Wiley-IEEE Press

What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality - this was the thesis of Aristotle's Poetics. The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted. Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness and ignorance into knowledge. In the modern age, argues Rancière, this fictional rationality was developed in new ways. The social sciences extended the model of causal linkage to all spheres of human action, seeking to show us how causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations. Literature took the opposite path. Instead of democratizing fictional rationality to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed its principles by abolishing the limits that circumscribed a reality peculiar to fiction. It aligned itself with the rhythms of everyday life and plumbed the power of the "random moment" into which an entire life is condensed. In the avowed fictions of literature as well as in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the central question is the same: how to construct the perceptible forms of a shared world. From Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa and from Marx to Sebald, via Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, Proust, Rilke, Conrad, Auerbach, Faulkner and some others, this book explores these constructions and sheds new light on the constitutive movement of modern fiction, the movement that shifted its centre of gravity from its traditional core toward those edges in which fiction gets confronted with its possible revocation.

The global triumph of democracy was announced thirty years ago, promising an age of consensus in which the dispassionate consideration of objective problems would give birth to a world at peace. Today, these grand hopes lie in ruins, and the era touted as new has turned out to be remarkably similar to the old order. To understand why this might be so, we need to examine the nature of the consensus itself, which is not the peace that it promised but rather the map of a territory on which new forms of warfare are being waged. The objective reality that imposed itself at the end of the 1990s was an absolutized and globalized capitalism which has produced ever more inequality, exclusion and hate.

In this book Jacques Rancière delivers a frank and piercing critique of the globalized capitalist consensus. The invasion of Iraq, the riots on Capitol Hill and the rise of the European far right all attest to the true nature of this consensus, as does the current state-sanctioned racism which exploits the disenchanted progressive tradition and is led by an intelligentsia that claims to be left-wing. At the same time, Rancière praises the dynamism of social movements which affirm the power of the assembly of equals and its capacity for worldmaking: autonomous protest collectives have proven themselves capable of opening breaches in the consensual order and challenging the post-1989 system of domination.

Risk Research: Practices, Politics and Ethics offers a
collection of essays, written by a wide variety of international
researchers in risk research, about what it means to do risk
research, and about how - and with what effects - risk
research is practiced, articulated and exploited.

This approach is based upon the core assumption that: to make a
difference in the study of risk, we must move beyond what we
usually do, challenging the core assumptions, scientific, economic
and social, about how we study, frame, exploit and govern risk.
Hence, through a series of essays, the book aims to challenge the
current ways in which risk-problems are approached and presented,
both conceptually by academics and through the framings that are
encoded in the technologies and socio-political and institutional
practices used to manage risk.

In addressing these questions, the book does not attempt to
offer a model of how risk research 'should' be done. Rather, the
book provides, through illustration, a challenge to the ways in
which risk research is framed as 'problem-solving.' The book's
ultimate objective aims to increase critical debate between
different disciplines, approaches, concepts and problems.