BIOGRAPHY OF JACQUES RANCIÉRE

BIOGRAPHY of Jacques ranciére
Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS.

Jacques Rancière (b. 1940) is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, professor emeritus at the Université de Paris, VIII, and one of the more significant and influential philosophers of our time. Over the last fifteen years, his work has slowly been translated into English, and yet, while some of his writings remain untranslated into this global language, he has nonetheless already cast a long shadow over the fields of politics, aesthetics, and education, well beyond the borders of France, in particular, and across the Anglo-American world. It is somewhat difficult to categorize much of Rancière’s work, especially his archival texts, but the overarching focus has certainly always been politics. Within this classification, it is, however, possible to more delicately divide his work into three “primary” categories as mentioned above: aesthetics, education, and politics. Yet the overarching political project of Rancière does not, however, only consist of these three categories independently but is constituted by their entanglement; as for Rancière, aesthetics and politics are intrinsically linked, and “true” education must be emancipatory, an objective that demands equality not as an end but as a point of departure. As a result, politics is not only a string of his project, but what knots its three elements—in brief, politics overdetermines the whole.

Rancière was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was a student of Louis Althusser. Rancière was an active member of the Union des Étudiants Communistes, By 1974, however, Rancière formally broke away from his professor, a theoretical break that culminated in the publication: Althusser’s Lesson.

Since the publication of Althusser’s Lesson, Rancière has published numerous books, including: The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics.

According to Rancière, debates amongst the various theoretical positions on education, equality, ideology, and state apparatuses miss the point entirely unless they begin from the premise and practice of an equality of intelligence. This pivotal point is at the center of all of Rancière’s work. This "investigation of the origin, continuation, and occasional subversion of the hiercharchical division of head and hand has been launched on two fronts. The first might be called the archival level, the documenting, chronicling, essentially recounting, of the experiences and voices of early-nineteenth century workers"; and this "narrative work has run parallel to ... the second, more polemical and discursive front: Rancière's critique of the claims of bourgeois observers and intellectuals ... to know, and thus 'speak for' or explicate, the privileged other of political modernity, the worker" (Ross, xviii/f). In brief, his thesis is that equality must be assumed as a point of departure and not a destination, for the simple reason that explication is “the myth of pedagogy,” since it does not eliminate incapacity and inequality, but in fact creates it and assures its continuation (ibid., xix/f). This “pedagogical myth,” according to Rancière, divides the world in those who know and those who do not, or those who can explain and those who will always need explication, since explication functions on the logical structure of infinite delay. The essential axiom of “equality as a starting point,” and the structural considerations that follow, are not relegated to his meditations on pedagogy, but form the very kernel of his thought on aesthetics (such as, The Emancipated Spectator) and politics, which according to the philosopher have only one true practice, a community of equals.

Students: Pablo Miranda, Diego García, Verónica Capotte.

Source: http://egs.edu/faculty/jacques-ranci%C3%A8re