Shaw Devin Zane. Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Rancière

Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. — 224 р. — ISBN: 978-1-472-50-544-6Jacques Rancière places equality at the forefront of emancipatory political thought. This book locates the historical and critical sources of Rancière's politics and aesthetics in the modern period. Drawing on Rancière's suggestion that egalitarian politics persistently appropriates elements from political philosophy to engage new forms of dissensus, Shaw uncovers a series of egalitarian moments from the histories of modern philosophy and aesthetics, and goes on to examine Rancière's debates with Badiou, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. From the Cartesian bonsens, through the aesthetics of Schiller and Benjamin, to an important revaluation of existentialism and Marxism, this is a concise tour through the subterranean currents of the history of egalitarianism. The first book to reconstruct Rancière's relationship to Cartesianism and existentialism, and his ideas of equality in relation to aesthetics and politics.