Ranciere

FROM THE BACK COVER: What is the essential nature of meaning? . . . . . This book answers by examining interpretive theories from the past and present. It finds that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation, a struggle that reaches crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand, this crisis is mollified by Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, which argues that we are always already in a meaningful relationship to the objects of the world. On the other hand, this crisis is exacerbated when phenomenology, structuralism, and aesthetic theory directly make meaning into an object of study. . . . . . . . . These historical developments culminate with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose non-hermeneutical phenomenology delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Intriguingly, Lacan's work reveals meaning to be sexual in nature. By integrating his notion of sexual difference with his work in discourse theory and topology, this book demonstrates how the subject's struggle with meaning can be suspended.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GENERAL DESCRIPTION: Broadly speaking, the majority of books on Jacques Lacan focus on the earlier periods of his career. They also tend to target the psychoanalytic clinical community, or else discuss his work in various political, social, and cultural contexts. But in almost all cases these books refrain from a detailed exegesis of his actual texts. They instead prefer to comment on his theoretical apparatus as a whole before turning to its practical implications. . . . . . This book positions itself against this grain. Firstly, it closely analyzes some half-dozen key Lacanian texts. This analysis is organized under a single thematic – the question of meaning – in order to advance the reader's understanding of the trajectory of Lacan's thought across his entire career, as well as to promote the book's thesis that the field of meaning can be suspended. Accordingly, an initial chapter takes up the hermeneutical tradition from Flacius onward. This is then supplemented by a chapter which surveys phenomenological, structuralist and aesthetic theories of meaning and their differing methods of textual analysis. Together these two chapters provide a unique context for the sustained analysis of Lacan's texts which begins in the third chapter, an analysis that forms the bulk of the book's content. This contextualization potentially widens the book's appeal to any scholar wishing to explore his relationship to those textual objects he interacts with on a daily basis. And because this book assumes the reader has little to no familiarity with Lacan, the reader will find patient explanations of the basics of his theories before slowly being led up to the more difficult theories of his late years. Again the argument is that Lacan has something to offer all scholars. His work is not just reserved for psychoanalysts. . . . . . It is with his late theories that the serious student of Lacan will find the book's most original contribution. For in the fourth chapter a detailed account is provided of how Lacan derived his infamous formulae of sexuation from Aristotelian logic. These formulae are then extensively discussed against the backdrop of interpretive theory and textual analysis, showing how these formulae capture much more than just the difference between the sexes. Strikingly, this difference is also found to run through meaning itself, something the final chapter aims to demonstrate. It does this by amalgamating three key components of late-Lacan: sexuation, discourse theory and his use of topological spaces. This amalgamation is a first in the literature. But this amalgamation is not just useful in demonstrating the book's thesis. It further suggests how seemingly divergent aspects of late-Lacanian theory can be made to work together.

This article explores Hannah Arendt’s critique and reformulation of human rights in three parts. Part One offers a summary of Arendt’s critique of human rights as she develops it in the central chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Part Two explores the intellectual foundations of Arendt’s reconstruction of human rights as the “the right to have rights” in her concept of natality, the core condition of human being. Finally, Part Three, engages Arendt’s effort in Eichmann in Jerusalem to think clearly about how international law might meaningfully understand the crime of “crimes against humanity.”

"ABSTRACT:
    This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology.
    Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity.
    Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning."

In this chapter I give an overview of “Post-Marxism.” Primary attention is paid to what should be considered the core of Post-Marxism in relation to Marxist and Non- Marxist critical theory, namely, its conception of the social. This shift is of importance for the overall post-Marxist philosophical vision of society, theory, and politics. Theorists discussed include Badiou, Honneth, Ranciere, Laclau/Mouffe, Foucault, Gorz, and Hardt/Negri.

What is the relationship between metaphysics and political revolution? Despite being two of the most widely discredited concepts in contemporary European philosophy, this chapter argues that we are witnessing the return of both in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Their return, however, is no mere repetition of the previous forms of classical metaphysics and modern revolution- defined by totality and the state. Rather, it is a differen- tial return: a return that changes something fundamental about these concepts and breathes into them a desperately needed new life. Many contemporary Eu- ropean philosophers have announced the "end of metaphysics" and the "death of philosophy." They have buried the ideas of metaphysics and revolution many years ago, but continue to pursue the endless task of vilifYing them- Jest their specters return from the grave.

"This book takes on the political by developing a practice and a thought we call ‘polemicization’. We draw from the work of Jacques Rancière, for whom a polemic or disagreement does not refer to the case when one interlocutor says white and another black. Instead, it designates the conflict arising when, for example, both parties say white, yet each understands something different by whiteness. This situation forces the interlocutors to construe the scene of the validity of their claims, which is just another way of saying that the given or commonplace is never settled once and for all. We generalize the logic of this encounter and claim that disagreement is the very process through which objectivity is instituted. We develop the contours of polemicization and deepen its philosophical implications through a critical engagement with the work of contemporary theorists, such as Lefort, Schmitt, Laclau, Derrida and Žižek. In particular, we interrogate commonplace narratives of modernity, identity, difference, universality, antagonism and subjectivity. The result is a text that cuts across the boundaries between political thought, cultural studies and social theory.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Polemic and Polemicization
1.1 Polemic and the Commonplace
1.2 The Commonplace of Political Modernity
1.3 Polemicizing the Commonplace

2. Polemicization and Political Philosophy
2.1 Polemicization and Attitude
2.2 Polemicization and the Political
2.3 Polemicization and Critique
2.4 Polemicization and Metaphysics
2.5 Polemicization and Plurality

3. Polemicizing Subjectivity
3.1 The Modern Subject
3.2 The Basic Antagonism
3.3 Outing the Subject
3.4 Who Wants to be Popular?

4. Polemicizing Universals
4.1 The Persistence of Universals
4.2 The Pragmatics of the Referent
4.3 Deliberation and Confrontation
4.4 Commonality Through Polemics"

Not published yet.
It is argued that agonistic democracy fails to fully distinguish itself from delibertive democracy and so it shares similar shortcomings. basically, agonistic democracy is unable to think about conflict as radical contestation of power.

The essay is an attempt to reinterpret Ranciere’s theory of politics and democracy contrary to its interpretation as a theory of a contingent, anarchical, and groundless disruption circumscribed by the framework of disagreement and opposition of politics to the police order. The author argues that, while notions of contingency, revolt, and disruption are present in Ranciere’s theory, in light of the complexity of Ranciere’s texts and the theoretical framework of “relationship,” these notions by themselves do not represent the entirety of democratic politics. The premise of the essay is that Ranciere’s theory is one of a process of political transformation. This process, animated by the radical equality as the essence of the community of human beings, carries within itself the unfolding potential to bring about the transformation and reconfiguration of material, sociopolitical, and theoretical-discursive structures of the given order. In the context of Ranciere’s political thought, this larger theoretical picture (beginning with the logic of the disagreement followed by disidentification and subjectification of the subjects of the given sociopolitical regime, culminating in the reconfiguration of the field of experiences circumscribed by such a regime) is what democratic politics is.

Parisian artist Claire Fontaine is a fraud, a forgery, her name casually lifted from a generic brand of school note- books, her existence only present in the art that bears her signature. She was first brought to life in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill. She resides now in the neon gas, the video pixels, the found objects, the paper, the ink and the many languages that constitute her work. Where an ordinary object, say a urinal or a bottle rack, can become a readymade piece of art simply on account of the artist saying it’s so, Claire functions as a ‘readymade artist’ to render this very form of artistic subjectivity in a more critical light. She has a long list of influences. Most directly, her inspiration springs from the radical feminization of the Italian Autonomist movement in the late 1970s. Her philosophical roots are planted firmly in the revolutionary political theories of Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. Her artistic allies include the ironically subversive Bernadette Corporation and the anti-political writing collective Tiqqun.
This interview was initiated during Claire Fontaine’s visit to Columbus, Ohio, in autumn 2009 for the group exhibition Descent to Revolution, curated by James Voorhies for the Bureau for Open Culture, to which Claire made two contributions: a solar-powered neon sign installed in down- town Columbus that cycled between the words WARM and WAR; and a multimedia lecture-performance on libidinal economy and human strike that focused on the bodies of women as site of political, social and aesthetic contestation in Berlusconi’s Italy.

Myriad examples might be evoked of politicians today acting with apparent impunity, resistant and/or immune to ccountability - even as public life itself is undergoing an ‘ethical turn.’ This paper explores such phenomena in light of the recent argument of Jacques Rancière that, if society and politics have recently undergone such an ethical turn, it is ultimately a depoliticising one, which deprives communities of the dissensus - the difference from itself - that is the founding condition of a political community. In turn, albeit more briefly, it considers David Harvey’s broader analysis of neoliberalism, which not dissimilarly traces the emergence of a post-modern consumer society that reduces difference to consumer choice. Each thinker’s work, it is concluded, suggests that ethics has been undermined by a complex exclusion from the political sphere of real difference. At the same time, each holds that such a political conjunction is by no means necessary. The paper explores the possibility of a return of ethics proper to politics by attending to the remedies each thinker prescribes and the broader issues raised, in their analyses,concerning the intersection of an effective ethics and politics.

Desde a transição para o século XXI, o pensamento de Jacques Rancière tem-se destacado como um dos que mais insistentemente tem interrogado o devir contemporâneo da arte no seio – e em confronto – com o nosso tempo. Neste artigo, procuraremos lançar luz sobre alguns dos principais momentos do seu pensamento estético: desde o nexo entre estética e política em relação com o conceito de “partilha do sensível” à crítica da “viragem ética”. Este itinerário implicará esclarecer em que medida só no quadro de um “regime estético da arte” (cujo sentido importará também explicitar) se torna possível pensar uma “política da arte” e questionar criticamente a valorização do conceito de sublime contra o pano de fundo de uma suposta ruptura pós-moderna.

Since the threshold of the 21th century Rancière’s thought has emerged as one of the most significant attempts to reappraise the fate of art amidst – and against – the present times. In this article, my aim is to shed light on some of the main moments of his aesthetic thinking, ranging from the link between aesthetics and politics in relation to the concept of “distribution of the sensible” to the criticism raised against the “ethical turn”. Such an itinerary entails clarifying the extent to which only in the context of the “aesthetic regime of the art” (whose sense should be spelled out as well) a “politics of the art” becomes thinkable, and calling into question the praise of the concept of sublime against the background of an alleged post-modern break.

"Introduction

1: The underside of difference and the limits of particularism
• Semiotics and some programmatic consequences of the culture wars
• A postmodern society? Vattimo’s wager
• A more cautious optimism
• The underside of disorientation
• The underside of multiplicity
• Universals, the discourse of rights and liberalism

2. Populism as a spectre of democracy
• Populism and democracy
• The gap between faith and scepticism and the elusiveness of populism
•Spectral recurrences

3. Populism as an internal periphery of democratic politics
• The verbal smoke surrounding populism
• Populism as a mode of representation
• Populism as a symptom of democracy
• Populism as an underside of democracy

4. Stirred and shaken. From ‘the art of the possible’ to emancipatory politics
• The realist coding of the impossible
• The impossible as supplement
• Agitation as unveiling/translation
• Emancipation, revolutionising and the interstitial region of politics

5. Talkin’ bout a revolution: The end of mourning
• The mourning after
• Polemicizing the limit: how radical does a radical change have to be?
• The play between the promise and the figure
• Revolutionary realism as enthusiasm for the impossible
• Figures of the promise and the iterability of revolution
• Postcards of a socialist imaginary
Bibliography"

ÖZET Sanat her zaman toplum, doğa ve politikayla iç içedir; hiçbir zaman kültürden kopuk bir olgu olmamıştır. Bu nedenle sanat mimetik bir edim olarak ele alınmış ve gündelik yaşamın bir yansıması olarak görülmüştür. Metinde özellikle üzerinde duracağımız bu tavır oyun güdüsüyle ortaya çıkan kendiliğindenliği temel olarak alacak; bu durum Schiller ve Hegel'in oyun üzerine düşünceleriyle desteklenecektir. Ardından Ranciére'in politik düzlem ve sanat birliğinden bahsedilerek, Vertov'un kinoglaz'ı ve Godard'ın sinema düşüncesi ele alınacaktır. İzleyen kısımda sinema ve yaşamsal olanın birliği ve aynı zamanda kopukluğu hermeneutik bir tavırla birleştirilerek, son aşamada Yeni Dalga sinemasının bir örneği olarak Matka Joanna od aniolow (Meleklerin Joanna Anası) filmi bir örnek olarak yorumlanmaya çalışılacaktır. ABSTRACT Art is always together to nature and politics; it is never a phenomenon which is separate from culture. Therefore, art have been taken as mimetic fact and seen as a reflection of daily life. That attitude which we are going to stand on, in the text, especially, will take the spontaneity which appears with play drive as basis; this state will be supported by Schiller's and Hegel's play ideas. After, with mentioning Ranciére's unity of politic and art plane, there will be taken Vertov's kinoglaz and Godard's cinema thought. At the following part, the unity and rupture, at the same time, of cinema and vital one will be united with hermeneutic attitude, and at the final stage there will be an interpretation try of an example of New Wave cinema, Matka Joanna od aniolow (Joanna mother of angels) movie.

Jill Schostak and I wrote this book as part of our evolving interest in doing research radically.  By radically we mean engaging with people's voices to learn how to create the conditions for social justice and for democratising all the organisations of everyday life.  We draw on our own research but also on the ways in which the media is used to shaw people's voices and behaviours.  We explore all the ways in which the desires and demands of elites are inscribed upon minds and bodies as well as how writing may create the conditions for counter inscriptions.  Writing research is to engage politically.  Whether it is the Arab Spring re-inscribing hopes for freedom, the Occupy Movement or young people challenging orthodoxies at home or in classrooms through use of the media, it is the power of writing in its broadest sense that makes the difference.

Attraverso una breve e veloce premessa storico-critica e storico-filosofica il testo proposto fa emergere il tema del rapporto problematico sussistente fra l'attuale ideologia che sorregge il fenomeno economico, sociale e politico della globalizzazione internazionale dei capitali (soprattutto finanziari) ed i riflessi di ordine umano e naturale che ne sono l'effettiva conseguenza. Da un punto di vista psicologico, sociale ed educativo l'impianto ideologico neoliberista viene allora contrastato dalla ripresa di un pensiero critico, radicale e rivoluzionario, che riutilizza il principio dell'infinito creativo e doppiamente dialettico, di lontana matrice presocratica e bruniana. Il testo analizza la progressione di avvicinamento a tale principio preparata dalle riflessioni di H. Marcuse, W. Reich, G. Deleuze, C. Castoriadis e A. Badiou.
Questo testo viene immesso qui in due versioni: una gratuita ed una a pagamento (vedi link sotto).

"El problema de la decisión y los sujetos políticos ha sido un tema abordado en el campo de la filosofía política del siglo XX por autores como Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt y Jacques Derrida, quienes lo trataron en estrecha relación con los conceptos
de soberanía, libertad y contingencia. En la actualidad, las obras de Ernesto Laclau y Slavoj Žižek han incorporado la cuestión de la decisión para abordar los aspectos constitutivos de lo político. En este contexto, dominado por la deconstrucción, el posmarxismo y el posestructuralismo, el artículo se propone indagar por la relación entre decisión y sujetos políticos en un escenario contemporáneo, profundizando en la distinción entre subjetividad, subjetivación y sujeto."

Dieser Beitrag zur Filmtheorie geht von Jacques Rancières Schriften zur Politik und zum Film aus. Rancière konzipiert Politik und (Film-)Ästhetik "ineinander" – die Politik im Zeichen der Ästhetik, die Ästhetik im Medium der Politik. Beide betreffen gemeinschaftliche Wahrnehmungsweisen und Platzzuweisungen ebenso wie deren Störung. Im Fokus dieser Theorie stehen dissensuale Akte: Inszenierungen von Streitfällen, durch die sich politische Subjekte bilden, indem sie sich von ihrer Identität und Bodenhaftung im Sozialen absetzen. Es geht um Wortergreifungen, die nicht vorgesehen sind, und um Erscheinen ohne sicheren Grund.
            Film ohne Grund sondiert Rancières Film-Texte – zumal sein Verhältnis zu Gilles Deleuze – im Licht seines Politikbegriffs und wirft einen kritischen Blick auf  aktuelle Mainstreamfilme wie auch auf Theorien, die jeweils beanspruchen, Kino und Politik zusammenzuführen. Daraus resultiert ein Votum für Dissens und Voraussetzungsbruch als Momente einer politischen Filmästhetik.

Hrant Dink, Armenian, author and chief editor of the magazine Agos was murdered on 19 January 2007 in Istanbul. This tragic incident is taken to reflect the complex circumstances of his murder and the ambivalent role of the intellectuals in the Turkish society. Novelists as Orhan Pamuk and ElifŞafak stimulated the debate on the genocide of Armenians in 2005. Touching
this old wound they opened a controversial discussion on Turkish history andthe understanding of Turkishness in Turkish public opinion. In consequence, Pamuk and Şafak - as about 60 authors and publishers in total - were blamed for ‘public denigration of Turkish identity’ under article 301 of the penal
code. Pamuk, today, is still one of the most disliked persons by ordinary nationalists. The Dink case shows that, on the one hand, the intellectuals have the power to name different, opposite perspectives and encourage people toexpress their individuality. On the other hand, the initiation of change
provokes these who want to prevent changes at all. Opposing intellectuals arenot in power and so they cannot hinder the people in power to use and misuseits possibilities to fight back

This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as represented by Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics (2001-2005). It analyses how the aesthetics of heterochronoia—multiple temporalities—play a crucial role in the development of a new understanding of the politics of “history painting.” As Schmidt’s work reveals, a radical conception of history exists outside the “singular moment,” and in dialogue with heterogenous visual cultures (news media, art history, advertising). In attempting to understand the import of Schmidt’s work, this essay considers his methodologies for creating a heterochronous mode of history painting, particularly his anachronistic engagement with the work of Theodore Géricault and the iconic history painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Unlike previous critical responses to Schmidt’s work, this paper argues that (after Géricault) the artist’s use of investigative “journalistic” methodologies for SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics do not generate an aesthetics of exposé but rather an aesthetics of “fictionalization.” This aesthetic is defined by the recalibration of documentary and speculative data as a means to reconceive the landscape of the perceptual. The findings of this research demonstrate that the use of disparate fragments—or data—to visualize otherwise diminishing historical events underpins contemporary history painting’s capacity for advancing a distinct economy of affect that circumvents the limitations of the news media and its “monopoly on reality.”

Human rights have historically been enshrined in a plethora of theories derived from the tradition of analytic philosophy. Attempting to go beyond the potentially narrow economy of thought of only one discipline, this dissertation draws upon a staging of enquiries and arguments which stem from social and political theory, international relations, legal theory, and philosophy, proposing a new distribution of the thinkable. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s thinking ‘in-between’ disciplines (a term which he establishes as ‘indisciplinarity’ (2007:101)), I contend that social studies are affected by the specialisation of knowledge within well-delimited disciplinary frameworks. For this reason, debates on human rights, political asylum, and democracy, as embedded within the realm of politics, aesthetics, and ethics will be discussed, whilst questioning the very meaning of these three realms. In other words, this dissertation focuses on the way in which human rights have been used as a means to various ends, and how the theory and praxis around them affect democracy and the bearers of rights. Some of the thematic questions which run throughout the dissertation are: are human rights means to an end, or are they an end in themselves? What kind of politics is desirable in order to recognise the obvious, namely the equality of asylum seekers with citizens, without having to appeal to an institution as a mediator and enactor of ‘rights’? Who is the subject of human rights? And ultimately, how are we to imagine a democracy based on a politics of equality and an ethics of hospitality?