Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Jacques Rancière is (and has been for some time now) doing some of the most interesting work in contemporary philosophy. His gesture is a radical historicization, a situation of organizing categories in their historical context and logic (a gesture which leads Badiou to call him an anti-philosopher); it is a historicization which serves not to limit, but rather to open up new and creative lines of flight. This is an excellent introductory collection to one of today’s most creative thinkers of art and politics.
— From SamDescription
Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Ranci re'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, Ranci re 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 Ranci re'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. Ranci re 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.
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) and A Lost Thread (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics (2006) and Conditions (Continuum, 2008).
