Parts of this book were previously published and have been reproduced, in revised form, with the permission of their respective publishers:
•‘Inaesthetics and Truth: The Debate between Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière’, Filozofski vestnik, 28, 2 (2007), 183–99.
•‘Alain Badiou, The Century’, The Radical Philosophy Review, 11, 1 (2008), 81–5.
•‘Alain Badiou’, in Miško Šuvaković and Aleš Erjavec (eds), Figure u pokretu. Savremena zapadna estetika, filozofija i teorija umetnosti. Belgrade: Atoča (2009), 645–57.
•‘Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature’, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (2011): http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2011/344.
•‘Cartesian Egalitarianism: From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière’, Phaenex, 7, 1 (2012), 101–29.
•‘The Nothingness of Equality: The “Sartrean Existentialism” of Jacques Rancière’, Sartre Studies International, 18, 1 (2012), 29–48.
I also presented portions of this book at the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy in 2006, the North American Sartre Society in 2011, and the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture in 2013. My participation at these various conferences would not have been possible without the travel grants I received from the Association of Part-Time Professors of the University of Ottawa.
This list of publications and conference presentations only tells part of the story of writing this book. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the research for this book began in 2006, when, due to my interest in his work on poststructuralist anarchism, I invited Todd May to give the keynote address to our graduate student conference at the University of Ottawa. May graciously accepted and told me that the topic would be ‘Difference and Equality in the Thought of Jacques Rancière’. Having only read Rancière’s The Names of History (in a way that, in retrospect, seems to have been inattentively), I rushed, for better or worse, to read Disagreement and The Philosopher and His Poor in preparation for his talk and the interview we planned to publish in the department’s graduate journal. Since then, I’ve accumulated a great many debts while writing this book, having benefitted from the patience of my editor, Frankie Mace, the suggestions of several anonymous reviewers, and the conversations with and comments of the following friends and colleagues: Ian Beeston, Mark Raymond Brown, Penny Cousineau-Levine (who invited me in 2012 to discuss Rancière in her graduate seminar, ‘Art and Cultural Theory’), Andrea Fitzpatrick, Wes Furlotte, Peter Gratton, T. Storm Heter, Bill Martin, Patrice Philie, Jeffrey Reid, Jeff Renaud, Tzuchien Tho and Jason M. Wirth. I would be remiss if I concluded this list without signalling the constant support of my family, and, especially, Kylie.
Not in Utopia, subterraneous Fields,
Or some secreted Island, Heaven knows where,
But in the very world which is the world
Of all of us, the place in which, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805, lines 140–4)