Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (review)

Jacques Rancière is one of a number of contemporary French philosophers whose work can be seen as taking place at the confluence of two factors: the influence of the structuralist or post-structuralist discourses of Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and Lacan, and the events of May 1968. Rancière's thought focuses on a particular configuration of the relation between these two factors, the relation between discourses of knowledge — even discourses that subvert or claim to subvert knowledge — and events of rupture, specific interlocutions, and/or dissensual voices. Different versions of Rancière's affirmation of untimely instances that upset the agreed order and temporality of things are elucidated and explored in this excellent book, which can work both as an introduction to Rancière's thought and as a critical assessment thereof. The volume, consisting of sixteen chapters, originated in a 2005 Pittsburgh conference, but adds essays by French philosophers Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, and Jean-Luc Nancy, who belong to the same generation as Rancière, an essay by Tom Conley on Rancière's writing on cinema, and an Afterword by Rancière himself. The book is organized into the three sections of the subtitle, signalling the three domains in which Rancière's contribution has been most acute, although a significant aspect of his thought involves a challenge to the orthodox divisions according to which the sensible world has been shared out (the notion of 'le partage du sensible', the title of a key work of 2000). Cross-referencing is made possible by a detailed index. Each section of the book includes essays that will be of vital interest to students and academics in French studies (but, evidently, not only within this field), whichever of the three domains identifies their mode of interest. Kristin Ross's essay, for example, the first in the 'History' section, looks at Rancière's challenge to 'functionalist' modes of historiography, but also uses Rancière's affirmation on untimely voices as a tool to unpick what she sees as the 'spatial' rhetoric operating in late poststructuralism (in de Certeau, for example). Still within this section, the essays by Éric Méchoulan and Giuseppina Mecchia address the use Rancière makes of classical sources. In the following section Peter Hallward, Todd May, Yves Citton, Bruno Bosteels, and Solange Guénoun discuss sympathetically, yet also polemically, Rancière's place, role, and potential in terms of political philosophy and action. The third section focuses on Rancière's contribution to aesthetics, which is significant. Subtle negotiations with the thought of Gilles Deleuze — on cinema and on art — is a particular feature of some of the contributions here, including Conley's discussion of Rancière's notion of the 'redemptive typology' (p. 226) shared by Deleuze and Godard in their respective summative histories. Each chapter in this volume is an engaging and valuable critical engagement with Rancière, and, while the book as a whole makes a persuasive case for a thorough and urgent reading of Rancière's work, it is also a useful critical supplement to it.