Abstract
Jacques Rancière plays a crucial role as regards the attempt to make the idea of an antifoundationalist story of progress, as well as the notion of a postmetaphysical culture, look attractive. In La Leçon d’Althusser (1973) and Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (1983) he advances a critique of traditional (Platonic) philosophy and of Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism that should be regarded as an important part of the antifoundationalist story of progress. He combines antifoundationalism, antiessentialism, and antirepresentationalism in a stimulating way. In this chapter, Schulenberg discusses Rancière’s version of topographical and horizontal critique. The first part analyzes his critique of Platonism and of Althusser, whereas the second part highlights affinities between Richard Rorty’s scenario of a poeticized culture and the Rancièrian aesthetic regime of art. Moreover, Schulenberg calls attention to some important differences between Rorty and Rancière’s versions of anti-Platonism.
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Notes
- 1.
As far as the idea of an antifoundationalist story of progress is concerned, see Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism, Finding and Making,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, xvi–xxxii. In addition, see Tom Rockmore and Beth J. Singer, ed., Antifoundationalism Old and New (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992).
- 2.
For a good overview of contemporary readings of Dewey, see Molly Cochran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dewey (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010). In addition, see Steven Fesmire, Dewey (New York: Routledge, 2015). Cheryl Misak offers a particularly stimulating history of pragmatism in The American Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013). See also Alan Malachowski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism (New York: Cambridge UP, 2013).
- 3.
For research on Rancière, see Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts, ed., Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Durham: Duke UP, 2009); Jean-Philippe Deranty, ed., Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts (Durham: Acumen, 2010); Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010); Joseph J. Tanke, Jacques Rancière: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2011); Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, ed., Reading Rancière (New York: Continuum, 2011); Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross, ed., Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality (New York: Continuum, 2012); and Oliver Davis, ed., Rancière Now: Current Perspectives on Jacques Rancière (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013). In addition, see Gabriel Rockhill, “Introduction: Through the Looking Glass—The Subversion of the Modernist Doxa,” in Rancière’s Mute Speech, 1–28; and Steven Corcoran’s “Editor’s Introduction” in Rancière’s Dissensus, 1–24. Also useful is chapter 5 (“The Silent Revolution: Rancière’s Rethinking of Aesthetics and Politics”) in Rockhill’s Radical History & the Politics of Art (New York: Columbia UP, 2014), 137–162. For our purposes, it is important to see that Rorty does not play a role in any of these discussions.
- 4.
For stimulating interpretations of twentieth-century French philosophy and intellectual history, see Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge UP, 2001); Alan D. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006); Gary Gutting, Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011); and Ian James, The New French Philosophy (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012).
- 5.
For a discussion of the Rancièrian notion of equality, see Peter Hallward, “Staging Equality: Rancière’s Theatrocracy and the Limits of Anarchic Equality,” Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Rockhill and Watts, 140–157; Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross, “Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Evidence of Equality and the Practice of Writing,” Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, ed. Deranty and Ross, 1–13; and Ian James, “Jacques Rancière: The Space of Equality,” The New French Philosophy, 110–129.
- 6.
In this context, Rancière’s elaborations on what he calls “the labour of fiction” are particularly suggestive: “Within any given framework, artists are those whose strategies aim to change the frames, speeds and scales according to which we perceive the visible, and combine it with a specific invisible element and a specific meaning. Such strategies are intended to make the invisible visible or to question the self-evidence of the visible; to rupture given relations between things and meanings and, inversely, to invent novel relationships between things and meanings that were previously unrelated. This might be called the labour of fiction […]” (2010: 141). Oliver Davis expands on the relation between the aesthetic affect and the significance of contingency as follows: “I would argue, however, that the aesthetic affect more often operates just below the threshold of awareness, subliminally or unconsciously and that it is by way of this direct and repeated encounter with aesthetic contingency that the spectator is not only ‘emancipated’ in the modest sense of being freed to interpret the artwork in question but, by the same token, is emancipated by the experience of aesthetic art, formed for ‘emancipation’ in the properly political sense, by being disposed to recognize contingency in other human artefacts that are not artworks in the strict sense” (2013: 162).
- 7.
Rancière tells the story of the poet-workers who refuse to accept the given distribution of the sensible in Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, updated edition, trans. John Drury (New York: Verso, 2012). In this context, see also Jacques Rancière, The Method of Equality, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 25–35.
- 8.
The next three paragraphs are taken from the chapter “Richard Rorty’s Notion of a Poeticized Culture” in my Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 31–41. For an interesting discussion of Rorty in this context, see Áine Mahon, The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). See also Paul Patton, “Redescriptive Philosophy: Deleuze and Rorty,” Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 60–77.
- 9.
In this context, see “On Aisthesis: An Interview,” Rancière Now: Current Perspectives on Jacques Rancière, ed. Davis, 202–218. In addition, see Jacques Rancière, Politik und Ästhetik: Im Gespräch mit Peter Engelmann, trans. Gwendolin Engels (Wien: Passagen, 2016).
- 10.
For a discussion of the notion of “literary democracy” (Rancière 2017: 14), see the chapter “Madame Aubain’s Barometer” in The Lost Thread (3–25).
- 11.
For a discussion of Rancière’s understanding of literature, see Oliver Davis, “Literature,” Davis, Jacques Rancière, 101–125; Alison Ross, “Expressivity, Literarity, Mute Speech,” Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Deranty, 133–150; and Joseph J. Tanke, “Why Julien Sorel Had to Be Killed,” Rancière Now: Current Perspectives on Jacques Rancière, ed. Davis, 123–142.
- 12.
For what is probably the first detailed discussion of the relation between Rancière and Adorno, see Ines Kleesattel, Politische Kunst-Kritik: Zwischen Rancière und Adorno (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2016).
- 13.
For Rancière’s understanding of literature, see also the following two interviews: “Politics and Aesthetics: An Interview” (115–140) and “Losing Too Is Still Ours: An Interview about the Thwarted Politics of Literature” (191–204), Dissenting Words: Interviews with Jacques Rancière, ed. and trans. Emiliano Battista (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
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Schulenberg, U. (2019). From Finding to Making: Jacques Rancière, Richard Rorty, and the Antifoundationalist Story of Progress. In: Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11560-9_8
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