Jacques Rancière: An Introduction offers the first comprehensive introduction to the thought of one of today's most important and influential theorists. Joseph Tanke situates Rancière's distinctive approach against the backdrop of Continental philosophy and extends his insights into current discussions of art and politics. Tanke explains how Rancière's ideas allow us to understand art as having a deeper social role than is customarily assigned to it, as well as how political opposition can be revitalized. The book presents (...) Rancière's body of work as a coherent whole, tracing key notions such as the distribution of the sensible, the aesthetics of politics, and the supposition of equality from his earliest writings through to his most recent interventions. Tanke concludes with a series of critical questions for Rancière's work, indicating how contemporary thought might proceed after its encounter with him. The book provides readers new to Rancière with a clear overview of his enormous intellectual output. Engaging with many un-translated and unpublished sources, the book will also be of interest to Rancière's long-time readers. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière presents much of his work as a political intervention, exposing the ways in which so-called critical theory gets “recuperated” in service of oppression and the status quo. But Rancière’s own interventions are ambiguously situated with respect to these same issues. A major source of frustration for Rancière’s readers is locating any kind of positive claim about the role theory could or should play within politics. I argue that, while Rancière’s later work depoliticizes itself, we (...) might look to his earlier work for resources that might a) help us rethink the role of critical theory; and b) take better advantage of Rancière’s later critical work. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s (...) work offers crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms. (shrink)

This article addresses Rancière’s critique of Aristotle’s political theory as parapolitics in order to show that Aristotle is a resource for developing an inclusionary notion of political community. Rancière argues that Aristotle attempts to cut off politics and merely police (maintain) the community by eliminating the political claim of the poor by including it. I respond to three critiques that Rancière makes of Aristotle: that he ends the political dispute by including the demos in the government; that (...) he includes the free masses only incidentally because, by chance, the rule is political, not based on mastery; and that he attempts to close off politics by determining in advance what speech counts as speech. I argue that Aristotle attempts to institute this contest by accepting the incommensurable claims of arithmetic and geometric equality. Aristotle puts this conflict at the root of political life in such a way that serves Rancière’s larger project of perpetuating politics. (shrink)

This book is a critical introduction to contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière. It is the first introduction in any language to cover all of his major work and offers an accessible presentation and searching evaluation of his significant contributions to the fields of politics, pedagogy, history, literature, film theory and aesthetics. This book traces the emergence of Rancière’s thought over the last forty-five years and situates it in the diverse intellectual contexts in which it intervenes. Beginning with his (...) egalitarian critique of his former teacher Louis Althusser, the book tracks the subsequent elaboration of Rancière’s highly original conception of equality. This approach reveals that a grasp of his early archival and historiographical work is vital for a full understanding both of his later politics and his ongoing investigation of art and aesthetics. Along the way, this book explains and analyses key terms in Rancière’s very distinctive philosophical lexicon, including the ‘police’ order, ‘disagreement’, ‘political subjectivation’, ‘literarity’, the ‘part which has no part’, the ‘regimes of art’ and ‘the distribution of the sensory’. This book argues that Rancière’s work sets a new standard in contestatory critique and concludes by reflecting on the philosophical and policy implications of his singular project. (shrink)

Recent work on Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière has rightly identified equality both as a central theme in their own thinking and as the key notion in contemporary radical political thought more broadly, but a focus on the differences between their respective accounts of equality has failed to clarify a major problem that they share. The problem is that human equality is said to rest on a particular human capacity, leaving Badiou's axiomatic equality and Rancière's assumed equality vulnerable (...) to the charge of having a blind spot for some of society's most vulnerable. This article introduces an alternative understanding of equality drawn from the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, an equality that does not rely on a human capacity to guarantee or verify it but rests on Nancy's notion of sense. The article explores the advantages of Nancy's account of equality in relation to sense over and against an alternative reading that focuses on Nancy's evocation of the suffering human body, before addressing, in conclusion, the problems with which Nancy's idea of equality will have to grapple, and why, despite these problems, it is still preferable to the Badiouian and Rancièrian approaches. (shrink)

This article examines the significance of Jacques Rancière’s work on pedagogy, and argues that to make sense of Rancière’s ‘lesson on the lesson’ one must do more but also less than merely explicate Rancière’s texts. It steadfastly refuses to draw out the lessons of Rancière’s writings in the manner of a series of morals, precepts or rules. Rather, it is committed to thinking through the ‘lessons’ of Rancière in another sense. Above all, Rancière wants (...) to ‘teach’ his readers something absolutely crucial about teaching. In making this claim the article emphasizes the extent to which Rancière advocates an utterly radical pedagogy, one that completely reconceives all the central elements of ‘schooling’, including teacher, student, intelligence and knowledge. Rancière thinks it possible to teach without knowing; he believes that the best schoolmasters can operate not on the assumption of their expertise, but on the equality of intelligence; and this means ultimately that Rancière contends that we can ‘teach what we do not know’. The best schoolmasters are ignorant schoolmasters. Rancière’s radical pedagogy depends upon, just as it consistently advances, a thoroughgoing resistance to a certain form of epistemological and ontological mastery. The rejection of mastery—of schoolmasters who would know it all, and convey this knowing to their students—forms the very backbone of all of Rancière’s writings and critical investigations. This is the chief reason why Rancière is, in a way, always talking about pedagogy, even when his subject matter appears to be something else entirely. (shrink)

Although relatively unknown a decade ago, the work of Jacques Ranciere is fast becoming a central reference in the humanities and social sciences. His thinking brings a fresh, innovative approach to many fields, notably the study of work, education, politics, literature, film, art, as well as philosophy. This is the first, full-length introduction to Ranciere's work and covers the full range of his contribution to contemporary thought, presenting in clear, succinct chapters the key concepts Ranciere has developed in his writings (...) over the last forty years. Students new to Ranciere will find this work accessible and comprehensive, an ideal introduction to this major thinker. For readers already familiar with Ranciere, the in-depth analysis of each key concept, written by leading scholars, should provide an ideal reference. (shrink)

Over the past decade, Jacques Rancière’s writings have increasingly provoked and inspired political theorists who wish to avoid both the abstraction of so-called normative theories and the philosophical platitudes of so-called postmodernism. Rancière offers a new and unique definition of politics, la politique, as that which opposes, thwarts and interrupts what Rancière calls the police order, la police — a term that encapsulates most of what we normally think of as politics (the actions of bureaucracies, parliaments, and (...) courts). Interpreters have been tempted to read Rancière as proffering a formally pure conception of politics, wherein politics is ultimately separate from and in utter opposition to all police orders. Here I provide a different account of Rancière’s thinking of politics: for Rancière politics goes on within police orders and for this reason he strongly rejects the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could never be pure; politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists purification. In carefully delineating the politique—police relation I show that the terms of Rancière’s political writings are multiple and multiplied. Rancière consistently undermines any effort to render politics pure, and therein lies his potential contribution to contemporary political theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Rancière Now?Joseph J. Tanke (bio)I. IntroductionAs philosophy's representative at an art college, a question is put to me by my colleagues, students, and other art-world types frequently enough that it is worth considering systematically: Why Rancière now? The query is in large part prompted by a recent issue of Artforum devoted to the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the publication of which caps (...) a seemingly overnight ascendance within discussions of art and politics. The very temporality of the question indicates that the discovery of Rancière by art professionals is a relatively recent development. Why is this taking place now? To begin to answer this question, we must first understand something about the current relationship between theoretical discourse and artistic practice.That Rancière is only now beginning to be discussed within the art world is indeed surprising, given the long-standing reliance upon theoretical approaches and the fact that Baudrillard, Derrida, and Deleuze now function as standard reference points. While it would be incorrect to say that Rancière was an unknown quantity in the Anglophone world until recently, the sense of revelation suggested by the query "Why now?" must be understood in terms of the ongoing exchange between European theory and contemporary art. This is a conversation that, independent of one's perspective as to whether it has had positive or negative consequences, cannot be denied. With this relationship between Continental philosophy, art making, and critical discourses, one is justified in asking, Why is Rancière only now coming to be read with any seriousness in art circles? The point is sharpened when we note that Rancière's work, unlike that of some of the more [End Page 1] celebrated names, is more readily suited for an interface with critical art discourse, concerned as it is with aesthetic issues and the analysis of contemporary art.One might be tempted to find lurking behind our question a certain amount of suspicion about further incursions by theory and detect a sense of exasperation at having yet another French name to pronounce. Those of us who find this interaction between art and theory edifying, however, should not simply shrug off this question and attribute it to an aversion to philosophy, or to a backlash against the excess of the past two decades. Understanding the context in which the question is posed allows us to expand it. And, while not all would agree, I think it is safe to say that there is a tacit consensus that fruitful arrangements between art and philosophy can be forged. With this situation in mind, we might, therefore, transform our question into something like the following: What might Rancière contribute to the work of the nonphilosopher, placed, for good or ill, within a dispositif wherein art and European theory discourse about many of the same phenomena, but in different idioms? The advantage of this formulation, of course, is that it allows us to avoid many of the facile responses to our initial question, variations on a theme suggesting that Rancière is simply one of the few members of that esteemed generation of thinkers still living and that the turning to his work is indicative of a generalized anxiety about the future of theoretical developments. We might also, in thus expanding our question, sketch an answer directed at those working at the edges of their respective disciplines: philosophers, artists, critics, historians—in short, all those interested in questions of contemporary culture. In accordance with what Rancière describes as the fortuitous breakdown of specializations, my efforts in this essay are intended as a contribution to an interdisciplinary conversation that is grappling with the intellectual issues raised by works of art, their reception, and the historical discourses that are created around them.II. To Avoid Two Discourses of MourningThe temporality of our question, why now?, is hinted at by Rancière at various points throughout his own work and pertains to what might be characterized as the default theoretical position of art, that of "mourning." For Rancière, this mourning takes two major forms: spectacle and the impossible. The former finds its genesis... (shrink)

As philosophy's representative at an art college, a question is put to me by my colleagues, students, and other art-world types frequently enough that it is worth considering systematically: Why Rancière now? The query is in large part prompted by a recent issue of Artforum devoted to the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the publication of which caps a seemingly overnight ascendance within discussions of art and politics. The very temporality of the question indicates that the (...) discovery of Rancière by art professionals is a relatively recent development. Why is this taking place now? To begin to answer this question, we must first understand something about the current relationship between .. (shrink)

Philosopher and literary theorist, Jacques Rancière, has argued that Marcel Proust’s work as a novelist enables us to understand how modern literature articulates and largely resolves a specifically aesthetic crisis. From Rancière’s standpoint, Proust shows us how the dominant conflict in nineteenth-century French literature was carried beyond a mere opposition and given a new aesthetic significance in the modern novel. In this paper, I will discuss Jacques Rancière’s attempt to assess Proust’s contribution to literature in the wake (...) of the aesthetic tradition epitomized by Kant and Schiller. Crucial to this attempt is the deployment of aesthetics as a historical discourse that introduces the possibility of variation in relation to the real. More specifically, I will examine Rancière’s argument that metaphor in Proust’s work has the capacity to transform a sense of doubleness into a new understanding of the real. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo revisar el concepto de emancipación en la obra de J. Rancière, particularmente como aparece desarrollado en El maestro ignorante y El espectador emancipado. De esta forma, se muestra que la emancipación no es el fin de un proyecto histórico sino un punto de partida a través de la igualdad de las inteligencias, y por lo tanto, cualquiera puede tener acceso a esta experiencia sin un proceso de concientización o un maestro explicador. Por último, reflexionamos (...) sobre los posibles retos y posibilidades del método de la igualdad. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses Rancière's critique of Aristotle's political theory as parapolitics in order to show that Aristotle is a resource for developing an inclusionary notion of political community. Rancière argues that Aristotle attempts to cut off politics and merely police the community by eliminating the political claim of the poor by including it. I respond to three critiques that Rancière makes of Aristotle: that he ends the political dispute by including the demos in the government; that (...) he includes the free masses only incidentally because, by chance, the rule is political, not based on mastery; and that he attempts to close off politics by determining in advance what speech counts as speech. I argue that Aristotle attempts to institute this contest by accepting the incommensurable claims of arithmetic and geometric equality. Aristotle puts this conflict at the root of political life in such a way that serves Rancière's larger project of perpetuating politics. (shrink)

In _Rancière’s Sentiments _Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. (...) Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be. (shrink)

Two key axes carry the parameters that define Rancière’s approach to poetry. The first axis is constituted by his well-known account of aesthetic modernity as a democratic “regime of the arts”, which breaks with the previous, “representative” one, by allowing all subjects and all genres to be appropriated in expressive gestures. These expressive gestures can no longer rely on the old representational rules and references and therefore require constantly reinvented creative forms. The second axis that emerges from the dismantlement (...) of the old regime of representation is therefore a new mode of expressive creativity inherent in individual and collective action. The combination of these two principles creates the structural conditions and the contradictions of the modern aesthetic field, within which individual poets define their tasks and encounter new limits and difficulties. Viewed as a series of individual, situated attempts at linguistic creation within a field in which the structures of perception and diction are inherently up for grabs, poetry becomes a particularly significant exercise. The great poets provide exemplary models of what saying and doing can mean in the conditions of modernity as a regime of equality; and from their individual exemplarity, profound theoretical implicit lessons can be drawn. Rancière’s writings on poetry as a result always seek to accomplish two aims: provide substantive hermeneutic reconstructions of writing practices, taken as exemplary forms of modern “poiesis”; and critique alternative theoretical uses of poetry and through these, alternative conceptions of modern practice and theory. To review these aspects of Rancière’s approach to poetry, I have adopted a genealogical approach, as it is the simplest way to give a sense of the richness of Rancière’s long engagement with the works of poets. (shrink)

Jacques Ranciere has become known for his writings both on politics and aesthetics. What ties them together is that they both concern the concept of equality. However, they address this concept in different ways. In this article, I address the concept of equality as it appears both in his political and aesthetic writings, with a focus on the latter.

Quien enseña sin emancipar no solo embrutece, predicaba Joseph Jacotot, sino que también adoctrina. Pasado un siglo y medio desde entonces, el filósofo y esteta francés emérito de la Universidad de París VIII y European Graduate School Jacques Rancière, en un ejercicio característico de la filosofía de la educación, publica en 1987 El maestro ignorante a partir de la experiencia de Jacotot. A lo largo de su vida y producción literaria, Rancière reflexiona concienzudamente sobre la naturaleza del proceso (...) de enseñanza y aprendizaje humano y se pregunta: ¿es posible enseñar? ¿qué decide el alumnado en su proceso de aprendizaje? ¿Cuáles son los límites de la palabra transmitida en el aprendizaje? ¿Es la determinación del saber un ejercicio del poder? ¿Son todos los seres humanos capaces de comprender lo que otros hacen y saben? ¿Qué relación hay entre el poder del maestro y el poder de la palabra? (shrink)

This article examines Rancière’s political reading of aesthetics through a historical analysis into the two aesthetic theories of freedom at work in Rancière’s philosophy; Kant’s freedom as self-governance and Schiller’s freedom as harmony. While aesthetic experience is considered morally conducive through its association with freedom, this article argues that Rancière translates such discussions of freedom into that of equality by extracting the political dimensions of aesthetic experience. Given that art has the unique ability to empower the spectator (...) through its aesthetic experience of equality, the true political potential of art arises from its power to redistribute the sensible rather than through the overt expression of political themes. By juxtaposing Rancière’s politics of art with Kant’s beauty as the symbol of morality, this article argues that art becomes a symbol of political emancipation for Rancière in its capacity to generate the experience of equality. Inasmuch as Rancière attributes the aesthetic revolution to the eighteenth century, it becomes evident that the empowerment of the spectator has been central to art since the inauguration of the aesthetic regime. (shrink)

The start of the 21st century has seen the very concept of the political become devalued, and the body-politic has become a casualty of the nihilism and neurosis afflicting western cultures. Kristeva’s call for the rehabilitation of public life, of the political, and for the rethinking of freedom, it seems, comes at the right time. Her proposed politics of revolt and Rancière’s radically democratic politics of the no-part are valuable attempts to effect such a rehabilitation. By turning to these (...) two figures and placing them in dialogue we can gain a renewed appreciation for what democracy ought to be and begin to conceptualize and re-envision what a healthy, optimally-functioning democratic body-politic looks like. Kristeva’s proposed rehabilitation of public life, particularly when viewed alongside Rancière’s, lands her squarely in the company of other theorists who propose a politics of radical democracy to solve the current political problematic. Her conception of a ‘democracy of the multiple’ challenges the current pluralistic democracies in place today. (shrink)

Overview of the special issue on Jacques Ranciere and Critical Theory, along with some additional thoughts.

Publicado originalmente em 2017, As margens da ficção reúne textos criteriosamente selecionados e ordenados a dar ao livro uma unidade sólida construída em torno de um projeto central, ampliar o projeto iniciado por Jacques Rancière em A palavra muda. Ensaio sobre as contradições da literatura (1998) e A política da literatura (2007), de uma poética da ficção moderna. Como tal, constitui uma possível introdução ao conjunto maior da vertente estética de sua obra. A noção de poética é tomada de (...) empréstimo da Poética de Aristóteles, na qual expõe a teoria das normas de composição do poema como ficção narrativa. Se a poética aristotélica forma “a matriz estável da racionalidade ficcional clássica no Ocidente” (RANCIÈRE, 2021, p. 8), a de Rancière pretende, por sua vez, dar conta das transformações que afetaram essa matriz no romance moderno e nas ciências humanas e sociais do século XIX. À vista disso, se em obras como A partilha do sensível (2000) ou O inconsciente estético (2001), o autor propôs uma releitura do discurso filosófico da estética, sua constituição do regime estético da arte que desestabiliza uma distinção fundamental no Ocidente e na modernidade, ao estabelecer a superioridade da razão sobre as faculdades sensíveis, A política da literatura ou O fio perdido. Ensaios sobre a ficção moderna (2013), Rancière explora uma outra dimensão da estética, a que diz respeito à ficção e às formas da narrativa. (shrink)

In thinking about Rancière and Law, as this collection exhorts us to do, I have turned my attention to one of the most well-known areas of Rancière’s writings, the Rights of Man. In “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, Rancière aimed a broadside at the rights-scepticism which can be traced in much of critical theory to the writings of Hannah Arendt, and an older tradition on the right exemplified by Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. (...) Rancière’s writings and thought cover a wide range of areas, but it is the famous focus on rights which interests me here, as it brings to bear the problematisation of the ‘subject’ which Rancière develops in his writings. Rancière does not take an ontological view of the subject. Rancière’s writings on human rights attempt to get out of an ontological trap he sees being promulgated in relation to them. These writings on rights and the subject illustrate Rancière’s conception of politics as a process, which emphasises a dynamic staging of conflicts and the impossibility of stepping outside that discussion and conflict. My starting point is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. This eighteenth century piece of literature is key for the discussion about the subject of human rights, and the paradoxes which those rights contain. This novel was used in United Nations debates to justify parts of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In basing the subject of human rights in part on the eponymous hero of the same novel, the drafting committee constructed a vision of the human subject which conflated the figures of man and citizen. The subject of human rights was not a natural man, but intimately connected and indivisible from the society in which he was living. I connect Arendt’s critique of the right to have rights to these debates at the United Nations, illustrating how they lend support to Arendt’s criticisms of human rights. I then outline Rancière’s counter-critique of Arendt, and his defence of politics and rights. I show how Rancière’s distinction between politics and the police envisions a subject which is created through ‘dissensual’ acts. These acts of ‘dissensus’ are the very divisions, the strife or the conflict which constitutes the stage on which politics occurs. Rancière’s subject does not need to act politically in an existing public sphere where individuals recognise each other as equal and distinct. Rather, the acts they commit help contest the very meaning of rights and politics; a politics which always entails the verification of equality as such. I want to turn to the consequences of this processual politics. I use Rancière’s writings on politics and his defence of rights to illustrate how, in his schema, political subjects can be formed and new subjects hitherto unrecognised can be created through dissensual acts. I argue that in Rancière, any judgment on the quality of a political act, and the subject it can create, is necessarily made ex post facto. Rancière’s separation of politics from ethics forces us to avoid pre-judgments of the political nature of acts. This carries the risk that the reader of Rancière will interpret only the acts they are already sympathetic towards as ‘political’ and dissensual. The political remains in the eye of the beholder. As a result, this processual politics must be supplemented with a later judgment to be able to differentiate between potential political acts. In treating Rancière as a serious thinker of modernity and of rights, we need a way to distinguish between an act which is, for example, carried out by racists or those who oppress rights, and an act carried out by a demonstrator or as an act of resistance against hegemony. I argue that it is possible, following Rancière, to conceive of both as acts of dissensual politics potentially giving rise to political subjects. This in turn highlights the key issue for me in relation to Rancière’s thought. How can we distinguish between the quality of actors who act politically, without falling back on a presumed political sphere or modern liberal political philosophy? I conclude that a stronger questioning of the types of judgment needed to differentiate between political acts is required to avoid Rancière’s thought being used to justify forms of action the reader finds sympathetic. (shrink)

Featuring original interviews with three of the most important theorists of the 21st century, this volume clarifies the relationship between contemporary French philosophy and poetry. The interviews demonstrate how Rancière, Milner, and Badiou are all in conversation with one another on various points.

Just over a decade on from a spike of interest in Jacques Rancière’s writing within educational philosophy and theory, I revisit his interventions on democracy and education to make the case for (re)engaging with Rancière’s writing now to address important questions about contemporary education policy, the role of schools in democratic societies and public debate over the curriculum. Specifically, I argue that Rancière’s interventions on the Platonism that characterises both ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ arguments about school curricula in (...) such contexts offer a vital tool for understanding the shifts in education policy and educational debate that animate our current political moment. Building on work that has applied Rancière’s writing to analyse neoliberal education policy, I argue that Rancière’s writing provides a distinctive analytical lens for interpreting a recent shift towards neo-conservative education policy agendas, and the imbrication of schools within the ‘culture-wars’ that characterise the contemporary political landscape in several national settings. Taking recent policies concerned with the teaching of values in England as an example, I argue that a Rancierian perspective on such policy is helpful for revitalising research concerned with education and the role of public schooling in societies that wish to maintain some claim to democracy. (shrink)

Neste artigo discuto a proposta de definição do sujeito dos direitos do homem no pensamento de Jacques Rancière. Inicialmente, examino a crítica de Rancière de que Arendt despolitiza os direitos humanos em função de seus pressupostos aristotélicos. Depois, explico como Rancière reconceitualiza a relação entre o humano e o político para entender a política de direitos humanos em termos estratégicos e não existenciais. Argumento que fornece uma base mais adequada para a compreensão da política de direitos humanos (...) do que a concepção de política de Arendt. Desta maneira, Rancière nos permite ver as disputas pelos direitos humanos como parte integrante das lutas sociais que são o cerne da vida política, uma vez que envolvem a promulgação da igualdade em condições de desigualdade. (shrink)

This paper discusses Rancière’s attitude to Sartre through an examination of the two philosophers’ analyses of Flaubert, and especially of Madame Bovary. It argues that Rancière simplifies Sartre’s conception of literary commitment and seriously downplays the subtlety of his understanding of the relationship between literature and politics. Furthermore, by limiting his sources to Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948), and not considering L’Idiot de la famille (1971–72), Rancière fails to recognise the similarities between Sartre’s account and his (...) own, with respect to both aesthetic theory and stylistic analysis. (shrink)

This paper discusses Rancière’s attitude to Sartre through an examination of the two philosophers’ analyses of Flaubert, and especially of Madame Bovary. It argues that Rancière simplifies Sartre’s conception of literary commitment and seriously downplays the subtlety of his understanding of the relationship between literature and politics. Furthermore, by limiting his sources to Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948), and not considering L’Idiot de la famille (1971–72), Rancière fails to recognise the similarities between Sartre’s account and his (...) own, with respect to both aesthetic theory and stylistic analysis. (shrink)

This paper discusses Rancière’s attitude to Sartre through an examination of the two philosophers’ analyses of Flaubert, and especially of Madame Bovary. It argues that Rancière simplifies Sartre’s conception of literary commitment and seriously downplays the subtlety of his understanding of the relationship between literature and politics. Furthermore, by limiting his sources to Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, and not considering L’Idiot de la famille, Rancière fails to recognise the similarities between Sartre’s account and his own, with (...) respect to both aesthetic theory and stylistic analysis. (shrink)

This paper discusses Rancière’s attitude to Sartre through an examination of the two philosophers’ analyses of Flaubert, and especially of Madame Bovary. It argues that Rancière simplifies Sartre’s conception of literary commitment and seriously downplays the subtlety of his understanding of the relationship between literature and politics. Furthermore, by limiting his sources to Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948), and not considering L’Idiot de la famille (1971–72), Rancière fails to recognise the similarities between Sartre’s account and his (...) own, with respect to both aesthetic theory and stylistic analysis. (shrink)

¿En qué condiciones hay política? Esta pregunta subyace al conjunto de la teoría de Rancière. Para quien no siempre la hay, lo que siempre hay, en cambio, es dominación, una división policial de lo sensible. Aprehender tales condiciones, y lo que ello nos dice sobre esta teoría de lo político, es el objetivo principal del presente artículo. Con tal fin se realizará una lectura interna de dicha teoría, indagando la lógica propia de los materiales ranciereanos, en pos de captar (...) sus potencialidades pero también sus puntos ciegos al problematizar lo político. En definitiva, se realizará una “crítica inmanente” de su teoría, la cual se enfocará especialmente en cómo este autor tematiza la relación entre conocimiento y política. Así, se estudiarán, por un lado, los factores que llevan a que el conocimiento (filosófico, sociológico, etc.) suprima a la política, al litigio que la caracteriza, según Rancière. Esto conducirá, a su vez, a detallar cuáles son las condiciones que él señala como necesarias para que “haya política”. Por el otro lado, y en vínculo con lo anterior, se analizará el estatus que en esta teoría se da a la “igualdad”, en tanto desligarla de toda pretensión de verdad (cognoscitiva) resulta clave en las objeciones a la relación entre conocimiento y política que plantea Rancière, en lo que constituye, al mismo tiempo, uno de los cuestionamientos contemporáneos más radicales de dicha relación. El fin que persigue la crítica inmanente de esta teoría es elaborar los elementos para una nueva problematización de ese lazo entre conocimiento y política, particularmente del lugar que el conocimiento crítico puede tener en una política democrática. (shrink)

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière is well known across the world for his groundbreaking contributions to aesthetic and political theory and for his radical rethinking of the question of equality. This much-needed new collection situates Rancière's thought in a range of practical and theoretical contexts. These specially commissioned essays cover the complete history of Rancière's work and reflect its interdisciplinary reach. They span his early historical research of the 1960s and '70s, his celebrated critique of pedagogy and (...) his later political theory of dissensus and disagreement, as well as his ongoing analysis of literature and 'the aesthetic regime of art'. Rancière's resistance to psychoanalytic thinking is also explored, as are his most recent publications on film and film theory. Contributors include Tom Conley, Carolyn Steedman, Geneviève Fraisse, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jeremy Lane, and many more. The book also includes a brand new interview with Rancière, reflecting on his intellectual project and developing new lines of thought from his latest major work, _Aisthesis_. _Rancière Now_ will be essential reading for students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences; it will stimulate and inspire discussion of Rancière’s work for years to come. (shrink)

Se trata de una reseña del libro de Jacques Rancière. Disenso. Ensayos sobre estética y política, primera edición en español. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 275 páginas.

In this essay, I analyze the pedagogical system contained within Jacques Rancière’s, paying special attention to the conceptions of knowledge and learning that follow from the presupposition of the equality of intelligence between teachers and students. From this, I show how the Rancièrian pedagogical system introduces the problem of distraction and suggest that the phenomenon of distraction in learning presents a problem for emancipatory teachers. I conclude by considering the role that pleasure plays in learning and suggest that cultivating (...) pleasure minimizes the problem of distraction. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze the pedagogical system contained within Jacques Rancière’s "The Ignorant Schoolmaster," paying special attention to the conceptions of knowledge and learning that follow from the presupposition of the equality of intelligence between teachers and students. From this, I show how the Rancièrian pedagogical system introduces the problem of distraction and suggest that the phenomenon of distraction in learning presents a problem for emancipatory teachers. I conclude by considering the role that pleasure plays in learning and (...) suggest that cultivating pleasure minimizes the problem of distraction. (shrink)

The Lessons of Rancière grapples with the thought of a philosopher, Jacques Rancière, determined not to pass on didactic lessons to his readers. How might one write a book such as Lessons, much less comment on it? What does it mean intellectually and politically to elucidate a thinker’s insights and yet in a way that doesn’t stabilize these into a falsely systematic body of thought or set of prescriptions? In Lessons, Samuel Chambers writes in a way faithful to (...) Rancière’s project by virtue of his own polemical style. If Chambers defines Rancière’s polemics as “designed to test and probe” and as “refus[ing] to systematize,” I then would argue that Chambers’s book likewise seeks to wrench critique away from... (shrink)

This article asks whether the work of Jacques Rancière might be said to present a philosophy of time. Outlining the ways in which a consideration of time is a central component of Rancière's thinking on a range of issues, particularly in his attention to the politics of time, the article shows Rancière's resistance both to certain Marxist and to phenomenological notions of time. Particular emphasis is given to the ways in which close attention to Rancière's writing (...) as writing is essential to understanding some of his key arguments. (shrink)

Much work in the field of education for democratic citizenship is based on the idea that it is possible to know what a good citizen is, so that the task of citizenship education becomes that of the production of the good citizen. In this paper I ask whether and to what extent we can and should understand democratic citizenship as a positive identity. I approach this question by means of an exploration of four dimensions of democratic politics—the political community, the (...) borders of the political order, the dynamics of democratic processes and practices, and the status of the democratic subject—in order to explore whether and to what extent the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can and should be understood as a particular order. For this I engage with ideas from Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière who both have raised fundamental questions about the extent to which the ‘essence’ of democratic politics can be captured as a particular order. In the paper I introduce the figure of the ignorant citizen in order to hint at a conception of citizenship that is not based on particular knowledge about what the good citizen is. I introduce a distinction between a socialisation conception of citizenship education and civic learning and a subjectification conception of citizenship education and civic learning in order to articulate what the educational implications of such an ‘anarchic’ understanding of democratic politics are. While the socialisation conception focuses on the question how ‘newcomers’ can be inserted into an existing political order, the subjectification conception focuses on the question how democratic subjectivity is engendered through engagement in always undetermined political processes. This is no longer a process driven by knowledge about what the citizen is or should become but one that depends on a desire for a particular mode of human togetherness or, in short, a desire for democracy. (shrink)

While the aesthetics of Rancière is a well-explored topic, there has been something missing from the reception of his works, and that is the relation between Rancière’s aesthetics and music. However, in recent years an interest in this relation has resulted in several academic contributions, which is sign enough that there is in fact a musical element in his works. Rancière himself, in response to this reception, has acknowledged as much. Music is a human form of expression (...) that uses the physicality of air to produce vibrations that encounter and resonate with the human body. Musicality is the ability to attend to such vibrations and harness the expectations and surprises that they bring about. In this article, I explore how a musical approach to Rancière’s writings can inform educational philosophy, especially as regards the practice of teaching. Particular attention is paid to his notion of the sensorium as a sensible realm where we experience and encounter difference and otherness, in political events as well as in teaching situations. Attending ethically to these situations is predicated on a certain sensibility that involves certain aesthetic qualities. In this article, I explore this sensibility as a particular educational musicality. Drawing from educational philosophy, the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière, and music philosophy, I connect this musicality of teaching to an ability to navigate in an ethical space that comes to life through a material/sensible community of interests formed in teaching practice. I use the term acousmatic experience as an explorative device in an attempt to depict teaching practice as something that can bring about a specific educational sensorium. (shrink)

This is the first collection on Rancière, a key thinker of political philosophy and aesthetics, which deals explicitly with the implications of his thought on theatre and performance studies.