jacques rancière history, politics, aesthetics jacques rancière gabriel rockhill and philip watts, eds. duke university press durham and london 2009 ∫ 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Katy Clove Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Contents Introduction / Jacques Rancière: Thinker of Dissensus gabriel rockhill and philip watts 1 part one: history 1. Historicizing Untimeliness kristin ross 15 2. The Lessons of Jacques Rancière: Knowledge and Power after the Storm alain badiou 30 3. Sophisticated Continuities and Historical Discontinuities, Or, Why Not Protagoras? eric méchoulan 55 4. The Classics and Critical Theory in Postmodern France: The Case of Jacques Rancière giuseppina mecchia 67 5. Rancière and Metaphysics jean-luc nancy 83 part two: politics 6. What Is Political Philosophy? Contextual Notes étienne balibar 95 7. Rancière in South Carolina todd may 105 8. Political Agency and the Ambivalence of the Sensible yves citton 120 9. Staging Equality: Rancière’s Theatrocracy and the Limits of Anarchic Equality peter hallward 140 10. Rancière’s Leftism, Or, Politics and Its Discontents bruno bosteels 158 11. Jacques Rancière’s Ethical Turn and the Thinking of Discontents solange guénoun 176 part three: aesthetics 12. The Politics of Aesthetics: Political History and the Hermeneutics of Art gabriel rockhill 195 13. Cinema and Its Discontents tom conley 216 14. Politicizing Art in Rancière and Deleuze: The Case of Postcolonial Literature raji vallury 229 15. Impossible Speech Acts: Jacques Rancière’s Erich Auerbach andrew parker 249 16. Style indirect libre james swenson 258 Afterword / The Method of Equality: An Answer to Some Questions jacques rancière 273 Notes 289 Bibliography 327 Index 341 Contributors and Translators 355 Acknowledgments This collection of essays has its earliest origins in a conference organized by Philip Watts at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2005 entitled Jacques Rancière: Politics and Aesthetics. We would like to thank the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh, and in particular Monika Losagio, as well as Dean John Cooper and Associate Dean Jim Knapp for their generous support. We would also like to thank the graduate students in French at the University of Pittsburgh for their participation, and Melissa Deininger for her design of the conference program. Given the high quality of the presentations and the growing interest in Rancière’s work, we began discussing the possibility of editing a volume of essays. This idea was bolstered by the success of the con- ference organized at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy la Salle in May 2005, where Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy presented the papers included in this collection. After the conference we contacted Étienne Balibar, who kindly agreed to let us translate one of his essays that examines Rancière’s arguments in Dis-agreement. In order to in- clude an essay on Rancière’s important contribution to film theory, we also contacted Tom Conley for his well-known work in this area. Finally, Rancière himself was kind enough to write the afterword. We would like to express our immense gratitude to him for his support and generosity in helping complete this project. As all of those who have had the pleasure to work with him already know, his intellectual prowess goes hand in hand with a profound benevolence. We would like to thank all of the contributors to this collection as well as all of those who have helped bring this longstanding project to com- pletion, including Courtney Berger and Ken Wissoker at Duke Univer- sity Press, and the translators who graciously agreed to work with us on this project: John Hulsey, Philip E. Lewis, Catherine Porter, and Tzuchien Tho. viii Acknowledgments Introduction Jacques Rancière: Thinker of Dissensus gabriel rockhill and philip watts Jacques Rancière has written some of the most significant philosophic work to be published in French in the last forty years. His corpus to date extends well beyond traditional philosophic boundaries, and includes engagements with the fields of history, politics, sociology, literary the- ory, literary history, art, psychoanalysis, and film theory. Although he has an explicit aversion to systematic philosophies, it is clear that he has developed a unique and robust project that is helping reshape academic disciplines and contemporary thought about the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics. If his reception in the English-speaking world has not kept apace with his rise to prominence in France and other parts of the world, it is in part due to the fact that his idiosyncratic work does not fit comfortably within the dominant models of intellectual importation. Although he is still sometimes mistakenly classified as a structuralist because of his early contribution to Louis Althusser’s Lire le Capital (1965), his first book was a virulent collection of essays upbraiding his former maître (La leçon d’Althusser, 1974), and he has repeatedly criticized the dis- course of mastery and the logic of hidden truths, which he identifies with the structuralist project reaching back to Marx.∞ At the same time, there are a number of patent markers that di√erentiate his work from that of his ‘‘poststructuralist’’ compatriots, including his aversion to compulsive textualism (visible in the general lack of direct quotations and his allergy to etymology), his angst-free relationship to Hegel, his general indi√erence toward phenomenology, his lack of deference to ethico-religious forms of alterity, his criticisms of the ethical turn in politics, his disregard for the supposed specters of metaphysics and the project of deconstruction, and his intense commitment to history that has led him beyond the canonical writers of the philosophic tradition. His distance from what is called poststructuralism should have been visible in the opening lines of his very first book, where he not only rejected the structuralist distinction between science and ideology, but where he also forcefully declared his distance from Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, often identified as members of the ‘‘poststruc- turalist’’ avant-garde. From the very beginning, Rancière was interested in developing a research agenda that broke with the dominant intellec- tual paradigm of his student years—structuralism—without following the lead of the ‘‘philosophers of di√erence.’’ One of the fundamental objectives of this collection of essays is to show that Rancière does not fit comfortably within either of these iden- tifiable movements, and that this is precisely one of the reasons why his work should be of interest today. Rather than rehearsing what have now become the familiar arguments of his immediate predecessors or simply exercising a form of exegetical thinking by updating the work of a single grand master from the past, Rancière has patiently elaborated a dis- tinct project with its own conceptual vocabulary and analytic strate- gies. His work also maintains a sharp polemical edge, as he regularly attacks prevailing assumptions and tenaciously dismantles their under- lying theoretical framework. He is a veritable thinker of dissensus who is constantly undermining what is easily taken to be the solid footing of previous philosophic work in order to resist the consensual systems of discourse and action that are in place. The second major goal of this collection is to emphasize the breadth of Rancière’s project and its relevance to a large number of current de- 2 gabriel rockhill and philip watts bates. For organizational purposes, we have chosen to divide the book into three sections, each one corresponding to the three principal areas of research Rancière has contributed to: history, politics, and aesthetics. Given the richness and depth of his work, as well as his distrust of insti- tutional and disciplinary boundaries, it should come as no surprise that the essays grouped together in each of these sections touch on a myriad of di√erent domains, ranging from the history of philosophy, art, and literature to political theory, aesthetics, historiography, psychoanalysis, ethics, and film. They also elucidate and explore the relationships be- tween Rancière and the various authors and artists he has analyzed, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Mallarmé, Auerbach, Bourdieu, Deleuze, and Badiou. The third and final goal of this collection is to critically engage with Rancière’s work. Rather than waning into laudatory hagiography or sectarian repetitions of Rancière’s lyrical style, the authors take his work as a crucial reference point in current debates, whose force comes not only from providing answers but also from proposing methods and raising important questions. In other words, the contributors to this collection aim not only at elucidating Rancière’s project but also at critically responding to it from their own perspectives. history Jacques Rancière has consistently engaged with the writing of history, with institutional and narrative constructions of time, and with the ways in which individuals and communities can disrupt what he has called the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible).≤ Seeking to draw attention to these ruptures and their potential for producing social change, Rancière has frequently argued with historians and social theo- rists who, even as they seemed to take