Earlier this month Charlotte declared July to be Rancière month and launched a fantastic competition to win a selection of our titles to celebrate. And of course the main reason we're celebrating is the recent publication of not one but two brand new translations of Rancière's work, Mallarmé and Althusser's Lesson. What with all the conferences and acquisitions around here lately, I've not had a chance to tell you more about them, so here goes.
Mallarmé, which was originally published in French in 1996 and is translated into English by Steven Corcoran, is Rancière's study of the 19th-century French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé. Rancière presents Mallarmé as neither an aesthete in need of rare essences and unheard-of words, nor the silent and nocturnal thinker of some poem too pure to be written. Mallarmé is the contemporary of a republic that is seeking out forms of civic worship to replace the pomp of religions and kings. If his writing is difficult, it is because it complies with a demanding and delicate poetics that is itself responding to an exceptional awareness of the complexity of an historical moment as well as the role that poetry ought to play in it.
Althusser's Lesson was Rancière's first ever book, originally published in 1974 and here translated by Emiliano Battista. It appeared just as the energies of May 68 were losing ground to the calls for a return to order. Rancière’s analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser’s Reply to John Lewisin 1973? How to explain the rehabilitation of a philosophy that had been declared ‘dead and buried on the barricades of May 68’? What had changed? The answer to this question takes the form of a genealogy of Althusserianism that is, simultaneously, an account of the emergence of militant student movements in the ‘60s, of the arrival of Maoism in France, and of how May 68 rearranged all the pieces anew.
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