Abstract

The Lessons of Rancière grapples with the thought of a philosopher, Jacques Rancière, determined not to pass on didactic lessons to his readers. How might one write a book such as Lessons, much less comment on it? What does it mean intellectually and politically to elucidate a thinker’s insights and yet in a way that doesn’t stabilize these into a falsely systematic body of thought or set of prescriptions? In Lessons, Samuel Chambers writes in a way faithful to Rancière’s project by virtue of his own polemical style. If Chambers defines Rancière’s polemics as “designed to test and probe” and as “refus[ing] to systematize,” I then would argue that Chambers’s book likewise seeks to wrench critique away from...