Jacques Rancière: Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (1998–) [ES, EN]

“Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic “distributions of the sensible,” which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière’s corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of “literature” is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, “literature” is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature’s still-vital capacity for reinvention.”

First published in French as La Parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature, Hachette Litteratures, 1998

English edition
Translated by James Swenson
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
New Directions in Critical Theory series
ISBN 0231151039, 9780231151030
194 pages

publisher (EN)

La palabra muda: ensayo sobre las contradicciones de la literatura (Spanish, trans. Cecilia González, 2009, 112 MB, added on 2014-3-6)
Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (English, trans. James Swenson, 2011)

Élisabeth Roudinesco: Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought (1993-) [Spanish/English]

Jacques Lacan remains not only one of the foremost intellectuals of the century, but also one of the most controversial. As a young doctor he set out to reinvent clinical psychotherapy and ended up transforming fundamental notions of the self, sexuality and the culture that shapes it all. This first major biography of Lacan is a fascinating portrait of his life and a masterful explication of the unorthodox, often perplexing ideas that brought him renown. 22 photos.

Originally published in French as Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un systeme de pensee, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1993

Spanish edition
Translated by Tomás Segovia
Publisher FCE, Argentina, 1994, FCE, Colombia, 2000
ISBN 9505572107, 9789505572106
815 pages

English edition
Translated by Barbara Bray
Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 1997
European Perspectives series
ISBN 0231101465, 9780231101462
574 pages

google books (EN)

Lacan: Esbozo de una vida, historia de un sistema de pensamiento (Spanish, 1994)
Lacan: A Biography (English, 1997, DJVU, no OCR)

Paul Ricœur: Memory, History, Forgetting (2000/2004)

“Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France’s role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history “overly remembers” some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.

Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricœur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricœur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricœur’s Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.”

Originally published in French as La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Le Seuil, 2000

Translated by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2004
ISBN 0226713415, 9780226713410
642 pages

Publisher

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