Here at Critical-Theory, we really dig Jacques Ranciere. So when two new Ranciere related books were released in the same month, well, we thought you should know. Well, not the same month, but within a month of each other. That counts, right?

Aisthesis

The word “aisthesis” has to do with perception and is related to the term “aesthetics.” Ranciere has written extensively about aesthetics and politics in the past.  To put it briefly, Ranciere thinks the man is trying to put you down by telling you how to see things. You should stop seeing things that way.

From Verso Books:

Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis–Rancière’s definitive statement on the aesthetic–takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events—some famous, others forgotten—to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.

You can read Joseph Tanke’s review of the book at the Los Angeles Review of Books and Jonathan Sturgeon’s review at the American Reader.

Ranciere and Film

Ranciere and Film is a compilation of critical essays concerning Ranciere and film. From Edinburgh University Press:

Jacques Rancière rose to prominence as a radical egalitarian philosopher, political theorist and historian. Recently he has intervened into the discourses of film theory and film studies, publishing controversial and challenging works on these topics. This book offers an exciting range of responses to and assessments of his contributions to film studies and includes an afterword response to the essays by Rancière himself.

Contributors include Nico Baumbach, Rey Chow, Monica Lopez Lerma, Richard Stamp, Patricia MacCormack, Bram Ieven and James Steintrager. The book is edited by Paul Bowman, who spends most of his time writing about the intersections of critical theory and Bruce Lee. He even wrote a whole book called Theorizing Bruce Lee, and wrote this article about Queer Theory, Ranciere, and Bruce Lee.

Keep on keeping on, Paul Bowman.