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Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher. He is a professor of aesthetics at the University of Paris-VIII. A student of Louis Althusser, 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.
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 he did not know (for instance, Jacotot taught Flemish students to speak French without speaking any Flemish himself). The book is both a history and a contemporary intervention in the philosophy and politics of education; 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.
- On the Shores of Politics (1995): ISBN 0860916375.
- Disagreement (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.
- Short Voyages to the Land of the People (2003): ISBN 0804736820