Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Rancière

Devin Zane Shaw teaches philosophy at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. He is author of Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art (Bloomsbury, 2010) and is co-editor of, and contributor to, “Theory Mad Beyond Redemption”: The Post-Kantian Poe, a special edition of the Edgar Allan Poe Review (2012).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Philosophy and EqualityPart I: SubjectivityChapter 1: The ‘Good Sense’ of Cartesian Egalitarianism1.1. ‘a history or, if you prefer, a fable’1.2. Descartes’s Egalitarianism and the Problem of Separation1.3. The Rationality of a Wrong1.4. Woman as Other, Woman as Subject1.5. Toward Collective EgalitarianismChapter 2: The Nothingness of Equality: Rancière’s ‘Sartrean Existentialism’2.1. Marked By Sartrean Existentialism2.2. The Politics of Equality2.3. Between the Practico-inert and the Party2.4. Subjects of Contingency2.5. The Politics of Impossible IdentificationPart II: AestheticsChapter 3: Modernity, Modernism, and Aesthetic Equality3.1. Disagreement and Misunderstanding3.2. From Mimesis to Aesthetics3.2.1. Breaking with Mimetic Norms3.2.2. Mute Speech and Literary Equality3.3. Artistic Autonomy and Sociology in Greenberg3.4. Benjamin’s ‘Archaeomodernism’3.4.1. The Politics of Art and Technology3.4.2. Archaeomodernism and Metapolitics3.5. Fragmentary Emancipation, Common Sense, and Aesthetic EqualityChapter 4: Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, and the Platonist Regime of Art4.1. The Return from Exile4.2. Between Aesthetics and Inaesthetics4.3. Between Aesthetic Education and the Absolute4.3.1. Aesthetic Emancipation and Policing4.3.2. Schiller’s Aesthetic Freedom4.3.3. Schelling on Artistic Production and Practical Reason4.4. Monuments and Micropolitics4.5. Heterotopias: One World Divides Into TwoConclusion: The Politics of AisthesisBibliography

The book speaks to an urgent, incomplete task of contemporary philosophy: to be done with its decades-long tradition of scholastic, ritual self-flagellation and get on with the business of thinking the emancipatory transformation of the world. Shaw’s contribution to this task is impressive, erudite, and takes a path less traveled.