Jacques Rancière

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Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII (St. Denis) who came to prominence during the 60's when he co-authored Reading Capital, with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Under Althusser, 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 "Les Philosophe et ses pauvres", (1983), or "The Philosopher and his poor", 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.

By 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts [1], and Rancière lectured at such art world events as the Freize Art Fair. [2]

[edit] 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)

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 0877228337.

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 0804719691.

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 0860916375.

Disagreement (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 0816628440.

Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003): ISBN 0804736820

The Politics of Aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible Tr. Gabriel Rockhill (2004): ISBN 082647067X.

[edit] Sources

"Democracy means Equality", interview in Radical Philosophy, online:[3]
Nights of Labor (1989). Temple University Press
The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991). Stanford University Press
The Names of History (1994). Minnesota University Press
On the Shores of Politics (1994). Verso
Counterpunch article online (2002): "Guantanamo, Justice, and Bushspeak: Prisoners of the Infinite."[4]
"Rancière, for Dummies," Artnet Magazine [5]