Jacques Rancière je francouzský filozof, jehož dílo se soustředí na klíčové pojmy politického diskurzu, jako je ideologie a role dělnické třídy ve vztahu ke znalostem. Odklonil se od svého učitele, aby prozkoumal, jak vnímáme masy a jejich postavení, a analyzoval například vztah filozofů k chudým. Jeho pozdější práce se zabývají právy člověka a rolí mezinárodních organizací při jejich prosazování, což se dotýká i otázek intervencí a války. Rancièreovy myšlenky o estetice se staly vlivnými ve vizuálním umění.
V knize Le maître ignorant (1987) nabízí Jacques Rancière, prostřednictvím biografie nevšedního lektora francouzské literatury v Lovani Josepha Jacotota, originální filosofickou reflexi, která se ani tak netýká filosofie výchovy, jako filosofie a politiky. To hlavní, co nás Rancièrův Jacotot učí, je, že se vzděláním je tomu jako se svobodou: nedává se, ale bere. Le maître ignorant představuje důležité dílo pro dějiny intelektuální emancipace. Kniha bude doplněna o úvodní studii, jež představí základní myšlenky díla v kontextu tehdejší i současné politické a sociální filosofie.
Ranciére se zde vrací ke kořenům politické filosofie (Platon, Aristoteles, Hobbes), aby demonstroval, jakým způsobem se střetávání politiky a filosofie vždy profilovalo na pozadí ambivalentního vztahu k tomu, co nazývá "díl lidí bez podílu", tedy části společenství, která si v té či oné podobě přisvojuje hlas tohoto společenství jako celku (athénský démos, moderní proletariát). Na základě této analýzy potom rozlišuje tři hlavní typy politiky, totiž arche-politiku, para-politiku a meta-politiku a v závěru knihy formuluje "výhledy", zasazující předchozí rozbory do současného kontextu. Kniha bezesporu patří k nejzásadnějším příspěvkům k post-marxistickému filosofickému i politickému myšlení.
"Jacques Ranciere has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Ranciere's corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Ranciere argues that our current notion of "literature" is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, "literature" is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarme, and Proust, Ranciere demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention."--Publisher description.
In Film Fables Jacques Ranciere 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, Ranciere shows us new ways of looking at and interpreting film. His analysis moves effortlessly from Eisenstein's and Murnau's transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang's confrontation with television, from the classical poetics of Mann's Westerns to Ray's romantic poetics of the image, from Rossellini's neo-realism to Deleuze's philosophy of the cinema. The book also includes extended commentaries on the work of Hitchcock, Godard, Vertov and Bergman. Film Fables is essential reading for anyone wanting to gain a better understanding of the power and complexity of the cinematic form and it's rich history.
"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 into knowledge. In the modern age, argues Ranciére, this fictional rationality was developed in new ways. The social sciences extended the model of causal linkage to all spheres of human action, seeking to show us how causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations. Literature took the opposite path. Instead of democratizing fictional rationality to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed its principles by abolishing the limits that circumscribed a reality peculiar to fiction. It aligned itself with the rhythms of everyday life and plumbed the power of the "random moment" into which an entire life is condensed. In the avowed fictions of literature as well as in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the central question is the same: how to construct the perceptible forms of a shared world. From Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa and from Marx to Sebald, via Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, Proust, Rilke, Conrad, Auerbach, Faulkner and some others, this book explores these constructions and sheds new light on the constitutive movement of modern fiction, the movement that shifted its centre of gravity from its traditional core toward those edges in which fiction gets confronted with its possible revocation"-- Provided by publisher
Consensus does not mean peace. Instead it refers to a map of operations of
war, of a topography of the visible, of what is possible and what can be
thought, in which war and peace live side-by-side. This book explores the
nature of consensus in contemporary politics. It aims to reopen that space
wherein politics once more becomes thinkable.
Dissenting Words is a lively and engaging collection of interviews that span the length of Jacques Rancière's trajectory, from the critique of Althusserian Marxism and the work on proletarian thinking in the nineteenth century to the more recent reflections on politics and aesthetics. Across these pages, Rancière discusses the figures, concepts and arguments he has introduced to the theoretical landscape over the past forty years, the themes and concerns that have animated his thinking, the positions he has defended and the wide range of objects and discourses that have attracted his attention and through which his thought has unfolded: history, pedagogy, literature, art, cinema. But more than reflecting on the continuities, turns, ruptures and deviations in his thought, Rancière recasts his work in a different discursive register. And the pleasure we experience in reading these interviews – with their asides, displacements and reconstructions – stems from the way Rancière transforms the voice of the thinker commenting on his texts and elucidating his concepts into another, and equally rich, manifestation of his thought.
