This article discusses Jacques Rancière's theory of literature as centred on an agonistic concept of literature, where literature is seen as a ‘positive contradiction’. This positive contradiction arises from what Rancière sees as literature's origins in the ‘errant letter’, which is conceived as an intrinsically democratic principle that, for Rancière, also results in the tendency of literature to incarnate the word and to propose an extra-textual truth which would signal the end of literature as democratic errancy. Asking whether it is (...) possible to identify Rancière as ‘taking sides’ in what he sets up as a struggle, the article analyses three examples of Rancière's engagement with literary texts in which he demonstrates the necessity for literature to maintain its constitutive contradiction, resulting in a conception of literature as an agonistic field and as a self-critical mode of writing. (shrink)

This article focuses on Jacques Rancière’s reflections on Alfredo Jaar’s The Rwanda Project in the context of wider discussions of the politics of naming the dead. Against the claim that his reflections reveal a depoliticizing, universalist commitment to naming all the dead, it contends that foregrounding the relation between naming and counting in this discussion shows Rancière’s focus to be the policing and politics of naming. In an original argument, it focuses specifically on how, for Rancière, in this context, individualized (...) proper names function politically and dissensually. To do so it explores Rancière’s analysis of the role of the mainstream media during the Rwandan genocide in perpetuating the police order which divided nameable individuals from anonymous masses, thereby constituting living and dead Rwandans as of little or no account, and his account of how Jaar’s art is able to disrupt the ‘partition of the sensible’ underpinning this count. The article concludes by considering how Rancière’s ideas about the relationship between naming and counting and between politics and police serve as a useful supplement to and extension of existing discussions of grievability. (shrink)

The indexicality of film and sound recordings remains an unresolved problem in contemporary documentary theory. The prevailing conceptualisation of the documentary assigns it the status of a sober discourse, a framing in which history is modelled as absent cause and the unqualified distinction between fiction and non-fiction is considered sacrosanct. The denotative literalism characteristic of indexical media, however, confounds this conceptualisation, which in turn encourages the devaluing of documentary aesthetics; the documentary is not a medium of art, it is said, (...) but of argument. In this article, I examine how philosopher Jacques Rancière offers an alternative account of the documentary grounded on aesthetics rather than sobriety. I show how, in rethinking the absent cause model of history as well as the relationship between fiction and nonfiction, Rancière's aesthetic approach resolves the conceptual problem posed by indexicality and brings clarity to the value and function of indexical media with respect to the documentary. (shrink)

The idea of “literary democracy” can be traced back to the early twentieth century, which this article does by looking initially at the work of Georg Lukács. His distinctly humanist view of literar...

Devin Zane Shaw’s new book Egalitarian Moments is an attempt to think with and through Jacques Rancière. Shaw’s highly original interpretation of Rancière opens space within Rancière’s thought for a new, expanded account of the politics of art and literature, and Shaw is then able to use this theory as a way of rereading the history of philosophy. Shaw’s project is ultimately an attempt to show that it is possible to do philosophy in an egalitarian way – that not all (...) political philosophy need be “political philosophy” in Rancière’s pejorative sense – and that philosophy can serve as a vital resource for egalitarian political movements. (shrink)

In Mao’s era, China’s policy makers and intellectuals viewed aesthetic experience and thought as handmaidens in the service of the political order. As China opened up and engaged more intensely with modern traditions of the West, aesthetic thinkers such as Li Zehou critiqued the subordinated role of aesthetics and reasserted notions of aesthetic autonomy and liberal humanism, calling for the separation of arts and literature from political, social, and moral concerns. This truncated aesthetic view stems from a modernist version of (...) Western aesthetics that favors sense and sensibility as the sole sources of aesthetic value—a view that considerably diminishes the horizon of concerns inherent in traditional and modern Chinese aesthetic thoughts. This article seeks to recapture a repoliticized aesthetics by considering the ways early twentieth-century Chinese thinkers linked aesthetic thoughts to moral and political considerations in the reconstruction of China as a modern nation-state. Instead of transcendent, pure aesthetics over and above political processes and social experience, prominent aesthetic thinkers like Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun invoked traditional Chinese aesthetic legacies and reconsidered intimate and necessary ties between aesthetic categories and broader concerns about cultural crises, moral reform, and nation building. (shrink)

This article compares science and the novel as different rhetorical strategies for representing relationships to the limits of knowledge and what seems unknown. I draw on Kenneth Burke's figure of “equipment for living” to revive the question of the value of knowledge and art for life, identifying the comparison between science and the humanities itself as a social phenomenon and focusing on the uses and rhetorical value of such disciplines and of literature for life in a period ruled by concerns (...) for so-called applied knowledge and dreams of its transfer and dissemination. In this way, I try to escape from a notion of rhetoric limited solely to social interaction and the mutual persuasiveness of selves in order to develop, by linking rhetoric to subjectivity, a rhetorical approach to the consciousness of a subject conceived as relating to the limits of what can be known. (shrink)

This paper offers a close reading of PAW Media animation My Name is Danny. Drawing across a growing body of recent Central and Western Desert experimental cinema, this paper asks what is at stake in the turn to animation. Rather than escapism or otherworldly fabrications which have little to do with lived experience of the “real,” animation in this context has potent everyday exigencies and politics. The capacity for bringing to life literally – animate – is here linked to the (...) primacy of a sentient landscape; an object world already alive and enlivened with motion, movement, sensation. The question for contemporary filmmaking is how to engage country and its viscera today. How to keep country/ancestor/story alive literally through sentient forms of affective exchange; a project which animation, as this paper will explore, uniquely provides. Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, as well as the animation theory of Cholodenko, Lemarre and others, this paper argues for a radical reconsideration of animation not as incompatible with tradition but in fact as facilitating traditional ontologies of affect and sensation in a national context of remote Aboriginal Australia “under occupation.”. (shrink)

This essay approaches the topic of the political impact of the novel from an unconventional angle. It argues that this impact, recently discussed by philosophers like Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, should be considered the result of a special feature of this genre, namely that the novel is read solitarily and in silence. Reading a novel unplugs the reader from ordinary life and transports him to a world of the self, an individual world. From this position, which will be compared (...) with the position of the subject in transcendental philosophy, the reader is able to see the world around him in a new, individualist and subjective perspective. This perspective may be regarded as at least one of the conditions of modern democratic citizenship. (shrink)

Identity resides in doing, not in being; it is a conquest, not a pre- established possession. It is for this reason that literature plays a great...