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)

A leading philosopher presents a radical manifesto for the future of art andfilm.

The ethical turn that affects artistic and political practices today should not be interpreted as their subjection to moral criteria. Today, the reign of ethics leads to a growing indistinction between fact and law, between what is and what ought to be, where judgement bows down to the power of the law imposing itself. The radicality of this law is that it leaves no choice, and is nothing but the simple constraint stemming from the order of things. This brings about (...) an unprecedented dramaturgy of infinite evil, justice and redemption that can be traced not only in contemporary politics, but in philosophical reflection and film. (shrink)

“Pedagogics of Unlearning”: this phrase obviously echoes a notion and a figure that I had set up in my own way when I published a book entitled The Ignorant Schoolmaster with the subtitle “Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation”.1 Both entail the idea of a specific form of learning, which is a negative one: learning how to unlearn, teaching as an ignoramus, learning the emancipatory virtue of ignorance. This idea raises two interrelated problems. First, how are we to understand the type (...) of negativity at work in this unlearning or this ignorance? Secondly, what is the exact target of this negative action? What is the positivity that is under attack? In other words, what is at stake in matters of... (shrink)

The head and the stomach January 1996 -- Borges in Sarajevo March 1996 -- Fin de siècle and new millenarium May 1996 -- Cold racism July 1996 -- The last enemy November 1996 -- The grounded plane January 1997 -- Dialectic in the dialectic August 1997 -- Voyage to the country of the last sociologists November 1997 -- Justice in the past April 1998 -- The crisis of art or a crisis of thought July 1998 -- Is cinema to blame (...) March 1999? -- The nameless war May 1999 -- One image right can sweep away another October 1999 -- The syllogism of corruption October 2000 -- Voici/voila : the destiny of images January 2001 -- From facts to interpretations : the new quarrel over the holocaust April 2001 -- From one torture to another June 2001 -- The filmmaker, the people and the government August 2001 -- Time, words, war November 2001 -- Philosophy in the bathroom January 2002 -- Prisoners of the infinite march 2002 -- From one month of May to another June 2002 -- Victor Hugo : the ambiguities of a bicentenary August 2002 -- The machine and the foetus January 2003 -- Death of the author or all too living artist April 2003 -- Logic of amnesia June 2003 -- The principle of insecurity September 2003 -- The new fictions of evil November 2003 -- Criminal democracy March 2004 -- The difficult heritage of Michel Foucault June 2004 -- The new reasons for the lie A\august 2004 -- Beyond art October 2004 -- The politics of images February 2005 -- Democracy and its doctors May 2005. (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)

Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature’s images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre’s dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the (...) spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images. (shrink)

Divided beauty (Dresden, 1764) -- Little gods of the street (Munich-Berlin, 1828) -- Plebeian heaven (Paris, 1830) -- The poet of the new world (Boston, 1841-New York, 1855) -- The gymnasts of the impossible (Paris, 1879) -- The dance of light (Paris, Folies Bergère, 1893) -- The immobile theatre (Paris 1894-95) -- Decorative art as social art: temple, house, factory (Paris-London-Berlin) -- Master of surfaces (Paris, 1902) -- The temple staircase (Moscow-Dresden, 1912) -- The machine and its shadow (Hollywood, 1916) (...) -- The majesty of the moment (New York, 1921) -- Seeing things through things (Moscow, 1926) -- The cruel radiance of what is (Hale County, 1936-New York, 1941). (shrink)

The people's theatre : a long drawn-out affair -- The cultural historic compromise -- The philosopher's tale : intellectuals and the trajectory of Gauchisme -- Joan of Arc in the Gulag -- The inconceivable revolution -- Factory nostalgia (notes on an article and various books) -- The ethics of sociology.

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

"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?" -/- In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown (...) discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it. -/- Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate. (shrink)

In this text, Jacques Rancière critically discusses the work of Georges Didi-Huberman on images. He disagrees with various claims seemingly made by Didi-Huberman about images, such as that they can “take position” or that they are “active.” Rancière argues that Didi-Huberman adds another form of dialectics to the simpler form of dialectics adopted by Bertolt Brecht and Harun Farocki in their works, namely one that also involves a layering of different temporalities. However, both in Brecht’s War Primer and in Didi-Huberman’s (...) analysis of it, all the potencies credited to images as such are actually potencies of the words that accompany the images. Rancière comes to the conclusion that to “put images in motion,” as Didi-Huberman wants to do, or to regard them as being “active,” he has to put words, his own poetic and extensive writings, in motion. (shrink)

Althusser's entire theoretical undertaking has one objective and can be summarized in a single paradox. The objective is defined in 1965 in the opening lines of Pour Marx: “the research into Marx's philosophical thought, which is indispensable if we are to emerge from the theoretical impasse that history has left us in” (Althusser 1965, p. 11). The paradox is recalled in his lecture on “La Transformation de la Philosophie”: “Marxist philosophy exists, and yet it was not produced as philosophy” (Althusser (...) 1994, p. 149). (shrink)

Y a-t-il un art communiste? was given as a talk at the Grand Palais in Paris on 10 April 2019 on the occasion of a special exhibition, Red: Art and Utopia in the Land of the Soviets (Rouge: Art et utopie au pays des Soviets). The exhibition ran from 20 March 2019 to 1 July 2019. Red displayed works produced in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. This covers early experiments (...) by avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Mayokovsky and Kazimir Malevich, the grand-scale construction of public monuments, and the mass-produced art of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Like many of Jacques Rancière’s recent publications on art, this article closely engages the material of its source exhibit, and, in it, he addresses the full range of art staged by the Grand Palais, offering a direct and provocative confrontation with the question of whether there can be a communist art. (shrink)

From Almanac of Fall to The Turin Horse, renowned Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has followed the collapse of the communist promise. The “time after” is the time when we are less interested in histories and their successes or failures than we are in the delicate fabric of time from which they are carved.

When I first contacted Jacques Rancière in March 2017, nearly three-and-a-half years before the completion of this interview, a few basic questions were growing heavy. Questions limited to current political climates, trending philosophical systems, specific literary works, designated historical shifts, or particular Rancièrean terms would be reluctantly put aside in pursuit of certain elemental distinctions that might better inform the rest. The original proposal was to work around such slippery paradoxes as resistance, and to readdress tangible material like the letter, (...) but the overall idea, communicated from the start, was to produce a sort of reintroduction to Rancière's thought, for myself and an intended... (shrink)

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to (...) create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj i ek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time. (shrink)

Mi mtavor arkats -- Angeti dasě -- Havasarneri banakanutʻyuně -- Arhamarhankʻi hasarakutʻyuně -- Azatagroghě ev nra kapikě -- Anget usutsʻchʻi ardiakanutʻyuně.

Dissenting Words is a lively and engaging collection of interviews that span the length of Jacques Rancière's trajectory, from the critique of Althusserian Marxism and the work on proletarian thinking in the nineteenth century to the more recent reflections on politics and aesthetics. Across these pages, Rancière discusses the figures, concepts and arguments he has introduced to the theoretical landscape over the past forty years, the themes and concerns that have animated his thinking, the positions he has defended and the (...) wide range of objects and discourses that have attracted his attention and through which his thought has unfolded: history, pedagogy, literature, art, cinema. But more than reflecting on the continuities, turns, ruptures and deviations in his thought, Rancière recasts his work in a different discursive register. And the pleasure we experience in reading these interviews – with their asides, displacements and reconstructions – stems from the way Rancière transforms the voice of the thinker commenting on his texts and elucidating his concepts into another, and equally rich, manifestation of his thought. (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 (ethnologie de Lévi-Strauss, psychanalyse lacanienne, archéologie du savoir de Foucault) 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)