The Politics of Aesthetics

Bloomsbury Revelations

By: Gabriel Rockhill - editor, Jacques Rancière

Narrated by: Charles Armstrong

Bloomsbury presents The Politics of Aesthetics by Jacques Ranciere, read by Charles Armstrong.

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Rancière's work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age.

Available now in the Bloomsbury Revelations series 10 years after its original publication, The Politics of Aesthetics includes an afterword by Slavoj Zizek, an interview for the English edition, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive bibliography.

©2025 Jacques Rancière (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

"Jacques Rancière is one of the most important and original contemporary French philosophers. This book provides perhaps the best available introduction to his thought in English. Its main contents are two interviews with Rancière...they provide an extraordinarily concise and systematic summary by Rancière of the main themes of his recent work across its whole range. Rancière's project is promising. It is illuminating to see aesthetics as political and politics in aesthetic terms, as a form of the 'distribution of the sensible.'" -Culture Machine (Culture Machine)

"[A]n excellent introduction to Jacques Rancière...Slavoj Žižek writes in his afterword: 'Rancière's thought is today more actual than ever: in our time of the disorientation of the left, his writings offer one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue to exist.'" - London Review of Books, August 3, 2006 (London Review of Books)

'Locating the political significance of art has not only gone out of fashion, it has in recent years become a source of embarrassment. No one has argued against this repression with more precision, nuance, and undeniable force than Jacques Ranciere ... This book, with an emphatic "Afterword" by Zizek, provides a riveting and compelling outline of the central elements of Ranciere's politics of aesthetics and its relation to his demanding rethinking of the political.' (J.M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research)

'A benchmark, this compact book shows why Ranciere is one of the most compelling thinkers and writers in France since Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.' (Tom Conley, Harvard University, USA)

'This is possibly the most important essay, despite its length, since Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.' (Adrian Rifkin, Professor of Visual Culture, Middlesex University, UK)