What Times Are We Living In?. Jacques Ranciere

What Times Are We Living In?

      A Conversation with Eric Hazan

      Jacques Rancière

      Translated by Steven Corcoran

      polity

      Originally published in French as En quel temps vivons-nous ? Conversation avec Eric Hazan © La Fabrique Éditions, 2017

      This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press

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      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3700-6

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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About the book

      This book took the form of a ‘conversation’ after a compromise was reached. At La Fabrique we wanted Rancière to express his thoughts on the times we are living in, but he himself didn’t feel the need to do so. Then, perhaps worn down by my asking, he told me one day that, if I presented him with some questions, he would reply to them. The task seemed to me a difficult one, although the aim was clear: to get Rancière to elaborate on things he had recently put forward in articles and interviews – on novelty in ‘our times’ and on what in them is continuous with the past, on the link between representation and democracy, on the end of work as the form of a common world to come, on hopes for a community of struggle that is also a community of life, on the new caution that we must adopt when speaking about such apparently simple notions as ‘people’, ‘insurrection’ or ‘history’ … But what questions should be asked and where to start?

I took some months to decide, then ended up by setting down one piece of the puzzle and, Rancière playing the game, the rest fell nicely into place. The conversation unfolded in written form, at a lively pace, between August 2016 and February 2017. The reader will be the judge of whether the result lives up to the question posed in the title of this short book.

      E.H.