of the “random moment” into which an entire life is condensed.

In the avowed fictions of literature as well as in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the central question is the same: how to construct the perceptible forms of a shared world. From Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa and from Marx to Sebald, via Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, Proust, Rilke, Conrad, Auerbach, Faulkner and some others, this book explores these constructions and sheds new light on the constitutive movement of modern fiction, the movement that shifted its centre of gravity from its traditional core toward those edges in which fiction gets confronted with its possible revocation.

The Intervals of Cinema

by Jacques Ranciere

Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature’s images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre’s dream.

Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images.

The Intervals of Cinema

by Jacques Ranciere

Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature's images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre's dream.

Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images.

Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double

by Jacques Ranciere

These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Rancière has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven themes: the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of “heretical” knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure. For the short-lived journal Les Révoltes Logiques, Rancière wrote on subjects ranging across a hundred years, from the California Gold Rush to trade-union collaboration with fascism, from early feminism to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” from the respectability of the Paris Exposition to the disrespectable carousing outside the Paris gates. Rancière characteristically combines telling historical detail with deep insight into the development of the popular mind. In a new preface, he explains why such “rude words” as “people,” “factory,” “proletarians” and “revolution” still need to be spoken.

Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double

by Jacques Ranciere

These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Rancière has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven themes: the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of “heretical” knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure. For the short-lived journal Les Révoltes Logiques, Rancière wrote on subjects ranging across a hundred years, from the California Gold Rush to trade-union collaboration with fascism, from early feminism to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” from the respectability of the Paris Exposition to the disrespectable carousing outside the Paris gates. Rancière characteristically combines telling historical detail with deep insight into the development of the popular mind. In a new preface, he explains why such “rude words” as “people,” “factory,” “proletarians” and “revolution” still need to be spoken.

Un Coup de Dés: Writing Turned Image, an Alphabet of Pensive Language

by Michael Newman, Jacques Ranciere, Gabriele Mackert

In her essay “Writing Turned Image: An Alphabet of Pensive Language," Sabine Folie writes, "An idea...explored in Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup de dés (A roll of the dice) of 1897 has in the twentieth century become an integral part of the poetological and, more generally, the avant-gardist vocabulary: the idea of unmasking language as a convention whose purpose it is to discipline the individual and to subject it to a regulated system of capitalist exploitation as well as to guarantee orientation in the world... Writing was released from the textual ensemble of the book and integrated into the flow of its media--as a disturbance, a deconstruction of meaning." The ideas of Symbolist poet and galvanizing nineteenth-century intellectual Stéphane Mallarmé are discussed in this text-heavy volume in relation to works by Robert Barry, Lothar Baumgarten, Marcel Broodthaers, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Rodney Graham, among others. Scholarly essays by Sabine Folie, Anna Sigridur Arnar, Jacques Rancière, Gabriele Mackert and Michael Newman accompany a generous selection of images by each of the artists.

The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction

by Jacques Ranciere

In The Lost Thread, Rancière debunks the notion of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Conrad, Woolf and Keats as reactionary producers of bourgeois mythologies, and instead foregrounds the egalitarian and democratic impulses of modernist literature. Contrary to the canonical interpretation of the relation between modernism and capitalism via the commodification of everyday life, Rancière proposes a radical rethinking of our received ideas regarding the politics of aesthetics in the modern era.

Through a complex and original stitching together of form and content, modernists strove to depict by embodying new forms and regimes of material and everyday life. Rancière articulates this substantial change in the politics of representation by explaining the shattering of the sacrosanct hierarchies of the genres and life-forms of classical literature. In the midst of the 19th century, poets, novelists and playwrights challenged the narrative staples of noble means and moral ends, and introduced an entirely new “structure of feeling”. In this work, Ranciere continues his project of outlining an egalitarian “distribution of the sensible” as the compelling linkage between politics and aesthetics in the modern age. The Lost Thread not only advances Rancière's commended work on aesthetics, it also offers the reader in depth analyses of the writers in question.

Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity (New Directions in Critical Theory, 30)

by Jacques Ranciere, Axel Honneth

Axel Honneth is best known for his critique of modern society centered on a concept of recognition. Jacques Rancière has advanced an influential theory of modern politics based on disagreement. Underpinning their thought is a concern for the logics of exclusion and domination that structure contemporary societies. In a rare dialogue, these two philosophers explore the affinities and tensions between their perspectives to provoke new ideas for social and political change.

Honneth sees modern society as a field in which the logic of recognition provides individuals with increasing possibilities for freedom and is a constant catalyst for transformation. Rancière sees the social as a policing order and the political as a force that must radically assert equality. Honneth claims Rancière's conception of the political lies outside of actual historical societies and involves a problematic desire for egalitarianism. Rancière argues that Honneth's theory of recognition relies on an overly substantial conception of identity and subjectivity. While impassioned, their exchange seeks to advance critical theory's political project by reconciling the rift between German and French post-Marxist traditions and proposing new frameworks for justice.

Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity (New Directions in Critical Theory, 30)

by Jacques Ranciere, Axel Honneth

Axel Honneth is best known for his critique of modern society centered on a concept of recognition. Jacques Rancière has advanced an influential theory of modern politics based on disagreement. Underpinning their thought is a concern for the logics of exclusion and domination that structure contemporary societies. In a rare dialogue, these two philosophers explore the affinities and tensions between their perspectives to provoke new ideas for social and political change.

Honneth sees modern society as a field in which the logic of recognition provides individuals with increasing possibilities for freedom and is a constant catalyst for transformation. Rancière sees the social as a policing order and the political as a force that must radically assert equality. Honneth claims Rancière's conception of the political lies outside of actual historical societies and involves a problematic desire for egalitarianism. Rancière argues that Honneth's theory of recognition relies on an overly substantial conception of identity and subjectivity. While impassioned, their exchange seeks to advance critical theory's political project by reconciling the rift between German and French post-Marxist traditions and proposing new frameworks for justice.

The Lost Thread The Democracy of Modern Fiction

by Jacques Ranciere

In The Lost Thread, Rancière debunks the notion of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Conrad, Woolf and Keats as reactionary producers of bourgeois mythologies, and instead foregrounds the egalitarian and democratic impulses of modernist literature. Contrary to the canonical interpretation of the relation between modernism and capitalism via the commodification of everyday life, Rancière proposes a radical rethinking of our received ideas regarding the politics of aesthetics in the modern era.

Through a complex and original stitching together of form and content, modernists strove to depict by embodying new forms and regimes of material and everyday life. Rancière articulates this substantial change in the politics of representation by explaining the shattering of the sacrosanct hierarchies of the genres and life-forms of classical literature. In the midst of the 19th century, poets, novelists and playwrights challenged the narrative staples of noble means and moral ends, and introduced an entirely new “structure of feeling”. In this work, Ranciere continues his project of outlining an egalitarian “distribution of the sensible” as the compelling linkage between politics and aesthetics in the modern age. The Lost Thread not only advances Rancière's commended work on aesthetics, it also offers the reader in depth analyses of the writers in question.

What is a People?

by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Ranciere, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations.

Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time.

The Politics of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Revelations)

by Jacques Ranciere

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Rancière's work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age.

Available now in the Bloomsbury Revelations series 10 years after its original publication, The Politics of Aesthetics includes an afterword by Slavoj Zizek, an interview for the English edition, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive bibliography.

Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New Directions in Critical Theory, 19)

by Jacques Ranciere

Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière's corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of "literature" is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, "literature" is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention.

Proletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France

by Jacques Ranciere

Proletarian Nights, previously published in English as Nights of Labor and one of Rancière’s most important works, dramatically reinterprets the Revolution of 1830, contending that workers were not rebelling against specific hardships and conditions but against the unyielding predetermination of their lives. Through a study of worker-run newspapers, letters, journals, and worker-poetry, Rancière reveals the contradictory and conflicting stories that challenge the coherence of these statements celebrating labor.

This updated edition includes a new preface by the author, revisiting the work twenty years since its first publication in France.

Names Of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge

by Jacques Ranciere

How can the language of history balance storytelling with truth-telling? Rancière considers this question in a meditation on the poetics of historical knowledge that attempts to identify the literary procedures by which historical discourse escapes literature and gives itself the status of a science.

The Groove of the Poem: Reading Philippe Beck (Univocal)

by Jacques Ranciere

“Music is the brute that shows.
It is the avowal of materials,
And stutters between its clanging of things.”
How should one think this musical groove of the poem whose back and forth motion shuffles the material of ordinary language and revives the frozen speech of old chants? This question by renowned French thinker Jacques Rancière is the entry point for his earnest and careful reading of one of France’s most singular and important contemporary poets. For Rancière, Philippe Beck sets himself the task of a poetry after poetry whereby Beck re-writes and transforms the poems of the past, reanimating faded genres, poetizing the prose of popular tales and even commentaries regarding poems. To read and follow this groove traced as such cannot simply be done by way of taking the poems as objects of study. It supposes a dialogue regarding what these poems attempt to do as well as an idea of a poetry which serves as their foundation. This book on Philippe Beck is thus also a book made with him.

The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing

by Jacques Ranciere

This new collection of challenging literary studies plays with a foundational definition of Western culture: the word become flesh. But the word become flesh is not, or no longer, a theological already-given. It is a millennial goal or telos toward which each text strives.
Both witty and immensely erudite, Jacques Rancière leads the critical reader through a maze of arrivals toward the moment, perhaps always suspended, when the word finds its flesh. That is what he, a valiant and good-humored companion to these texts, goes questing for through seven essays examining a wide variety of familiar and unfamiliar works.
A text is always a commencement, the word setting out on its excursions through the implausible vicissitudes of narrative and the bizarre phantasmagorias of imagery, Don Quixote's unsent letter reaching us through generous Balzac, lovely Rimbaud, demonic Althusser. The word is on its way to an incarnation that always lies ahead of the writer and the reader both, in this anguished democracy of language where the word is always taking on its flesh.

Short Voyages to the Land of the People

by Jacques Ranciere

This book analyzes a range of texts that seek, in different ways, to represent "the people." Rancière approaches these texts as travel narratives or ethnographies whose authors have traveled not to distant or exotic lands but across class lines. In this truly comparative study, he examines Wordsworth's poetry, the utopian discourse of the Saint-Simoniens, the correspondence and theater of Büchner, Claude Genoux's Mémoires d'un enfant de la Savoie, Michelet's theories of history, the prose and poetry of Rilke, and the performance of Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's postwar film Europe 51.

Rancière examines the various forms of displacement that affect his subjects, enabling each to become foreign to the sites and trajectories commonly known as reality.

He argues convincingly that "the people" have no proper signification in the texts under consideration, instead, they function as points of reality upon which the voyager can drape a conceptual framework shaped by the circumstances not of the other, but of the self.

The Ignorant Schoolmaster Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

by Jacques Ranciere

This extraordinary book can be read on several levels. Primarily, it is the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiles French schoolteacher who discovered in 1818 an unconventional teaching method that spread panic throughout the learned community of Europe.

Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who knew no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn. The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all people were equally intelligent. From this postulate, Jacotot devised a philosophy and a method for what he called "intellectual emancipation"--a method that would allow, for instance, illiterate parents to themselves teach their children how to read. The greater part of the book is devoted to a description and analysis of Jacotot's method, its premises, and (perhaps most important) its implications for understanding both the learning process and the emancipation that results when that most subtle of hierarchies, intelligence, is overturned.

The book, as Kristin Ross argues in her introduction, has profound implications for the ongoing debate about education and class in France that has raged since the student riots of 1968, and it affords Rancière an opportunity (albeit indirectly) to attack the influential educational and sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (and others) that Rancière sees as perpetuating inequality.

Althusser's Lesson

by Jacques Ranciere, Emiliano Battista

Jacques Rancière's first major work, Althusser's Lesson appeared in 1974, just as the energies of May 68 were losing ground to the calls for a return to order. Rancière's analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser's Reply to John Lewis in 1973? How to explain the rehabilitation of a philosophy that had been declared 'dead and buried on the barricades of May 68'? What had changed? The answer to this question takes the form of a genealogy of Althusserianism that is, simultaneously, an account of the emergence of militant student movements in the '60s, of the arrival of Maoism in France, and of how May 68 rearranged all the pieces anew. Encompassing the book's distinctive combination of theoretical analysis and historical description is a question that has guided Rancière's thought ever since: how do theories of subversion become the rationale for order?

Althusser's Lesson

by Jacques Ranciere, Emiliano Battista

Jacques Rancière's first major work, Althusser's Lesson appeared in 1974, just as the energies of May 68 were losing ground to the calls for a return to order. Rancière's analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser's Reply to John Lewis in 1973? How to explain the rehabilitation of a philosophy that had been declared ‘dead and buried on the barricades of May 68'? What had changed? The answer to this question takes the form of a genealogy of Althusserianism that is, simultaneously, an account of the emergence of militant student movements in the ‘60s, of the arrival of Maoism in France, and of how May 68 rearranged all the pieces anew. Encompassing the book's distinctive combination of theoretical analysis and historical description is a question that has guided Rancière's thought ever since: how do theories of subversion become the rationale for order?

Béla Tarr, the Time After

by Jacques Ranciere

From Almanac of Fall (1984) to The Turin Horse (2011), renowned Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has followed the collapse of the communist promise. The "time after" is not the uniform and morose time of those who no longer believe in anything. It is the time when we are less interested in histories and their successes or failures than we are in the delicate fabric of time from which they are carved. It is the time of pure material events against which belief will be measured for as long as life will sustain it.

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics

by Jacques Ranciere

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Rancière's key recent writings on art and politics to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.

In this illuminating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière's ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn in aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a 'politics of art' might be.

With a brand new introduction from the translator this is a superb collection of the work of one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers.

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics

by Jacques Ranciere

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Rancière's most recent writings on art and politics to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.

In this fascinating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière's ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a 'politics of art' might be.

This important collection includes several essays that have never previously been published in English, as well as a brand new afterword. Together these essays serve as a superb introduction to the work of one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers.

Moments Politiques

by Jacques Ranciere

How do we define politics?  What is our role in the unfolding of the political?

Moments Politiques finds Jacques Rancière, the legendary French philosopher, addressing these questions in essays and interviews drawn from thirty years of passionate public discourse. Reflecting on events from the Paris uprisings of May 1968 to the near present, and on his contemporaries including Michel Foucault, Guy Debord, and Roland Barthes, Rancière interrogates our understanding of equality, democracy, and the shifting definition of communism today.

In these short, provocative, accessible pieces, we are asked to imagine a society where the “anarchic bedrock of the political” is precisely “the power of anyone.” This is a world of radical equality. It is a place where the student or factory worker’s opinion is equal to that of any banker or politician. To support these ideas, key concepts of Rancière’s political thought are introduced, such as his notions of dissensus and political performance, and his special definition of “police.” Moments Politiques stages unflinching confrontations with immigration law, new waves of racism, and contemporary forms of intervention. As ever, Rancière leads by example and breathes life into his argument that “dissent is what makes society liveable.”

Hatred of Democracy (Radical Thinkers)

by Jacques Ranciere

In this vehement defence of democracy, Jacques Rancière explodes the complacency of Western politicians who pride themselves as the defenders of political freedom. As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Rancière argues that true democracy—government by all—is held in profound contempt by the new ruling class. In a compelling and timely analysis, Hatred of Democracy rethinks the subversive power of the democratic ideal.

Dissenting Words Interviews with Jacques Rancière

by Jacques Ranciere

Dissenting Words is a lively and engaging collection of interviews that span the length of Jacques Rancière's trajectory, from the critique of Althusserian Marxism and the work on proletarian thinking in the nineteenth century to the more recent reflections on politics and aesthetics. Across these pages, Rancière discusses the figures, concepts and arguments he has introduced to the theoretical landscape over the past forty years, the themes and concerns that have animated his thinking, the positions he has defended and the wide range of objects and discourses that have attracted his attention and through which his thought has unfolded: history, pedagogy, literature, art, cinema. But more than reflecting on the continuities, turns, ruptures and deviations in his thought, Rancière recasts his work in a different discursive register. And the pleasure we experience in reading these interviews – with their asides, displacements and reconstructions – stems from the way Rancière transforms the voice of the thinker commenting on his texts and elucidating his concepts into another, and equally rich, manifestation of his thought.

Film Fables

by Jacques Ranciere

In Film Fables Jacques Ranciere turns his critical eye to the history of modern cinema. Combining an extraordinary breadth of analysis with an attentiveness to detail born from an obvious love of cinema, Ranciere shows us new ways of looking at and interpreting film. His analysis moves effortlessly from Eisenstein's and Murnau's transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang's confrontation with television, from the classical poetics of Mann's Westerns to Ray's romantic poetics of the image, from Rossellini's neo-realism to Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema. The book also includes extended commentaries on the work of Hitchcock, Godard, Vertov and Bergman. Film Fables is essential reading for anyone wanting to gain a better understanding of the power and complexity of the cinematic form and it's rich history.

Dissenting Words: Interviews with Jacques Rancière

by Jacques Ranciere

Dissenting Words is a lively and engaging collection of interviews that span the length of Jacques Rancière's trajectory, from the critique of Althusserian Marxism and the work on proletarian thinking in the nineteenth century to the more recent reflections on politics and aesthetics. Across these pages, Rancière discusses the figures, concepts and arguments he has introduced to the theoretical landscape over the past forty years, the themes and concerns that have animated his thinking, the positions he has defended and the wide range of objects and discourses that have attracted his attention and through which his thought has unfolded: history, pedagogy, literature, art, cinema. But more than reflecting on the continuities, turns, ruptures and deviations in his thought, Rancière recasts his work in a different discursive register. And the pleasure we experience in reading these interviews – with their asides, displacements and reconstructions – stems from the way Rancière transforms the voice of the thinker commenting on his texts and elucidating his concepts into another, and equally rich, manifestation of his thought.

Uncertain Times

by Jacques Ranciere

The global triumph of democracy was announced thirty years ago, promising an age of consensus in which the dispassionate consideration of objective problems would give birth to a world at peace. Today, these grand hopes lie in ruins, and the era touted as new has turned out to be remarkably similar to the old order. To understand why this might be so, we need to examine the nature of the consensus itself, which is not the peace that it promised but rather the map of a territory on which new forms of warfare are being waged. The objective reality that imposed itself at the end of the 1990s was an absolutized and globalized capitalism which has produced ever more inequality, exclusion and hate.

In this book Jacques Rancière delivers a frank and piercing critique of the globalized capitalist consensus. The invasion of Iraq, the riots on Capitol Hill and the rise of the European far right all attest to the true nature of this consensus, as does the current state-sanctioned racism which exploits the disenchanted progressive tradition and is led by an intelligentsia that claims to be left-wing. At the same time, Rancière praises the dynamism of social movements which affirm the power of the assembly of equals and its capacity for worldmaking: autonomous protest collectives have proven themselves capable of opening breaches in the consensual order and challenging the post-1989 system of domination.