Background

Jacques Rancière was born on June 10, 1940, in Algiers, Alger, Algeria. He spent his childhood partly in Algeria and partly in Marseille.

Education

Rancière studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris under the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Career

In 1969 Jacques Rancière joined the philosophy faculty of the newly created Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes, which became the University of Paris VIII in 1971. He remained there until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2000. He also served as a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Rancière contributed to the original French edition of Althusser’s Lire "Le Capital" (1965; Reading Capital), which attempted to elucidate a scientific theory of history in the later works of Karl Marx. Following the uprising of students and workers in Paris in May 1968, however, he broke with his former teacher, charging that Althusser’s emphasis on the necessary role of the intellectual vanguard (in disabusing the masses of bourgeois ideology) was contradicted by the self-directed popular revolts in the streets of Paris that year. In opposition to Althusser’s "theoreticist" Marxism, Rancière held that workers are perfectly capable of understanding their own oppression and of emancipating themselves without guidance from an elite class of theoreticians. He subsequently explored what he considered to be the common assumption among Western philosophers that workers are incapable of serious thought, arguing in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (1983; The Philosopher and His Poor) that Western philosophy since Plato has defined itself in direct opposition to manual labour.

Rancière’s major published works, in addition to those mentioned above, include La Nuit des prolétaires (1981; The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France), Mots de l’histoire: essai de poétique du savoir (1992; The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge), Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (2000; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible), and Le Spectateur émancipé (2008; The Emancipated Spectator).

Achievements

• Jacques Rancière is particularly known for his work on equality and for his writings on art, literature, and film. His thinking has gradually come into prominence in the English-speaking world in the last decades, especially in the fields of political theory, education, and aesthetics. It is today an influential paradigm in those parts of the humanities and social sciences interested in continental philosophy.

Works

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  • Proletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France

    (Proletarian Nights, previously published in English as Ni...)

    1989
  • Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double

    (These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the dis...)

    2011
  • The Philosopher and His Poor

    (Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor meditates...)

    1983
  • Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics

    (Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together som...)

    2010
  • Reading Capital

    (A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged ...)

    1965
  • Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics

    (Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political disc...)

    2011
  • The Future of the Image

    (In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a f...)

    2007
  • Politics of Literature

    (The politics of literature is not the same as the politic...)

    2011
  • Chronicles of Consensual Times

    (In this fascinating collection, Jacques Ranciere, one of ...)

    2010
  • Hatred of Democracy

    (In this vehement defense of democracy, Jacques Rancière e...)

    2007
  • Althusser's Lesson

    (Jacques Rancière's first major work, Althusser's Lesson a...)

    1974
  • The Politics of Aesthetics

    (The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship betw...)

    2004
  • Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

    (Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis-Rancière’s defi...)

    2013
  • Béla Tarr, the Time After

    (From Almanac of Fall (1984) to The Turin Horse (2011), re...)

    2013
  • On the Shores of Politics

    (It is frequently said that we are living through the end ...)

    1995
  • Disagreement

    (According to Rancière, the phrase also expresses the para...)

    1998
  • The Aesthetic Unconscious

    (This book is not concerned with the use of Freudian conce...)

    2009
  • The Emancipated Spectator

    (The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern ...)

    2011
  • The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

    (This extraordinary book can be read on several levels. Pr...)

    1987

Religion

Jacques Rancière is an atheist.

Politics

Rancière is a proponent of Marxism and a prominent contributor to its modern vision.

Views

The central theme of Rancière’s educational and political philosophies is radical equality. According to him, the division of labour, responsibility, and power characteristic of inegalitarian social orders is based in part on spurious assumptions about differences in the mental capacities of individuals. The supposition that some people are naturally more intelligent than others is, he insists, unsupported by differences in educational achievement and other evidence, all of which can be accounted for in other ways. In Le Maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (1987; The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation), he cited work by the 19th-century French educational theorist Jean-Joseph Jacotot to argue that anyone, no matter what his educational background, can teach anything to anyone else by using pedagogical techniques that enable students to discover and develop their own intellectual powers.

According to Rancière, all social orders are reinforced by and reflected in the "distribution of the sensible" - the complex of individuals and individual speech ("bodies" and "voices") that are effectively visible, sayable, or audible (or invisible, unsayable, or inaudible), together with implicit assumptions about the natural capacities of different individuals and groups. In some societies, for example, blue-collar workers, the poor, the unemployed, immigrants, ethnic minorities, and other groups may be largely unrecognized and their aspirations, complaints, and interests not so much dismissed as simply unseen or unheard. Correlatively, workers as a class may be tacitly perceived as lazy, ignorant, and selfish. For Rancière, politics rightly understood is the inherently disruptive attempt by those who are victimized or excluded by inegalitarian social orders ("the part without part") to assert themselves as the equals of those with privilege and power. To the extent that such efforts are successful, the distribution of the sensible is redrawn in more egalitarian ways.

In Rancière’s idiosyncratic usage, the term "police" refers to the rules and conventions that enforce inegalitarian distributions of the sensible, together with the broadly ideological beliefs and values that justify inegalitarian social orders as fair, democratic, inclusive, consensus-based, or in some sense natural or necessary. Examples of the latter include the public-private distinction, which is used to exclude salary disputes from the scope of public decision-making; the notion of national cultural identity, which is used to support restrictions on the rights of immigrant groups; and the theme of political or economic "realism," which is used to cast the inegalitarian status quo as necessary and to dismiss those who disagree as utopian dreamers. The function of the police is thus to prevent the outbreak of genuine politics as Rancière understands it.

One of the more original aspects of Rancière’s thought is his emphasis on the "aesthetic" dimension of politics and the "political" dimension of aesthetics. Politics is aesthetic in a broad sense insofar as it is concerned with the "sensible" distributions that constitute social hierarchies, and aesthetics is political in the sense that historically important conceptions of the nature of art and of the role of the artist - the broadest of which Rancière calls artistic "regimes" - determine distributions of the sensible in the artistic domain and lend insight into the distributions that characterize a larger society.

Rancière distinguishes three artistic regimes: the ethical, the representational, and the aesthetic. Under the "ethical regime of images," which he associates with the ideal state of Plato, art strictly speaking does not exist, and visual or literary images, understood as copies of things that are real or true are produced only to reinforce the social order. The "representational regime of art," which begins with Aristotle, defines hierarchies of artistic forms, recognizes the distinctive nature of artistic creativity, and frees the artist from direct service to the state, though his work is still expected to serve a salutary purpose. Under the "aesthetic regime of art," which encompasses the rise of Modernism, the Classical hierarchies and conventions are overthrown in novel mixtures of forms and subjects; religious and aristocratic themes are replaced by those more closely approximating everyday life; and art is recognized as valuable in itself. Because it thus involves a radical assertion of equality against the hierarchies of art, the aesthetic regime, according to Rancière, serves as an analog of political action against the hierarchies of society.

Quotations: "To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself."

"Keeping a monopoly on legitimate violence is still the proven best way to limit violence and allow reason some asylum where it can be freely practiced."

"Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies."

"To teach what one doesn't know is simply to ask questions about what one doesn't know."

"It is easier to compare oneself, to establish social exchange as that swapmeet of glory and contempt where each person receives a superiority in exchange for the inferiority he confesses to."

Membership

Like many of Althusser’s students, Rancière was an active member of the Union des Étudiants Communistes.

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  Union des Étudiants Communistes , France

Personality

Jacques Rancière is known for his critical mind and schematic, sometimes pedantic way of thinking.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Alain Badiou, Louis Althusser, Karl Marx

• Politicians

  François Mitterrand

• Writers

  Stéphane Mallarmé

• Artists

  Kazimir Malevich

• Music & Bands

  Arnold Schoenberg

Connections

There is very little information on Jacques Rancière's private life. It is known that he has a son Romain Rancière, who is an economist.

Son:

Romain Rancière

mentor:

Louis Althusser

References

• Jacques Ranciere: Key Concepts
  2014
• Distributions of the Sensible: Rancière, between Aesthetics and Politics
  2019
• Dissenting Words: Interviews with Jacques Rancière
  2017
• The Practice of Equality: Jacques Rancière and Critical Pedagogy
  2019
• Rancière and Music
  2020