Jacques Rancière: Aesthetics, Politics, Philosophy by Mark Robson

Abstract

MLR,102.2, 2007 53I pas ensemble),andwith an absorbing close analysis ofPialat's short I96 Idocumentary L'Amour existe, the firstfilmtobring him professional recognition.Her second chap ter,also introductory after a fashion, analyses Pialat's lifelong ambivalence towards theNew Wave, whose I960s success he feltdeprived him of recognition and success at a crucial point inhis career, and reads L'Enfance nue against Truffaut's Les 400 coups to telling effect.All Pialat's feature filmsexcept Sous lesoleil de Satan and Van Gogh, treated in a penultimate chapter on 'exceptional men', are then given close readings in three chapters organized around considerations of 'the family'-tensions, conflict, and violence within male-female couples and between generations. Here Warehime traces the pain, love, and hate that characterize familial bonds, both within Pialat's narratives and between the director, his collaborators, and his performers (Pialat had a reputation for stormy relationships with his actors). She gives ample attention to the formal effectsof such sustained emotional intensity,and to the devices found to communicate it-although her division of each reading into a section on 'Narrative and characterization' and another on 'Form and style' inevitably introduces to some degree the 'false dichotomy' between form and content shewishes to avoid (p. 67). Having dealt with Sous le soleil de Satan and Van Gogh, 'Pialat's move towardsmore ambitious projects in traditional genres' (p. 131),Warehime concludes with a sti mulating and revelatory discussion of his last filmLe Gar_u, inwhich he cast his four-year-old son Antoine. As she convincingly demonstrates, Le Garcu 'brings his career full circle' (p. I55) by focusing even more intently on the familywhile re connecting with his early autobiographical and documentary impulses.Warehime's discussions of Pialat's ambivalence towards fatherhood probably form the strongest element of her thorough and pleasing book, and if they are unfortunately not coun terbalanced by any thoroughgoing feminist analysis of his female characters, this is at least partly explained by the conservative sexual politics of his narratives. Rather more regrettable is the absence of any theoretical framework foran analysis of class thatwould have set the crudity and tenderness of Pialat's couples' sexual relations in context, and reinforced the critique of the bourgeoisie Warehime does highlight in Passe tonbac d'abord. All in all, however, this is a fine study,and should be of service to researchers and students of French cinema from I960 to I995. UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM KATE INCE Jacques Ranciere: Aesthetics, Politics, Philosophy. Ed. by MARK ROBSON. (Para graph, I3/i) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2005. 115 pp. ,(iJ8.99. ISBN 978-0-7486-2I88-0. Though the essays in this special issue ofParagraph do a good deal of rehashing of the basic points ofRanciere's project, they also advance either critical questions orways ofplacing Ranciere ina broader historical context. The focus of thecollection ison the relationship between aesthetics and politics inRanciere's philosophy, a relationship which has garnered academic interestbecause of the relatively autonomous bodies of research thatRanciere has amassed in his investigations into political emancipation and aesthetic experience, all thewhile using a conceptual framework that, for the range of historical documents that it investigates, remains surprisingly simple. It is these simple conceptual formulations, such as 'the part of those who have no part', that are explained over and over again in a way that often leaves behind the very density and specificity thatgives these simple formulations theirweight. Mark Robson introduces the link between aesthetics and politics in Ranciere's thought by describing how both aesthetic creation/reception and political eman cipation require an indifference towards the hierarchical relationships between, as 532 Reviews Ranciere says, 'manners of speaking, manners of doing and manners of being' (p. i). For his part, Ranciere gives a slightly different explanation of the linkbetween aes thetics and politics by emphasizing how his recentwork isdedicated to interrogating theassumptions involved in theories of the end of grand narratives and of themoder nist paradigm in art, revealing in both instances that 'time as a form of distribution of the possible and the impossible' (p. 23) creates an epochal foreclosure thatmust be reopened by 'substituting a topography of the re-distribution of the possible and amultiplicity of...