Jacques Rancière

In 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Frieze Art Fair. Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal described Rancière as her favourite philosopher. Among those intellectuals influenced by his work, Gabriel Rockhill, the editor and translator into English of Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics, has developed a new paradigm for thinking about the historical relation between aesthetics and politics in close dialogue with Rancière's writings.

Rancière's philosophy is radically anti-elitist and aggressively anti-authoritarian, his mature philosophy primarily distinguished by his proposal to obliterate the distinction between aesthetics and politics. Gabriel Rockhill published an English glossary of Rancière's technical terms in 2004 as Appendix I to the English translation of Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics with cross references to their explication in Rancière's major works. This glossary includes key terms in Rancière's philosophy that either he invented or uses in a radically different manner than their common usages elsewhere such as aesthetic regime, aesthetic unconscious, archi-politics, Community of Equals, demos, dissensus, distribution of the sensible, emancipation, the ethical regime of images, literarity, meta-politics, ochlos, para-politics, partition of the sensible, police order, the poetics of knowledge, post-democracy, regimes of art, silent speech, and le tort.

Rancière's book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (original title Le Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle, published in 1987) was written for educators and educators-to-be. Through the story of Joseph Jacotot, Rancière challenges his readers to consider equality as a starting point rather than a destination. In doing so, he asks educators to abandon the themes and rhetoric of cultural deficiency and salvation. Rather than requiring informed schoolmasters to guide students towards prescribed and alienating ends, Rancière argues that educators can channel the equal intelligence in all to facilitate their intellectual growth in virtually unlimited directions. The schoolmaster need not know anything (and may be ignorant). Rancière begins with the premises that all are of equal intelligence and that any collective educational exercise founded on this principle can provide the insights from which knowledge is constructed. He claims that the poor and disenfranchised should feel perfectly able to teach themselves whatever it is they want to know. Furthermore, anyone can lead, and the oppressed should not feel bound to experts or reliant on others for their intellectual emancipation.

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, such as ideology and proletariat. He sought to address whether the working class in fact exists, and how the masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge, particularly the limits of philosophers' knowledge with respect to the proletariat. 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.

From 1975 to 1981, Rancière was a figurehead for the Journal Les Révoltes Logiques. Forming partly out of a philosophy seminar on Workers’ history that Rancière gave at Vincennes, it drew together philosophers and historians for a radical political intervention into French thought after the May 1968 uprisings. Its title acting as both a reference to Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, Democratie (‘Nous Massacrerons les revoltes logiques’ – ‘We'll smash all logic revolts.’) and the Maoist Cultural Revolutionary slogan adopted by the Gauche Prolétarienne group, of which some of Les Rèvoltes Logiques' members were active within, ‘On a raison de se revolter’ – ‘It is right to revolt.’, the Journal attempted to interrogate and contest the historiographic and political norms around the representation of workers’ and social history. Writing, along with figures like feminist historian Genevieve Fraisse, Rancière and others attempted to reveal the complexity, contradictions and diversity of ‘thought and history from below’. In its fifteen ordinary issues, the collective wished to overcome the historiographic norms in which the working class were given historical treatment but rendered voiceless, homogeneous and pre-theoretical; instead, they allowed workers to speak for themselves, and interrogated their words seriously.

Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading Capital before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris; Rancière felt Althusser's theoretical stance did not leave enough room for spontaneous popular uprising.

Jacques Rancière (French: [ʁɑ̃sjɛʁ]; born 10 June 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring Reading Capital (1965) with the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and others, and after witnessing the 1968 political uprisings his work turned against Althusserian Marxism, he later came to develop an original body of work focused on aesthetics.