Jacques Rancière

Preface vii

Acknowledgements xiii

1 The Early Politics: From Pedagogy to Equality 1

Althusser's lesson 2

Platonic inequality in Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu 15

Jacotot and radical equality 25

2 History and Historiography 36

Les Révoltes Logiques (1975–81) 36

The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France [1981] 52

The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge [1992] 57

Conclusion 72

3 The Mature Politics: From Policing to Democracy 74

Politics and 'the police' 76

Rancière's structural account of democracy: the 'wrong' and the miscount 80

Political 'subjectivation' 84

The aesthetic dimension of politics: the 'division' or 'distribution' of 'the sensory' (le partage du sensible) 90

Overall assessment of Rancière's account of politics 92

4 Literature 101

'What is literature?' 102

Writing, literarity . . . and literature 107

Rancière as reader 115

5 Art and Aesthetics 126

Aesthetic experience and equality: with Kant and Gauny, against Bourdieu 128

The regimes of art 134

Film and film theory 138

Contemporary art, politics and community 152

Afterword 160

Notes 162

References 191

Index 207