Jacques Rancière

Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man

As we know, the question raised by my title took on a new cogency during the last ten years of the twentieth century. The Rights of Man or Human Rights had just been rejuvenated in the seventies and eighties by the dissident movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe— a rejuvenation that was all the more significant as the ‘‘formalism’’ of those rights had been one of the first targets of the young Marx, so that the collapse of the Soviet Empire could appear as their revenge. After this collapse, they would appear as the charter of the irresistible movement leading to a peaceful posthistorical world where global democracy would match the global market of liberal economy. As is well known, things did not exactly go that way. In the following years, the new landscape of humanity, freed from utopian totalitarianism, became the stage of new outbursts of ethnic conflicts and slaughters, religious fundamentalisms, or racial and xenophobic movements. The territory of ‘‘posthistorical’’ and peaceful humanity proved to be the territory of new figures of the Inhuman. And the Rights of Man turned out to be the rights of the rightless, of the populations hunted out of their homes and land and threat-

Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière

In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History, for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an “excess of words” that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth century. Similarly, in On The Shores of Politics, you begin your discussion with an excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you speak of “the part of those who have no-part” as voicing a “wrong” for the sake of equality. In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more generally) is very different from those thinkers of the “linguistic turn” in political philosophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democracies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus on the aporias of language as such. Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about democratic politics? Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic thinking as a “poetics of politics”?

The Politics of Literature

Original Sources Hypotheses - The Politics of Literature - Literary Misunderstanding Figures - The Putting to Death of Emma Bovary: Literature, Democracy and Medicine - On the Battlefield: Tolstoy, Literature, History - The Intruder: Mallarmes Politics - The Gay Science of Bertolt Brecht - Borges and French Disease Crossings - The Truth Through the Window: Literary Truth, Freudian Truth - The historian, literature and the genre of biography - The Poet at the philosophers: Mallarme and Badiou

The nights of labor : the workers' dream in nineteenth-century France

Authors Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Donald Reid Part I: The Man in the Leather Apron 1. The Gate of Hell 2. The Gate of Heaven 3. The New Babylon 4. Circuit Rounds and Spirals 5. The Morning Star Part II: The Broken Plane 6. The Army of Work 7. The Lovers of Humanity 8. The Hammer and the Anvil 9. The Holes of the Temple Part III: The Christian Hercules 10. The Interrupted Banquet 11. The Republic of Work 12. The Journey of Icarus Epilogue: The Night of October Outline Chronology

The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge

How should we understand the syntagm of my title? Obviously it is not a question of claiming that politics or knowledge must take on an aesthetic dimension or that they have to be grounded in sense, sensation, or sensibility. It is not even a question of stating that they are grounded in the sensible or that the sensible is political as such. What aesthetics refers to is not the sensible. Rather, it is a certain modality, a certain distribution of the sensible. This expression can be understood, at least initially, by turning to the text that has framed the space of aesthetics, though the term was never used there as a substantive. I mean, of course, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which I will use as a guiding thread in the construction of a tentatively more comprehensive concept of aesthetics. For now I only wish to draw from this text the three basic elements that make up what I call a distribution of the sensible. First, there is something given, a form that is provided by sense—for instance, the form of a palace as described in section two of Kant’s text. Second, the apprehension of this form is not only a matter of sense; rather, sense itself is doubled. The apprehension puts into play a certain relation between what Kant calls faculties: between a faculty that offers the given and a faculty that makes something out of it. For these two faculties the Greek language has only one name, aesthesis, the faculty of sense, the capacity to both perceive a given and make sense of it. Making sense of a sense given, Kant tells us, can be done in three ways. Two of the three ways define a hierarchical order. In the first of these, the faculty of signification rules over the faculty that conveys sensations; the understanding enlists the services of imagination in order to subordinate

A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière

When it comes to the appreciation of a thinker, there are two levels of investigation. One can examine his/her ideas, test their consistency, compare them with other thinkers’ ideas and judge the good or bad effects that they can produce when going from ‘theory’ to ‘practice’. But, at another level, one examines the way these ‘ideas’ are produced, the issues they address, the materials they select, the givens they consider significant, the phrasing of their connection, the landscape they map, their way of inventing solutions (or aporias), in short their method.

The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics

Abstract The ethical turn that affects artistic and political practices today should not be interpreted as their subjection to moral criteria. Today, the reign of ethics leads to a growing indistinction between fact and law, between what is and what ought to be, where judgement bows down to the power of the law imposing itself. The radicality of this law is that it leaves no choice, and is nothing but the simple constraint stemming from the order of things. This brings about an unprecedented dramaturgy of infinite evil, justice and redemption that can be traced not only in contemporary politics, but in philosophical reflection and film.

Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics

Communities of Sense argues for a new understanding of the relation between politics and aesthetics in today’s globalized and image-saturated world. Established and emerging scholars of art and culture draw on Jacques Ranciere’s theorization of democratic politics to suggest that aesthetics, traditionally defined as the “science of the sensible,” is not a depoliticized discourse or theory of art, but instead part of a historically specific organization of social roles and communality. Rather than formulating aesthetics as the Other to politics, the contributors show that aesthetics and politics are mutually implicated in the construction of communities of visibility and sensation through which political orders emerge. The first of the collection’s three sections explicitly examines the links between aesthetics and social and political experience. Here a new essay by Ranciere posits art as a key site where disagreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. In the second section, contributors investigate how sense was constructed in the past by the European avant-garde and how it is mobilized in today’s global visual and political culture. Exploring the viability of various models of artistic and political critique in the context of globalization, the authors of the essays in the volume’s final section suggest a shift from identity politics and preconstituted collectivities toward processes of identification and disidentification. Topics discussed in the volume vary from digital architecture to a makeshift museum in a Paris suburb, and from romantic art theory in the wake of Hegel to the history of the group-subject in political art and performance since 1968. An interview with Etienne Balibar rounds out the collection. Contributors . Emily Apter, Etienne Balibar, Carlos Basualdo, T. J. Demos, Rachel Haidu, Beth Hinderliter, David Joselit, William Kaizen, Ranjanna Khanna, Reinaldo Laddaga, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, Reinhold Martin, Seth McCormick, Yates McKee, Alexander Potts, Jacques Ranciere, Toni Ross

What Does it Mean to be Un

I wish to express my gratitude to Paul Magee and to the Cultural Studies Association of Australia who invited me to speak here today in the Parliament House. Needless to say, this is the first time in my life that I have spoken in a parliament, and it is a great honour for me. But I am aware of the responsibility that this privilege carries. As the only speaker in this conference to address you from this place, I should not only speak about UNAUSTRALIA but also embody UNAUSTRALIA in the place where Australia is embodied. If being unAustralian only meant ‘not being Australian’, this would be no problem. But then there would be no point in having me speak here. On the other hand, if it means being an Australian citizen who does not fit the mainstream Australian way of being, or even refuses it, then I am not entitled to play this role: I am neither a citizen of Australia nor a citizen of UNAUSTRALIA. In such a situation, what apparently remains to me is to comment on the un, and possibly embody it. It might be said that that is not much, and that it could be done anywhere. I shall try to reverse this statement. This is the right place for this exercise, because this is the place of the political representation of this nation and the whole of politics can be encapsulated in such little prefixes as ‘un’. Politics, in fact, is about matters of inclusion and exclusion. And it is about matters of relations between spaces and identities. In a similar fashion, I shall try to reverse this situation, by acting as if I were the right person to be speaking in this place. I am not entitled to speak here. I have no competence in relation either to Australia or UNAUSTRALIA. Yet this incompetence, or illegitimacy, may well make me the right person for discussing the relation between the fact of being incompetent—or unqualified—and the very sense of political community. Accordingly, I shall speak about the ‘un’, about the fact of being out of place, of not being entitled, of not belonging in one identity. And I shall try to say why I think that those un-qualifications point to the core of what politics means.

Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed

Atfirst sight there is somethingwrongwithmy title.Whenyouannounce that you will give the reason why a person was killed, you take for granted that he or she was killed, that his or her death was a murder. In this case however there exists strong textual evidence against the alleged fact. Even those who have never readMadame Bovary know at least one thing:nobody killed Emma, she committed suicide. Those who have read it know that, after absorbing the poison, she took care to write, “No one is guilty. . . .” Therefore the right question apparently reads as follows: Why did Emma Bovary commit suicide? The answer to that “right” question is well known: she killed herself because she could not pay her debts. She was indebted because of her extramarital love affairs. And she had love affairs because of the discrepancy between the life she had dreamed of, out of the romances she had read as a schoolgirl in a convent, and the life she had to live as the wife of a poor stubborn doctor in amurky, provincial, small town. In short, her suicide happened to be the last consequence of a chain of causes that reached back to a first mistake: as she had too much imagination, she had mistaken literature for life. Needless to say, it is easy to reach further back and invoke deeper social reasons: inappropriate education, social alienation,male domination, and so on. This is supposed to amount to apolitical account for the suicide. Clearly enough, if I decided to change the question and ask, against all evidence, why she had to be killed, it is because I was not satisfied with the logic of the answers, not satisfied with the kind of cause-and-effect relation that they implemented as a political account. It seemed to me that they