I once attended a talk that the philosopher Jacques Derrida gave in the ‘80s and the philoso-paparazzi effect was incredible: hungry graduate students clambering for seats, female art students fawning, palpable electricity abounded. In times of numbing political tide and cultural sea change where a sense of revolution is in the air to the point where we can taste it, (in 1776, 1968, during the Reagan years, or now—take your pick) it never fails that a swarthy Gallic figure emerges capturing our imaginations and setting cocktail parties ablaze with chatter and new brazen ideas.
Enter: Emeritus professor of philosophy Jacques Rancière, a strikingly original and distinctive social thinker who wet his feet during May 1968, co-authored the seminal Structural Marxist classic Reading Capital with Louis Althusser, and of late has sent the artworld’s heads spinning with his rich writings on visual culture, aesthetics and their relationship between politics and modernity.
You can expect that an evening spent with Rancière and his “cartography of the visible” and other touching-down points from his seminal en-vogue Politics Aesthetics will leave you feeling moved, maddened, inspired, and transfixed by continental thought with very serious street-cred. Unlike other big-time French rockstars of the intellectual armchair-Marxist variety (such as Bernard-Henri “God is dead but my hair is perfect” Levy, a man who developed his “immoderate taste” for the power of media glitz by allegedly watching the entire 1968 revolt on television), Rancière is the real deal—a vivid thinker who’s easily had as much influence as Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault.
Never mind Mother Mary and Joe DiMaggio—in times of trouble, turn to politically grounded, “sensuously impenetrable” French social thought. Rancière’s appearance this evening at PNCA (part of the PNCA+FIVE “Idea Studios” lecture series) promises to be one of the great events in Portland’s noosphere this year.
Jacques Rancière : What Makes Images Unacceptable is tonight, February 29 at 6:30 PM at PNCA (1241 NW Johnson)
–Tim DuRoche
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