The Future of the Image

Description

A major philosopher presents a fascinating treatise on the radical future of art and film. In "The Future of the Image", Jacques Ranciere develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Ranciere argues that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies. Furthermore, he claims that many avant-garde practices are susceptible to being hijacked by power, despite the claims of those who support them. He suggests that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Ranciere, there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution has always meant the creation of a liberatory egalitarian social space.

Jacques Ranciere is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII, France. His books include Hatred of Democracy and On the Shores of Politics (both from Verso), The Politics of Aesthetics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People and The Nights of Labor.

"Ranciere's writings offer one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist." - Slavoj Zizek "Like all of Jacques Ranciere's texts, The Future of the Image is vertiginously precise." - Les Cahiers du cinema"