Mute Speech

by Ranciere, Jacques; Swenson, James; Rockhill, Gabriel

• ISBN13: 9780231151030
• ISBN10: 0231151039
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-10-07
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Throughout his career, shaped by a notable collaboration with Louis Althusser, Jacques Ranci re has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly by examining its relationship to aesthetics. Like Michel Foucault, he broke with his many of his predecessors to upend dominant twentieth-century historical narratives and critical theories. Often overlooked in the canon of his works, Mute Speech contains the critical seeds of Ranci re's most provocative assertions, challenging the intellectual orthodoxy that had come to define the nature of art and representation. Arguing that art is neither inherently political nor colonized by politics, Ranci re casts art and politics as "distributions of the sensible," or configurations of what are visible and invisible in experience. Through an original reinterpretation of German Romanticism and phenomenology, especially the work of its most prominent figures Kant and Hegel, and engaging with the thought of Germaine de Sta l, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Blanchot, among others, Ranci re reevaluates conceptions of art in various decades, from the classical age of representation to the modern, anti-representational turn and its promise of political transformation. Rather than dwell on modernity's "crisis of representation," he celebrates the triumph of realism in modern aesthetics, which for him is the true representative art. Opening radical new vistas onto the history of art and philosophy, Ranci re pioneers a theory of aesthetics in which democratic politics constitute the essence of art.

Author Biography

Jacques Rancire is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Paris VIII. Among his major works translated into English are The Future of the Image, The Philosopher and His Poor, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, and The Politics of Aesthetics (edited with Gabriel Rockhill). Gabriel Rockhill is assistant professor of philosophy at Villanova University and program director at the Collge International de Philosophie. He is the author of Logique de l'histoire and coeditor of the Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, as well as coauthor of Jacques Rancire: History, Politics, Aesthetics. James Swenson is associate professor of French and dean of humanities at Rutgers University. He is the author of On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution and a well-known translator of tienne Balibar and Jacques Rancire.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Through the Looking Glass-The Subversion of the Modernist Doxa	p. 1
Introduction: From One Literature to Another	p. 29
From Restricted to General Poetics
From Representation to Expression	p. 41
From the Book of Stone to the Book of Life	p. 52
The Book of Life and the Expression of Society	p. 62
From Generalized Poetics to the Mute Letter
From the Poetry of the Future to the Poetry of the Past	p. 73
The Book in Pieces	p. 86
The Fable of the Letter	p. 93
Writing at War	p. 101
The Contradictions of the Work of Literature
The Book in Style	p. 113
The Writing of the Idea	p. 128
Artifice, Madness, the Work	p. 145
Conclusion: A Skeptical Art	p. 167
Notes	p. 177
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