This essay introduces readers to the work of Jacques Ranciere and demonstrates how his thinking on art and politics can help alleviate certain impasses within contemporary aesthetic and political theory. Exploiting untranslated sources, I present Ranciere's recent work as responding to predispositions within the theory and practice of art that threaten to obscure the links between aesthetic experience and projects of political emancipation. Countering the disparagement of aesthetics within European thought, Ranciere's work is a deliberate effort to hold open the promise of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century formulations. He proposes a historical way of analyzing art that allows us to gauge its political import in terms of its practices of equality. In this sense, essential for understanding the celebrated notion of the "distribution of the sensible," and the rather specific senses that he give to the words "aesthetics" and "politics," is knowledge of his reflections on the writings of Joseph Jacotot, the nineteenth-century pedagogue who devised a method of teaching that promised intellectual emancipation. Throughout, I show how Ranciere's reflections on pedagogy inform his aesthetic philosophy, and how the latter in turn contributes to an education in democratic citizenship. (Contains 35 notes.)