The Future of the Image, Paperback

Lauded by major contemporary artists and philosophers, Jacques Ranci re's work returns politics to its central place in understanding art.

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Ranci re develops a fascinating new concept of the image incontemporary art, showing how art and politics have always beenintrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, filmmakers such as Godard and Bresson, andthinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard andGreenberg, Ranci re shows that contemporary theorists of the image aresuffering from religious tendencies.

He argues that there is a starkpolitical choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Ranci re there is never apure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarianideals.

Jacques Ranci re is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. His books include The Politics of Aesthetics, On the Shores of Politics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, The Nights of Labor, Staging the People, and The Emancipated Spectator.

Gregory Elliott is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and author of Althusser: The Detour of Theory and Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Decay of Labour England?.