Introduction: Rancière's Sentiments

Unpublished manuscript, 2015

This study aims to determine what is left of the philosophical belief in art’s potential to bring about social emancipation and change early in the 21st century. It does so by critically assessing one of the most elaborate, emphatic and influential contemporary re-assertions of this potential by French philosopher Jacques Rancière. It focuses on three components of Rancière’s writings on aesthetics and politics that are key to such an evaluation. First, his affirmation of an emancipatory core at the heart of Idealist-Romanticist aesthetics, the aesthetic works of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich von Schiller in particular. Second, his reconceptualization of autonomous and heteronomous forms of political art in the modern era. Third, his critical analyses of dominant tendencies within political art from the 1960s until today and his own proposals for a truly emancipatory contemporary art practice. With regard to the first component, the project problematizes Rancière’s return to aesthetics mainly by comparing it with theories recently articulated by other radical Leftist thinkers. It concerns theories that emphasize the contradictory political status of aesthetics as both reactionary and liberating (Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson) or point to a constitutive, original violence at its heart (Dave Beech & John Roberts). Based on this, I argue that Rancière’s redemptive approach toward aesthetics is too one-dimensional, resulting in an overly positive assessment of the emancipatory value of traditional conceptions of aesthetics. In relation to the second key aspect of Rancière’s political aesthetics, I demonstrate how he offers a typically third way solution to the problematic of art’s autonomy and heteronomy. He does so by integrating some of the most complex twentieth century theorizations of both autonomous (Theodor Adorno) and heteronomous positions (Peter Bürger) into a dialectical working model. I argue that, regrettably, Rancière hereby also takes on board deeply tragic views on art’s political potential, resulting in an overcautious stance towards radically heteronomous art practices. Apart from critiquing him on this score, I point to alternative conceptualizations of art’s autonomy and heteronomy more suited to thinking the key characteristics and political potential of contemporary radicalized art. As to Rancière’s critique of recent political art practices and his proposed alternative, I find it to be driven by a misguided attempt at conceiving the radical political potential of art in purely aesthetic terms to the neglect of other functions traditionally taken up by political artists such as representation and activism. I contend that not only can such a purist view on art’s politics not be upheld in fact - which even holds for Rancière’s own, alternative aesthetic politics of art - neither is it desirable if one wants to devise a robust and versatile theoretical framework for thinking contemporary politicized art. I do so by pointing to the radical political value of representational artistic strategies, as well as artistic practices that engage in activities beyond those traditionally associated with art.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2018

Jacques Rancière's wide-ranging and difficult to categorize work has recently gained increasing attention in English-speaking political theory. Davide Panagia's Rancière's Sentiments is a unique and exciting contribution to this vibrant literature. Panagia's work is unique in two respects. First, it specifically focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Rancière's oeuvre. Second, rather than trying to explain or contextualize Rancière's work, Panagia chooses to put on display what he identifies as Rancière's distinctive mode of reading and writing: his 'sentimental mode' (p. 36). Accordingly, Panagia's book seeks to challenge extant sensibilities and perceptibilities, and open up new possibilities of thinking, seeing, and doing, by, among others, 'position[ing] things that typically don't belong together alongside (rather than against) one another' (p. 12). The result is a dense and absorbing volume that positions Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Second Discourse, Aristotle's Poetics and Metaphysics, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and the debates that took place in the pages of the journal Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, alongside Rancière's writings, including those that have largely been overlooked by political theorists, such as Film Fables, The Future of the Image, Politics of Literature, and, most significantly, Aisthesis. Through his juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate works and Rancière's oeuvre, Panagia not only offers a forceful and provocative reading of Rancière but also presents a compelling, if disorienting, account of what it means to practice political theory without being 'committed to the prescription of concepts, ideas, and norms for the purpose of a political program' (p. 5). Rancière's Sentiments begins with an engaging preface that sets Rancière's thinking about aesthetics and politics against various forms of 'judgment-oriented political theory' (p. x). According to Panagia, politics of judgement, even in its most astute accounts, such as that of Linda Zerilli, rests on a pre-political 'commitment to the authority of responsiveness that compels one to have to provide reasons about one's forms of perceptibility and sensibility' (p. xii). In contrast to this view of politics, which calls upon the subject to 'elicit criteria for counting', Rancière's politics is 'about the making count' (p. xi), where political subjects

Epistemological, Ethical and Political Issues in Modern Philosophy, 2018

Eray Yag anak / Ahmet Umut Hacıfevziog lu (eds.) Epistemological, Ethical and Political Issues in Modern Philosophy This edited collection of essays aims to acquaint the reader with different aspects of the contemporary philosophy. The contributors to this book provide a genuinely scholarly basis for the understanding of the philosophical issues on epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. Each author provides an in-depth analysis of various aspects of the problems, such as democracy, ground of the law, epistemology of ignorance, public and private sphere distinction.

Continuum Publishing , 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage viii CONTENTS 3.2 Three Regimes of Art 3.3 Equality in Art 3.4 In Place of Modernity 3.5 Against Postmodernity 3.6 Art as Dissensus Conclusion Chapter 4: Regimes of Cinema Introduction 4.1 A Historical Poetics of Cinema 4.2 Cinema, the Dream of the Aesthetic Age 4.3 The Logic of the Thwarted Fable 4.4 Allegories of Modernity: Deleuze and the Use of Hitchcock 4.5 Cinema and Its Century: Godard and the Abuse of Hitchcock Conclusion Chapter 5: Beyond Rancière ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Books rarely have simple origins. They emerge from multiple contexts, respond to various conversations, and bespeak numerous relationships only too fleetingly hinted at in their pages. This book is no exception. It was undertaken with the support of the Chalsty Initiative in Aesthetics and Philosophy, the Provost's Office, and the Division of Humanities and Sciences at California College of the Arts. While working on this study, I profited greatly from conversations with colleagues, students, and friends, many of whom were generous enough to read and discuss portions of what I wrote. In particular, I would like to thank

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2022

This article explores Jacques Rancière's critique of political philosophy. I argue that, to understand this critique, it is necessary to explore the aesthetic dimension of philosophers' politics, pointing out that, at its foundation, lies a certain understanding of time that, paradoxically, negates political practice. To get out of this paradox, I point out that Rancière proposes a politics of writing that allows us to understand political practice from the point of view of a heterochronic and conflictive form of time. This approach, which distances itself from the Western tradition of political thought, allows us to address the concepts of contingency and equality in a radical way.

This article explores the force and limitations of Jacques Rancière's novel attempt to rethink the relationship between aesthetics and politics. In particular, it unravels the paradoxical threads of the fundamental contradiction between two of his steadfast claims: (1) art and politics are consubstantial, and (2) art and politics never truly merge. In taking Rancière to task on this point, the primary objective of this article is to work through the nuances of his project and foreground the problems inherent therein in order to break with the "talisman complex" and the "ontological illusion" of the politics of aesthetics in the name of a new understanding of the social politicity of artistic practices.

Continental Philosophy Review, 2017

Jacques Rancière's work has become a major reference point for discussions of art and politics. However, while Rancière's negative theses (about what "political art" is not) are becoming widespread and well understood, his positive thesis is still poorly understood, owing partly to Rancière's own formulation of the issue. I first clarify Rancière's account of the links between politics and art. I then explore a gap in this account; Rancière has stuck too closely to a politics of art's reception. I argue for a politics of art production, which would expand the possible engagement between politics and art.

2023

This paper argues that much of Jacques Rancière's redefinition of emancipation owes a lot to one key character from his archival research on nineteenth-century worker-poets, Louis-Gabriel Gauny, the self-proclaimed plebeian philosopher. This is especially the case in regard to Rancière's understanding of subjectivation forming a double of the self and a double of social reality as worlds within worlds. The paper puts forward that Gauny's form of emancipation is valid today as an aesthetic revolution that reveals Rancière's practices of equality to be an emancipatory way of life. In doing so, it will engage with Gauny's connection with the contemporary precariat.

Peter Lang, Berlin-New York-Wien 2023

Jerzy Franczak comprehensively presents Jacques Rancière’s thought by emphasizing the relationship between politics and literature. This detailed analysis takes into account the context of modern aesthetics and political philosophy, as a result, the book introduces further protagonists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, or Jean-François Lyotard. Franczak first reconstructs Rancière’s original philosophy of literature and subsequently apply it in readings of select world literature masterpieces by Gustav Flaubert, Max Jacob, Bertold Brecht, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip Roth.

This paper considers Jacques Rancière's influential theory of the relation between aesthetics, politics, and art. First, it synthesizes Rancière's theory. Second, it offers a critical perspective of Rancière's conception of the autonomy of art in relation to his theory of politics and aesthetics. In doing so, the purpose is to work towards the development of a theoretical base in which we may follow Rancière's theory of the relation between aesthetic experience and politics whilst avoiding compliance with his relatively fixed and structural notion of the autonomy of art as an attribute of what he calls the aesthetic regime of art. Drawing a distinction between the autonomous experience of the work of art and the ideology of the autonomy of art, this paper argues that the prior comes about both within and in opposition to the latter: the autonomy of art hinges on a relative and relational production of a singularity, not on a structural and defining separation of art from the world of habitual aesthetic experience.