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Reviewed by:
  • Jacques Rancière et la politique de l’esthétique
  • Hector Kollias
Jacques Rancière et la politique de l’esthétique. Edited by Jé Rôme Game and Aliocha Wald Lasowski. Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2009. 178 pp. Pb €25.00.

There is, at the moment, a proliferation of publications by and on Jacques Rancière, and in particular on his unique way of thinking together the realms of politics and aesthetics. Readers are referred, most recently, to a review by Patrick ffrench of an anglophone volume with almost the same title and preoccupations (see French Studies, 65 (2011), 126–27). Like that volume, the one here under review is also the product of a conference, in this case at the École Normale Supérieure in 2008; and like its anglophone counterpart, this volume leaves the last word to Rancière himself, in the form of an interview that is as lucid as it is engaging. Unlike the previous work, however, this collection is not helpfully subdivided into sections but presents disparate essays dealing with Rancière’s contributions to the fields of literature, film, politics, and aesthetics, as well as bringing him into dialogue with pre-eminent near-contemporary French thinkers such as Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, or Lyotard. There can be no doubt that Rancière’s thought deserves the attention it is so prolifically receiving, yet the question as to why another such volume is necessary or desirable becomes difficult to avoid. Nevertheless, ultimately this is a most welcome addition to the growing canon of Rancière scholarship, for two principal reasons. First, perhaps because of the familiarity with the general tenets of Rancière’s thought, as well as with the majority of his writings, that is quite rightly (given the proliferation already mentioned) more or less presumed, the essays in this volume tend to be involved, both critically and polemically, in depth as well as in range. This gives results that can sometimes be dense or too concerned with an author/participant’s own philosophical agenda, but it can also produce, for example in the case of Véronique Bergen’s formidable defence of Deleuze against Rancière, essays that combine polemics with a tangible critical engagement with both Rancière and his philosophical adversaries. The second reason, however, that this volume deserves its place among the many consecrated to Rancière, is more important and possibly more surprising. In essays such as Gabriel Rockhill’s fascinating defence of Rancière’s notion of democracy alongside a trenchant discussion of his worrying siding with reactionary stances over the 2005 riots, or Élie During’s startling decision to focus on the question of ‘accent’ while bringing Rancière’s work in dialogue with Derrida’s Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, readers get more than a glimpse of why Rancière’s thought can appear so vital in [End Page 556] contemporary discussions of aesthetics and politics. It is because such efforts bring Rancière almost violently out of context and into rich new grounds of argument and analysis that this volume deserves to be read. And it is because Rancière’s thought remains so amenable to such treatments, having become not only an indisputable canonic reference in recent French philosophy but also a potent springboard from which surprising and exciting new thought can develop, that this will certainly not be the last volume dedicated to this seminal figure.

Hector Kollias
King’s College London
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