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This article sets forth a compositional model of ideology by drawing on the tradition of historical materialism and further developing its insights into the aesthetic composition of reality. It demonstrates how ideology is not simply a set of false beliefs but is rather the process by which social agents are composed over time in every dimension of their existence, including their thoughts, practices, perceptions, representations, values, affects, desires, and unconscious drives. By working through a number of diverse debates and authors—ranging from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Louis Althusser, Eduardo Galeano, Rosaura Sánchez, and Paulo Freire—it thereby elucidates how ideology is best understood as an aesthetic process that includes aspect of sense and sense-making, and that therefore requires a collective, cultural revolution as its antidote.

In this wide-ranging interview, Gabriel Rockhill discusses his most recent book, Counter-History of the Present, in the broader context of his research to date on aesthetics, politics and history, as well as its relationship to important interlocutors like Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir. He explains the similarities and important differences between genealogy and counter-history, and he elucidates how his work performs a materialist deconstruction that contests the idealist logocentrism operative in purely textualist modes of interpretation. The interview also develops an account of “radical geography” that calls into question culturalist spatial imaginaries, which plague certain forms of decolonial theory that diminish or efface social stratification and class conflict. The discussion thereby contributes to the development of a new model for critical social theory with an internationalist perspective, which seeks to weave these conceptual innovations into a rigorous and radical materialism.

This chapter turns to the work of one of the major philosophic figures in France to have stalwartly resisted the theoretical constellation of the philosophy of difference, in part through his identification with a tradition of radical critique that calls into question the standard academic role of philosophy and redefines it as ‘the attempt to think the totality of the thinkable.’ Situating his work in relationship to the so-called structuralists and post-structuralists, it presents the fundamental stakes of his broad intellectual project by providing a succinct but comprehensive account of how his historical ontology and his defense of political autonomy form the backdrop for his writings on aesthetics and psychoanalysis.

This chapter outlines Rancière’s major contribution to contemporary debates on art and politics by situating it in relationship to the work of his predecessors, and more specifically the paradigms of content-based commitment and formal commitment found respectively in Sartre and Barthes. It highlights the refreshing departure that he proposes from established models for thinking art and politics, but it also underscores some of the limitations inherent in his transhistorical conception of politics as well as in the hermeneutic framework he uses to interpret works of art.

The introduction distinguishes between two different modalities of theoretical practice: one that plays by the rules of an established discourse (an interpretation) and another that seeks to contest these norms in order to introduce alternative forms of intellectual practice (an intervention). Based on this distinction, it outlines the basic stakes of the book as a whole: to intervene in the discourse of contemporary continental philosophy. It then provides an overview of the methodological orientation of the various essays by detailing three different forms of intervention that are operative—to varying degrees—in all of them. To begin with, the essays contribute to a descriptive intervention that seeks to develop the broad lines of a counter-history of contemporary thought in which the dominant schematizations are called into question. Secondly, the chapters contribute either explicitly or implicitly to a metaphilosophical critique of contemporary theoretical practice by questioning many of the unspoken norms that govern philosophic work in the present. This form of critical or metaphilosophical intervention is closely intertwined with a discursive intervention, which consists in elaborating new discursive strategies for thinking and alternative models for doing philosophy.

This chapter critically examines Rancière’s intervention in Hatred of Democracy by calling into question his transhistorical conception of politics as well as his problematic positions on current events (which purport—in rather contradictory fashion—to distinguish between what is ‘properly political’ and what is not). This critical reflection weaves together both historical analysis and the study of the present in order to formulate an argument against the existence of ‘politics proper.’ More specifically, it sketches the broad outlines of an intransitive history of democracy in which there is no fixed, transhistorical object such as Democracy. It also formulates arguments against the purity of the political in order to highlight the extent to which political practice is always bound up with diverse social, cultural, economic and even psychological forces.

With a few rare but important exceptions, it is arguable that major contemporary debates on the historical relationship between art and politics—from the work of Lukács and Adorno to that of Lyotard and Rancière—have generally favored the visual arts and literature over and against architecture and urban design. However, as a few thinkers like Benjamin and Foucault have recognized, if there is one art that appears to be prototypically political (in the sense that it is almost inevitably the site of collective decisions that directly shape the social body while simultaneously being subject to multifarious communal appropriations), it is surely architecture. This paradox leads to a question of central importance, which serves to guide the analysis in this final chapter: why have many of the foremost philosophic debates on the historical relation between art and politics sidelined what is perhaps the political art par excellence? This leads to a critical re-examination of the metaphilosophical assumptions undergirding many of the standard historical narratives regarding the development of art and its relationship to politics.

This chapter proposes a counter-history of a seminal debate in the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. It calls into question the widespread assumption that Derrida rejects Foucault’s structuralist stranglehold by demonstrating that the meaning of a text always remains open. Through a meticulous examination of their respective historical paradigms, methodological orientations and hermeneutic parameters, it argues that Derrida’s critique of his former professor is, at the level of theoretical practice, a call to return to order. The ultimate conclusion is that the Foucault-Derrida debate has much less to do with Descartes’ text per se, than with the relationship between the traditional tasks of philosophy and the meta-theoretical reconfiguration of philosophic practice via the methods of the social sciences.

The opening chapter in this section outlines the implicit value system and binary normative logic—the valorization of difference over and against identity—that has dominated the ‘philosophy of difference’ in France and played an important role in the ‘politics of difference’ in the Anglophone world and beyond. By detailing a series of surreptitious conceptual operations aimed, in part, at disguising the rigidity of this metaphilosophical axiology, it calls into question the sacralization of difference, with special attention paid to its operative historiographical paradigms and its ultimate political consequences. It develops, in this regard, a metaphilosophical critique of one of the deep-seated normative commitments that has dominated a very significant portion of contemporary theory. This critical intervention thereby brings together one of the central motifs of the book as a whole, which aims at dismantling the more or less discreet attribution of value to difference in a seemingly unlimited number of domains (including history, politics and aesthetics).

It has now been some fifteen years that Jacques Ranciere has been developing his meticulous research on the aesthetic revolution that has deeply marked the last two centuries. His work testifies to a remarkable originality insofar as it opposes the modernist discourse that obstinately dominates debates on art history by trafficking in simple and reductive conceptual schemes: classical art and modern art, art theory and artistic practice, art for art's sake and committed art, the non- or anti-representative rupture, the intransitive turning point, and so on. Ranciere's method, moreover, consists in integrating all of those who have been seduced by these schematic representations into his own historical project, turning them into pieces on his chessboard, via what I propose to call explanatory and synthetic polemics. His work also has the particularity of breaking with the dominant categories for thinking the relationship between art and politics, whether those of the Marxist tradition, those of the sociology of art, or those of the post-structuralists. In proposing the notion of a distribution of the sensible common to art and politics, he masterfully analyses their consubstantiality by showing that art, to the extent that it distributes and redistributes the categories of the sensible world (the visible and the invisible, the expressible and the inexpressible, the possible and the impossible, etc.), is already political. In the case of the aesthetic regime of art, he foregrounds, moreover, the proximity between the aesthetic revolution of the last two centuries and the egalitarian politics of democracy, without however confusing the two. Given the unequalled rigour of Ranciere's research, the originality of the positions he takes, and all of the methodological innovations that he introduces, his reader cannot but be surprised that he only rarely broaches a question that nonetheless appears essential to his project, namely that of historical causality: why did the aesthetic revolution, in the specific form that it takes in Ranciere's work, begin near the end of the eighteenth century? Why did it develop in such an intimate, but often conflictual, relationship with modern democracy? Ranciere sometimes refers to a few key events of the modern age, be it the French Revolution, the revival of Christianity, the emergence of the social sciences, the democratic surge of the nineteenth century, or sometimes the birth of the museum and the circulation of novels.

The opening chapter explores a philosophic question that reflexively sheds light on the orientation of the book as a whole: how can we write the history of the present? Against the backdrop of the more specific question of how to understand the present state of philosophy, it turns to the late work of Michel Foucault and his unique account of the ontology of actuality or of contemporary reality (ontologie de l’actualité). It carefully reconstitutes his concern with providing a historico-philosophical justification of his own project, which he situates in a trajectory that begins with the emergence of the ontology of actuality in the later Kant. It assesses the contemporary relevancy of his critique of historical periodization and his redefinition of modernity in terms of a critical attitude. Given the apparent contradiction between his rejection of periodic history and his identification of a new era of historical thought, the chapter goes on to suggest that an alternative logic of history—founded on the three dimensions of time, space and social practice—would allow us to completely reformulate the way in which we think the present.

With the aim of rethinking the state and stakes of contemporary theory, Gabriel Rockhill critically works through some of the most important recent philosophical writings on the intertwined topics of history, politics and art. He offers guidance to some of the complex debates in these areas, as well as a commanding overview of the key issues and some of the central figures, including Foucault, Derrida, Castoriadis, Badiou and Rancière. By resituating theoretical work in a broader force field of culture and power, he advances an innovative and nuanced description of recent intellectual developments that calls into question the now standard but rather stereotypical accounts of prominent thinkers and philosophical movements. Far from hiding behind the towering figures with whom he engages, Rockhill stakes out positions in relationship to them and formulates precise arguments in favour of a novel understanding of the historical relationship between art and politics, arguing that there is a need for a deep shift in the tectonic plates that undergird these debates. The result is an invitation not only to retool extant methodological paradigms but also to ultimately reinvent the practice of theory itself.

Passage d l'envers Jacques Rancikre's circuitous response to the question "what is literature?" in the introduction to La Parole muette is in many ways indicative of the historical methodology operative in his most recent work on art and politics. The concept of literature, he claims, is at once absolutely self evident and radically undetermined. Rather than invoking this paradox as a Heideggerian justification for investigating the essential question of our age, Rancikre uses it as a vehicle for analyzing the intellectual constructs at work in the various attempts to isolate the nature of literature. The empirical approach, for example, accepts the selfevidence of the historical conventions that establish a well-circumscribed catalogue of literary works. This positivistic attitude is countered by a theoretical definition that posits the existence of a literary essence irreducible to the simple bibliographical delimitations inherent in textual classification. Instead of searching for a passage between the Scylla of positivism and the Charybdis of speculation, Rancibre is interested in the historical conditions that render such a choice possible. In other words, he refuses to give a straightforward answer to the question "what is literature?" in order to resituate the question itself in its historical context and examine the various factors that determine possible responses. One of the guiding presuppositions at work in the attempt to define literature is that aesthetic history can and should be divided between works of art and the philosophic reflection on the nature of aesthetics. In order to thwart this erroneous assumption, Rancibre painstakingly demonstrates that these domains are in fact coextensive and that it is impossible to separate theoretical claims from artistic practice. In the introduction to La Parole muette, he provides a brief analysis of this relationship in terms of the dispute between John Searle and Gdrard Genette. On the one hand, he agrees with Genette's claim that the literary status of a play like Britannicus is not simply due to the pleasure it produces and that literature cannot be reduced to Searle's notion of arbitrary aesthetic judgment. However, he refuses to accept Genette's counter-claim that Britannicus is a literary work because of its specific genre. According to Rancidre, such a conclusion would have been incomprehensible for Racine's contemporaries. Britannicus was strictly

Victor Hugo's professed decision to have written a vast and serpentine novel in memory of the inscription and later effacement of a single word-anagke: fatality, necessity-- might serve to preface the following investigation of the relationship between law, power and dissimulation in the work of Michel Foucault.1 Aside from the dominant role played by regimes of visibility and invisibility,2 one of the central features of the author's search for the story behind an inscription in the recesses of Notre-Dame is his insistence on working from the bottom up through a series of local and apparently disconnected events. He thereby avoids any centralized account that would authoritatively establish the precise role of the word in the novel. Anagke, along with its French equivalents fatalite and necessite, comes to function as a place holder for various contextually defined uses. If there can be no single answer to the question "what is the meaning of anagke in Notre-Dame de Paris?" it is ultimately because Hugo situates his reader in a matrix of discursive forces lacking any final law that would determine every specific use of the term or concept.3 In other words, the reader is performatively inscribed in an elusive network of linguistic constraints that reveals a surprising proximity with the mysterious anagke that Hugo himself sets out to elucidate. Under the guise of exposing the story behind anagke, Hugo thus surreptitiously positions his reader within it.5 His object of study is concealed in the circuitous and fragmented narrative lines that are supposed to lead up to it, thereby mirroring the very process of dissimulation that accompanies anagke. This series of themes suggests an immediate affinity with the subject of the present article: the diverse currents at work in Michel Foucault's research on the question of power, particularly in the mid to late 1970s. Rejecting all essentialist attempts at a metaphysics of force that presumes to isolate the defining characteristics of power in a single, abstract and universal idea, Foucault illustrates how power operates at a local level in decentralized constellations specific to precise historical situations. Since power ultimately escapes philosophical abstraction, it is impossible to define it once and for all or even give a general account of Foucault's theory (since, strictly speaking, there is none). The difficulty inherent in discussing Foucault's work on this subject should thus be readily apparent, without mentioning the further complication that it is disseminated through essays, interviews, and passages from various books where he reformulates, corrects, or amends what he says elsewhere, leaving his reader unsure as to which particular description, if any, should be taken as authoritative. Much like Hugo's anagke, Foucault's notion of power not only eludes interpretive abstraction but, as an object of study, it cannot be divorced from the various forces operative in the very act of investigating it. For this reason, the following analysis will be partially hermeneutic and methodological in nature, in order to contravene some of the dominant tendencies at work in the construction of Foucault's "theory of power": the assumption that nominal notions such as power can be assimilated into abstract, unified concepts; the presupposition that Foucault's research evolved in a relatively homogenous fashion, leading to the progressive maturity of his ideas and their expression; and the tendency to read Foucault's conception of power through pre-existing philosophic schemata. Given these hermeneutic concerns, the investigation that follows will be guided by one central theme in order to circumvent the temptation to give a general account of power. It will focus on the transformation that occurred in Foucault's later writings when certain features of the analytics of power formulated in the 1970s were sacrificed in the name of a binary model of domination and resistance. …