A brand new collection of Jacques Rancière's writings on art and politics.

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.

Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers—including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray—the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism. The author employs discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, and the idea of radical democracy.

Disability and Dissensus is an interdisciplinary volume that critically engages with disability representation in contemporary cultures, fostering new understandings of human diversity and contributing to a dissensual ferment of thought in the academia, arts, and activism.

This book provides an explanation for the fundamental disagreement pertaining to immigration and asylum in Europe. Since the collapse of consensus with the end of the Cold War, immigration and asylum have increasingly emerged as a central socio-political issue in Europe. The present work attempts to move beyond the complexity of ‘managing’ migratory flows by focusing on the most daunting issues arising from the response to the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe. This debate is intimately connected to borders, security, belonging, citizenship and labour precarity/inequality. The book addresses some crucial dimensions related to the migration and asylum dissensus by providing an integrated frame of analysis from the point of view of resistance, rather than that of power. It connects notions of belonging and the migrant integration with the processes of de-democratisation, racist populism, citizenship and authoritarian migration regimes, and contributes towards a theory of the asylum and immigration dissensus by examining the potential for transition towards a society of equality and rights. The author proposes that the encounter(s) with surplus populations in Europe, which result in the multiplication of liminal regimes as well as spaces for resistance, generates potential for social imaginaries, promising a society unimaginable in previous epochs. This book will be of much interest to students of migration and border studies, global governance, European politics and International Relations.

The Politics of Dissensus inverts the traditional perspective on the study of parliamentary politics by focusing on its less obvious and less well-known aspects. Dissensus instead of consensus becomes the condition for the intelligibility of parliamentary politics. Such politics is indebted to the rhetorical culture of addressing issues from opposite perspectives and debating the alternatives pro et contra: no motion is approved without a thorough examination of, and confrontation among, imaginable alternatives. Establishing the openness of political debating, parliamentarism has become a distinctive historical contribution to the rise of parliamentary democracy. Parliament in Debate refers to the paradigmatic institution for political deliberation, the debates surrounding its legislative activity, as well as the supervision of government and administration. Parliament has become a fascinating object of scrutiny as a political institution adopted and developed by different political traditions. In a nutshell, the book retrieves the study of parliamentary politics to present political theory and action in the parliamentary mode. It is a book on the relevance of parliamentarism to the study of politics and a book on the comparative conceptual and institutional history of parliamentary politics. The Politics of Dissensus: Parliament in Debate is the outcome of an international team of contributors coordinated by two ongoing research projects, relying on a long-lasting international cooperation, namely the Academy of Finland project The Politics of Dissensus and the Spanish National Research Fund projects The Rhetorics of Democracy and The Civic Constellation.

This book reflects on the problematic relation of ethics to politics in our 'democratic' era. If democracy implies the loss of an ultimate foundation for both ethics and political action, how can it be defended against its (ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist, ...) critics. Are there reasons for being a 'democrat' and what does it mean to be so or to act 'democratically'. Does this merely imply strict obedience to certain procedures that we call 'democratic' or does a democratic society ask for a democratic attitude or ethos. If so, how can this ethos be defined and grounded. All contributions to this volume articulate answers to these questions or to problems intrinsically related to them (i.e. what is the status of the law when it loses ultimate foundation). They do so by reflecting on the work of some important contemporary French philosophers: Lefort, Lyotard, Derrida, Levinas, Lacan, etc