 |
GetTextbooks.co.uk
Compare Prices & Save up to 90% |
|
|
|
| Login | Sign up | Settings | My Wish List |
 | | The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Ranciere ISBN-10: 9780826489548 ISBN-10: 0-8264-8954-0 ISBN-13: 9780826489548 ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-8954-8 Paperback 2006-07 Continuum Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description "The Politics of Aesthetics" rethinks the relation between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance for contemporary experience. Here, Jacques Ranciere develops a critical aesthetic that goes far beyond the paradigms of modernism and modernity and their 'posts' which still haunt us. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, "The Politics of Aesthetics" ranges across art and politics, the uses and abuses of modernity, the role of visual technologies, the relationship between history and fiction, utopias, the avant-garde and the three aesthetic regimes, which constitute the 'partitions of the sensible.' Already translated into five languages, this English edition of "The Politics of Aesthetics" includes a new afterword by Slavoj Zizek and a new interview with Ranciere in which he situates his writing within the context of the work of, amongst others, Foucault, Barthes, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Derrida, Badiou, Balibar and Zizek. | ||
Reviews | ||
The Injunction of Aesthetics and Politics Jacques Ranciere in The Politics of Aesthetics implicates aesthetics and politics as part of the same paradigm in a series of short essays and an interview. Ranciere poses three "regimes" in art: the 1) political/ethical, 2) poiesis/mimesis and 3) aesthetic. Using these regimes, Ranciere develops an acute sense of modernism and postmodernism on the basis that the former tried to represent the "teleology of historical evolution and rupture" (p. 28) and that the latter mournfully reversed the notion of historical contingency wholesale. Ranciere's address of a "politics of aesthetics" and "aesthetics to politics" posits an interesting injunction between what often seem two disparate fields of practice. The Politics of Aesthetics remarkably investigates two knotty matters: political theory and art-theory using methods derived from materialism and marxism. Ranciere writes of art that it happens and, as such, makes visible. This visibility opens up multiple "universal" possibilities, contrary to the singularity of a universal transcendent truth of non-happening in art. Yet, Ranciere does not say what appearance these possibilities should have, but that they be aesthetic and political--a fascinating finding. | ||
Interesting essays badly translated. This sort of book is always a pig in a poke and the pig is the translation. the translater here, one Gabriel Rockhill, is either very badly edited by Continuum (always possible) or is a dreadful writer. If you want an introduction to Ranciere, read _The Ignorant Schoolmaster_, which is translated by kristin Ross. I can't imagine why Continuum put out such a shoddily edited book, except maybe they figured, cynically, it would be read by art students, on whom actual prose is wasted. If you're in art school, you're already wasting thousands on a useless degree, but here is sixteen dollars that you can save. Don't buy this book. | ||
Blinging It Post Althusserian Marxist-Structuralist Style!!! I have found this book entirely engrossing, despite some of the author's arcane writing style. The subtitle, The Distribution of the Sensible, is the major focus of the book,which is central to the author's ouevre. I find instances where he is building on both the notions of Foucault's power and knowledge equations of disciplinary discourse and Weber's processes of rationalization. The analysis of history as a possible fiction narrative is unique and erudite, as is his rethinking of Benjamin's "aura" in the arts as a distinction between mimesis and aesthetic forms of artistic production, which was a rethinking of Hegel's "Spirit". I dig it. | ||