Aesthetics and Its Discontents Rancière Hardback Polity Press 9780745646305

Aesthetics and Its DiscontentsAuthor(s): Jacques Rancire, Steven Corcoran\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, United Kingdom\nImprint: Polity Press\nISBN-13: 9780745646305, 978-0745646305\nSynopsis\nAesthetics and Its Discontents\n\n Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed.\n\n But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution.\n\n Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collecti.