Product Description

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relation between art and politics, reclaiming 'aesthetics' from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance for contemporary experience. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics ranges across art and politics, the uses and abuses of modernity, the role of visual technologies, the relationship between history and fiction, utopias, the avant-garde and the three aesthetic regimes which constitute the 'partitions of the sensible.' Already translated into five languages, this English edition of The Politics of Aesthetics includes a new afterword by Slavoj Zizek and a new interview with Ranciere.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16153 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 116 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780826489548
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"'Locating the political significance of art has not only gone out of fashion, it has in recent years become a source of embarrassment. No one has argued against this repression with more precision, nuance, and undeniable force than Jacques Ranciere... This book, with an emphatic "Afterword" by Zizek, provides a riveting and compelling outline of the central elements of Ranciere's politics of aesthetics and its relation to his demanding rethinking of the political.' J.M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research 'A benchmark, this compact book shows why Ranciere is one of the most compelling thinkers and writers in France since Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.' Tom Conley, Harvard University 'This is possibly the most important essay, despite its length, since Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.' Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Visual Culture, Middlesex"

About the Author
Jacques Ranciere is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Paris VIII (St Denis) and a former student of Louis Althusser. His translated works include The Nights of Labour, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, The Names of History and Disagreement.

Customer Reviews

The Injunction of Aesthetics and Politics
Jacques Ranciere in The Politics of Aesthetics implicates aesthetics and politics as part of the same paradigm in a series of short essays and an interview. Ranciere poses three "regimes" in art: the 1) political/ethical, 2) poiesis/mimesis and 3) aesthetic. Using these regimes, Ranciere develops an acute sense of modernism and postmodernism on the basis that the former tried to represent the "teleology of historical evolution and rupture" (p. 28) and that the latter mournfully reversed the notion of historical contingency wholesale. Ranciere's address of a "politics of aesthetics" and "aesthetics to politics" posits an interesting injunction between what often seem two disparate fields of practice. The Politics of Aesthetics remarkably investigates two knotty matters: political theory and art-theory using methods derived from materialism and marxism.

Ranciere writes of art that it happens and, as such, makes visible. This visibility opens up multiple "universal" possibilities, contrary to the singularity of a universal transcendent truth of non-happening in art. Yet, Ranciere does not say what appearance these possibilities should have, but that they be aesthetic and political--a fascinating finding.

Blinging It Post Althusserian Marxist-Structuralist Style!!!
I have found this book entirely engrossing, despite some of the author's arcane writing style. The subtitle, The Distribution of the Sensible, is the major focus of the book,which is central to the author's ouevre. I find instances where he is building on both the notions of Foucault's power and knowledge equations of disciplinary discourse and Weber's processes of rationalization. The analysis of history as a possible fiction narrative is unique and erudite, as is his rethinking of Benjamin's "aura" in the arts as a distinction between mimesis and aesthetic forms of artistic production, which was a rethinking of Hegel's "Spirit". I dig it.

Burdensome words to contribute to fix the break between politics and aesthetics
The volume tries to capture a snapshot of Ranciere's thought and claim it as milestone for English reading audiences. It falls short on a few counts, from translation to clarity, from background to accessibility, to make it anything but novel.

Unfortunately what Ranciere sets to do, denouncing in part the manufactured and false divide between aesthetics and politics, is a very important aspect of contemporary culture, and despite its obvious constructions for many, plenty of mainstream conceptions still play with that divide at the heart of how they present their activity. However, not only Ranciere's discourse seems obscure and convoluted during most of its length but the fact that he is making any meaningful contribution, it's doubtful at best.

The so-called "rethink" rests on a close knitted terminology that Ranciere has made up to develop his train of though, hides plenty of references and precedents, and should be better called reinvention rather than "rethinking". If one does not embed entirely the reading within his terminology, one may quickly realize the simplification of terms he falls commonly into, or ignoring entirely significant contributions that have explored in a much more inviting and meaningful terms concepts that he picks ups rhetorically ad nauseam.

This might be significant for some in a close follow-ship of Ranciere, the way his thought was developed, or the way one needs to admire and justify the professorship he held before his retirement, which carries the title of the volume.

The book comes adorned with a pompous translator preface and introduction and a cumbersome and often uncomfortably translated series of chapters slated in a semi-false interview structure to unveil topics of Raunciere's work. The volume also includes a glossary of "technical terms", which comes to mean the often self referential lingo used by Ranciere to offer his circular work, and if you want to be game, that is where one might want to start the reading.