Rancière's Sentiments

In Rancière’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Rancière’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Rancière’s literary voice, and how Rancière juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Rancière’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.

“To understand Rancière, Panagia argues, is to set aside the search for prescriptive constructs and instead embrace the aesthetic sensibilities that create the world. Recommended.”, "Davide Panagia has written a complex and pathbreaking book that engages the work of democratic theorist Jacques Rancière in order to redefine what it means to practice democracy. Rancière’s Sentiments is not an introduction to Rancière’s oeuvre, but rather a book that grapples with his most difficult ideas in order to challenge established assumptions about how politics comes to be known, felt, and practiced.", "Rancière’s Sentiments is a whistle-stop tour of aesthetics in the work of Jacques Rancière. . . . Davide Panagia skillfully meshes a scenic narrative, wending his way through four chapters, each exploring a different line of division that Rancière’s writing puts into question.", "I would recommend Davide Panagia's Rancière's Sentiments without hesitation to any researcher in literature, political science, or philosophy who seeks an articulate presentation of Rancière's very particular manner of thinking and arguing. Panagia has done a superb job of navigating through and illuminating the various constellations that characterize Rancière's thought, while maintaining the sense and the feel of a manner of thinking that elide closure."

Davide Panagia is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of The Political Life of Sensation and The Poetics of Political Thinking, both also published by Duke University Press, as well as Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics.