Books in the Atopia: Philosophy, Political Theory, Aesthetics series

This book explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art.

The Passive Eye is a revolutionary and historically rich account of Berkeley's theory of vision. In this formidable work, the author considers the theory of the embodied subject and its passions in light of a highly dynamic conception of infinity.

In this extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics, the author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She studies why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject.

This new collection of challenging literary studies plays with a foundational definition of Western culture: the word become flesh. But the word become flesh is not, or is no longer, a theological already-given. It is a millennial goal or telos toward which each text strives.

This book analyzes a range of texts that seek, in different ways, to represent "the people." Ranciere approaches these texts as travel narratives or ethnographies whose authors have traveled not to distant or exotic lands but across class lines.

In order to grasp what it means to call Rousseau an author of the Revolution, it is necessary to take full measure of the difficulties of literary interpretation to which Rousseau's work gives rise. This is a deconstructive analysis of Rousseau as an "author" of the French Revolution.