Jacques Rancière

Rancière’s work on education is becoming widely known, but it must be understood in its context to avoid any misleadingly conventional readings. The work on industrial history is obviously connected, but so are the more technical academic criticisms of Althusser, Bourdieu and Marx. These are excellent and informative critiques in their own right, and add considerably to conventional accounts of economism or sociologism. Together with Rancière’s work on aesthetics, they can also be seen as revealing a definite methodology based closely on Foucault, and this can be seen to unify the work overall. Reading Rancière in this way offers a deeper and more critical engagement in his work and raises implications for how we might understand contemporary educational politics and practice.

Given the recent proliferation of English-language commentary on the thought of Jacques Rancière, it is appropriate that the title of this recent collection pairs the philosopher"s name with the "contemporary scene." That there has been so much written about Rancière over the past few years necessitates a "lay of the land," and in their selections for this volume Deranty and Ross offer such a view. As the subtitle suggests, the editors use their introductory chapter to position the collection around the performative nature of equality in Rancière"s work:

PhaenEx, 2013

Given the recent proliferation of English-language commentary on the thought of Jacques Rancière, it is appropriate that the title of this recent collection pairs the philosopher"s name with the "contemporary scene." That there has been so much written about Rancière over the past few years necessitates a "lay of the land," and in their selections for this volume Deranty and Ross offer such a view. As the subtitle suggests, the editors use their introductory chapter to position the collection around the performative nature of equality in Rancière"s work:

This essay first locates Jacques Rancière's account of politics in the context of French thinking in the second half of the 20th century. It then summarizes how Rancière defines politics in terms of an originary equality that supports all orders of command and obedience. For Rancière, also, the world as a 'whole' does not add up. It is characterized by 'paradoxical magnitude'. Paradoxical magnitude means that every regime of politics will nonetheless also be a miscount, a 'wrong' that will in particular fail to satisfy the originary equality that is supposed by all 'partitions of the sensible'. Since there is no metric by reference to which the 'whole' of the world can be made to add up, politics cannot be an epistemological question. For Rancière it is a matter of the polemical practices by which equality is verified through emancipation. The complex 'taking place' of emancipation is the theme of teaching what we do not know that preoccupies Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Here, the essay argues, emancipation also finds a distinctly messianic expression. The aporetic difficulty of teaching what we do not know as an emancipatory practice is explored by reading The Ignorant Schoolmaster with and against Stanley Rosen's reading of Plato's Statesman, which poses the same problem but resolves it differently. The essay concludes by asking what is at stake in this messianic expression of emancipation.

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2012

Educationalists are currently engaging with Jacques Rancière's thought on emancipation and equality. The focus of this paper is on what initiates the process that starts emancipation. With reference to teachers the question is: how do teachers become emancipated? This paper discusses how the teacher's life is made 'sensible' and how sense is distributed in her life. Two stories are taken from Rancière's own work, that of Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Jacotot, that give us an indication of the initiation process of emancipation. Then I will see this in relation to the teacher, Mr Briggs, who is one of the main characters of the play Our Day Out (1987) by Willy Russell.

2021

I try to problematise the categories that structure diagnoses of our present and debates about it." (Jacques Rancière 2008c) Introduction-Biography and Placement in the Socio-Political Context 1 Jacques Rancière provokes-also and especially sociology. And yet, or perhaps precisely because of this, Rancière has something to say when it comes to illuminating the spectrum of French sociological thought. To what extent Rancière challenges sociology and which theoretical building blocks and motifs of thought he draws upon in doing so is made clear in this article. First of all, some information on Rancière's biography and the socio-political context as well as the intellectual milieu from which he comes: Born in Algiers in 1940, the philosopher and art theorist studied in Paris at the prestigious university École Normale Supérieure (ENS). From 1968 until 2000, he was a professor and teacher in the Department of Art and Philosophy at the Université Paris VIII Vincennes à Saint Denis. There, Rancière met numerous comradesin-arms, intellectual competitors and colleagues, such as Alain Badiou, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze, who, in the wake of May '68, campaigned for a different university based on egalitarian structures and participation (cf. Gilcher-Holtey 2001). After his retirement, Rancière has repeatedly received numerous visiting professorships in many countries, not least in the USA and South America (cf. Klass 2013). Rancière's work, which often combines literarypoetic modes of presentation with a more rigorous scientific style, is generally regarded as difficult, which links him to the other "master thinkers" of 2 his generation. In the early 1960s, Rancière began to intervene in intellectual-political debates in France in the environment of Louis Althusser and his attempt at a structuralist reformulation of (post-)Marxism (Althusser 2011 (1965), Althusser et al. 2015). The disputes thereby conducted between theoretical ideas and their translation into social practice reached a certain climax in May '68 (cf. Dosse 1999: 135-233). After intensive Marx reading and a period of "Althusserianism" (Rancière 2014b)-Rancière was particularly fascinated by Althusser's attempt to understand Marxism as a totality of thought-Rancière soon distanced himself again from his former 'teacher' Althusser. 3 Influenced by these political-theoretical experiences of false claims to representation and supposed theoretical superiority, Rancière spent a great deal of time until the early 1980s in the workers' archives in Paris, tracking down and sifting through documents (of very different kinds) produced by workers. In addition, until 1985 Rancière was active in the journal collective Les Révoltes logiques, which he founded in 1975 (cf. Suter 2011). After this intensive period in 1 I refer in my remarks primarily to an earlier version in: Wetzel, Claviez 2016. Important information on biography and social context is also provided by Davis 2014, Tanke 2011, May 2010 and Dosse 1999. 2 The 'master thinkers' is a negative attribution that goes back to the book The Master Thinkers by André Glucksmann (Glucksmann 1987). I do not subscribe to this interpretation, but use the term with its implicit ambivalence. 3 Rancière justifies this with the fact that Althusser presumptuously and with an authoritarian gesture placed himself at the head of the Marxist movement in the universities (cf. Althusser 1977, 1993; Rancière 1975).

2012

This book forms the first critical study of Jacques Rancière's impact and contribution to contemporary theoretical and interdisciplinary studies. It showcases the work of leading scholars in fields such as political theory, history and aesthetic theory; each of whom are uniquely situated to engage with the novelty of Rancière's thinking within their respective fields. Each of the essays provides an investigation into the critical stance Rancière takes towards his contemporaries, concentrating on the versatile application of his thought to diverse fields of study (including, political and education theory, cinema studies, literary and aesthetic theory, and historical studies). The aim of this collection is to use the critical interventions Rancière's writing makes on current topics and themes as a way of offering new critical perspectives on his thought. Wielding their individual expertise, each contributor assesses his perspectives and positions on thinkers and topics of contemporary importance. The edition includes a new essay by Jacques Rancière, which charts the different problems and motivations that have shaped his work.

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2012