Duke University Press Rancière's Sentiments

In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’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 Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’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. Review “To understand Rancière, Panagia argues, is to set aside the search for prescriptive constructs and instead embrace the aesthetic sensibilities that create the world. Recommended.” Author: L. A. Wilkinson Source: Choice Review "Proposing a singular and provocative reading of Rancière's oeuvre, Davide Panagia refuses hermeneutics in favor of a focus on dispositions, style, modes of appearance, and arrangement of things that acknowledges the permanence and ubiquity of division while illuminating the productivity, playfulness, and generative quality of lines of division. Panagia offers a reading that seeks to be faithful to the disjunctive moments that inspire Rancière's writings, celebrating scenes of change rather than engagement in philosophical interpretation. Panagia's Rancière does not hold out a theory to overcome inequalities. In its stead Panagia's reading makes visible the power of the makings and doings of anyone and everyone in transforming sensibilities, opening up new possibilities of imagination: in short, enacting the aesthetics of politics." Author: Aletta J. Norval, author of Source: Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition From the Author 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. About the Author 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.