Jacques Ranciere and the Contemporary Scene

Jean-Philippe Deranty is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. In addition to his monograph on Axel Honneth (Brill, 2009) he is the editor of the forthcoming volume Jacques Ranciere: Key Concepts (Acumen, July 2010). Alison Ross is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. She is the author of The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy (Stanford UP, 2007) and the editor of The Agamben Effect (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2008). To date she has published two essays on the aesthetic themes of Ranciere's work (in Sub-Stance and Theory@ buffalo).

• 1. Introduction: The Philosophy of Radical Equality, Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross; 2 TBA - a previously unpublished piece by Jacques Ranciere; 3. Ranciere and Film, Jay M. Bernstein; 4. Ranciere and the Philosophy of Anarchism, Todd May; 5. Ranciere and Work, Jean-Philippe Deranty; 6. Ranciere and Marx, Emmanuel Renault; 7. Ranciere and Godard, Lisa Trahair; 8. Ranciere and Education, Caroline Pelletier; 9. Ranciere and Literature, Alison Ross; 10. Ranciere and Politics, Paul Patton; 11. Ranciere and Arendt, Andrew Schaap; 12. Ranciere and History, Dmitri Nikulin; 13. Ranciere and Deleuze/Badiou, Eleanor Kaufmann; Bibliography; Index.

This collection of essays is a testament to the breadth and depth of the influence of Rancière's project to date. Staged as a series of specific interventions into the various fields that he has engaged with—ranging from film theory and aesthetics to history, pedagogy, politics, work and emancipation—it provides the reader with a kaleidoscope of perspectives that appropriately mirrors Rancière's forceful impact on the contemporary scene. The final essay is a fitting capstone to this important collection since Rancière himself provides a sustained reflection on his own asystematic work as an idiosyncratic analysis of the work of dissensus that is at one and the same time a performative manifestation thereof.