Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics

In: New directions in critical theory

Abstract

Throughout his career, shaped by a notable collaboration with Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly by examining its relationship to aesthetics. Like Michel Foucault, he broke with his many of his predecessors to upend dominant twentieth-century historical narratives and critical theories. Often overlooked in the canon of his works, Mute Speech contains the critical seeds of Rancière's most provocative assertions, challenging the intellectual orthodoxy that had come to define the nature of art and representation.Arguing that art is neithe