(DOWNLOAD) "Introduction: Jacques Ranciere on the Shores of Queer Theory (Work Overview)" by Borderlands * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Introduction: Jacques Ranciere on the Shores of Queer Theory (Work Overview)
- Author : Borderlands
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 97 KB
Description
This special issue of Borderlands proposes to consider an engagement that has never occurred, between two fields of thought that have never been (and have often resisted becoming) proper 'fields.' This issue itself must therefore stage that encounter, but to do so both the issue and the pieces that comprise it must flirt with a particular danger: namely, that the engagement staged here will be a 'staging' in the worst possible senses.[1] Staging could mean a false and forced construction, a merely academic exercise, or perhaps just a sham. While it goes without saying that we, as editors of the issue, hope to bring about a different sort of staging, it remains for us to say what sort, and why. In thinking through the encounter orchestrated and presented here, we consider the meaning of staging as a mise en scene. We might think such a staging in Ranciere's sense as a particular partition of the sensible. In a response to a recent issue of Parallax devoted to his work, Ranciere, speaking in the third person, discusses precisely the 'dramaturgical' aspects of his work and its refusal to solidify into a 'field' or a 'method': 'This is not a theory of politics, setting the principles for political practice. This is a dramaturgy of politics, a way to make sense of the aporias of political legitimacy by weaving threads between several configurations of sense' (Ranciere, 2009b: 120). We might also think such a staging in the terms of queer activism, as a political confrontation (for example, ACT-UP's 'staging' of kiss-ins or die-ins). Therefore, this special issue rests on the wager that the encounter between the thought of Jacques Ranciere and the work of queer theory will add up to much more than exercises in comparison/contrast or trumping efforts; an effective staging of this encounter must seek to transform both fields of thought. Ranciere conveys just this sense of transformation: Performing or playing, in the theatrical sense of the word, the gap between a place where the demos exists and a place where it does not ... Politics consists in playing or acting out this relationship, which means first setting it up as a theatre, inventing the argument, in the double logical and dramatic sense of the term, connecting the unconnected. (Ranciere, 1999: 88, emphasis added)