"This timely collection of essays should finally jump-start the English-speaking conversation about the work of Jacques Ranciere, one of the most innovative political philosophers now writing. His method of equality, his contrast of a stable 'police' order with 'the political' as an interruption of that order by those invisible within it, and his idea that both politics and art involve modes of distributing/partitioning the sensible together form a unique constellation of radical political thinking."--J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research

Introduction: Jacques Rancière: Penseur de l'envers / Gabriel Rockhill and Phil Watts Part One: History 1. Historicizing Untimeliness / Kristen Ross 2. The Lessons of Jacques Rancière: Knowledge and Power after the Storm / Alain Badiou 3. Sophisticated Continuities and Historical Discontinuities, Or, Why Not Protagoras? / Eric Méchoulan 4. The Classics and Critical Theory in Postmodern France: The Case of Jacques Rancière / Giuseppina Mecchia 5. Rancière and Metaphysics / Jean-Luc Nancy Part Two: Politics 6. What is Political Philosophy? Contextual Notes / Étienne Balibar 7. Rancière in South Carolina / Todd May 8. Political Agency and the Ambivalence of the Sensible / Yves Citton 9. Staging Equality: Rancière's Theatrocracy and the Limits of Anarchic Equality / Peter Hallward 10. Rancière's Leftism, Or, Politics and Its Discontents / Bruno Bosteels 11. Jacques Rancière's Ethical Turn and the Thinking of Discontents / Solange Guénoun Part Three. Aesthetics 12. The Politics of Aesthetics: Political History and the Hermeneutics of Art / Gabriel Rockhill 13. Cinema and Its Discontents / Tom Conley 14. Politicizing Art in Rancière and Deleuze: The Case of Postcolonial Literature / Raji Vallury 15. Impossible Speech Acts: Jacques Rancière's Erich Auerbach / Andrew Parker 16. Style indirect libre / James Swenson Afterword: The Method of Equality: An Answer to Some Questions / Jacques Rancière