Chronicles of Consensual Times

In this fascinating collection of writings, Jacques Ranciere, one of the world's most important and influential living philosophers, explores the nature of consensus in contemporary politics. Consensus does not mean peace. Instead it refers to a map of operations of war, of a topography of the visible, of what is possible and what can be thought, in which war and peace live side-by-side. Lying at the heart of these consensual times are new forms of racism and ethnic cleansing, humanitarian wars and wars against terror. Consensus also implies using time in a way that sees in it a thousand devious turns. This is evident in the incessant diagnoses of the present and of amnesiac politics, in the farewells to the past, the commemorations, and the calls to remember. But all these twists and turns tend toward the same goal: to show that there is only one reality to which we are obliged to consent. What stands in the way of this undertaking is politics. These chronicles aim to re-open that space wherein politics once more becomes thinkable.

Preface \ The Head and the Stomach January 1996 \ Borges in Sarajevo March 1996 \ Fin de siècle and the New Millenary May 1996 \ Cold-blooded Racism July 1996 \ The Latest Enemy November 1996 \ The Grounded Plane January 1997 \ Dialectic in the Dialectic August 1997 \ Voyage to the Country of the Last Sociologists November 1997 \ Justice in the Past April 1998 \ A Crisis of Art or a Crisis of Thought? July 1998 \ Is Cinema to Blame? March 1999 \ The Nameless War May 1999 \ One's Right to the Image Can Destroy Another's October 1999 \ The Syllogism of Corruption October 2000 \ Voici/Voilà: The Future of Images January 2001 \ From Facts to Interpretations: The New Quarrel over the Holocaust April 2001 \ From One Kind of Torture to Another June 2002 \ The Film Director, the People and the Governors August 2001 \ Time, Words, War Novemebr 2001 \ Philosophy in the Bathroom January 2002 \ Prisoners of the Infinite March 2002 \ From One May to Another June 2002 \ Victor Huge: Ambiguities of a Bicentenary August 2002 \ The Machine and the Foetus January 2003 \ A Dead Author or an Artist with too much Life? April 2003 \ The Logic of Amnesia June 2003 \ The Insecurity Principle September 2003 \ New Fictions of Evil Novemebr 2003 \ Criminal Democracy March 2004 \ The Troubling Heritage of Michel Foucault June 2004 \ The New Reasons for Lying August 2004 \ Beyond Art? October 2004 \ The Politics of Images February 2005 \ Democracy and its Doctors May 2005 \ Index.