Abstract
Political theory has increasingly turned toward the thought of French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Those engaging his work are drawn by his attempt to map a middle ground between top-down, elitist models of administration and order – what he would call la police – and an utterly unclassifiable modality of free play. By contrast, Rancière deems ‘politics’ (la politique) quite rare, achieved in the spasmodic dissensus and ‘interruptions’ where equality is affirmed by those alleged to be equal, yet not counted within the established order. However, Rancière can be challenging, as he resists notions of normativity, eschews traditional intellectual divisions and generally shuns attempts at systematisation and classification.
This volume offers sixteen essays which sympathetically and critically engage Ranciere's thought, organised according to the themes in the subtitle – history, politics and aesthetics. These contributions are largely drawn from a 2005 conference at the University of Pittsburgh, but the editors have added contributions from Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar and Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as a brief response from Rancière himself. The essays offer important insights into Rancière's work: situating Rancière in relation to his contemporaries (Badiou), examining his engagement with the classics (Ross, Méchoulan), highlighting the utility of Rancière's thought in understanding contemporary injustice (May), analysing the promises and risks inherent in his unique understanding of politics (Bosteels, Hallward), as well as the synergy Rancière sees between politics and aesthetics (Rockhill, Conley, Parker).
This collection has many positive attributes. It contextualises Rancière's work in a way that one cannot achieve through reading him directly, offering a companion to his core writings. In addition, nearly all of the pieces infuse Rancière's work with a sense of urgency and timeliness that can often be lost in volumes focused on a single thinker. The intellectual and political ‘stakes’ of engaging Rancière are eloquently articulated here. The downsides are endemic to this type of volume. There are points of repetition, as the authors present the same central ideas and claims in their respective contributions. In addition, as the volume aims to be comprehensive in scope, some pieces are of far greater interest to scholars in film and literary studies than political theorists. These minor shortcomings aside, the volume is an impressive and much-needed discussion of Rancière's thought and should prove invaluable to those with an interest in his work.