What do you think?
Rate this book
Les Temps modernes: Art, temps, politique
Les études réunies dans ce volume constituent la première exploration systématique de la question du temps par Jacques Rancière.Dans le retour des pensées critiques d’aujourd’hui, l’interrogation sur le temps est une figure constante, que l’on songe à la notion d’« événement » ou aux débats inusables sur la modernité et la postmodernité.Le temps est aussi un problème qui a accompagné toute l’oeuvre de Rancière, à travers le temps arraché par les ouvriers de La Nuit des prolétaires, les nouvelles figures du temps inaugurées par la modernité littéraire, ou encore les politiques de l’image dans les cinémas de Bresson ou Straub.Les temps modernes déploient quatre moments de la réflexion rancièrienne : Temps, récit et politique ; La modernité revisitée ; Les moments de la danse ; Les temps du cinéma. Ces quatre domaines d’intervention sont aussi bien l’occasion d’une réflexion générale sur le temps, l’esthétique et la politique, qu’une discussion sur des moments et des temps singuliers de l’émancipation. Ces temporalités émancipatrices ne se donnent à voir, pour Rancière, ni comme une progression linéaire, ni comme un événement sorti de nulle part, mais plutôt comme des vagues : entre l’activité et l’inactivité, entre le pas-encore et le déjà-là. Peut-être plus encore que les philosophes ou les historiens, les écrivains, chorégraphes et cinéastes ont davantage à dire, pour Rancière, sur l’océan de gestes et de signes, sur le flux et le reflux du temps qui rompent avec l’horizon étriqué de la domination.
160 pages, Paperback
Published May 17, 2018
4 people are currently reading
179 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Rancière
205 books485 followersJacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.
Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading "Capital" (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris.
Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.
Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.
In 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Freize Art Fair. Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.
Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading "Capital" (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris.
Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.
Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.
In 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Freize Art Fair. Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 5, 2023
'the language of cinema is not the performance that unfolds and folds up again, but the primitive language that makes utter novelty of history communicate in step with the immemorial time of myth.'
February 4, 2024
"The liberal arts were practised by so-called free men for their leisure. The mechanical arts were practised by artisans as a profession, for the utility of others and for their own subsistence. It is in relation to this hierarchy that the modern differentiation of art can be conceived and that we can understand the notions of representation and anti-representation. … Destruction of the representative order is thus something quite different from the abandonment of figuration in the visual arts. It is the destruction of a hierarchical order inscribed in the very forms of the perceptible and the conceivable, the destruction (in my terms) of a whole ‘distribution of the sensible’. This subversion of the very forms within which artistic practices are perceived and conceived is what I have called the aesthetic revolution. As a result of it, art exists not simply as an essence common to all the arts, but as a determinate historical configuration" (p.35).
September 18, 2018
C'est le genre de bouquin qui se digère doucement. J'ai terminé la lecture mais pas la digestion. Le philosophe nous perd un peu mais la forme reprise de conférence n'y est pas pour rien.
La première partie porte sur le temps politique, des grands récits, de la reprise de l'analyse Marxiste de sens de l'Histoire par nos chers élites néo-libérales. On y verra alors une courte salve en direction de notre époque.
La seconde partie porte sur l'art moderne, l'avant garde, les incompréhensions issues de l'ignorance des caractères historiques de ces notions, et des dominations de ceux qui ont du temps sur ceux qui n'en ont pas. Cette partie m'a de suite envoyé regarder "l'Homme à la caméra" (https://youtu.be/z97Pa0ICpn8). Chef d'oeuvre !
La troisième partie porte sur la danse et la quatrième sur le cinéma ("les raisins de la colères"). Je dois encore relire ces parties là.
C'est franchement chouette mais ça se gagne.
La première partie porte sur le temps politique, des grands récits, de la reprise de l'analyse Marxiste de sens de l'Histoire par nos chers élites néo-libérales. On y verra alors une courte salve en direction de notre époque.
La seconde partie porte sur l'art moderne, l'avant garde, les incompréhensions issues de l'ignorance des caractères historiques de ces notions, et des dominations de ceux qui ont du temps sur ceux qui n'en ont pas. Cette partie m'a de suite envoyé regarder "l'Homme à la caméra" (https://youtu.be/z97Pa0ICpn8). Chef d'oeuvre !
La troisième partie porte sur la danse et la quatrième sur le cinéma ("les raisins de la colères"). Je dois encore relire ces parties là.
C'est franchement chouette mais ça se gagne.
August 10, 2024
A few of the most interesting points in Ranciere’s challenge to the doxa of modernism:
- Contrary to fashionable claims that our current mode of temporality is defined by ‘presentism’, the new version of history with an immanent end (and of necessary cause and effect) is globalisation.
- Rather than the temporality of modernity being defined by a perfect synchronicity between man and machine, it is marked by a ‘not yet’, an attempt at catching-up to the new speeds of daily and political life.
- Capitalism is defined primarily by an iniquity in how time is experienced (those who have time, and those who do not). Communism is the attempt at establishing a common time; the equivalence and translatability of acts/gestures/temporalities into one totality.
- Contrary to fashionable claims that our current mode of temporality is defined by ‘presentism’, the new version of history with an immanent end (and of necessary cause and effect) is globalisation.
- Rather than the temporality of modernity being defined by a perfect synchronicity between man and machine, it is marked by a ‘not yet’, an attempt at catching-up to the new speeds of daily and political life.
- Capitalism is defined primarily by an iniquity in how time is experienced (those who have time, and those who do not). Communism is the attempt at establishing a common time; the equivalence and translatability of acts/gestures/temporalities into one totality.
July 17, 2024
Super readable, in the sense that a critique of modernism feels pretty low-stakes at this point and so many pages are gorgeously excerptible. It's a digestible analysis of class differences as distinguished by those who have time & those who have-not; temporalities in "putatively objective realities and professedly eternal categories."
.
There are discursions on dance and dramaturgy. There are, in terms plain and firm, primers on emancipatory struggles. All things dovetail in art analyses, like the old Grapes of Wrath adaptation. It was mostly pleasant to follow along.
.
There are discursions on dance and dramaturgy. There are, in terms plain and firm, primers on emancipatory struggles. All things dovetail in art analyses, like the old Grapes of Wrath adaptation. It was mostly pleasant to follow along.
May 8, 2024
perhaps went a bit over my head in parts
May 15, 2023
Rancière writes about interesting concepts/things - Marxism, modernity, dance, film - but in such a way as to make them quite a lot more complex and symbolic than one might presume them to be. I will admit to being surprised by the use of dance and film - granted, he references specific dancers AND specific films - to discuss Marxism, Soviet era politics, and the ambiguous idea of 'the modern/modernism', but Rancière is smart enough to make his premises hold up to scrutiny. Granted, they are presented more as opinion than strict theory, so one is able to read with a more casual eye and appreciate their novelty without being pressed to accept them whole cloth, or to compare them to other conceptions of 'the modern/modernity'. His idea of modern/ity as more political than temporal is intriguing, if a bit under-analyzed. Still, an interesting book that made me think about some things in a way I hadn't ever before.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews