Chronicles of consensual times

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New York: Continuum. 2010. 170 p. ISBN: 978-0-8264-4288-8.In this fascinating collection, Jacques Ranciere, one of the world's most important and influential living philosophers, explores the nature of consensus in contemporary politics. Consensus does not mean peace. Instead it refers to a map of operations of war, of a topography of the visible, of what is possible and what can be thought, in which war and peace live side-by-side. Lying at the heart of these consensual times are new forms of racism and ethnic cleansing, humanitarian wars and wars against terror. Consensus also implies using time in a way that sees in it a thousand devious turns. This is evident in the incessant diagnoses of the present and of amnesiac politics, in the farewells to the past, the commemorations, and the calls to remember. But all these twists and turns tend toward the same goal: to show that there is only one reality to which we are obliged to consent. What stands in the way of this undertaking is politics. These chronicles aim to re-open that space wherein politics once more becomes thinkable.Table of contentsPrefaceThe Head and the Stomach, January 1996Borges in Sarajevo, March 1996Fin de Siecle and New Millennium, May 1996Cold Racism, July 1996The Last Enemy, November 1996The Grounded Plane, January 1997Dialectic in the Dialectic, August 1997Voyage to the Country of the Last Sociologists, November 1997Justice in the Past, April 1998The Crisis of Art or a Crisis of Thought? July 1998Is Cinema to B lame? March 1999The Nameless War, May 1999One Image Right C an Sweep Away Another, October 1999The Syllogism of C orruption, October 2000Voici/Voila: The Destiny of Images, January 2001From Facts to Interpretations: The New Quarrel over the Holocaust, April 2001From One Torture to Another, June 2001The Filmmaker, the People and the Government, August 2001Time, Words, War, November 2001Philosophy in the Bathroom , January 2002Prisoners of the Infinite, MarchFrom One Month of May to Another, June 2002Victor Hugo: The Ambiguities of a Bicentenary, August 2002The Machine and the Foetus, January 2003The Death of the Author or the Life of the Artist? April 2003The Logic of Amnesia, July 2003The Insecurity Principle, September 2003The New Fictions of Evil, November 2003Criminal Democracy? March 2004The Difficult Legacy of Michel Foucault, June 2004The New Reasons for the Lie, August 2004Beyond Art? October 2004 The Politics of Images, February 2005Democracy and Its Doctors, May 2005NotesIndex