Oliver Davis 
Jacques Rancière [PDF ebook] 

This book is a critical introduction to contemporary French
philosopher Jacques Rancière. It is the first introduction in
any language to cover all of his major work and offers an
accessible presentation and searching evaluation of his significant
contributions to the fields of politics, pedagogy, history,
literature, film theory and aesthetics.

This book traces the emergence of Rancière’s thought
over the last forty-five years and situates it in the diverse
intellectual contexts in which it intervenes. Beginning with his
egalitarian critique of his former teacher Louis Althusser, the
book tracks the subsequent elaboration of Rancière’s
highly original conception of equality. This approach reveals that
a grasp of his early archival and historiographical work is vital
for a full understanding both of his later politics and his ongoing
investigation of art and aesthetics.

Along the way, this book explains and analyses key terms in
Rancière’s very distinctive philosophical lexicon,
including the ‘police’ order,
‘disagreement’, ‘political subjectivation’,
‘literarity’, the ‘part which has no part’,
the ‘regimes of art’ and ‘the distribution of the
sensory’.

This book argues that Rancière’s work sets a new
standard in contestatory critique and concludes by reflecting on
the philosophical and policy implications of his singular project.

Tabella dei contenuti

Preface vii

Acknowledgements xiii

1 The Early Politics: From Pedagogy to Equality 1

Althusser’s lesson 2

Platonic inequality in Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu 15

Jacotot and radical equality 25

2 History and Historiography 36

Les Révoltes Logiques (1975-81) 36

The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century
France [1981] 52

The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge [1992]
57

Conclusion 72

3 The Mature Politics: From Policing to Democracy 74

Politics and ‘the police’ 76

Rancière’s structural account of democracy: the ‘wrong’ and
the miscount 80

Political ‘subjectivation’ 84

The aesthetic dimension of politics: the ‘division’ or
‘distribution’ of ‘the sensory’ (le partage du sensible) 90

Overall assessment of Rancière’s account of politics 92

4 Literature 101

‘What is literature?’ 102

Writing, literarity . . . and literature 107

Rancière as reader 115

5 Art and Aesthetics 126

Aesthetic experience and equality: with Kant and Gauny, against
Bourdieu 128

The regimes of art 134

Film and film theory 138

Contemporary art, politics and community 152

Afterword 160

Notes 162

References 191

Index 207

Circa l’autore

Oliver Davis is Associate Professor of French Studies and Programme Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts at the University of Warwick.