Overview

In Ranciere's Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Ranciere's aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing-of form, style, and scenography-in Ranciere's writings, Panagia characterizes Ranciere as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Ranciere focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Ranciere's modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Ranciere's literary voice, and how Ranciere juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Ranciere's work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.

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9780822370222

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Reviews

Against the politics of belonging that infuses so much democratic theory today, Davide Panagia offers a characteristically bold reading of Ranciere that makes us feel the force of a very different path to emancipatory democratic politics. Grounded in an aesthetics and politics of impropriety, Ranciere's Sentiments shows the transformative potential of the unauthorized sensibilities, words, and acts of those who 'have no part' in the scenes of democratic politics conventionally conceived. An exciting piece of work. -- Sharon R. Krause, author of * Freedom beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism *

To understand Ranciere, Panagia argues, is to set aside the search for prescriptive constructs and instead embrace the aesthetic sensibilities that create the world. Recommended. -- L. A. Wilkinson * Choice * Davide Panagia has written a complex and pathbreaking book that engages the work of democratic theorist Jacques Ranciere in order to redefine what it means to practice democracy. Ranciere's Sentiments is not an introduction to Ranciere's oeuvre, but rather a book that grapples with his most difficult ideas in order to challenge established assumptions about how politics comes to be known, felt, and practiced. -- Elisabeth Anker * Perspectives on Politics * Ranciere's Sentiments is a whistle-stop tour of aesthetics in the work of Jacques Ranciere. . . . Davide Panagia skillfully meshes a scenic narrative, wending his way through four chapters, each exploring a different line of division that Ranciere's writing puts into question. -- Clare Woodford * Review of Politics * I would recommend Davide Panagia's Ranciere's Sentiments without hesitation to any researcher in literature, political science, or philosophy who seeks an articulate presentation of Ranciere's very particular manner of thinking and arguing. Panagia has done a superb job of navigating through and illuminating the various constellations that characterize Ranciere's thought, while maintaining the sense and the feel of a manner of thinking that elide closure. -- David F. Bell * H-France, H-Net Reviews *

To understand Ranciere, Panagia argues, is to set aside the search for prescriptive constructs and instead embrace the aesthetic sensibilities that create the world. Recommended. -- L. A. Wilkinson * Choice *

Author Information

Davide Panagia is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of The Political Life of Sensation and The Poetics of Political Thinking, both also published by Duke University Press, as well as Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics.

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