Jacques Rancière

In this vehement defense of the principle of democracy, Jacques Ranciere argues that the West can no longer simply extol the virtues of democracy by contrasting it with the horrors of totalitarianism. With Western governments exporting democracy via brute force, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion willing to abandon civil liberties, Ranciere argues that true democracy-government by all-represents a challenge to all elitist forms of power, which has earned it the fear and hatred of the new ruling class. In a compelling and timely analysis, Hatred of Democracy rethinks the subversive power of the democratic ideal. Social & Political Philosophy. Political Structures: Democracy.

Réflexion sur l'évolution depuis Platon des critères de distinction de ceux qui peuvent légitimement philosopher, et de la perception du philosophe et de sa pensée par ces concitoyens non-philosophes, sur la philosophie dans le rapport entre classe dominante et classe dominée, etc.

In this title, the foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of seeing. The role of the viewer in art and film theory revolves around a theatrical concept of the spectacle. The masses subjected to the society of spectacle have traditionally been seen as aesthetically and politically passive - in response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a performance. In this follow-up to the acclaimed "The Future of the Image", Ranciere takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. Beginning by asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, instead, a melancholic affirmation of their omnipotence?

'This collection shows us Jacques Ranciere at his best. The chronicle is ideally suited for his style of thinking. Ranciere philosophizes with a fine razor blade to take apart all the presuppositions behind our present-day consensus yet the effect is as fatal and irreversible as if he had used a sledge hammer.'-Bruno Bosteels. In this fascinating collection, Jacques Ranciere, one of the world's most important and influential living philosophers, explores the nature of consensus in contemporary politics. Consensus is not peace. Instead it refers to a map of operations of war, of a topography of the visible, of what is possible and what can be thought, in which war and peace live side-by-side. Lying at the heart of these consensual times are new forms of racism and ethnic cleansing, humanitarian wars and wars against terror. Consensus also implies using time in a way that sees in it a thousand devious turns. This is evident in the incessant diagnoses of the present and of amnesiac state politics, in the farewells to the past, the commemorations, and the calls to remember. All these twists and turns tend toward the same goal: to show that only one reality exists and that we have to consent to it. But democratic politics stands in the way of this undertaking. These chronicles aim to re-open the space in which it can again be thought. --Book Jacket.

Democratic malaise, political disarray and panic: a year after Francois Hollande's election, things aren't looking good. Jacques Ranciére and Pierre Rosanvallon, two major thinkers and theorists of democracy, attempt to understand our moral and political predicament. --from publisher description.

"A leading radical thinker reflects on the state of contemporary politics"--

The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers represent social structures or political struggles. The expression 'politics of literature' assumes that there is a specific connection between politics as a form of collective practice and literature as a historically determined regime of the art of writing. It implies that literature intervenes in the parceling out of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and the invisible, that is the arena of the political. This book seeks to show how the literary revolution shatters the perceptible order that underpinned traditional hierarchies, but also why literary equality foils any bid to place literature in the service of politics or in its place. It tests its hypotheses on certain writers: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hugo, Mallarmé, Brecht and Borges, to name a few. It also shows the consequences of this for psychoanalytical intepretation, historical narration and philosophical conceptualization. -- Publisher description.

"In this book, Jacques Rancie re explores how political relations develop fundamentally from sensual experience, as individual feelings become the concern of the whole community. Since politics emerges then from the 'division of the sensual', aesthetic experience becomes a radical means for social and political upheaval"--

James Coleman (b.1941) is one of the most prominent Irish artists working today. This publication accompanies the most ambitious staging of James Coleman's work in Ireland.

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 the thought that does not think, and the power of the speech that 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. --From publisher's description.