Politics of Aesthetics

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. Gabriel Rockhill is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, USA. He also teaches at the Centre Parisien d'Etudes Critiques and the Collège International de Philosophie, France. He is the author of Logique de l'histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (Editions Hermann, 2010) and Pour un historicisme radical: Entre esthétique et politique avec Rancière (Editions du Sandre, forthcoming).

"Jacques Rancière is one of the most important and original contemporary French philosophers. This book provides perhaps the best available introduction to his thought in English. Its main contents are two interviews with Rancière...they provide an extraordinarily concise and systematic summary by Rancière of the main themes of his recent work across its whole range. Rancière's project is promising. It is illuminating to see aesthetics as political and politics in aesthetic terms, as a form of the 'distribution of the sensible.'" -Culture Machine

• Translator's preface: The Reconfiguration of Meaning Translator's Introduction: Jacques Ranciere's Politics of Perception \ The Politics of Aesthetics \ Foreword \ The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity \ Mechanical Arts and the Promotion of the Anonymous \ Is History a Form of Fiction? On Art and Work \ Interview with Jacques Ranciere for the English Edition: The Janus-Face of Politicized Art \ Historical and Hermeneutic Methodology \ Universality, Historicity, Equality \ Positive Contradiction \ Politicized Art \ Afterword by Slavoj Zizek: The Lesson of Ranciere \ Appendix I: Glossary of Technical Terms \ Appendix II: Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources \ Index.