Jacques Rancière

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Western Philosophy
20th / 21st-century philosophy
Name
Jacques Rancière
Birth 1940
Flag of France Algiers, Algeria
School/tradition 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 · 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.

Contents

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 Freize Art Fair.[2] Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.[3]

[edit] 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]

In November 2006 Rancière participated in a scholarly conference, which took place as part of the 2nd Moscow Biennale[5] of modern art.

[edit] Works

Rancière's work in English includes:

  • 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.
  • 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 0816628440.
  • The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible Tr. Gabriel Rockhill (2004): ISBN 082647067X.

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

[edit] Sources

[edit] References

  1. ^ Rancière, for Dummies - artnet Magazine
  2. ^ artforum.com / DIARY
  3. ^ United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy
  4. ^ http://www.radikaly.ru/press-1935.html
  5. ^ The Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art - Jacques Ranciere Misadventures of Universality

[edit] External links