Jacques Rancière

The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking.

The Emancipated Spectator

This extraordinary book can be read on several levels. Primarily, it is the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiled French schoolteacher who discovered in 1818 an unconventional teaching method that spread panic throughout the learned community of Europe. Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who know no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn. The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all people were equally intelligent. From this postulate, Jacotot devised a philosophy and a method for what he called "intellectual emancipation"--a method that would allow, for instance, illiterate parents to themselves teach their children how to read. The greater part of the book is devoted to a description and analysis of Jacotot's method, its premises, and (perhaps most important) its implications for understanding both the learning process and the emancipation that results when that most subtle of hierarchies, intelligence, is overturned. The book, as Kristin Ross argues in her introduction, has profound implications for the ongoing debate about education and class in France that has raged since the student riots of 1968, and it affords Ranciere an opportunity (albeit indirectly) to attack the influential educational and sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (and others) that Ranciere sees as perpetuating inequality.

Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

The Ignorant Schoolmaster

Bela Tarr, Ertesi Zaman

The Intervals of Cinema

The future of the image

Kelimelerin Mekânı

Outlines a new concept of the image in contemporary art to demonstrate how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined, in a provocative manifesto that traces the work of key thinkers and movements that seeks to demonstrate how contemporary theorists are suffering from religious tendencies as a result of political influences.

The Future of the Image

In this vehement defense of the principle of democracy, Jacques Ranciere argues that the West can no longer simply extol the virtues of democracy by contrasting it with the horrors of totalitarianism. With Western governments exporting democracy via brute force, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion willing to abandon civil liberties, Ranciere argues that true democracy-government by all-represents a challenge to all elitist forms of power, which has earned it the fear and hatred of the new ruling class. In a compelling and timely analysis, Hatred of Democracy rethinks the subversive power of the democratic ideal. 'This tastily sardonic essay is partly a scholarly sprint through the history of political philosophy, and partly a very enjoyable stream of insults directed at rival penseurs.' Guardian 'A piercing essay on the definitions and redefinitions of the term 'democracy'.' Times Higher Education Supplement 'In our time of the disorientation of the left, Ranciere's writings offer one the few consistent conceptualizations of how are to continue to resist' Slavoj Zizek

Hatred of Democracy

Rancière’s magnum opus on the aesthetic Aisthesis is Jacques Rancière’s long-awaited, definitive statement on aesthetics, art and modernity. The book comprises a string of dramatic and evocative locales, each embodying specific artistic tendencies and together spanning the modern era—from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, and visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the distinctions between the different arts along with the borders separating them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from conventional understandings of modernism.

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

المعلم الجاهل

The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-century France

Proletarian Nights

Essays on Temporality in Art and Politics

Modern Times

interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan

The method of equality

La nuit des prolétaires

O Destino das Imagens

This book is not concerned with the use of Freudian concepts for the interpretation of literary and artistic works. Rather, it is concerned with why this interpretation plays such an important role in demonstrating the contemporary relevance of psychoanalytic concepts. In order for Freud to use the Oedipus complex as a means for the interpretation of texts, it was necessary first of all for a particular notion of Oedipus, belonging to the Romantic reinvention of Greek antiquity, to have produced a certain idea of the power of the thought that does not think, and the power of the speech that remains silent. From this it does not follow that the Freudian unconscious was already prefigured by the aesthetic unconscious. Freud's "aesthetic" analyses reveal instead a tension between the two forms of unconscious. --From publisher's description.

The aesthetic unconscious

In this important new book the leading philosopher Jacques Rancière continues his reflections on the representative power of works of art. How does art render events that have spanned an era? What roles does it assign to those who enacted them or those who were the victims of such events? Rancière considers these questions in relation to the works of Claude Lanzmann, Goya, Manet, Kandinsky and Barnett Newman, among others, and demonstrates that these issues are not only confined to the spectator but have greater ramifications for the history of art itself. For Rancière, every image, in what it shows and what it hides, says something about what it is permissible to show and what must be hidden in any given place and time. Indeed the image, in its act of showing and hiding, can reopen debates that the official historical record had supposedly determined once and for all. He argues that representing the past can imprison history, but it can also liberate its true meaning.

Figures of History

On the shores of politics

El maestro ignorante/ The Ignorant Teacher

An essential analysis of cinema from one of the great figures of French philosophy. Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature’s images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre’s dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Rancière, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images.

Jacques Rancière

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