Böcker av Jacques Ranciere

Jacques Ranciere has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "e;distributions of the sensible,"e; which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Ranciere'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. Ranciere argues that our current notion of "e;literature"e; 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, "e;literature"e; 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, Mallarme, and Proust, Ranciere demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention.

"e;Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?"e;In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Ranciere highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it.Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.

From Almanac of Fall (1984) to The Turin Horse (2011), renowned Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr has followed the collapse of the communist promise. The "time after" is the time when we are less interested in histories and their successes or failures than we are in the delicate fabric of time from which they are carved.

"Is there any such thing as political philosophy?" So begins this provocative book by one of the foremost figures in Continental thought. Here, Jacques Ranci re brings a new and highly useful set of terms to the vexed debate about political effectiveness and "the end of politics." What precisely is at stake in the relationship between "philosophy" and the adjective "political"? In Disagreement, Ranci re explores the apparent contradiction between these terms and reveals the uneasy meaning of their union in the phrase "political philosophy"--a juncture related to age-old attempts in philosophy to answer Plato''s devaluing of politics as a "democratic egalitarian" process. According to Ranci re, the phrase also expresses the paradox of politics itself: the absence of a proper foundation. Politics, he argues, begins when the "demos" (the "excessive" or unrepresented part of society) seeks to disrupt the order of domination and distribution of goods "naturalized" by police and legal institutions. In addition, the notion of "equality" operates as a game of contestation that constantly substitutes litigation for political action and community. This game, Ranci re maintains, operates by a primary logic of "misunderstanding." In turn, political philosophy has always tried to substitute the "politics of truth" for the politics of appearances. Disagreement investigates the various transformations of this regime of "truth" and their effects on practical politics. Ranci re then distinguishes what we mean by "democracy" from the practices of a consensual system in order to unravel the ramifications of the fashionable phrase "the end of politics." His conclusions will be of interest to readers concerned with political questions from the broadest to the most specific and local.

This work reveals the significant impact of historiography on the human sciences during the 20th century.