Jacques Ranciere

The contributors to this collection do not simply elucidate Ranciere’s project; they also critically respond to it from their own perspectives. They consider the theorist’s engagement with the writing of history, with institutional and narrative constructions of time, and with the ways that individuals and communities can disturb or reconfigure what he has called the “distribution of the sensible.” They examine his unique conception of politics as the disruption of the established distribution of bodies and roles in the social order, and they elucidate his novel account of the relationship between aesthetics and politics by exploring his astute analyses of literature and the visual arts. In the collection’s final essay, Ranciere addresses some of the questions raised by the other contributors and returns to his early work to provide a retrospective account of the fundamental stakes of his project.

Contributors. Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Yves Citton, Tom Conley, Solange Guenoun, Peter Hallward, Todd May, Eric Mechoulan, Giuseppina Mecchia, Jean-Luc Nancy, Andrew Parker, Jacques Ranciere, Gabriel Rockhill, Kristin Ross, James Swenson, Rajeshwari Vallury, Philip Watts

Garbiel Rockhill is an assistant professor of philosophy at Villanova University. He is edited and translated Jacques Ranciere’s The Politics of Aesthetics. Philip Watts is an associate professor of French at Columbia University. He is the author of Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France.

Philip Watts is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University. He is the author of Allegories of the Purge.