Jacques Rancière - The Misadventures of Critical Thinking (or, how the critique of fetishism, consumerism, spectacle etc. fueled either sheer melancholy or anti-democratic rage.)
Haldeman Center Kreindler Conference Hall (Room 041)
Jacques Rancière is a leading French philosopher and Emeritus professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris 8 whose work has grown only more influential in recent years. Starting as a collaborator with Louis Althusser, the leading French Marxist theorist of the 1960s, Rancière then focused independently on social and intellectual emancipation and elaborated a theory of politics as a process of subjectivization which recasts the configuration of the sensible by implementing the presupposition of the equality of everyone and anyone. From then on, he proposed a new view of aesthetics and of the relations between aesthetics and politics in modern culture. His extensive repertoire includes literature, film and visual culture. Rancière's authored or co-authored books available in English include: Reading Capital (1968) (with Louis Althusser and others); The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989); The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (1994); On the Shores of Politics (1995); Disagreement (1998); Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003); The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (with Slavoj Zizek) (2004); Hatred of Democracy (2007).