[artinfo] on Jacques Ranciére's aesthetical thinking

[Index]

   Critical art in a time of consensus
   On Jacques Rancière's aesthetical thinking

   Thursday May 18, 5pm - 8pm, 2006
   Seminar at the French Institute in Stockholm
   Kommendörsgatan 16, 3rd floor
   SITE Magazine and Index, in collaboration with the French Institute in
   Stockholm, invites you to a seminar with
   and about the French philosopher Jacques Rancière.
   Jacques Rancière has since the 1960's in a long series of books
   developed a thinking based on the notion of
   radical equality. During the last couple of years his works on
   political theory, aesthetics, literature and film have
   gained a large interest both in France and internationally. For
   Jacques Rancière, politics is the search for emancipation
   according to an ideal of universal equality. But every political
   communality, he means, is also an aesthetical
   communality, a "distribution of the sensible" that defines what can be
   said, seen and done, and which thereby
   decides who has access to this communality and who is excluded from
   it. It is starting from this distribution that
   the question about the politics of aesthetics and about the critical
   potentials of art can be posed. There is no
   conflict between an art for art's sake and a political art - they both
   define a new structure for the common life.
   Also participating in the seminar are Fulvia Carnevale, philosopher
   and artist, Paris, and Alexandre Costanzo,
   philosopher and editor of the magazine Failles, Paris.
   On the evening of the 18th, SITE Editions new publication with texts
   by Jacques Rancière in Swedish translation,
   Texter om politik och estetik (Texts on politics and aesthetics) will
   also be presented. The book gathers fundamental
   essays from the last ten years on political theory, on the birth of
   the concept of aesthetics and on the history of
   literature, film and visual arts, and it constitutes the first Swedish
   book-length presentation of Jacques Rancière's works.
   For the cover of the book, artist Mattias Åkesson has designed the
   work Corporate Red, at the invitation of Index
   and SITE. More information on www.indexfoundation.se/projects.
   SITE Editions is a book series for political philosophy, aesthetic
   theory and essays, and is published by SITE
   Magazine in collaboration with the publishing house Propexus. SITE
   Editions first publication was Giorgio
   Agamben's Undantagstillståndet (The State of Exception), which came
   out in 2005. During 2006 SITE Editions
   will publish, besides Jacques Rancière's Texter om politik och
   estetik, a collection of essays by Jean Genet, which

   have never been available in Swedish before.


   Index
   Kungsbro strand 19
   112 26 Sthlm, Sverige
   T: 46 (0)8 640 60 69
   T: 46 (0)8 640 94 92
   E: index at algonet.se
   www.indexfoundation.se
   The Index exhibition programme is curated Markus Degerman, Andreas
   Gedin, Helena Holmberg, Mats Stjernstedt and Niklas Östholm.