Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2009)

Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today’s calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.

Translated by Steven Corcoran
Publisher Polity, 2009
ISBN 074564631X, 9780745646312
176 pages

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Jacques Rancière: The Future of the Image (2007)

A leading philosopher presents a radical manifesto for the future of art and film

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Rancière argues that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies. He suggests that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution will always embrace egalitarian ideals.

Published by Verso, London, 2007
ISBN: 1844671070, 9781844672974
160 pages

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Jacques Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000-)

“The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming “aesthetics” from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible.

Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Rancière’s work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age.”

First published as Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique, La Fabrique, 2000.

Translated with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill
With an afterword by Slavoj Žižek
Published by Continuum, 2004
ISBN 0826489540, 9780826489548
116 pages

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