Book 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. Here, Jacques Ranciere develops a critical aesthetic that goes far beyond the paradigms of modernism and modernity and their 'posts' which still haunt us. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, Critical 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 introduction by Slavoj Zizek and a new interview with Ranciere in which he situates his writing within the context of the work of, amongst others, Foucault, Barthes, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Derrida, Badiou, Balibar and Zizek. 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, On the Shores of Politics and Disagreement
The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible FROM THE PUBLISHER
"The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics outside of the models established by the Marxist tradition, the Frankfurt School, and the more recent contributions made by the post-structuralists. Reclaiming aesthetics from the narrow confines it is often reduced to, Jacques Ranciere reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analyzing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible." Presented as a series of interlinked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Ranciere's work to date. Ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age, it includes incisive analyses of the uses and abuses of the concept of modernity, the relationship between art and mechanical reproduction, the logic of facts and fiction in history, the positive contradiction at work in modern literature, and the notion of politicized art.
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