Jacques Rancière Book order

The global triumph of democracy was announced thirty years ago, promising an age of consensus in which the dispassionate consideration of objective problems would give birth to a world at peace. Today, these grand hopes have been destroyed, and the era touted as new and exceptional has turned out to be remarkably similar to the old order – but not simply due to the aggression of external forces. Instead, we must look to the nature of consensus itself, which, in the view of leading radical philosopher Jacques Rancière, is revealed as a violent, absolutized capitalist machine whose output is ever more inequality, exclusion and hate. This book delivers a frank and piercing assessment of the globalised capitalist consensus. The invasion of Iraq, the riots on Capitol Hill and the rise of the European far right all provide evidence of the consummation of consensual realism, as does the current state-sanctioned racism which exploits the disenchanted progressive tradition and is led by an intelligentsia that claims to be left-wing. At the same time, Rancière also praises the dynamism of social movements which affirm the power of the assembly of equals and its capacity for worldmaking: autonomous protest collectives have proven themselves capable of opening breaches in the consensual order and challenging the post-1989 system of domination.

The critique of modernist ideology from France's leading radical theorist

Rethinking the role of the radical public intellectual

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

"What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality -- this was the thesis of Aristotle's Poetics. The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted. Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness and ignorance into knowledge. In the modern age, argues Ranciére, this fictional rationality was developed in new ways. The social sciences extended the model of causal linkage to all spheres of human action, seeking to show us how causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations. Literature took the opposite path. Instead of democratizing fictional rationality to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed its principles by abolishing the limits that circumscribed a reality peculiar to fiction. It aligned itself with the rhythms of everyday life and plumbed the power of the "random moment" into which an entire life is condensed. In the avowed fictions of literature as well as in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the central question is the same: how to construct the perceptible forms of a shared world. From Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa and from Marx to Sebald, via Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, Proust, Rilke, Conrad, Auerbach, Faulkner and some others, this book explores these constructions and sheds new light on the constitutive movement of modern fiction, the movement that shifted its centre of gravity from its traditional core toward those edges in which fiction gets confronted with its possible revocation"-- Provided by publisher

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.

In The Lost Thread, Ranci�re debunks the notion of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Conrad, Woolf and Keats as reactionary producers of bourgeois mythologies, and instead foregrounds the egalitarian and democratic impulses of modernist literature. Contrary to the canonical interpretation of the relation between modernism and capitalism via the commodification of everyday life, Ranci�re proposes a radical rethinking of our received ideas regarding the politics of aesthetics in the modern era. Through a complex and original stitching together of form and content, modernists strove to depict by embodying new forms and regimes of material and everyday life. Ranci�re articulates this substantial change in the politics of representation by explaining the shattering of the sacrosanct hierarchies of the genres and life-forms of classical literature. In the midst of the 19th century, poets, novelists and playwrights challenged the narrative staples of noble means and moral ends, and introduced an entirely new "structure of feeling". In this work, Ranciere continues his project of outlining an egalitarian "distribution of the sensible" as the compelling linkage between politics and aesthetics in the modern age. The Lost Thread not only advances Ranci�re's commended work on aesthetics, it also offers the reader in depth analyses of the writers in question.

In Film Fables Jacques Ranciere turns his critical eye to the history of modern cinema. Combining an extraordinary breadth of analysis with an attentiveness to detail born from an obvious love of cinema, Ranciere shows us new ways of looking at and interpreting film. His analysis moves effortlessly from Eisenstein's and Murnau's transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang's confrontation with television, from the classical poetics of Mann's Westerns to Ray's romantic poetics of the image, from Rossellini's neo-realism to Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema. The book also includes extended commentaries on the work of Hitchcock, Godard, Vertov and Bergman. Film Fables is essential reading for anyone wanting to gain a better understanding of the power and complexity of the cinematic form and it's rich history.

Originally published: [Caen]: NOUS, 2016, under the title Le sillon du poaeme: en lisant Philippe Beck.

The development of Rancière’s philosophical work, from his formative years through the political and methodological break with Louis Althusser and the lessons of May 68, is documented here, as are the confrontations with other thinkers, the controversies and occasional misunderstandings. So too are the unity of his work and the distinctive style of his thinking, despite the frequent disconnect between politics and aesthetics and the subterranean movement between categories and works. Lastly one sees his view of our age, and of our age’s many different and competing realities. What we gain in the end is a rich and multi-layered portrait of a life and a body of thought dedicated to the exercise of philosophy and to the emergence of possible new worlds.