Rancière Jacques. Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics

Translated by James Swenson. Introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. — New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. — viii, 194 p. — (New Directions in Critical Theory). — ISBN: 978-0-231-15102-3, 978-0-231-52800-9, 978-0-231-15103-0.Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière's corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of "literature" is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, "literature" is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention.Gabriel Rockhill. Introduction: Through the Looking Glass — The Subversion of the Modernist Doxa
Introduction: From One Literature to AnotherFrom restricted to general poetics
From Representation to Expression
From the Book of Stone to the Book of Life
The Book of Life and the Expression of SocietyFrom generalized poetics to the mute letter
From the Poetry of the Future to the Poetry of the Past
The Book in Pieces
The Fable of the Letter
Writing at WarThe contradictions of the work of literature
The Book in Style
The Witing of the Idea
Artifice, Madness, the Work
Conclusion: A Skeptical ArtNotes