Rancière: Aesthetics

The book forms the first critical study of Jacques Rancière’s impact and contribution to contemporary theoreticaland interdisciplinary studies. It showcases the work of leading scholars infields such as political theory, history and aesthetic theory; each of whom areuniquely situated to engage with the novelty of Rancière’s thinking withintheir respective fields. Each of the essays provides aninvestigation into the critical stance Rancière takes towards hiscontemporaries, concentrating on the versatile application of his thought todiverse fields of study. The aim ofthis collection is (...) to use the critical interventions Rancière’s writing makeson current topics and themes as a way of offering new critical perspectives onhis thought. Wielding their individual expertise, each contributor assesses hisperspectives and positions on thinkers and topics of contemporary importance.The edition includes a new essay by Jacques Rancière, which charts thedifferent problems and motivations that have shaped his work. (shrink)

RESUMO A fim de nos aproximarmos da singular constelação conceitual que nos permite falar de uma noção de imagem artística na estética adorniana - ainda que na margem do seu pensamento e muito menos manifesta do que na escrita de Walter Benjamin - partimos da conexão entre os conceitos de “aparência” e “expressão”, remetendo-nos à própria materialidade das obras de arte, da literatura à música, para uma maior nitidez teórico-crítica. O intuito de ressaltar a importância do conceito de imagem artística (...) em Theodor W. Adorno visa tanto atualizar alguns pontos opacos de sua estética quanto conectar seu pensamento com o debate acerca da imagem na estética contemporânea, sobretudo em Jacques Rancière e Didi-Huberman. ABSTRACT In order to approach the remarkable conceptual constellation that permits us to develop a notion of artistic image in Adorno's aesthetics - although not outstanding in the author's thought, and even less evident than in Walter Benjamin's writings - we depart from the connection between the concepts of “appearance” and “expression”, referring to the material quality of works of art in themselves, from literature to music, for broader theoretical and critical clearness. The intent of highlighting the importance of the concept of artistic image within Theodor W. Adorno's ideas, aims to both update some opaque points within the author's aesthetics and to connect his thought with the debate about the image in contemporary aesthetic theories, mostly in the works of Jacques Rancière and Didi-Hubermann. (shrink)

RESUMO Esse artigo trata da relação entre a estética e a representação na teoria de Jacques Rancière. Segundo o autor, a representação é simultaneamente presente e proibida na estética moderna. Ela aparece como um parasita ou um intruso na produção artística. Rancière pergunta: sob quais condições a representação se torna proibida e o que significa a arte não representar? O eixo central da análise explora quais as consequências dessa configuração, com destaque para a política. Segundo Rancière, o conceito de partilha (...) do sensível implica invariavelmente um regime de vida e, portanto, alguma forma de política. Sendo assim, a estética não se limita à arte, mas atinge a vida em seu sentido pleno. A relação entre estética e representação implica necessariamente um modo de vida no qual a representação se torna impossível em todos os sentidos. ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between aesthetics and representation in Jacques Rancière's theory. According to the author, representation is simultaneously present and prohibited in modern aesthetics. It appears as a parasite or an intruder in artistic production. Rancière asks: under what conditions is representation prohibited and what happens when art does not represent? The central axis in the analysis explores the consequences of this configuration, with emphasis on politics. According to Rancière, the concept of distribution of the sensible invariably implies a regime of life and, therefore, some sort of politics. Hence, aesthetics is not limited to arts, reaching life as a whole. The relationship between aesthetics and representation necessarily implies a mode of life where representation becomes impossible in all senses. (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)

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)

A keynote Speech at the 2017 Annual Conference of the Society for Photographic Education, Orlando Florida. Using Jacques Rancière’s theoretical development of an a priori logic of an equality of intelligence, I will examine how an assumed equality of intelligence, applied across all the various forms of photography can provide a more productive framework to consider how images are used and reused. It will be argued that by assuming this a priori logic, we can move the debate beyond questions that (...) are concerned with the originality of an image or its status as document and allows for a reconsideration of its use as a catalyst for debate. What is called for is a photographic discourse that reformulates the role of documentary photography as a means to engage with the reader’s imagination as an explicit challenge to perception. This new discourse re-frames the photograph as a vehicle for debate, as a discursive document. (shrink)

Using Jacques Rancière’s theoretical development of an a priori logic of an equality of intelligence, I will examine how an assumed equality of intelligence, applied across all the various forms of photography can provide a more productive framework to consider how images are used and reused. It will be argued that by assuming this a priori logic, we can move the debate beyond questions that are concerned with the originality of an image or its status as document and allows for (...) a reconsideration of its use as a catalyst for debate. What is called for is a photographic discourse that reformulates the role of documentary photography as a means to engage with the reader’s imagination as an explicit challenge to perception. This new discourse re-frames the photograph as a vehicle for debate, as a discursive document. (shrink)

The paper investigates the relationship between political oratory and literature in Romania during the second part of the 19th century. Extending the theories of Jacques Rancière, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižec, and Leonidas Donskis, I analyze the relationship between politics and literature by comparing a set of illustrative speeches delivered by Take Ionescu and P. P. Carp, who distinguished themselves as brilliant political orators and also as personalities who gave up literature in order to assume a political career. My main goal (...) is to determine how much of one’s appetite for aesthetic autonomy turns into mere appetite for political autonomy, and thus for dissent and dissidence. Both examples chosen for illustration brought me to the conclusion that prior literary habits and practices into a politician’s public career can determine his/her ways of legitimizing party-switches or volatile doctrinarian attitudes. (shrink)

La théorie des régimes d’identification de l’art établie par le philosophe J. Rancière décrit le passage de l’ancien système des Beaux-Arts au régime esthétique de l’art. Selon ce régime contemporain, le propre des différents arts ne repose plus essentiellement sur leur technicité, mais sur l’expérience sensible qu’ils favorisent indépendamment de leurs modes de faire spécifique. La performance artistique s’inscrit pleinement dans ce régime esthétique de l’art, à la faveur de son projet idéologique: elle vise l’élargissement de l’expérience sensible au-delà de (...) la seule production d’objet, déstabilisant de la sorte les frontières entre l’artistique et le non-artistique; elle cherche à restaurer les liens entre art et expérience ordinaire pour favoriser un art vivant. On montrera que les idées développées par le philosophe pragmatiste anglo-saxon J. Dewey ont fortement contribué à la définition de ce projet artistique radical. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the social and political dimensions of aesthetic autonomy as it is given formal expression in Wallace Stevens’s poetry of the 1930s and the early 1940s. Whereas modernist claims to autonomy are often said to rest upon an ideological assertion of art’s detachment from socio-historical concerns, I argue that, in Stevens’s work, autonomy is conceived in relational terms, which gives rise to new lines of interconnection between his poetry and its cultural situation. Written over a period when the (...) political efficacy of literature became a staple of discussion among a myriad of writers and critics, Stevens’s poetry offers an understanding of autonomy not as an escape from, but as a productive condition for imagining alternative forms of engagement with the historical crisis with which it has to reckon. In taking into account the cultural context from which Stevens’s poetics of autonomy emerged, my study aims to highlight the significance of the concept to the poet’s exploration of the tension between aesthetic and social domains, to his imaginative formations of collective agency, and to the vexed relationship between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking. By transposing the theoretical discussion of autonomy into the register of historical scrutiny, I hope to pave the way for a rethinking of autonomy and its relevance to the period’s radical and modernist writing, literary debates, and cultural politics. For this purpose, I draw on recent theories, such as those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, on poetry, politics, and aesthetics, which serve to complicate the working definitions of modernist autonomy as literature’s immunity from the world, and to indicate an alternative path for analyzing its critical and contextual implications. (shrink)

The present paper explores diffident and dissident practices reflected by the political talk at the end of the 19th-century in Romania. Relying on Jacques Rancière’s theories on the ‘aesthetic regime of politics,’ the introduction sketches a historical frame and proposes a focus change: the relation between ‘politics’ and ‘aesthetics’ does not stand on a set of literary cases, but on political scripts as such. Thus, the hypotheses investigated by the next three parts can be formulated as follows: 1. though determined (...) by an ideological direction (Conservative or Liberal), the political speech still preserves his tendency towards aesthetic autonomy. 2. oratorical merits (hinting at aesthetic autonomy) can turn into practices of political autonomy, diffidence and, then, dissidence. Methodologically, two types of aesthetic practices organize the chosen materials; both the diffident script and the theatre of dissidence help us to perceive how the philosophical and moral meaning of these practices could change into an ideology of dissidence. The formalization of diffident practices, their conversion to outspoken dissidence, also corresponds to the symmetrical symptom of unlimited authority; when old-time politicians warned on ‘Caesarism,’ ‘Vizierate,’ ‘Despotism,’ ‘Omnipotence’ or ‘Tyranny,’ the Romanian society had already been training for a long experience of ‘dictatorship.’. (shrink)

Written in relation to After the Last Sky, WJT Mitchell notes how ‘extraordinarily limited’ the image of the Palestinian is. Obscured from the dominant field of vision, Mitchell suggests that ‘visual facts’ which everyone knows in theory, but is rarely seen in practice – the Palestinian woman, the domestic space and children are subsequently constituted as ‘icons’ of an unseen reality that underpin Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s project. As a photo-essay, After the Last Sky has been referred to as (...) a ‘nation-making’ text that sought to produce a new type of visibility concerning the Palestinian. With this in mind, my paper will focus on an online photo-essay facilitated by the Israeli activist photography collective, Activestills in 2012. Based in the Bedouin village of Susiya, located in the Southern Hebron Hills of the Occupied Territories, the photography collective worked in collaboration with the female villagers to produce a series of images based on their own lives. Thus, firstly, I will explore how the photo-essay challenges the universal legibility of an individual photo, interrupting the visual order by which the Palestinian is most commonly framed. Secondly, by focusing specifically on the collaboration between Israeli citizen and unrecognized Palestinian, I will identify how visual activism promotes a widening of the space in which politics can be conceived and performed. By creating new visibilities, in a political process that Jacques Rancière defines as a ‘sense-making practice’, visual activism tackles the issues of democracy creatively, not as a goal but as a practice that is democratic in its very development. (shrink)

The rehabilitation of aesthetics that is undertaken by Jacques Rancière for a thinking of both art and politics is as stylistically refreshing as it is philosophically appealing. The combination of vast scholarship and lively polemic that underpins all his analyses also lends his celebration of democracy, equality and humanity a persuasiveness that is difficult to resist. This paper examines how Rancière’s understanding of “the aesthetics of politics” differs from that of Walter Benjamin, especially in terms of Benjamin’s elaboration of the (...) change sustained by “experience” in modernity. It considers how reading a prose poem by Baudelairethrows into relief what is at stake in this difference. (shrink)

Mass culture nourishes itself through cinematographic comedy, considered as alternative Gestalt that binds us to our little world. In doing so, mass culture return us an ideal mirror image of our life allowing us to consider ideal our daily life. Therefore distance between cinema and life tends to reduce and aesthetic education programme is completed. This essay examines this process in reference to some contemporary thinkers – from Schmitt to Benjamin up to Rancière.

This exegesis aims to assess the communicative power of assemblage-based installation art. The body of research underlying this assessment provides tools for understanding experimental assemblage-based installation practices and their affective nature. The exegesis tracks discourses between contemporary assemblage-based practices and recent philosophy on aesthetics. It reviews mechanisms used by contemporary artists to engage the spectator that resist existing aesthetic structures and assert new communicative visual forms. Definitions of ‘the contemporary’ are employed to help situate the dialectic of forms. By way (...) of applying some key concepts of philosopher Gilles Deleuze to methods of production, the assessment proposes a symbiotic relationship between Deleuzian philosophy and assemblage-based practices. Deleuze’s ‘affect’, ‘de-stratification’, ‘repetition’ and ‘assemblage’ are the main theories applied to this a posteriori relationship. This exegesis investigates artists’ methods of sign manipulation such as compositions of repetitions, rhythms and durations. The experience of the spectator is investigated from the key positions of three disciplines of thought. How the brain processes information when viewing art is examined by way of readings from commentator Jacques Ranciere, philosopher David Hume and neurologist Vilayanaur Ramachandran. This establishes a speculative foundation for the relationship between the spectator and ‘the sign’. In terms of linguistics and visual forms, a critical analysis is applied to ‘signs’ to analyse the practices of artists who challenge established form and narrative structures. Readings of Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and Giorgio Agamben’s analogous ‘apparatus’ are used to articulate systems of communication and their compositions of elements. It is put forward that an artist’s assemblage of signs is the dispositif of their practice. This analysis posits that, asserting new and non-linear forms rather than following pre-existing models can be a powerful means for affective and lucid communication. Chapter IV of this exegesis presents a discussion of examples of my work completed as part of the research. This chapter is a more reflective expression of my motivations for creating assemblage-based installation focused on form and meaning. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss the ethical and political problems that we face when we think of transgenic art. The paper is articulated in three parts that seek, in the first place, to give readers the conceptual tools necessary to think of the transgenic art inserted within the panorama of contemporary aesthetics. In order to fulfill this purpose the paper presents two Works by Eduardo Kac, leading exponent of the movement: Genesis and GFP Bunny. Later, visiting some (...) ideas of Jacques Rancière, an ethicalpolitical reading of transgenic art is proposed and a path of discussion is opened to think the role of bioethics in a world where genetic manipulation and the upgrade of bodies is a reality. (shrink)

Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of 'relational aesthetics' has proved an influential framework for understanding discipline cross overs in art of the 1990s. This paper traces precedents in aesthetic philosophy, both Kantian and Marxist that inform Bourriaud's account of the relational aesthetic of contemporary art. In the process it registers a number of points of disagreement with the liberal view of democratic social bonds, and the links between aesthetics, ethics and politics that Borriaud propounds. The critical terms of my response to relational (...) aesthetics are derived from a Neo-Marxist thinking of democracy, and the relation between aesthetics and politics developed by philosopher Jacques Rancière. This questioning of Bourriaud's claims about the democratic incline of relational aesthetics is fleshed out by an examination of the cross disciplinary art of Mark Dion. Dion is known for producing performative, site-specific events and installations that incorporate the discourses and professional protocols of natural science and archaeology. Bourriaud situates Dion's practice within a sub-set of relational aesthetics, namely art production that is modelled on the professional procedures of non-art disciplines, and which emulates the "relational world" that such disciplines suppose. While acknowledging some affinities between Dion's art and relational aesthetics, this paper draws a distinction between the kinds of social and disciplinary interaction that Bourriaud endorses, and the role that the aesthetic plays in Dion's archaeological dig projects of the late 1990s. (shrink)

The concept of intellectual equality dominates Jacques Rancière’s prolific bibliography and remains fundamental to his aesthetic philosophy. Whereas equality’s relationship to Rancièrean pedagogy, politics, and literature has been discussed at length in recent years, however, I argue that translation represents a sustained and specific focus in Rancière’s political-aesthetic framework, one that scholarship has so far overlooked. This article considers the important but rarely-cited essay “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization” alongside several of Rancière’s more canonical works in order to trace the role (...) of translation as a metonymy, a scholarly style, and a political activity in his philosophical thought. The intersection of translation with ways of “doing, being, and saying” clarifies Rancière’s elegant elision of poetics and politics and ultimately sheds new light on his specific contribution to literary studies. (shrink)

Today’s film scholars draw from a dizzying range of theoretical perspectives—they’re just as likely to cite philosopher Gilles Deleuze as they are to quote classic film theorist André Bazin. To students first encountering them, these theoretical lenses for viewing film can seem exhilarating, but also overwhelming. _Thinking in the Dark _introduces readers to twenty-one key theorists whose work has made a great impact on film scholarship today, including Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, and Judith Butler. Rather than (...) just discussing each theorist’s ideas in the abstract, the book shows how those concepts might be applied when interpreting specific films by including an analysis of both a classic film and a contemporary one. It thus demonstrates how theory can help us better appreciate films from all eras and genres: from _Hugo _to_ Vertigo_, from _City Lights _to _Sunset Blvd._, and from _Young Mr. Lincoln_ to _A.I. _and _Wall-E_. The volume’s contributors are all experts on their chosen theorist’s work and, furthermore, are skilled at explaining that thinker’s key ideas and terms to readers who are not yet familiar with them. _Thinking in the Dark _is not only a valuable resource for teachers and students of film, it’s also a fun read, one that teaches us all how to view familiar films through new eyes. Theorists examined in this volume are: Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Michel Chion, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Douchet, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Vachel Lindsay, Christian Metz, Hugo Münsterberg, V. F. Perkins, Jacques Rancière, and Jean Rouch. (shrink)

This article aims to introduce the reader to the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière. By examining his latest publications and papers – Le Partage du sensible, L’Inconscient esthétique and Le Spectateur émancipé – we shall shed light on some key concepts of his thought, such as “Le Partage du sensible” and “Dissensus”, and explain how they are linked to the different regimes of artistic expression that Rancière identifies in his work as the ethic regime, the representational regime and the aesthetic regime (...) of art. In so doing, we shall show how Rancière rightfully demonstrates that political and pedagogical implications are always present and felt within artistic expression. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière, in his essay ‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’, puts forth a challenge that is ever more pertinent to our times. What constitutes the unrepresentable today? Rancière frames his answer in a very specific way: the question of unrepresentability leads directly to the way in which political violence may or may not be put into an image. Offering an alternative to Rancière’s approach, the present article turns instead to the information society, asking if and how something might be unrepresentable in (...) a world saturated by data and information. Thus one approaches the issue of transparency and secrecy here from the perspective of the relative perspicuity of data visualization. Two theses structure the argument, first that ‘data have no necessary visual form’ and, second, that ‘only one visualization has ever been made of an information network’. The tension between these two theses leads to a disconcerting conclusion, that the triumph of information aesthetics precipitates a decline in informatic perspicuity. One is obligated therefore to call for a strong reinvigoration of poetics and hermeneutics within the digital universe, so that representation as such can take place, perhaps for the first time. (shrink)

In The Future of the Image (2007) Jacques Rancière states that the end of images is behind us. He argues for an aesthetics of the image that acknowledges the continuing power of images as educating documentations of traces of history, as directly affecting interruptions, and as open-to-combining signs of the visible and the sayable ad infinitum. But does Rancière's claim also concern the future of cinema? His cinematic references, in a Deleuzian sense, are mostly to modern time-images. Is the future (...) of film indeed a form of the time-image, or has the ‘heart’ of cinema moved beyond this image-type? This paper proposes to look at a third category of cinematographic images, based in the third synthesis of time as developed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. This filmic image, that could be called the neuro-image, is connected to the impure regime of images typical for the database logic of the digital age. By comparing Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) to the television seriesFlashForward (2009), I will analyse the temporal operations of the image of the time-image to these images of a new regime of images, the image of and from the future.1. (shrink)

This article offers a pragmatic and relational analysis of the controversial heuristic of cultural resistance and presents some of the problems that affect the production and distribution of the poetic discourses of resistance and emancipation. To that end, it focuses on the incorporation of the historicity and the historic contingency of conflict as key elements of the subjectification constituted by the poem of resistance as “poem for the political”. It also explores the applicability of certain notions common to the contemporary (...) critical tradition, as developed by scholars such as Badiou, Mouffe, Rancière, Bal and Žižek. (shrink)

In _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ Davide Panagia focuses on the role that aesthetic sensibilities play in theorists’ evaluations of political arguments. Examining works by thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Rancière, Panagia shows how each one invokes aesthetic concepts and devices, such as metaphor, mimesis, imagination, beauty, and the sublime. He argues that it is important to recognize and acknowledge these poetic forms of representation because they provide evaluative standards that theorists use in appraising the value of ideas—ideas about (...) justice, politics, and democratic life. An investigation into the intertwined histories of aesthetic and political accounts of representation—such as Panagia presents here—sheds light on how modes of poetic thinking delimit the questions of unity and diversity that continue to animate contemporary political theory. Panagia not only illuminates the structure of much contemporary political theory but also shows why understanding the poetics of political thinking is vital to contemporary society. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s critique of negation and his privileging of paradox as the source of political thought, Panagia suggests that a non-teleological concept of difference might generate insight into pressing questions about foreignness and citizenship. Turning to the liberal/poststructural debate that dominates contemporary political theory, he compares John Rawls’s concept of justice to Rancière’s ideas about political disagreement in order to demonstrate how, despite their differences, both thinkers comprehend aesthetic and moral reasoning as part and parcel of political writing. Considering the writings of William Hazlitt and Jürgen Habermas, he describes how the essay has become the exemplary genre of what is considered rational political argument. _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ is a compelling reappraisal of the role of representation within political thought. (shrink)

Este artículo se plantea definir en qué medida la estética de Jacques Rancière constituye un programa a seguir, un nuevo modo de reflexión estética dedicado tanto a la revisión de la historia del arte moderno como a la autocomprensión de la estética. Para ello, se centra en el análisis de la reescritura de la modernidad artística emprendida por el filósofo francés señalando cuáles son sus ejes conceptuales y sus herramientas. Por otra parte, se propone la tesis de que la estética, (...) como formuladora en términos comprensibles del “régimen de identificación del arte”, está determinada a convertir sus conceptos en valores. (shrink)

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)

“Where did this unexpected mobility of epistemological arrangements come from…? What event, what law, do these mutations obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way…?” The recent wave of interest in the work of Jacques Rancière in North America can likely be traced back to the unique status he gives to the category of the aesthetic in its relation to the political. Coming after the exhaustion of (...) debates surrounding the notion of “aesthetic ideology,”1 and expressing dissatisfaction with familiar arguments about the aestheticization of politics, Rancière’s oeuvre seems to offer the promise of a.. (shrink)

The first collection of critical essays on the film work of the philosopher Jacques Ranciere. Jacques Ranciere rose to prominence as a radical egalitarian philosopher, political theorist and historian. Recently he has intervened into the discourses of film theory and film studies, publishing controversial and challenging works on these topics. This book offers an exciting range of responses to and assessments of his contributions to film studies and includes an afterword response to the essays by Ranciere himself.

The present paper aims to investigate the critique of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière to a traditional way of looking the relationship between politics and art appropriated for a specific current of social criticism that examines political vocation of artistic creation as simple privileged means of showing the real domination behind the numerous other images released to us. Against this perspective, Rancière proposes to reconsider the logic that is involved in the common distribution of the sensible, the audible and speakable (...) while real political vocation of art, since he believes that political action is precisely the one that changes the places and the calculation of bodies organized by police device. (shrink)

Este artículo sugiere algunas aristas que permiten pensar lo que está en juego en la política de la estética en la filosofía de Jacques Rancière. A partir de una de las escenas de la obra Aisthesis, el texto pretende enlazar dos registros de la política de la estética: por un lado, la irrupción del régimen estético del arte como un tejido de la experiencia sensible que desestabiliza las determinaciones de lo que quiere decir el “universal reportaje”; y por el otro, (...) ciertas formas de emancipación singular que se ponen en escena en experiencias éticas de des-identificación que irrumpen en el orden consensual. (shrink)

Este artículo sugiere algunas aristas que permiten pensar lo que está en juego en la política de la estética en la filosofía de Jacques Rancière. A partir de una de las escenas de la obra Aisthesis, el texto pretende enlazar dos registros de la política de la estética: por un lado, la irrupción del régimen estético del arte como un tejido de la experiencia sensible que desestabiliza las determinaciones de lo que quiere decir el “universal reportaje”; y por el otro, (...) ciertas formas de emancipación singular que se ponen en escena en experiencias éticas de des-identificación que irrumpen en el orden consensual. (shrink)

The critique of images is seen as a set-up’s critique for the emergency ofcritical thinking in the era of the proliferation of information and communication systems, imposed due to their apparent objectivity. This article discusses in seven paragraphs the link among montage, image and event according to the thoughts ofGilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière.

This paper responds to Rancière’s reading of Lyotard’s analysis of the sublime by attempting to articulate what Lyotard would call a “differend” between the two. Sketching out Rancière’s criticisms, I show that Lyotard’s analysis of the Kantian sublime is more defensible than Rancière claims. I then provide an alternative reading, one that frees Lyotard’s sublime from Rancière’s central accusation that it signals nothing more than the mind’s perpetual enslavement to the law of the Other. Reading the sublime through the figure (...) of the “event,” I end by suggesting that it may even have certain affinities with what Rancière calls “politics.”. (shrink)

This paper responds to Rancière’s reading of Lyotard’s analysis of the sublime by attempting to articulate what Lyotard would call a “differend” between the two. Sketching out Rancière’s criticisms, I show that Lyotard’s analysis of the Kantian sublime is more defensible than Rancière claims. I then provide an alternative reading, one that frees Lyotard’s sublime from Rancière’s central accusation that it signals nothing more than the mind’s perpetual enslavement to the lawof the Other. Reading the sublime through the figure of (...) the “event,” I end by suggesting that it may have certain affinities with what Rancière calls “politics.”. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière is one of France's leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who's who of Continental philosophy. Since his time as a student at the Ecole normale supérieure, Rancière has generated a body of work that is at once wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and consistent. His arguments for a postfoundational and postliberal democratic understanding of politics have influenced, echoed, or demanded critical response from such other Continental luminaries as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 2004) and Alain Badiou (2005). Much of this cachet (...) is no doubt due to Rancière's central thesis regarding the sources, uses, and ends of politics. According to this argument, politics does not derive from putative a priori .. (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)

In this article I re-examine the role that aesthetics play in Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. As opposed to the vast majority of scholarship in this area, I suggest that aesthetics play a more centralised role in pedagogy above and beyond arts-based curricula. To help clarify Freire's position, I will argue that underlying the linguistic resolution of the student/teacher dialectic in the problem-posing classroom is an accompanying shift in the very aesthetics of recognition. In order to demonstrate the always (...) already aesthetic nature of all education, I will turn to the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière. Through Rancière we can begin to understand how the pedagogy of the oppressed is predicated on an aesthetic redistribution of the sensible, of what can be seen and what can be heard. As Rancière will confirm, if we truly want to understand the aesthetics of pedagogy, we cannot simply see aesthetics as external to teaching and learning. Rather, education as an aesthetic event has to be taken seriously, and aesthetics should regain primacy in discussions of critical pedagogy. (shrink)