Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics

by Jacques Rancière, Steven Corcoran

Overview

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Rancière's most recent writings on art and politics to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.

In this fascinating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière's ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a 'politics of art' might be.

This important collection includes several essays that have never previously been published in English, as well as a brand new afterword. Together these essays serve as a superb introduction to the work of one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472583550
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/30/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.70(d)

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.

Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and/or translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (Continuum, 2010), two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics and Conditions, and Alienation and Freedom (Bloomsbury 2017) by Frantz Fanon.

Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and/or translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (Continuum, 2010), two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics and Conditions, and Alienation and Freedom (Bloomsbury 2017) by Frantz Fanon.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Editor's Introduction
Part I: The Aesthetics of Politics
1. Ten Theses on Politics
2. Does Democracy Mean Something?
3. Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?
4. Communism: From Actuality to Inactuality
5. The People or the Multitudes?
6. Biopolitics or Politics?
7. September 11 and Afterwards: A Rupture in the Symbolic Order?
8. Of War as the Supreme Form of Advanced Plutocratic Consensus
Part II: The Politics of Aesthetics
9. The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes
10. The Paradoxes of Political Art
11. The Politics of Literature
12. The Monument and its Confidences; or Deleuze and Art's Capacity of 'Resistance'
13. The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics
Part III: Response to Critics
14. The Use of Distinctions
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Rewarding in its scholarly engagement with Derrida, Arendt, Lyotard et al ... [Rancière] has a certain sardonic precision.

An accessible introduction to Rancière's thought and an essential collection of his essays.

Steven Corcoran has provided a timely and coherently organized collection of Rancière's short writings, one that can stand as a solid introduction to the author's thought...There is a distinct shift of emphasis that occurs in Rancière's writings around the late 1990's, however, and the task of a good collection would be to capture both periods and the thematic interaction between them. The writings gathered here, which date from 1996 to 2004, perform both tasks admirably...For those who seek to get a sense of both the richness and the breadth of the work of one of the most significant thinkers of our time, Dissensus provides a valuable resource. I can think of no better starting point than this collection.

Title mention in Times Higher Education, January 2010

From the Publisher