Mute Speech

Mute Speech counts among Jacques Ranciere's most intensive and compelling studies of the origins and consequences of modern literature. Taking German Romantic philosophy as a point of departure and setting his sights on Flaubert, Mallarme and Proust, Ranciere draws his readers through the many contradictions that give rise to the aesthetic turn of our age. Elegantly translated by James Swenson, Mute Speech invites us to think afresh the philosophical, aesthetic and political dilemmas that ground the modern canon. -- Tom Conley, Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Visual & Environmental Studies, Harvard University

Jacques Ranciere has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Ranciere's corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Ranciere argues that our current notion of "literature" is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, "literature" is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarme, and Proust, Ranciere demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention.