Promotional Information

Mute Speech counts among Jacques Ranciere's most intensive and compelling studies of the origins and consequences of modern literature. Taking German Romantic philosophy as a point of departure and setting his sights on Flaubert, Mallarme and Proust, Ranciere draws his readers through the many contradictions that give rise to the aesthetic turn of our age. Elegantly translated by James Swenson, Mute Speech invites us to think afresh the philosophical, aesthetic and political dilemmas that ground the modern canon. -- Tom Conley, Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Visual & Environmental Studies, Harvard University

About the Author

Jacques Ranciere (b. 1940) is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Paris VIII. Among his major works translated into English are The Future of the Image, The Politics of Aesthetics, The Philosopher and His Poor, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Disagreement: Politics And Philosophy, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Gabriel Rockhill is assistant professor of philosophy at Villanova University and program director at the College International de Philosophie. He is the author of Logique de l'histoire and coeditor of the Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, as well as Jacques Ranciere: History, Politics, Aesthetics. James Swenson is associate professor of French and dean of humanities at Rutgers University. He is the author of On Jean-Jacques Rousseau Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution and a well-known translator of Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere.

Reviews

Ranciere is refreshingly unorthdox in unearthing examples of 'mute speech' not from modernism, but from relatively prosaic realist and naturalist novels. Times Literary Supplement Although the text does not lend itself to quick, light-hearted reading, it does reward thoughtful consideration. The tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions that characterize poetics and aesthetics are given space to move in this text -- Jerilyn Sambrooke Church and Postmodern Culture An excellent English translation of Jacques Ranciere's study of literary style... -- Edmund Campion The European Legacy Ranciere offers us fresh ways to understand how we got from a system of poetics that organized a number of particular arts, to an aesthetic regime in which it is now possible to speak of art in the singular. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies One welcomes [an] ambitious, iconoclastic work like Gabriel Rockhill's Mute Speech Radical History, Radical Philosophy