What Times Are We Living In?
- 75 pages
- 3 hours of reading
A leading radical thinker reflects on the state of contemporary politics--
Jacques Rancière Books
June 10, 1940
Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher whose work probes foundational concepts of political discourse, questioning ideology and the relationship between masses and knowledge. He famously broke with his mentor to explore how we perceive the disenfranchised and how thinkers engage with those outside intellectual circles. His later writings examine human rights, particularly the authority of international bodies in determining interventions and conflict, and his aesthetic theories have significantly influenced the visual arts.
Rethinking the role of the radical public intellectual
The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking
Returning politics to its original and necessary meaning: the organization of dissent
From Almanac of Fall (1984) to The Turin Horse (2011), renowned Hungarian filmmaker B la 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.
Aisthesis
- 304 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.
Althusser's Lesson
- 199 pages
- 7 hours of reading
The first English translation of Jacques Ranciere's first book, in which he explores and begins to move beyond the thought of his mentor, Louis Althusser.
The politics of aesthetics : the distribution of the sensible
- 116 pages
- 5 hours of reading
Aiming to rethink the relation between art and politics, this title seeks to reclaim aesthetics from its contemporary narrow confines to reveal its significance for contemporary experience. It ranges across art and politics, the uses and abuses of modernity, the role of visual technologies, and the relationship between history and fiction.
The critique of modernist ideology from France's leading radical theorist
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.
