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- Volume 32, Issue 185, 2017
Maska - Volume 32, Issue 185-186, 2017
Volume 32, Issue 185-186, 2017
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The aesthetic revolution
More LessAbstractIn this paper Jacques Rancière outlines the main threads of his book Aisthesis and the overall logic connecting them. Aisthesis concerns the logic of what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art, the regime within which, from the mid-eighteenth century on, Art (with a capital ‘A’) comes to be identified as a sphere in its own right. This regime consists in a democratization of sensible experience, which in turn fosters the project of an aesthetic revolution in which the aim is to reshape the very forms of sensible experience. Rancière describes the aspects and logic of this unique project.
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The lost thread of strategy: Lord Jim, Jacques Rancière and dreaming
More LessAbstractThis paper discusses Rancière’s recent work The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction. Similar to his directly preceding work, Aisthesis, The Lost Thread explores the transformation of the very paradigm of fiction itself with the advent of modern realism in its break with the conventions of belles lettres. For Rancière, the specific logic of modern fiction, its democracy, consists in a logic of (im)purity that generates what he calls effects of equality. The specificity of modern fiction thus yields a rather different idea of the politics of fiction than that conveyed by modernist readings and epitomized by Roland Barthes’ notion of the reality effect. This paper discusses the logic of this change in fiction implicit within Rancière’s account, a logic the author refers to as ‘creative destruction’ in contradistinction to modernist dialectics; second, it explores the kind of subject implied by this fiction – where subject is understood both as the kind of limit situation that this fiction recounts and the constitution of its characters. Third, the author briefly suggests that Rancière’s reading of the logic of the event, in particular in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, can be seen as sketching an answer to why it is that the key question of ‘how are we to live?’ only ever comes after the event.
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Metaphorical and metonymical equality: From a rhetoric of society to an aesthetics of politics
By Rok BenčinAbstractThe notion of the division of the sensible allows Jacques Rancière to suspend and redraw the lines between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics, as well as between forms of political and aesthetic equality. The essay discusses Rancière’s work from a different angle, namely the distinction of two rhetorical figures, metaphor and metonymy, following Ernesto Laclau’s use of Gérard Genette’s reading of Proust as a model for his political theory. Outlining Rancière’s own use of the two figures as political models as well as his readings of Proust, the essay traces the differences between the rhetoric of society (Laclau) and the aesthetics of politics (Rancière).
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Fictioning disagreement: The construction of separation in the work of Jacques Rancière
By Bruno BesanaAbstractAlthough constantly intertwining aesthetic and political considerations, the work of Rancière also forcefully stresses the absence of any evidence in the relation between art and politics. The article uses the theme of this lack of self-evident relation in order to analyse a series of key-concepts of Rancière’s work (regime, contrariété, disagreement, etc.) and, lastly, proposes to read through this reconstruction of its conceptual architecture the place – both conceptual and practical – where a subject can be thought and produced. In this sense, this article proposes to read in Rancière’s work the presence of a structured concept of the subject, the very determination of which is inseparable from the – at once collective and singular – articulation of a space of indetermination and fracture: a space articulating the absence of relation between different modes of interruption of evidences, taking place in the arts and in politics. In this way, Rancière’s work contributes to thinking the subject as groundless, irrelative to any given, specific reality (such as, for instance, ‘humanity’), as a new form connecting together, via a radically new narrative, a series of fractures operated within received, allegedly ‘natural’ modes of classifications of reality.
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The refugee issue at the heart of political film
By Andrej ŠprahAbstractThe article addresses the issue of the refugee crisis through the perspective of the film opus of Portuguese director Pedro Costa and especially French documentarist Sylvain George in the light of Rancière’s analyses of their works. It focuses on the radical actions of depersonalization by which refugees revolt against the intolerable regulations of the migrant and asylum policy of the European Community. It draws from the analysis of the dialogue between Rancière and George to point out aspects of political film that strive to let individuals who are excluded from economic and social trajectories take charge of their own destinies: to reclaim the possibility of their own voice and a common space. This process of transcending the intolerable is established in the relationship between politics and aesthetics, which is simultaneously the relationship between the forms of (self-) articulation of the underprivileged and the form of art utilized by the filmmaker.
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‘You ought not to be obsessed with the idea that you have to intervene on every subject at every moment’: Interview with Jacques Rancière
Authors: Pia Brezavšček and Saška Rakef PerkoAbstractFor the conference The Aesthetic Regime of Art: Dimensions of Rancière’s Theory, organised by Maska, Radio Ars commissioned an interview with Jacques Rancière. The conversation focused on topics such as the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and the genesis of Rancière’s thinking, which has recently focused on aesthetics beyond the notion of beauty. We discussed the role of art in contemporary society and the accusations of its hermeticity. And we tackled the idea of communism for present times. In contrast with other star intellectuals, Rancière expresses reservations about the constant need for intellectuals to provide opinions on all subject-matters and events.
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Taking cinematic aesthetics into outer space: Dreaming of Space and Paper Soldier
More LessAbstractThis article takes up Rancière’s conceptualization of the regimes of art in order to explore what might be left of art, if the scale of the world is expanded to the cosmos, rather than constrained to earth. Starting from the assertion that the beginning of the space age may be considered an event that radically reshapes the coordinates of subjectivity, the paper discusses its reverberations in the realm of aesthetics. The text focuses on two recent Russian films about the beginning of the space age: Dreaming of Space (2005) and Paper Soldier (2008). Both films are examined as statements – ones that are contextually bound and yet that harbour an element of excess – rather than as mere representations of a certain socio-cultural context.
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Hybridity: Discussing Rancière with Austro-Marxism
By Ivana PericaAbstractThe paper draws on possibilities of applying Rancière’s views to the poetics and politics of ‘Red Vienna’, that is, to the cultural and educational policies developed by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (SDAP), which in the 1920s supported aesthetic policies structurally related to Rancière’s own conceptions of art and aesthetic revolution. The aim of the paper is to discuss Rancière’s understanding of aesthetic revolution in the light of the historical achievements and impasses of the Viennese social democratic politics.
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Dandy Socialism
By Lev KreftAbstract‘It was a dark and stormy night...’ with these words Edward Bulwer-Lytton began his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. ‘Le 13 décembre 1838, par une soirée pluvieuse et froid’ are the words with which Eugène Sue begins his novel The Mysteries of Paris, its narrative following a ‘conceptual’ introductory address to the reader. There are many more features connecting these two popular literary pieces of the Romantic period. In-between, a new genre emerged – the melodramatic social(ist) novel – together with new means of communication, i.e. the novel feuilleton that was printed in daily newspapers. This subtle form of censorship suggests that a genre believed to be melodramatically mediocre had an excessive aestheticopolitical attractiveness. Eugène Sue was a star writer of nineteenth century bestsellers novels–feuilletons during the period between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Afterwards he practically fell into oblivion and was barely mentioned in the company of ‘serious’ writers like Balzac and Hugo or Dickens and Thackeray, all of whom, however, took his allegedly mediocre melodramatic and popular narratives as cases to be followed. His temporary fame was confirmed by the response of Bruno Bauer’s group of young Hegelians, who found in Sue’s literary attractiveness a philosophical solution for all the mysteries and conflicts of the period. Marx’s criticism of their philosophical and political position in The Sacred Family includes a lengthy and thorough criticism of their ‘philosophical’ readings of the novel, of the novel itself, and of their and Sue’s understanding of the new bourgeois reality. Among other points, Sue’s alleged socialism is described with the help of a comparison between the police and the moral police. Can we, along with a re-establishment of the context of The Mysteries of Paris, leave behind the critique of ideology and the literary critique of popular and mass culture in order to bring back into the aesthetic field this melodramatic narrative of class society and to re-establish the politics of its aesthetics?
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