In the preface to a slender volume entitled La communauté affrontée, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “The present state of the world is not a war of civilizations. It is a civil war: it is the internecine war of a city, of a civility, of a citizenry [citadinité] that are being deployed up until the limits of this world, and because of this, up until the extremity of their own concepts” . Globalization, or the limitless expansion of the West driven by (...) totalizing notions such as “History, Science, Capital, Man and/or their Nothingness” reaches a point where such concepts must of necessity break apart, where “a distended figure bursts, [and] a chasm appears” . This chasm signals a rent in the supposedly .. (shrink)

This book engages with recent philosophical interventions into democracy, equality, and human rights to demonstrate their relevance to the field of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. The book explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial Algerian novel.

This book reevaluates the historical, political, and artistic legacies of twentieth-century France and the French-speaking world, proposing new formulations of the relationships between fiction, aesthetics, and politics for the present century.

My article analyses the political power of the utopian imaginary through the concepts of actuality, potentiality and possibility. Tracing the tensions of a critical model of utopia as both a form of thought and a form of the sensible, it links Louis Marin's concept of the utopic imaginary as a common sensorium that is reconfigured through the play of a mobile figure with Jacques Rancière's formulation of the partition of the sensible. Studying the critical reception of Melville's Bartleby in Deleuze, (...) Rancière and Agamben, it proposes that the space of literary potentiality, where the past could not have been or retains its possibility to be otherwise, where the actual can not be and the potential and the possible have a right to be and exist, forms the spatio-temporal configuration of the utopian imaginary of literature. Potentiality offers a key to understanding the politics of the ontology constructed by aesthetics. (shrink)

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has influenced disciplines from history and philosophy to political theory, literature, art history, and film studies. His research into nineteenth-century workers’ archives, reflections on political equality, critique of the traditional division between intellectual and manual labor, and analysis of the place of literature, film, and art in modern society have all constituted major contributions to contemporary thought. In this collection, leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism engage Rancière’s work, illuminating (...) its originality, breadth, and rigor, as well as its place in current debates. They also explore the relationships between Rancière and the various authors and artists he has analyzed, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Flaubert, Rossellini, Auerbach, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. The contributors to this collection do not simply elucidate Rancière’s project; they also critically respond to it from their own perspectives. They consider the theorist’s engagement with the writing of history, with institutional and narrative constructions of time, and with the ways that individuals and communities can disturb or reconfigure what he has called the “distribution of the sensible.” They examine his unique conception of politics as the disruption of the established distribution of bodies and roles in the social order, and they elucidate his novel account of the relationship between aesthetics and politics by exploring his astute analyses of literature and the visual arts. In the collection’s final essay, Rancière addresses some of the questions raised by the other contributors and returns to his early work to provide a retrospective account of the fundamental stakes of his project. _Contributors_. Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Yves Citton, Tom Conley, Solange Guénoun, Peter Hallward, Todd May, Eric Méchoulan, Giuseppina Mecchia, Jean-Luc Nancy, Andrew Parker, Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, Kristin Ross, James Swenson, Rajeshwari Vallury, Philip Watts. (shrink)