Egalitarian Moments

Jacques Rancièe places equality at the forefront of emancipatory political thought. This book locates the historical and critical sources of Rancière's politics and aesthetics in the modern period. Drawing on Rancière's suggestion that egalitarian politics persistently appropriates elements from political philosophy to engage new forms of dissensus, Shaw uncovers a series of egalitarian moments from the histories of modern philosophy and aesthetics, and goes on to examine Rancière's debates with Badiou, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. From the Cartesian bonsens, through the aesthetics of Schiller and Benjamin, to an important revaluation of existentialism and Marxism, this is a concise tour through the subterranean currents of the history of egalitarianism. The first book to reconstruct Rancière's relationship to Cartesianism and existentialism, and his ideas of equality in relation to aesthetics and politics, this is essential reading for students of philosophy, studying continental philosophy, aesthetics, cultural theory and cultural studies

Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Philosophy and Equality -- Part I: Subjectivity. Chapter 1: The 'Good Sense' of Cartesian Egalitarianism ; Chapter 2: The Nothingness of Equality: Rancière's 'Sartrean Existentialism' -- Part II: Aesthetics. Chapter 3: Modernity, Modernism, and Aesthetic Equality ; Chapter 4: Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, and the Platonist Regime of Art -- Conclusion: The Politics of Aisthesis -- Bibliography.

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Philosophy and Equality -- Part I: Subjectivity -- 1. The 'Good Sense' of Cartesian Egalitarianism -- 1.1. 'a history or, if you prefer, a fable' -- 1.2. Descartes's egalitarianism and the problem of separation -- 1.3. The rationality of a wrong -- 1.4. Woman as other, woman as subject -- 1.5. Toward collective egalitarianism -- 2. The Nothingness of Equality: Rancière's 'Sartrean Existentialism' -- 2.1. Marked by Sartrean existentialism -- 2.2. The politics of equality -- 2.3. Between the practico-inert and the party -- 2.4. Subjects of contingency -- 2.5. The politics of impossible identification -- Part II: Aesthetics -- 3. Modernity, Modernism and Aesthetic Equality -- 3.1. Disagreement and misunderstanding -- 3.2. From mimesis to aesthetics -- 3.2.1. Breaking with mimetic norms -- 3.2.2. Mute speech and literary equality -- 3.3. Artistic autonomy and sociology in Greenberg -- 3.4. Benjamin's 'archaeomodernism' -- 3.4.1. The politics of art and technology -- 3.4.2. Archaeomodernism and metapolitics -- 3.5. Fragmentary emancipation, common sense, and aesthetic equality -- 4. Aesthetics, Inaesthetics and the Platonic Regime of Art -- 4.1. The return from exile -- 4.2. Between aesthetics and inaesthetics -- 4.3. Between aesthetic education and the absolute -- 4.3.1. Aesthetic emancipation and policing -- 4.3.2. Schiller's aesthetic freedom -- 4.3.3. Schelling on artistic production and practical reason -- 4.4. Monuments and micropolitics -- 4.5. Heterotopias: One world divides into two -- Conclusion: The Politics of Aisthesis -- Bibliography -- Index.