TEHRAN – French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s book “Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics” has been published in Persian.

Ney is the publisher of the book translated by Mehdi Amirkhanlu. 

Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic “distributions of the sensible,” which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. 

Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière’s corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. 

Rancière argues that our current notion of “literature” is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. 

In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, “literature” is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. 

With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico and Cervantes, and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature’s still-vital capacity for reinvention.

Rancière is an 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 Future of the Image” and “The Nights of Labor”.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian edition of Jacques Rancière’s book “Mute Speech”.

MMS/YAW