The unfinished song: Intermittency and melancholy in Ranciére

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Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 61-76

  Gibson, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 79959515045     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/para.2005.28.1.61     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. 'An unfinished song sinks into the grave,/He takes his most beautiful verses with him'. Quoted in Courts voyages au pays du peuple (Paris, Seuil, 1990), 73. Hereafter CV. All translations into English are my own, except where otherwise specified.
2. See Le Maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'é mancipation intellectuelle (Paris, Fayard, 1987), 230. Hereafter MI.
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (London, Verso, 1978), 15.
4. For a relevant account of melancholy that engages with Freud, Adorno and Ranciére, see my 'Oublier Baudrillard: Melancholy of the Year 2000', in 'Remembering the 1990s', New Formations 50 (Autumn 2003), 123-41.
5. La Mésentente: politique et philosophie (Paris, Galilée, 1995), 188, hereafter M. If Ranciére's work is haunted by a certain melancholy, that is because it refuses to adjust itself specifically to the 'happy consensus' of Fortress Europe.
6. This is glossed, in 'L'inadmissible', by way of an analogy with an Imperial Rome growing ever more efficient at banishing both the thought and the reality of those denied access to its wealth and splendour. See 'L'inadmissible', Aux bords du politique (Paris, La Fabrique, 1998), 128-47, especially at 136-7 (On the Shores of Politics). Hereafter BP. The reference is of course to Rome at a much later date than the events on the Aventine Hill referred to below. It is by no means insignificant for the analogy that the later Rome of 'L'inadmissible' has properly incorporated its own plebeians.
7. Estragon in Waiting for Godot. See Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London, Faber and Faber, 1990), 41.
8. Le Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (Paris, La Fabrique, 2000), 14. Hereafter PS.
9. 'Ranciére et l'apolitique', in Abrégé de métapolitique (Paris, Seuil, 1998), 129-38 (138).
10. See Livy in Fourteen Volumes, translated by B.O. Foster (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1967), Book II, xxxii.
11. The nineteenth-century thinker and historian who provided his own interpretation of Livy's narrative, and whom Ranciére takes to constitute a link between a 'classical' and a 'modern' politics. See La Mésentente, 53; and Ballanche, 'Formule générale de tous les peuples appliquée á l'histoire du peuple romain', Revue de Paris, September 1830.
12. Ranciére is quoting from Jacotot's Langue maternelle (Paris, 1836), 109.
13. 'Preface', La Nuit des prolétaires: archive du rêve ouvrier (Paris, Fayard, 1981), 7, 9;
14. The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by John Drury, introduction by Donald Reid (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989), vii, ix. Hereafter references are to the English text, given as NL.
15. 'The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes', New Left Review (second series, March/April 2002), 133-51, 133. Hereafter AR.
16. La Parole muette: essais sur les contradictions de la literature (Paris, Hachette, 1998), 98.
17. In La Chair des mots: politiques de l'écriture (Paris, Galilée, 1998), 87-113 (The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing). Hereafter CM.
18. See La Parole muette, passim.
19. Elsewhere, Ranciére has read Lyotard in more positive terms. In L'Inconscient esthétique (The Aesthetic Unconscious), at least, Lyotard represents the 'latest trick played by the aesthetic unconscious on the Freudian unconscious'; that is, the ineluctable if contradictory logic according to which the aesthetic always threatens to hollow out the efforts of those, like Freud, who seek to think it, unmelancholically, without ambivalence, in terms of hope, effectiveness and remedy. See L'Inconscient esthétique (Paris, Galilée, 2001), 75-8.