Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism ed. by Patrick M. Bray

Abstract

Reviewed by: Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism ed. by Patrick M. Bray Haythem Guesmi Patrick M. Bray, ed. Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 288 pp. The abundance of recent work produced by the French theorist Jacques Rancière, the relevance of his study of the relation between literature, philosophy, and politics, and his refreshing critical attitude toward modernity and modernism suggest the need for continuous engagement with Rancierian scholarship. Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to his writings on modernism and its iterations. [End Page 301] As part of the Bloomsbury Academic series “Understanding philosophy, Understanding modernism,” and after the first two volumes on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, this volume, edited by Patrick M. Bray and conventionally divided into three main sections, engages with “the multiplicity of Rancière though close readings of his texts, through comparative readings with other philosophers, and through an engagement with modernist works of art and literature” (7). And yet, Bray’s volume offers much more than that, especially in bringing together of some of the most insightful critics of Rancière’s thought and in its attention to the theoretical blind spots in his writings. Part I, titled “Conceptualizing Rancière,” features seven essays on Rancière’s principal works such as Nights of Labor, The Emancipated Spectator, and Le fil perdu, and presents the central concepts that inform his thought and theory. Emily Apter’s study of Rancière’s micropolitics in The Hatred of Democracy, Margaret Flinn’s analysis of Rancière’s writings on film in Film Fables, and Giuseppina Mecchia’s chapter on Rancière’s politics of aesthetics in Mute Speech uncover the relationships between discourses of knowledge, fragmentation, and emancipation in Rancière’s radical thought. The volume’s second part, “Rancière and Aesthetics,” provides a concise, hands-on discussion of Rancière’s argument, polemical at times, on aesthetics as a concept and as a mode of emancipatory action that challenges all discourses of hegemony and exclusion. Alison Ross’s excellent discussion of Rancière’s criticism of modernism and his view on the suspension of the will within the aesthetic regime, Suzanne Guerlac’s chapter on Rancière’s analysis of Proust, and Marina van Zuylen’s weighing in on Rancière’s polemical reading of Bourdieu’s sociology, especially the notion of “habitus,” provide important insights into the tensions in Rancièrian thought. Indeed, Tina Chanter, in her chapter “Feminist Art: Disrupting and Consolidating the Police,” convincingly engages with what I consider one of the most enduring blind spots in Rancière’s thought, that of feminist politics, by “explicitly opening up his aesthetic considerations to a feminist sensibility” (159). Part III offers a concise glossary of the five main terms—“Distribution of the Sensible,” “Fable,” “Intellectual Equality,” “Mute Speech,” and “Regimes of Art”— that are common threads to which Rancière continuously returns to rethink their configurations in modernity and modernism. The last section of the book presents a new interview with Rancière conducted by the volume editor. Bray’s volume successfully engages with one of the most distinctive elements of Rancière’s radical and multiple ideas through the attention to [End Page 302] repetition. Although Bray often tries to contextualize the repetitive use of such concepts as distribution of the sensible, equality, and dissensus as “echoes,” I consider these echoes to be a highly effective pedagogy that helps the reader delve into the complexity of Rancière’s thought and become mindful of the use of overlapping and crisscrossing as distinctive tools in his writings. Despite its noteworthy exploration of some of the tensions and blind spots in Rancière’s theories, this volume would have benefitted from a further exploration of the adaptation of his work in non-Western contexts, as well as of how his thinking might provide new ways of reexamining the global spatial divisions and exploding the borders, especially when we read that Rancière acknowledges that “forms of sensibility are created from the ‘peripheries,’ East Asia or Latin America for example, and then take over the English-speaking world” (288, my emphasis). All in...