5 results
The Body of Spirit: Hegel's Concept of Flesh and its Normative Implications
- Jean-Philippe Deranty
-
- Journal:
- Hegel Bulletin / Volume 42 / Issue 1 / April 2021
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 October 2020, pp. 39-56
- Print publication:
- April 2021
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
This paper attempts to show that an expansive normative vision can be drawn from Hegel's texts, one whose scope significantly exceeds the anthropocentric model presented in the ‘objective spirit’ parts of his system. This expansion of normativity is linked to an expansive vision of relationality underpinning Hegel's model of ‘concrete freedom’. In order to put into sharper relief the links between expansive relationality and normativity, the late thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is mobilized as a heuristic contrasting point. In the ‘subjective spirit’ sections of the Encyclopaedia are found insights that anticipate key features of Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘flesh’. Locating these insights allows us to detect the underlying thread this paper seeks to mine. Hegel's own ‘theory of flesh’ culminates in the notion of ‘constitutive attachments’, the idea that the content of subjectivity is made up of all the bonds linking the human subject to her surrounding worlds and objects. Since freedom for Hegel is ‘being with’, and since normative demands arise from the different ways in which freedom is concretely realized, it would seem that Hegel's relational conception of subjectivity should lead to an equally expansive conception of normativity. Against the objection that Hegel denied any normative status to non-human beings, the paper points to passages in his work, notably his account of aesthetic judgement and natural beauty, which appear to suggest the opposite.
Introduction: a journey in equality
-
- By Jean-Philippe Deranty, Macquarie University
- Edited by Jean-Phillipe Deranty, Macquarie University, Sydney
-
- Book:
- Jacques Rancière
- Published by:
- Acumen Publishing
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2010, pp 1-14
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
It has taken several decades for the work of Jacques Ranciére to find a wide audience. His first publications, in which he developed an alternative approach to the history of the labour movement, were known only to a few specialists in the mid- 1970s. Interest in his writings started to grow with the publication of Disagreement, his major book of political philosophy (1995 in France, 1998 for the English translation). Since then, his unflinching defence of a radical version of democratic equality has made him one of the key references in contemporary political thought. Parallel to this work on democracy, his writings on literature and the visual arts, particularly film, have also gained increased attention in the last two decades. Of the more than twenty books he has published, only a handful are not yet translated into English. He now publishes regularly in international journals of politics and aesthetics and receives invitations all over the world from the most prestigious academic and artistic institutions.
Early Marxist years and the rupture of May '68
Ranciére was born in 1940 in Algiers. He was therefore a decade younger than the generation of the most famous postwar French theorists, like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. Ranciére's generation, of which Alain Badiou is the other very famous figure, was the one that would become engulfed by the revolutionary activism awakened by the events of May 1968.
Afterword
-
- By Jean-Philippe Deranty, Macquarie University
- Edited by Jean-Phillipe Deranty, Macquarie University, Sydney
-
- Book:
- Jacques Rancière
- Published by:
- Acumen Publishing
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2010, pp 183-188
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Read in order, the different chapters of this book retrace the intellectual journey accomplished by Jacques Ranciére, from the early affirmation of his commitment to radical equality, to the application of this fundamental “axiom” in many areas of the social sciences (the history and sociology of the labour movement, historiography, education, politics), culminating in the seminal books of the last decade (Disagreement, Film Fables, The Future of the Image). As we look back on the rich and complex work this journey in radical equality has produced, five important threads become visible, the texture of which gives this work its amazing consistency. These are Ranciére's distinctive conceptualization of equality and freedom, his humanistic concern, his hermeneutic approach and his materialism. Identifying these threads helps us to better understand where the originality of Ranciére's thought lies, and the reasons that explain why his key concepts and arguments have become attractive to many theorists and practitioners.
Obviously, the major thread running through Ranciére's writings is the principle of equality. With Badiou, Ranciére calls this an “axiom”, to indicate the fact that equality between individuals must be postulated because it can never be definitively proven. Indeed, many factual aspects of modern societies seem to run counter to this axiom. However, once postulated, the principle transforms the way in which individuals, society, politics and even the arts are seen. For Ranciére a true theory of emancipation not only takes political emancipation as its object of study but aims to participate practically in emancipation.
9 - Regimes of the arts
- from PART III - POETICS
-
- By Jean-Philippe Deranty, Macquarie University
- Edited by Jean-Phillipe Deranty, Macquarie University, Sydney
-
- Book:
- Jacques Rancière
- Published by:
- Acumen Publishing
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2010, pp 116-130
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Ranciére's notion of “regimes of the arts” appeared for the first time in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004; original French edition 2000). The term captured much of the substantial work of conceptual and historical analysis begun a few years earlier, notably in La parole muette (1998). In this book, Ranciére spoke of “systems of representation” and of “poetic systems”. Since then, his many aesthetic writings have greatly refined and enriched the content of that notion.
The notion of “regimes of the arts” is first a descriptive one. It is the gateway to Ranciére's rich aesthetic thinking. At its heart, the notion serves to identify the specific features of the understanding of art characteristic of modern society, that is, the society that was ushered in by the political, economic and cultural revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crucially, the notion serves to contrast the modern understanding of art, summarized by the term “aesthetic”, from a classical understanding, encapsulated in the terms “poetic” and “representative”.
As always with Ranciére, though, the notion also serves a polemical purpose. With its help, Ranciére wants to contest some of the prominent approaches to art in the contemporary humanities. In particular, the notion is used by him to reject interpretations that frame artistic practices in linear, mono-causal historical narratives: for example, formalist accounts that read the history of an art form as a movement of purification towards the appropriation by that art form of the specificity of its own medium (like surface and colour for painting); or metaphysical interpretations that read modern art works against the background of a teleological vision of history, as the unfolding of some essential logic.
1 - Logical revolts
- from PART I - PHILOSOPHY
-
- By Jean-Philippe Deranty, Macquarie University
- Edited by Jean-Phillipe Deranty, Macquarie University, Sydney
-
- Book:
- Jacques Rancière
- Published by:
- Acumen Publishing
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2010, pp 17-24
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This chapter deals with Ranciére's first writings, following his rupture with Althusserian Marxism, whose post mortem is drawn in the 1974 book-length essay, Althusser's Lesson. Ranciére's disillusionment with the orthodoxy of his time coincided with his involvement in the movements following the 1968 student and workers' revolts. The egalitarian spirit fuelling these movements led to a radical challenge of all social hierarchies. Ranciére's research in that decade sought to apply this radical egalitarian acumen at the point where “logos”, as the catchphrase for all the forms of reasoned discourse (from the arts and sciences to political deliberations), meets with the institutions of social life. This led him in particular to concentrate his research on “the workers' dream in nineteenth century France” (the sub-title of The Nights of Labour, the master work of that period). By recovering the theoretical and poetical writings, the organizational plans and political manifestos, the hopes and complaints of the nineteenth-century proletarians, Ranciére aimed to achieve a double aim: on the positive side, to demonstrate the capacity of the dominated to use the resources of logos, their ability to articulate their own thoughts and feelings on the basis of their specific experiences; on the negative side, to unveil the boundaries and divisions that are projected from the social into the intellectual realms, and that prevent the dominated from having their discourses count as meaningful and significant.