Jacques Rancière

In this vehement defence of democracy, Jacques Rancière explodes the complacency of Western politicians who pride themselves as the defenders of political freedom. As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version of democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Rancière argues that true democracy—government by all—is...

The Emancipated Spectator by Jacques Rancière addresses the complex relationship between the viewer and the artwork, questioning the longstanding notion that spectators are passive observers. The book delves into the efforts of modern artists and thinkers who strive to transform the act of viewing into a participatory and engaging experience, turning passive spectators into active participants and reimagining the spectacle...

Jacques Rancière's first major work, Althusser's Lesson, appeared in 1974, just as the energies of May '68 were losing ground to the calls for a return to order. Rancière's analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser's Reply to John Lewis in...

Chekhov’s short stories offer a subtle yet powerful message: that there is potential for change in our lives. Contrary to the image of a desolate soul, they reveal Chekhov as a beacon of hope and freedom. His narratives delve into the very essence of time, juxtaposing the relentless monotony of servitude with the glimmering moments that fracture this cycle, hinting...

Faced with growing inequalities and new forms of domination and exploitation, can the movement of emancipation take on a new life today, or has it been arrested by the powers of repression and normalization? In order to address this question, Jacques Rancière pays close attention to the sociopolitical rhythms of our time, listening for the figures of trembling and oscillation...

What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality – this was the thesis of Aristotle’s Poetics. The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted. Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness, and ignorance...

The development of Rancière’s philosophical work, from his formative years through the political and methodological break with Louis Althusser and the lessons of May 68, is documented here, as are the confrontations with other thinkers, the controversies and occasional misunderstandings. So too are the unity of his work and the distinctive style of his thinking, despite the frequent disconnect between...

The Time of the Landscape is not the time when people started describing gardens, mountains, and lakes in poems or representing them in works of art; it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. It is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature led to...

The global triumph of democracy was announced thirty years ago, promising an age of consensus in which the dispassionate consideration of objective problems would give birth to a world at peace. Today, these grand hopes lie in ruins, and the era touted as new has turned out to be remarkably similar to the old order. To understand why this might...

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing 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...

In this book, the influential philosopher Jacques Rancière, in discussion with Peter Engelmann, explores the enduring connection between politics and aesthetics, arguing that aesthetics forms the fundamental basis for social and political upheaval. Beginning from his rejection of structuralist Marxism, Rancière outlines the development of his thought from his early studies on workers’ emancipation to his recent work on literature,...

In Film Fables, Jacques Rancière turns his critical eye to the history of modern cinema. Combining an extraordinary breadth of analysis with an attentiveness to detail born from an obvious love of cinema, Rancière shows us new ways of looking at and interpreting film. His analysis moves effortlessly from Eisenstein and Murnau's transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang's...

The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers represent social structures or political struggles. The expression politics of literature assumes that there is a specific connection between politics as a form of collective practice and literature as a historically determined regime of the art of...

Chekhov's fiction offers a subtle yet powerful message: another life is possible. Something can always happen to our lives – a possibility that breaks the monotony of servitude and points to a different, more liberated existence. This is the way to approach all these brief tales of lost lives, nights filled with tears and joy, landscapes, or love, against the...

It is frequently said that we are living through the end of politics, the end of social upheavals, the end of utopian folly. Consensual realism is the order of the day. But political realists, remarks Jacques Rancière, are always several steps behind reality, and the only thing which may come to an end with their dominance is democracy. We could,...

The time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing gardens, mountains and lakes in poems or representing them in works of art: it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. It is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature led to...