"Recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot"--Vii.

"Recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot" -- vii.

Although relatively unknown a decade ago, the work of Jacques Ranciere is fast becoming a central reference in the humanities and social sciences. His thinking brings a fresh, innovative approach to many fields, notably the study of work, education, politics, literature, film, art, as well as philosophy. This is the first, full-length introduction to Ranciere's work and covers the full range of his contribution to contemporary thought, presenting in clear, succinct chapters the key concepts Ranciere has developed in his writings over the last forty years. Students new to Ranciere will find this work accessible and comprehensive, an ideal introduction to this major thinker. For readers already familiar with Ranciere, the in-depth analysis of each key concept, written by leading scholars, should provide an ideal reference.

Demonstrates the importance of Rancière's educational thought and how educational theory needs to be informed by his philosophical project.

The development of Rancière’s philosophical work, from his formative years through the political and methodological break with Louis Althusser and the lessons of May 68, is documented here, as are the confrontations with other thinkers, the controversies and occasional misunderstandings. So too are the unity of his work and the distinctive style of his thinking, despite the frequent disconnect between politics and aesthetics and the subterranean movement between categories and works. Lastly one sees his view of our age, and of our age’s many different and competing realities. What we gain in the end is a rich and multi-layered portrait of a life and a body of thought dedicated to the exercise of philosophy and to the emergence of possible new worlds.

This book explores Marx's theory of the phenomenal forms in relation to critical pedagogy and educational action research, arguing that phenomenal forms pose a pedagogical obstacle to any endeavour that seeks to expand an individual's awareness of the larger social whole.

Jacques Rancière (born 1940) is one of the few living French philosophers to have established a significant dialogue with contemporary art. Rancière unites a politicized perspective on art's ability to rupture everyday life with his influential theorizations of education (The Ignorant Schoolmaster) and politics (The Nights of Labor). His profile has ascended dramatically in the U.S. over the past decade, and this volume considers the continuity of his work across aesthetics, politics and education. With essays by Evan Calder Williams, Arne de Boever, Claire Fontaine, Peter Friedl, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Maria Muhle, Frank Ruda, Jason E. Smith, Jan Voelker and Rancière himself, this volume asks the question: how might a new model of aesthetic education transform our concepts of art, politics and pedagogy?

"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.