The Politics Of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible

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, Critical 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 introduction 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.

Jacques Ranciere is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Paris VIII (St Denis) and a former student of Louis Althusser. His translated works include The Nights of Labour, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, The Names of History, On the Shores of Politics and Disagreement