Synopses & Reviews
This lively and thought-provoking collection of interviews with Jacques Rancière provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of his thought, from its beginnings during the Red Years in France to its most recent formulations. It supplements Rancière's scholarly and theoretical works with his reflections on the continuities, turns, ruptures and deviations in his thought. It does so in a conversational style replete with informative asides into current events and draws upon examples ranging from the history of the workers' struggle to literature, cinema and the arts - all of which we have learned to associate with Rancière.
The interview format offers an accessible introduction to some of Rancière's more complex theoretical formulations and key concepts. References to concrete contemporary political issues help to clarify the origins and significance of his interventions and their influence on his philosophy. The range of interviews from the course of Rancière's career provides an overview of the development of his thinking and its position in the context of political history.
Synopsis
Dissenting Words is a lively and engaging collection of interviews that span the length of Jacques Ranciere'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, Ranciere 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, Ranciere 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 Ranciere transforms the voice of the thinker commenting on his texts and elucidating his concepts into another, and equally rich, manifestation of his thought.
About the Author
Jacques Rancière taught at the University of Paris VIII, France, from 1969 to 2000, occupying the Chair of Aesthetics and Politics from 1990 until his retirement.
Emiliano Battista is the translator of Jacques Rancière's Althusser's Lesson (2011) and Film Fables (2006).
Table of Contents
Introduction by Emiliano Battista
1. The Fraternal Image (1976)
2. But If You're (1981)
3. A Visit to the People (1985)
4. The Politics of Writing (1994)
5. A History of Names and the Names of History (1994)
6. The Names of Film History (1995)
7. Is Politics Nothing But Police? (1999)
8. The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1999)
9. Man as Literary Animal (1999)
10. The Tomb of the End of History (2000)
11. Biopolitics or Politics? (2000)
12. Cinema and the Heterogeneity of Images (2001)
13. Politics is Not Coextensive with Life or the State (2001)
14. Deleuze Accomplishes the Aesthetic (2002)
15. People or Multitudes? (2002)
16. Community and Dissensus (2003)
17. Identifications of the People (2003)
18. The Current Relevance of The Ignorant Schoolmaster (2005)
19. Jacques Rancière as A-disciplinary (2006)
20. Anti-democracy: A New Discourse (2006)
21. There is No Future Waiting to be Born (2007)
22. The Politics of Literature (2007)
23. Critique of the Critique of the 'Spectacle' (2009)
24. Constructing the Spaces of Politics (2009)
25. May 68 and the Writing of Althusser's Lesson (2012)
Index