The Future of the Image

by Jacques Ranciere

Overview

Lauded by major contemporary artists and philosophers, Jacques Rancière’s work returns politics to its central place in understanding art.

In The Future of the Image,Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image incontemporary art, showing how art and politics have always beenintrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, filmmakers such as Godard and Bresson, andthinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard andGreenberg, Rancière shows that contemporary theorists of the image aresuffering from religious tendencies.

He argues that there is a starkpolitical choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy,or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never apure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarianideals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788736565
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	09/03/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	276 KB

About the Author

Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. His books include The Politics of Aesthetics, On the Shores of Politics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, The Nights of Labor, Staging the People, and The Emancipated Spectator.

Gregory Elliott is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and author of Althusser: The Detour of Theory and Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Decay of Labour England?.

Table of Contents

Sources of Texts     vii
The Future of the Image     1
Sentence, Image, History     33
Painting in the Text     69
The Surface of Design     91
Are Some Things Unrepresentable?     109
Notes     139
Index     143

What People are Saying About This

Slavoj Zizek

In our time of the disorientation of the left, his writings offer one of the few conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist.

Liam Gillick

In the face of impossible attempts to proceed with progressive ideas within the terms of postmodernist discourse, Rancière shows a way out of the malaise.

Kristin Ross

His art lies in the rigor of his argument – its careful, precise unfolding –
and at the same time not treating his reader, whether university professor or unemployed actress, as an imbecile.

Editorial Reviews

Much of the value of Rancière’s writings on art and aesthetics arises from his initial refusal of terms that are self-evident to the point of invisibility.”
—Frieze

“It is too simplistic to say that Jacques Rancière is the anti-Bourdieu. But it is not inaccurate. Robustly conceptual where Bourdieu is empirical, abstractly philosophical where Bourdieu was sociologically precise, he offers a recasting of aesthetic questions that attempts implicitly to rescue the category of the aesthetic from the learned helplessness, or cynical reason, in which Bourdieu left it.”
—Nicholas Dames, n+1

“His art lies in the rigor of his argument—its careful, precise unfolding—and at the same time not treating his reader, whether university professor or unemployed actress, as an imbecile.”
—Kristin Ross

“In the face of impossible attempts to proceed with progressive ideas within the terms of postmodernist discourse, Rancière shows a way out of the malaise.”
—Liam Gillick

“In our time of the disorientation of the left, his writings offer one of the few conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist.”
—Slavoj Žižek

“It’s clear that Jacques Ranciere is relighting the flame that was extinguished for many—that is why he serves as such a signal reference today.”
—Thomas Hirschhorn

“Like all of Jacques Rancière’s texts, The Future of the Image is vertiginously precise.”
—Les Cahiers du Cinema


“What we see here is Rancière developing a unique voice as a political theorist.”
—Variant

From the Publisher

A series of gratifyingly knotty and close discussions of nineteenth and twentieth century literature, film and painting.

Guardian

It's clear that Jacques Ranciere is relighting the flame that was extinguished for many—that is why he serves as such a signal reference today.

Thomas Hirschhorn

French philosopher Jacques Ranciere is a refreshing read for anyone concerned with what art has to do with politics and society.

Art Review

What we see here is Ranciere developing a unique voice as a political theorist.

Bookforum

Ranciere's writings offer one of the few conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist.

Slavoj Zizek

Like all of Jacques Rancière’s texts, The Future of the Image is vertiginously precise.

Les Cahiers du Cinema