Translator's introduction -- Preface -- Part I: The aesthetics of politics -- Ten theses on politics -- Does democracy mean something? -- Who is the subject of the rights of man? -- Communism : from actuality to inactuality -- The people or the multitudes -- Bio-politics or politics -- September 11 and afterwards : a rupture in the symbolic order -- Of war as the supreme form of advanced plutocratic consensus -- Part II: The politics of aesthetics -- The aesthetic (...) revolution and its outcomes -- The paradoxes of political art -- The politics of literature -- The monument and its confidences or Deleuze and Art's capacity for resistance -- The ethical turn of aesthetics and politics -- Part III: Response to critics -- The usage of distinctions. (shrink)

Gives politics the following meaning: the organization of dissent.

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relation between art and politics, reclaiming 'aesthetics' from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance ...

What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them? Why is the history of philosophy—from Plato to Karl Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre to Pierre Bourdieu—the history of so many figures of the poor: plebes, men of iron, the demos, artisans, common people, proletarians, the masses? Why have philosophers made the shoemaker, in particular, a remarkably ubiquitous presence in this history? (...) Does philosophy itself depend on this thinking about the poor? If so, can it ever refrain from thinking for them? Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role—sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument. Published in France in 1983 and made available here for the first time in English, this consummate study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato’s admonition that workers should do “nothing else” than their own work. It offers innovative readings of these thinkers’ struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor. Presenting a left critique of Bourdieu, the terms of which are largely unknown to an English-language readership, The Philosopher and His Poor remains remarkably timely twenty years after its initial publication. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

"Is there any such thing as political philosophy?" So begins this provocative book by one of the foremost figures in Continental thought. Here, Jacques Ranciere brings a new and highly useful set of terms to the vexed debate about political effectiveness in the face of a new world order. What precisely is at stake in the relationship between "philosophy" and the adjective "political"? In Disagreement, Ranciere 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 Ranciere, 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, Ranciere 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. Ranciere 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 toreaders concerned with political questions from the broadest to the most specific and local. (shrink)

Rancière s'est toujours attaché à commenter et à expliciter son parcours et ses interventions en en exposant les inflexions et les continuités ; à opérer un travail de définition, de redéfinition et de démarcation par rapport à d'autres interventions théoriques ; à montrer le caractère indissociable de ses textes sur la politique, l'esthétique, l'art, le cinéma et la littérature ; à apporter des réponses aux objections et aux interrogations soulevées par ses écrits. Voici un outil indispensable pour tous ceux qui (...) s'efforcent de définir les termes d'une politique démocratique radicale aujourd'hui. (shrink)

"Recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot" -- vii.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 113-126 [Access article in PDF] Dissenting Words:A Conversation with Jacques Rancière 1 Davide Panagia:In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History, for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an "excess of words" that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth century. Similarly, in On The Shores of Politics, (...) you begin your discussion with an excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you speak of "the part of those who have no-part" as voicing a "wrong" for the sake of equality.In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more generally) is very different from those thinkers of the "linguistic turn" in political philosophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democracies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus on the aporias of language as such.Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about democratic politics?Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic thinking as a "poetics of politics"?Rancière's Reply:In order to address your question adequately, it would be wise to enlarge the sense of "linguistic turn" you invoke. In its most generally accepted sense, the linguistic turn in philosophy consists in ascribing to linguistic processes certain phenomena and specifiable modes of relating objects attributed, in a previous instance, either to factual processes or lines of thought. This approach is not limited to the two figures you invoke in your question. The linguistic turn also has two stages of development that, from my experience, have been more noticeable in France than in the United States. The first phase, then, emerged with Lévi-Strauss and his structural approach to social relations founded on a linguistic model of relationality, subsequently reprised in Lacan's psychoanalytic notion that "the unconscious is structured like a language" that, in its turn, conjoins the energetic mental processes Freud discusses to linguistic practices. The primacy of "the linguistic" thus granted language all the properties of the Freudian unconscious [End Page 113] along with those of a Marxist notion of infrastructure. The Saussurian opposition between langue and parole provided a privileged status to a linguistic model whose role was that of a general law that unconsciously structures the behavior of individuals and societies. It is on the basis of these parameters that the structuralist moment of the linguistic turn was constituted. At one and the same time, the analysis of speech acts became first and foremost a "symptomatic" analysis of those procedures of misrecognition that linguistically structured both the behavior of individuals and social relations. When we "read" Le Capital with Althusser, the interpretive and methodological schema for linguistic phenomena operated like a kind of "policing of the enunciated": that is, a search for those unsuccessful (i.e., inadequate) modes of expression that exemplify such symptomatic procedures of misrecognition.The second phase of the linguistic turn constituted itself more ambiguously. For those who shared intellectual experiences similar to my own, this version involved a critique of the langue/infrastructure model; that is, a further and more favorable consideration of the value of the political and the linguistic games therein that, according to the Althusserian/Marxist model (and, indeed, with structuralism more generally), were to be treated as ideological artifacts. In a very real sense, it all began with the May '68 assertion that "we are all German Jews"--an entirely ideological statement, the validity of which, if analyzed at the level of its content, one finds to rest entirely on the capacity to overturn the political relationship between the order of designations and that of events by emphasizing the gap that separates subject and predicate. From there, an entire field of understanding speech acts as political gestures opened up: a field that reconfigured the division between words and things while rearranging the distinction between legitimate... (shrink)

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. (shrink)

De 1933 à nos jours, le regard des cinéastes sur l'histoire et leur façon de la mettre en scène a beaucoup évolué. A partir de films documentaires, un philosophes (J. Rancière) et un cinéaste (J.-L. Comolli) analysent cette évolution et s'attachent aux notions d'archive, de propagande, d'engagement, de commentaire, de construction de la mémoire...

The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking.

Si le politique s'est imposé comme objet philosophique de pensée c'est sans doute que cet adjectif neutre signifiait commodément un écart avec le substantif de la politique, dans son sens ordinaire de lutte des partis pour le pouvoir. Parler du politique et non de la politique, c'est indiquer que l'on parle des principes de la loi, du pouvoir et de la communauté et non de la cuisine gouvernementale. Le politique est la rencontre de deux processus hétérogènes. Le premier est celui (...) du gouvernement. Il consiste à organiser le rassemblement des hommes en communauté et leur consentement et repose sur la distribution hiérarchique des places et des fonctions. Je donnerai à ce processus le nom de police. Le second est celui de l'égalité. Il consiste dans le jeu des pratiques guidées par la présupposition de l'égalité de n'importe qui et par le souci de vérifier. Le nom le plus propre à désigner ce jeu est celui d'émancipation. (shrink)

History in our day is still a story, and yet one from which we expect to tell the truth - not just the facts, the names and events of the past, but the invisible order and forces behind them. How can the language of history balance these seemingly contrary tasks - the narrative, the scientific, and the political? This is the question Jacques Ranciere explores in "The names of history", a meditation on the poetics of historical knowledge. In the works (...) of writers from Jules Michelet to Fernand Braudel, Ranciere traces an ongoing revolution in historical study, a movement that challenged, in the practice of language, the opposition of science and literature. By way of a commentary on Erich Auerbach, he shows how fictional narrative intertwines with historical narrative to produce a "truth" that retains mythical elements. The poetics of knowledge Ranciere develops here is an attempt to identify the literary procedures by which historical discourse escapes literature and gives itself the status of a science. His book is also an appreciation of Braudel, whose work in the Annales school greatly advanced this project. Ranciere follows and extends Braudel's discursive production of new agencies of history, which accounts for both the material conditions in which history takes place and the language in which it is written. (shrink)

This new collection of challenging literary studies plays with a foundational definition of Western culture: the word become flesh.

"Le mot de philosophie politique ne désigne aucun genre ou territoire de la philosophie. Il est le nom d'une rencontre polémique où s'exprime le paradoxe de la politique : son absence de fondement propre. La politique commence quand l'ordre naturel de la domination et la répartition des parts entre les parties de la société sont interrompus par l'apparition d'une partie surnuméraire, le démos, qui identifie la collection des incomptés au tout de la communauté. L'égalité, qui est la condition non politique (...) de la politique, ne fait effet que par le jeu de cette partie litigieuse qui institue la communauté politique comme communauté du litige. À partir de ce mécompte premier s'institue une logique de la mésentente, également éloignée de la discussion consensuelle et du tort absolu. La "philosophie politique", elle, commence avec la récusation platonicienne de l'apparence, du mécompte et du litige propres à la démocratie, et la requête d'une politique "en vérité". On s'interrogera sur les transformations du régime de cette vérité, de l'archipolitique platonicienne à la métapolitique marxienne, et sur leurs effets en retour dans la pratique politique. De là peuvent se déduire quelques repères pour analyser aujourd'hui la complémentarité de l'idylle consensuelle et du mélodrame humanitaire, tout comme l'équivalence de la "fin" de la politique et de son "retour" ". (J.R.). (shrink)

En 1974 Jacques Rancière examinait la leçon de marxisme donné par le philosophe Louis Althusser à un collègue anglais et en faisait l'occasion d'un bilan sur l'althussérisme lui-même. Althusser avait imposé dans les années 1960 l'idée d'un retour à la vraie pensée de Marx, en phase avec les formes nouvelles de la pensée structuraliste mais aussi avec les nouveaux espoirs révolutionnaires qui secouaient la planète à l'heure des luttes de décolonisation et de la révolution culturelle chinoise. Or les événements de (...) 1968 avaient montré le total décalage de ce marxisme renouvelé par rapport aux aspirations portées par les mouvements de la jeunesse et aux formes prises par la mobilisation populaire. La pensée du renouveau théorique et politique s'était transformée en pensée de l'ordre. Mais aussi, dans le contexte de l'après-68, cette pensée de l'ordre ne pouvait trouver son efficacité qu'en s'exprimant dans le langage de la subversion. La Leçon d'Althusser s'attachait à dégager les conditions de ce renversement en examinant le coeur politique de la philosophie althussérienne, l'opposition de la science et de l'idéologie, à la lumière de l'histoire récente mais aussi à celle de la tradition ouvrière et révolutionnaire. Ce texte devenu introuvable est aujourd'hui réédité avec une préface de l'auteur qui en souligne l'actualité : le destin de cette pensée de la subversion devenue une justification de l'ordre existant n'est que le premier épisode d'un mouvement politique et intellectuel bien plus vaste. Des années 1970 jusqu'à notre présent nous avons été témoins d'une vaste contre-révolution politique et intellectuelle dirigée contre tous les acquis des mouvements populaires d'un siècle et contre toute idée d'émancipation. Or cette contre-révolution a continuellement recyclé à son profit tous les thèmes de la pensée marxiste et critique d'hier. La Leçon d'Althusser mettait en lumière le mécanisme fondamental de ce processus et anticipait en ce sens le travail poursuivi par Jacques Rancière jusque dans des livres récents comme La Haine de la démocratie et Le Spectateur émancipé. Ce travail est donc propre à aider à la compréhension du présent et à la reformulation d'une pensée de l'émancipation. (shrink)