As our world seems to continually move from one catastrophe to the next without a credible governing leadership, authors like Ranciere... force us to conceive of politics differently. LA Review of Books The equality of all before the light and the inequality of the little people as the great pass by are both written on the same photographic plate. With this sentence, Jacques Ranciere effectively aligns his conception of aesthetic theory as the always antagonistic distribution of the sensible under the sign of the demand for equality with the invention of photography. It is a beautiful and breathtaking conceit in what is, perhaps, the most beautiful of Ranciere's texts. His accounts here of the figures of history in photography, film, and painting generally - with dazzling accounts of particular works - expand and deepen his aesthetic theory in intriguing ways. Indeed, I cannot imagine a more inviting entree to Ranciere's thinking about art, history and politics than this little book. J.M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research