Rancière Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics

New York, London: Continuum. 2010. 236 p. ISBN: 978-1-8470-6445-5Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Rancière's most recent writings on art and politics to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.In this fascinating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière's ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a ‘politics of art' might be.This important collection includes several essays that have never previously been published in English, as well as a brand new afterword. Together these essays serve as a superb introduction to the work of one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers.Acknowledgements
Editor's IntroductionThe Aesthetics of PoliticsTen Theses on Politics
Does Democracy Mean Something?
Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?
Communism: From Actuality to Inactuality
The People or the Multitudes?
Biopolitics or Politics?
September II and Afterwards: A Rupture in the Symbolic Order?
Of War as the Supreme Form of Advanced Plutocratic ConsensusThe Politics of AestheticsThe Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes
The Paradoxes of Political Art
The Politics of Literature
The Monument and Its Confidences; or Deleuze and Art's Capacity of 'Resistance'
The Ethical Tum of Aesthetics and PoliticsResponse to CriticsThe Use of DistinctionsNotes