Jacques Ranci?re's work has challenged many of the assumptions of contemporary continental philosophy by placing equality at the forefront of emancipatory political thought and aesthetics. Drawing on the claim that egalitarian politics persistently appropriates elements from political philosophy to engage new forms of dissensus, Devin Zane Shaw argues that Ranci?re's work also provides an opportunity to reconsider modern philosophy and aesthetics in light of the question of equality. In Part I, Shaw examines Ranci?re's philosophical debts to the 'good sense' of Cartesian egalitarianism and the existentialist critique of identity. In Part II, he outlines Ranci?re's critical analyses of Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg and offers a reinterpretation of Ranci?re's debate with Alain Badiou in light of the philosophical differences between Schiller and Schelling.
From engaging debates about political subjectivity from Descartes to Sartre, to delineating the egalitarian stakes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art from Schiller to Badiou, this book presents a concise tour through a series of egalitarian moments found within the histories of modern philosophy and aesthetics.
Devin Zane Shawteaches philosophy at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University. He is author of
Freedom and Nature in Schelling's Philosophy of Art(Bloomsbury, 2010) and is co-editor of, and contributor to, Theory Mad Beyond Redemption : The Post-Kantian Poe, a special edition of the
Edgar Allan Poe Review(2012).
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Philosophy and Equality
Part I: Subjectivity
Chapter 1: The 'Good Sense' of Cartesian Egalitarianism
1.1. 'a history or, if you prefer, a fable'
1.2. Descartes's Egalitarianism and the Problem of Separation
1.3. The Rationality of a Wrong
1.4. Woman as Other, Woman as Subject
1.5. Toward Collective Egalitarianism
Chapter 2: The Nothingness of Equality: Ranci?re's 'Sartrean Existentialism'
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