Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism ed. by Patrick Bray (review)

This edited volume is published in the"Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism" series, which places philosophers into dialogue with theories of modernism and problematics in modernist studies. Jacques Rancière is a logical choice for this series, not least of all because, as Rancière states in the interview that closes the volume, his work "takes as a starting point the total critique of the concepts of modernism and modernity" (263). The book is divided into four parts: "Conceptualizing Rancière"provides critical readings of some of Rancière's major works;"Rancière and Aesthetics"offers a broad consideration of Rancière's work in relation to modernist aesthetics across media and disciplinary boundaries; part three is a glossary of key terms, and part four is an illuminating interview with Rancière. There is, to be sure, a tension in this volume between the task of providing an accessible overview of Rancière's important ideas and the task of exploring new, productive ways of reading Rancière. The first of these tasks is admirably performed, but the richness of this volume really emerges from the way that the contributors expertly draw out the significance of Rancière's challenge to the category of modernism—and, by extension, the category of postmodernism—while also pushing back against the inevitable oversights or blind spots of Rancière's thought. To give but a few examples, Bettina Lerner argues for the need to dig deeper into how gender and class divisions might inflect Rancière's analyses (36); David F. Bell's reading of Le fil perdu (2014) urges Rancière to undertake "an engagement with Marxism beyond Sartre," one which would, in particular, take into account the work of Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson (124); Suzanne Guerlac's dazzling reading of Rancière's essays on Proust amplifies some of Rancière's major insights while suggesting the necessity of additional, more nuanced considerations of photography (175) and temporality in Proust (177). A number of the essays in this volume also offer helpful reflections on Rancière's overt and covert rendezvous with the thought of important figures like Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. However, while Giuseppina Mecchia touches on how Rancière critiques the assumptions of structuralist poetics (99), I would have been interested to read more analysis of Rancière's disagreements with analytic aesthetic philosophers like Jean-Marie Schaeffer, notably in Malaise dans l'esthétique (2004). Such an analysis would offer further insight into how Rancière reads literature for plot—a subject broached by Margaret C. Flinn (74)—and, secondarily, into how Rancière might understand the importance of traditions of genre fiction today—contemporary literature is, intriguingly, only discussed in passing in this volume. Such small suggestions notwithstanding, on the whole this is an excellent volume which provides both a detailed overview of Rancière's key ideas and concepts, and a persuasive demonstration of why these ideas should matter to anyone who is trying to understand what, for better or worse, we tend to call modernism.