Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière
Full name	Jacques Rancière
Born	1940 Algiers, Algeria
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Post-Marxism
Main interests	Politics · Aesthetics
Notable ideas	theories of democracy, disagreement, visual aesthetics
Influenced by Plato · Aristotle · Ballanche · Jacotot · Marx · Althusser · Foucault · Lacan · Lyotard
Influenced Ernesto Laclau · Slavoj Zizek · Simon Critchley · Bernard Aspe

Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Career

Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading "Capital" (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris.

Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.

One of the few philosophers to write so influentially on a egalitarianism education and pedagogy besides Paulo Freire (see Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Ranciere's book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, published in 1991, has earned its reputation as a must-read for educators and educators-to-be. In the text, through the story of Joseph Jacotot, Ranciere challenges his readers to consider equality as a starting point rather than a destination. In doing so, readers are asked to abandon all of the cultural deficiency and salvation themes so pervasive in educational rhetoric today. Rather than requiring informed schoolmasters to guide students towards prescribed and alienating ends, Ranciere argues that educators can channel the equal intelligence in all to facilitate their intellectual growth in virtually unlimited directions. The schoolmaster need not know anything (i.e., s/he may be ignorant). No longer should the oppressed feel bound to experts or reliant on others for their intellectual emancipation. Because all are of equal intelligence, and everything can be found in everything, the poor and disenfranchised should feel perfectly able to teach themselves whatever it is they want to know. Anyone can lead. One need not let one's ignorance stand in the way of embarking on the journey towards personal and/or collective intellectual emancipation.

Influence

In 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts,^[1] and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Frieze Art Fair.^[2] Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.^[3]

Rancière and Russia

In 2003 Rancière co-signed, with other French intellectuals, a letter, addressed to Putin, protesting the illegitimacy of the 2003 Chechen referendum.^[4]

Works

Rancière's work in English includes:

• Reading Capital (1968) (With Louis Althusser, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar - in the French original edition)

• “Reply to Levy”. Telos 33 (Fall 1977). New York: Telos Press.

• The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989): This book is an influential work of social history which examines in detail the records of ordinary workers' lives in order to produce a new picture of their surprising political sophistication. ISBN 0-87722-833-7.

• The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991): This book describes the emancipatory education of Joseph Jacotot, a post-Revolutionary philosopher of education who discovered that he could teach things that he himself did not know. The book is both a history and a contemporary intervention in the philosophy and politics of education, through the concept of autodidactism; Rancière chronicles Jacotot's "adventures," but he articulates Jacotot's theory of "emancipation" and "stultification" in the present tense. ISBN 0-8047-1969-1.

• The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (1994): This is a relatively brief, but dense book, arguing for an epistemological critique of the methods and goals of the traditional study of history. It has been influential in the philosophy of history.

• On the Shores of Politics (1995): ISBN 0-86091-637-5.

• Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998): This book is a return to classical texts about the origins and meaning of politics, in an attempt to re-theorize a "disagreement" which may not be simply transcendable. ISBN 0-8166-2844-0.

• Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003): ISBN 0-8047-3682-0

• The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible Tr. Gabriel Rockhill (2004): ISBN 0-8264-7067-X.

• The Future of the Image (2007): ISBN 1-84467-107-0

• Hatred of Democracy (2007): ISBN 978-1-84467-098-7

Articles in English include:

• "Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?" The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 103, Number 2/3, Spring/Summer 2004, pp. 297-310

• "Is there a Deleuzian Aesthetics?" Tr. Radmila Djordjevic, Qui Parle?, Volume 14, Number 2, 2004, pp. 1-14

Interviews

• "Democracy means Equality", interview in Radical Philosophy
• Politics and Aesthetics, Jacques Ranciere interviewed by Peter Hallward, 2003
• Eurozine interview with Ranciere, 2006
• "Art is Going Elsewhere. And Politics Has to Catch It", Jacques Ranciere interviewed by Sudeep Dasgupta, 2008
• "Aesthetics against Incarnation: An Interview by Anne Marie Oliver," Critical Inquiry, 2008
• (French) "Jean-Luc Godard, La religion de l'art. Entretien avec Jacques Rancière" paru dans CinémAction, « Où en est le God-Art ? », n° 109, 2003, pp. 106-112, reproduit sur le site d'analyse L'oBservatoire (simple appareil).

Short Articles

• Ten Thesis on Politics, 2001
• "Guantanamo, Justice, and Bushspeak: Prisoners of the Infinite", CounterPunch article (2002)
• A special issue of the journal Labyrinthe, 2004 (in French): "Jacques Rancière, l'indiscipliné"
• Preface to new Hindi translation of 'Nights of Labour', January 2009

References

External links

• Art & Research theme issue on Rancière
• "Rancière, for Dummies", Artnet Magazine
• Recordings of a series of guest lectures given during Spring 2008 at U.C. Berkeley.
• Luka Arsenjuk article on Ranciere
• "What Makes Images Unacceptable?" A talk at PNCA + FIVE, 2008
• Jacques Rancière; politics and aisthesis
• Notes on the Politics of Aesthetics in Fillip
• PNCA+FIVE Idea Studio Featuring Jacques Ranciére
• [1], Kristin Ross on Jacques Ranciere
• Luka Arsenjuk On Jacques Rancière [2]