Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Rancière`s most recent writings on art and politics to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.

In this fascinating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière`s ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a `politics of art` might be.

This important collection includes several essays that have never previously been published in English, as well as a brand new afterword. Together these essays serve as a superb introduction to the work of one of the world`s most influential contemporary thinkers.

Table Of Contents

Acknowledgements
Editor`s Introduction
Part I: The Aesthetics of Politics
1. Ten Theses on Politics
2. Does Democracy Mean Something?
3. Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?
4. Communism: From Actuality to Inactuality
5. The People or the Multitudes?
6. Biopolitics or Politics?
7. September 11 and Afterwards: A Rupture in the Symbolic Order?
8. Of War as the Supreme Form of Advanced Plutocratic Consensus
Part II: The Politics of Aesthetics
9. The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes
10. The Paradoxes of Political Art
11. The Politics of Literature
12. The Monument and its Confidences; or Deleuze and Art`s Capacity of `Resistance`
13. The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics
Part III: Response to Critics
14. The Use of Distinctions
Notes
Index