Politics of Literature

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.

Literature & Fiction

Jacques Rancière

History & Criticism

Polity

Short Voyages to the Land of the People (Atopia: Philosophy, Political Theory, Aesthetics)

This book analyzes a range of texts that seek, in different ways, to represent "the people." Rancière approaches these texts as travel narratives or ethnographies whose authors have traveled not to distant or exotic lands but across class lines. In this truly comparative study, he examines Wordsworth's poetry, the utopian discourse of the Saint-Simoniens, the correspondence and theater of Büchner, Claude Genoux's Mémoires d'un enfant de la Savoie, Michelet's theories of history, the prose and poetry of Rilke, and the performance of Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's postwar film Europe 51. Rancière examines the various forms of displacement that affect his subjects, enabling each to become foreign to the sites and trajectories commonly known as reality. He argues convincingly that "the people" have no proper signification in the texts under consideration, instead, they function as points of reality upon which the voyager can drape a conceptual framework shaped by the circumstances not of the other, but of the self.

James B. Swenson

Stanford University Press

Disagreement: Politics And Philosophy

“Is there any such thing as political philosophy?” So begins this provocative book by one of the foremost figures in Continental thought. Here, Jacques Rancière brings a new and highly useful set of terms to the vexed debate about political effectiveness and “the end of politics.”
What precisely is at stake in the relationship between “philosophy” and the adjective “political”? In Disagreement, Rancière 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 Rancière, 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, Rancière 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. Rancière 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 to readers concerned with political questions from the broadest to the most specific and local.

Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Univ. of Minnesota Press

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.

The Philosopher and His Poor

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Duke University Press Books

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 does not mean 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 politics, in the farewells to the past, the commemorations, and the calls to remember. But all these twists and turns tend toward the same goal: to show that there is only one reality to which we are obliged to consent. What stands in the way of this undertaking is politics. These chronicles aim to re-open that space wherein politics once more becomes thinkable.

Chronicles of Consensual Times

Steven Corcoran

Continuum

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relation between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance for contemporary experience. Here, Jacques Ranciere develops a critical aesthetic that goes far beyond the paradigms of modernism and modernity and their 'posts' which still haunt us. 
Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, Critical Aesthetics ranges across art and politics, the uses and abuses of modernity, the role of visual technologies, the relationship between history and fiction, utopias, the avant-garde and the three aesthetic regimes which constitute the 'partitions of the sensible.' 
Already translated into five languages, this English edition of The Politics of Aesthetics includes a new introduction by Slavoj Zizek and a new interview with Ranciere in which he situates his writing within the context of the work of, amongst others, Foucault, Barthes, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Derrida, Badiou, Balibar and Zizek. 
Jacques Ranciere is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Paris VIII (St Denis) and a former student of Louis Althusser. His translated works include The Nights of Labour, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, The Names of History, On the Shores of Politics and Disagreement

The Politics Of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Arts & Photography

Continuum Intl Pub Group

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Rancière's work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age. Already translated into five languages, this English edition of The Politics of Aesthetics includes a new afterword by Slavoj Zizek, an interview for the English edition, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive bibliography.

The Politics of Aesthetics

Gabriel Rockhill

Bloomsbury Academic

Originally published in France in 1981, this first English translation of "Les Nuits des Proletaires" dramatically reinterprets the Revolution of 1830, contending that workers were not rebelling against specific hardships and conditions but against the unyielding predetermination of their lives. Through a study of worker-run newspapers, letters, journals, and worker-poetry, Ranciere reveals the contradictory and conflicting stories that challenge the coherence of these statements celebrating labor. Nineteenth-century workers sought out proletarian intellectuals, poets, and artists who were able to articulate their longings. At night, these worker-intellectuals gathered to write journals, poems, music, letters, and to discuss issues.The worker diatribes they composed served the purpose of escape from their daily worker lives. Unwilling to give in to sleep at night to repair the body for more manual labor, these 'migrants who moved at the borders between classes' regarded the night as their real life. They sought to appropriate for themselves the night of those who could stay awake and the language of those who did not have to beg. Once these workers and those whom they represented had glimpsed other lives, they fought for the possibility of living other lives.Thus, Ranciere disregards 'the majestic masses' and concentrates instead on the words and fantasies of a few dozen 'non representative' individuals those who performed the radical act of breaking down the time-honored barrier separating those who carried out useful labor from those who pondered aesthetics. "The Nights of Labor" incorporates the post-structuralist insistence on the production of meaning as a dynamic, conflictual process. Ranciere's method shares a common strategy with the deconstructionist technique of locating points in the text that reveal contradictions engendered by the suppression of 'writing'. In choosing to deconstruct the proletariat, Ranciere exposes its conflicts and strategies of containment. Jacques Ranciere, known as an early disciple of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, teaches philosophy at the Universite de Paris VIII. He co-authored "Lire le Capital" and founded the journal, "Les Revoltes Logiques".

The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France

Business & Money

Economics

Temple University Press

Jacques Rancière's first major work, Althusser's Lesson appeared in 1974, just as the energies of May 68 were losing ground to the calls for a return to order. Rancière's analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser's Reply to John Lewis in 1973? How to explain the rehabilitation of a philosophy that had been declared 'dead and buried on the barricades of May 68'? What had changed? The answer to this question takes the form of a genealogy of Althusserianism that is, simultaneously, an account of the emergence of militant student movements in the '60s, of the arrival of Maoism in France, and of how May 68 rearranged all the pieces anew. Encompassing the book's distinctive combination of theoretical analysis and historical description is a question that has guided Rancière's thought ever since: how do theories of subversion become the rationale for order?

Althusser's Lesson

Emiliano Battista

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Books by Jacques Rancière