Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 546

Beschreibung

Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy introduces the political and educational ideas of Jacques Rancière, a leading philosopher increasingly important in educational theory. In light of his ideas, the volume explores the current concern for democracy and equality in relation to education. * The book introduces and discusses the works of Jacques Rancière, a leading philosopher increasingly important in the field of educational theory and philosophy * The volume will have a broad appeal to those in the field of education theory and philosophy, and those concerned with democracy, equal opportunities and pedagogy * Balanced in its introduction of the political and educational ideas of this author and in its exploration in line with his work of some important issues in education and policy today * Contributors from diverse countries and intellectual and cultural backgrounds, including the UK, US, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, France, Canada

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Notes on Contributors

Foreword

Chapter 1: Introduction: Hatred of Democracy . . . and of the Public Role of Education?

Introduction

Of Masters, Intellectuals and Inequality

On Lessons, Equality, Democracy

Focus and Contributions to the book

Acknowledgement

Chapter 2: The Public Role of Teaching: To keep the door closed

1. Introduction

2. Jacotot’s Experiment

3. The Stultifying Master

4. The Ignorant/Emancipating Master

5. The Public Role of the Teacher

Conclusion

Chapter 3: Learner, Student, Speaker: Why it matters how we call those we teach

Learner

Student

Speaker

Coda

Chapter 4: Ignorance and Translation, ‘Artifacts’ for Practices of Equality

1. Introduction: The Elite and its ‘Other’

2. The Artifact as Subversive Necessity

3. Teaching Practices and Equality

4. Conclusions

Chapter 5: Democratic Education: An (im)possibility that yet remains to come

Opening Scene or the Progressive Utopia

Critical Pedagogy and Notions of Democracy

The Pedagogy of the What If . . .

Policing as the Negation of Politics

The Question of Democratic Education

Confronting the Entanglement of Schooling—Planning—Comparing

Democracy and Justice

Concluding Thoughts

Chapter 6: Governmental, Political and Pedagogic Subjectivation: Foucault with Rancière

Introduction

The Demos and Cratos in Education Today

Police, Divisions and Plebs

Democracy, Equality, Emancipation, Political Subjectivation

Consensus, Experts of Inclusion, De-Politization

Education, Schools and Pedagogic Subjectivation

Concluding Thoughts

Endnote: Rancière with Foucault

Chapter 7: The Immigrant Has No Proper Name: The disease of consensual democracy within the myth of schooling

Introduction

The Myth of Schooling

A National Curriculum

The Disease of Consensus

The Immigrant Who Has no Proper Name

A Pedagogy of Dissensus

Conclusion

Chapter 8: Queer Politics in Schools: A Rancièrean reading

Introduction

Visibility’s Vicissitudes

The Distribution of the Sensible

Identification and Subjectification

How Political is ‘Coming Out’?

Queer as the New Proletarian?

Allies and Alliances

Conclusion

Chapter 9: Paulo Freire’s Last Laugh: Rethinking critical pedagogy’s funny bone through Jacques Rancière

Make’em Laugh, Make’em Laugh, Make’em Laugh!

The Laughing Consciousness

Laughing: No Laughing Matter

The Joke of Critical Theory

Lights Please!

Chapter 10: Settling no Conflict in the Public Place: Truth in education, and in Rancièrean scholarship

Introduction

Pedagogy’s Explanatory Role

That Explanation is Rife

Explanation, Language and Truth

Truth in Education

The Emancipated Scholar

Chapter 11: The Hatred of Public Schooling: The school as the mark of democracy

Introduction

1. The School as a Place of Inequality: A Story of Elevators, Cradles, Talents and (Un)Equal Opportunities

2. The School of Equality: A Story of (Free) Time, Excitement, Danger, Inspiration/Enthusiasm, Fear and Love

Conclusion: The Mark of Democracy and its Hatred

Chapter 12: Endgame: Reading, writing, talking (and perhaps thinking) in a faculty of education

Something is Taking its Course

What’s Happening, What’s Happening?

Bare Interior

Endgame

Index

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Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issue Book Series

Series Editor: Michael A. Peters

The Educational Philosophy and Theory journal publishes articles concerned with all aspects of educational philosophy. Their themed special issues are also available to buy in book format and cover subjects ranging from curriculum theory, educational administration, the politics of education, educational history, educational policy, and higher education.

Titles in the series include:

Educational Neuroscience: Initiatives and Emerging Issues

Edited by Kathryn E. Patten and Stephen R. Campbell

Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy

Edited by Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein

Thinking Education Through Alain Badiou

Edited by Kent den Heyer

Toleration, Respect and Recognition in Education

Edited by Mitja Sardo

Gramsci and Educational Thought

Edited by Peter Mayo

Patriotism and Citizenship Education

Edited by Bruce Haynes

Exploring Education Through Phenomenology: Diverse Approaches

Edited by Gloria Dall’Alba

Academic Writing, Philosophy and Genre

Edited by Michael A. Peters

Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education

Edited by Mark Mason

Critical Thinking and Learning

Edited by Mark Mason

Philosophy of Early Childhood Education: Transforming Narratives

Edited by Sandy Farquhar and Peter Fitzsimons

The Learning Society from the Perspective of Governmentality

Edited by Jan Masschelein, Maarten Simons, Ulrich Bröckling and Ludwig Pongratz

Citizenship, Inclusion and Democracy: A Symposium on Iris Marion Young

Edited by Mitja Sardoc

Postfoundationalist Themes In The Philosophy of Education: Festschrift for James D. Marshall

Edited by Paul Smeyers (Editor), Michael A. Peters

Music Education for the New Millennium: Theory and Practice Futures for Music Teaching and Learning

Edited by David Lines

Critical Pedagogy and Race

Edited by Zeus Leonardo

Derrida, Deconstruction and Education: Ethics of Pedagogy and Research

Edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas and Michael A. Peters

This edition first published 2011

Originally published as Volume 42, Issues 5–6 of Educational Philosophy and Theory

Chapters © 2011 The Authors

Book compilation © 2011 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rancière, public education and the taming of democracy / edited by Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein.

p. cm. – (Educational philosophy and theory special issue book series; 17)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4443-3843-0 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-1-4443-9384-2 (ePDF) – ISBN 978-1-4443-9386-6 (Wiley Online Library) – ISBN 978-1-4443-9385-9 (ePub)

 1. Rancière, Jacques–Philosophy. 2. Rancière, Jacques–Political and social views. 3. Education–Philosophy. I. Simons, Maarten. II. Masschelein, Jan.

 LB880.R352R36 2011

 370.1–dc22

2011014940

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs (9781444393842); Wiley Online Library (9781444393866); ePub (9781444393859)

Notes on Contributors

Gert Biesta (www.gertbiesta.com) is Professor of Education and Director of Research at the Stirling Institute of Education, University of Stirling, and Visiting Professor for Education and Democratic Citizenship at Mälardalen University, Sweden. He is editor-in-chief of Studies in Philosophy and Education. Recent and forthcoming books include: Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy (Paradigm Publishers, 2010); Derrida, Deconstruction and the Politics of Pedagogy (with Michael A. Peters; Peter Lang, 2009); Complexity Theory and the Politics of Education (co-edited with Deborah Osberg; Sense Publishers, 2010); and Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation (with Charles Bingham; Continuum, 2010). Email: [email protected]

Charles Bingham is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. He writes on education and Continental Philosophy. His books include Jacques Rancière: Education, truth, emancipation (with Gert Biesta; Continuum, 2010), Authority is Relational (SUNY, 2008), No Education Without Relations (Peter Lang, 2004), and Schools of Recognition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). Email: [email protected]

Goele Cornelissen is a PhD student at the K.U.Leuven, Department of Educational Sciences, Center for Philosophy of Education. She is mainly interested in the significance of Rancières work for the current debate on educational equality as well as in its implications for methodological debates in educational sciences. She uses the work of Rancière in order to re-think the role of film-ethnography in educational sciences. Email: [email protected]

Mark Dercyke is professor at the University of Lyon and the University of Saint-Etienne (France). His main research interest is in education, literacy and citizenship focusing on daily-life practices. He has published on Rancière, practices of evaluation, and semantics. Email: [email protected]

Daniel Friedrich is Associate Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research interests are related to the production of the citizen as a technology of government, the relations between memory, history and curriculum, and comparative and international education. He has published articles in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education and in The Journal for the Historiography of Education, among others. Email: [email protected]

Bryn Jaastad is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, drawing mainly upon Deleuze to consider constructions of difference in teacher education. He also works with practicum student teachers. Email: [email protected]

Jorge Larrosa is Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Theory and History of Education of the University of Barcelona, Spain. His research interest is in language, literature, film and education, and in difference and childhood in education. He has published several articles and books, including La experiencia de la lectura. Ensayos sobre literatura y formación (Laertes, 1999; 3rd edn. 2004), Entre las lenguas. Lenguaje y educación después de Babel (Laertes, 2003) and Entre Pedagogía y literatura (with Carlos Skliar) (Miño y Dávila, 2005). Email: [email protected]

Tyson E. Lewis is an assistant professor of educational philosophy at Montclair State University. He has published widely in a variety of journals such as Rethinking Marxism, Historical Materialism, Theory and Event, and Educational Theory. He has also recently completed a new book on pedagogy, biopolitics, and critical theory entitled Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age. Email: [email protected]

Jan Masschelein is Professor for Philosophy of Education at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His primary areas of scholarship are educational theory, social and political philosophy, and critical theory. Currently his research concentrates on the ‘public’ role of education in the age of networks and on ‘mapping’ and ‘walking’ as critical research practices. Recent work includes: Globale Immunität. Ein kleine Kartographie des Europaischen Bildungsraum (Diaphanes, 2005), The Learning Society from the Perspective of Governmentality (ed., Blackwell, 2007) and the Dutch translation of The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière). Email: [email protected]

Thomas S. Popkewitz, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His studies are concerned with the systems of reason that govern pedagogical reforms, research traditions, and teacher education. His recent publications include Cosmopolitanism and The Age of Reform: Science, Education And Making Society By Making The Child (Routledge, 2008) which explores historically the epistemological principles and cultural theses governing contemporary pedagogical reforms and sciences and their implications for inclusion, exclusion, and abjection; and Globalization and The Study of Education (with F. Rizvi, eds., Wiley, 2009) which focuses on critical analyses of the changing conditions influencing schooling. Email: [email protected]

Claudia Ruitenberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She teaches courses in educational theory, critical social theory and philosophical research methods and has published in (a.o.) the Philosophy of Education Yearbooks, the Journal of Philosophy of Education, and Studies in Philosophy and Education. She is editor of the recent collection What Do Philosophers of Education Do? (And How Do They Do It?) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Her research interests include: discursive performativity and its relation to freedom of speech, hate speech and censorship in education; agonistic political theory and the implications for political education; philosophical research methods; and epistemological diversity in educational research and practice. Email: [email protected]

Professor Carl Anders Säfström is Dean of Education at Mälardalen University, School of Education, Culture and Communication. He is director of the research group SIDES (Studies in Intersubjectivity and Difference in Educational Settings). He has published extensively on curriculum theory, educational theory and didactics in international journals and published books mainly in Scandinavian languages. He is an active contributor to the public debate about education and teacher education in Sweden. Säfström is the editor of the series Advanced Studies in Education at Liber Publishers.He is currently working on an edited book on The Price of Order. Email: [email protected]

Maarten Simons is professor at the Centre for Educational Policy and Innovation and the Centre for Philosophy of Education, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His research interests are educational policy, political and social philosophy and educational theory with a specific focus on new modes of governance, globalisation/Europeanization and the public role of (higher) education/teachers. Recent work includes: Globale Immunität. Ein kleine Kartographie des Europaischen Bildungsraum (Diaphanes, 2005), The Learning Society from the Perspective of Governmentality (ed., Blackwell, 2007) and Re-reading Education Policies: Studying the policy agenda of the 21st century (ed., Sense Publishers, 2009). Email: [email protected]

Foreword

As Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein, the editors of this monograph, explain Jacques Rancière from the very beginning of his career has pursued the philosophy of democracy and its relations and implications for equality and education in novel ways that began by splitting with Louis Althusser over the significance of the events of 1968. As his biography at the European Graduate School puts it: ‘He first came to prominence under the tutelage of Louis Althusser when he co-authored with his mentor Reading Capital (1968). After the calamitous events of May 1968 however, he broke with Althusser over his teacher’s reluctance to allow for spontaneous resistance within the revolution.’

Jacques Rancière was born in Algiers in 1940 and he grew up with the Algerian War. He is Professor Emeritus at the Université de Paris (St. Denis) and currently Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School where he conducts an Intensive Summer Seminar.1 One of the attractions of his work for educational philosophers is that it has been explicitly pedagogical even though his oeuvre is difficult to place. As Kristin Ross makes clear:

Ranciere’s books have eluded classification. His treatise on history, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Les Mots de I’histoire: Essai de poetique du savoir, 1992), angered or bewildered historians but was embraced by literary critics. The volume by Ranciere most read by artists, it seems, is not his recent work on aesthetics–The Politics of Aesthetics (La Partage du sensible: Esthetique et politique, 2000)–but a little book I translated sixteen years ago called The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Le Maitre ignorant, 1987). An extraordinary fable of emancipation and equality, it tells the story of a schoolteacher who developed a method for showing illiterate parents how they themselves could teach their children to read. Set in the post-Revolutionary period, it was written at the height of the hypocrisies and misdeeds of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mitterand–the moment when consensus first comes to be taken for granted as the optimum political gesture or goal, and disagreement or contradiction vaguely, if not explicitly, criminalized.2

In an interview for Radical Philosophy in 1997 Ranciere explained the starting point for his trajectory:

Given the historical and political conjuncture of the 1970s, which I certainly did not foresee, I wanted to look again at certain of the concepts and conceptual logics that Marxism used to describe the functions of the social and the political. For me, that wish took the form of a decision, which might be described as purely empirical, to look at the contradiction between the social and the political within the working-class tradition. Basically, I wanted to know how Marxism related to that tradition. I wanted both to establish what that working-class tradition was, and to study how Marxism interpreted and distorted it. For many years I took no more interest in philosophy. More specifically, I turned my back on what might be called political theories, and read nothing but archive material. I posited the existence of a specifically working-class discourse. I began to suspect that there was once a socialism born of a specifically working-class culture or ethos. Years of work on working-class archives taught me that, to be schematic about it, ‘working-class proletarian’ is primarily a name or a set of names rather than a form of experience, and that those names do not express an awareness of a condition. Their primary function is to construct something, namely a relationship of alterity.3

Rancière engages with the philosophical tradition and with his contemporaries in unusual ways and he subsequently developed in the The Politics of Aesthetics a description of the the lgoic of police order stifles political thinking and activity by prescribing our sensibilities. Liberation from the logic of police order by attempting to redistribute what is perceived is based on the notion of universal equality. Aesthetics for Rancière is related to ‘the distribution of the sensible’—‘a way of mapping the visible, a cartography of the visible, the intelligible and also of the possible’ where free speech emerges as a form of transgression and as a basis of the politics of aesethetics that forms political communities by establishing what can be said and done.4

I am delighted to offer a Foreword to this monograph Rancière, Public Education and the Taming of Democracy which brings together eleven essays by a group of prominent international scholars. Both Rancière and this volume expertly edited by Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein are bound to become more important to educational philosophy and theory in the coming years.

Notes

1. For his biography at the European Graduate School see his Faculty page http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques-ranciere/biography/.

2. See ‘Kristin Ross on Jacques Rancière’ (ArtForum, March, 2007) at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_45/ai_n24354910/?tag=content;col1.

3. See http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2190&editorial_id=10429.

4. See the Eurozine interview with Truls Lie (an obvious pseudonym) entitled ‘Our police order: What can be said, seen, and done’ at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-08-11-lieranciere-en.html.

Michael A. Peters

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

1

Introduction: Hatred of Democracy … and of the Public Role of Education?

Maarten Simons & Jan Masschelein

Introduction

Democracy and equality through (and in) education appears to be a major concern today: the organisation of democratic schools, the development of competencies for democratic citizenship and participation, policies on equal opportunities … . Most of the current initiatives assume that the reduction of inequality and the development of democracy are essentially policy concerns and objectives, and a matter of organisational reform or curriculum reform. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière does not take this (policy, organisational, curricular) concern for democracy, inclusion and equality for granted. Indeed, he is somehow a provocative voice in the current public debate; he wants to challenge the insistence on current procedures of deliberative democracy, participation, consensus and agreement (e.g. On the Shores of Politics (2007a); Hatred of Democracy (2007b)), as well as the taken for granted (unequal) pedagogic relation between master and pupils (e.g. The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991)). Instead of merely criticizing current practices and discourses, the attractiveness of Rancière’s work is that he does try to formulate in a positive way what democracy is about, how equality can be a pedagogic or educational (instead of policy) concern, and what the public role of education is (since equality and democracy are for Rancière closely related to ‘the public’).

The aim of this book is twofold. First, it is an introduction to the political and educational ideas of an author who is not well known in the field of educational theory and philosophy—although he is one of the leading philosophers in and outside France. Second, the contributions not only present scholarly work ‘on Rancière’, but attempt to explore ‘in line with Rancière’ the current concern for democracy and equality in relation to education. Before we introduce the different contributions to this book, we briefly indicate some of the main tenets of Rancière’s work as well as some of his basic ideas that can help us to clarify the overall focus of this book.

Of Masters, Intellectuals and Inequality

As a brilliant student of Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the 1960s, Rancière immediately set the tone for his future work when he distanced himself radically from his ‘master’ in La leçon d’Althusser published in 1974.1 This work indicated a general line of argument that has continued throughout his subsequent work. As one of the leading Marxist theorists at that time, Althusser had been very critical about the revolt of May 1968. He was, however, attacked by Rancière, not initially for his reading of Marx or his understanding of the May events, but for the fact that his theory was above all an educational theory that justified the eminent value and superiority of the masters (or the intellectuals) themselves over the workers (or the people). The masters, on this view, are those who ‘think’ and objectively ‘know’ how society operates and therefore are the owners of the truth about what happens and is the case. The workers are those who do not think but just act; they are ignorant about the laws of history and the logic of capitalism, which motivates and ultimately determines their actions; and they are captivated by illusions about their ‘real’ situation and are prisoners of ideologies or bearers of a false consciousness. According to Rancière, it was, therefore, a theory that legitimized the inequality and distance between those who know and the ignorant, those in need of the knowledge they lack in order to be emancipated and truly conscious, i.e. in need of the explanations of the master. Althusser’s philosophical theory thereby confirmed and justified (as did most philosophy and educational theory according to Rancière) the labour division that gives it its place: the distinction between those who think and those who act, between those who know and the ignorant. Philosophy and educational theory assume the role of speaking for those whose supposed ignorance offers them their own reason for existence. Emancipation and (in)equality are thereby always related to knowledge and, hence, to the institution of a limit (or abyss/distance) between the ignorant and those who know. To a large extent Rancière’s work is about the unsettlement, suspension or displacement of the connection/relation between emancipation and knowledge, and the implied border/limit-setting.

One of the most intriguing, disturbing and fascinating ways in which he did this was inspired by the ideas of the collective Les révoltes logiques (Collectif Révoltes Logiques, 1984),2 which vividly documented the experiences and voices of workers/labourers of the early 19th century who transcended the limits imposed on them (e.g. La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (1981); Courts voyages au pays du peuple (1990); La parole ouvrière, 1830/1851 (Faure & Rancière 1976); Louis-Gabriel Gauny. Le philosophe plebeian (1985)). In his work Rancière approached these workers as equals and took seriously what they had to say about their conditions. More particularly, he revived more or less marginal figures whose emancipation consisted in claiming the time that the bourgeoisie claimed for itself: the time which is not the time of labour and necessity but free or dead time i.e. un-economic time. These were figures who claimed the right to think and thereby disrupted the definition of their social category as workers (who don’t think but do/work). Although Rancière made sure these voices maintained their individual and historical specificity, he also decontextualised them by involving them in a diagnosis of the present and bringing them back in time, creating untimely voices that interfered in the timely debate on the issues of equality and democracy. It was also during his investigations in the archives of the labour movement, looking for the ‘proper’ voice of the ‘people’, that Rancière stumbled upon Joseph Jacotot, who at the beginning of the 19th century announced the equality of intelligence of all people and elaborated what he called ‘universal teaching’ including the possibility to teach what one does not know and the capacity of the illiterate to emancipate their children. This figure not only became the central character in Rancière’s wonderful story of the ‘Ignorant Schoolmaster’ but also continues to accompany him (closely) throughout all his work (there is indeed almost no text, where Jacotot does not in one way or another appear).3 At the time of its publication in 1987 Rancière wanted to intervene through this story in the intellectual debate on the public role of education with regard to equality and democracy, which was a central debate in France at that time. The intervention took the form of an ‘activation of the archives’ (Badiou, 2006): a displacement, translation and repetition of the untimely discourse of Jacotot through a rephrasing and rewording of his story. A story that will also be recalled and retold extensively in various forms throughout this volume and that we, therefore, want to leave for now.

Rancière did not only revive the voices of emancipated people of the 19th century, however, but time and again criticized the intellectuals (sociologists, philosophers, historians, educationalists …) who claimed to know the ignorance of the others, who thought that they had to explain this ignorance and to speak for those who don’t know (as argued for example in his texts The Philosopher and his Poor (2004); Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998); Hatred of Democracy (2007b)). According to Rancière, those intellectuals, including Althusser, Bourdieu, Milner among others, always teach us first and above all a lesson in inequality. While they always start from the assumption of inequality they continuously prove inequality, and by proving it they constantly rediscover it. For example, whether one conceives of the school as a machine that reproduces social inequality (Bourdieu) or as an instrument to reduce inequality (Milner), the effect remains the same: a distance is inaugurated and maintained between a future equality and a present inequality, between a future intellectual richness and an actual intellectual poverty. It is about a distance that is installed in the order of discourse and is reinstituted and reconfirmed time and again. The effect is that the ignorant and the poor remain in their place (in the social order), the place which, according to the discourse, corresponds to their ‘nature’ or their ‘capacities’. Rancière is not looking for counter-arguments, however, but instead refuses the attitude or position that ascribes a body (also a social body) to a certain type of utterance and a certain place in the social order. In this context, Jacotot embodies the counter-position to Bourdieu, Althusser and Milner, in that he does not claim that inequality can or has to be undone gradually. Equality constitutes no criterion or goal that would define the time needed to transform today’s society into what it should become in the future. Equality is for Jacotot the starting point, the axiom or hypothesis that fosters thought, experiment and invention. Equality is neither a promise nor an (empirical) fact, but a practical hypothesis to start with. Equality is a practice, not a reward in a distant future. Jacotot’s ‘lesson’ in emancipation says that all people have at their disposal an equal intelligence and that emancipation means to actualise/realise this equal intelligence, i.e. the ability to speak, think and act.

On Lessons, Equality, Democracy

Indeed, Rancière subtitled his story on Jacotot ‘Five lessons in intellectual emancipation’. It is worthwhile to give this a moment’s thought since it seems paradoxical to speak about lessons when one wants to question precisely the idea of education as the teaching of students by a master. In fact, Rancière’s lessons in emancipation do not teach anything, they do not explain. They tell the story, recite the utterances and recall the actions of Jacotot in such a way that the experiences of Jacotot ‘are blown out of the past into the present’ in such a way that they can cut into the present (see Ross, 1991). These lessons do not explain, but tell a story. Telling stories is one of the two basic operations of any intelligence, according to Rancière/Jacotot, the other being ‘to guess’. Both are operations to verify the equality of intelligence. Both start from equality. But can they then still be called lessons? A question even more pressing since it is difficult to define the genre of the text and the discipline to which it belongs (is it a philosopher, an educationalist/pedagogue, an historian who is the author?). The book seems to escape any clear classification. It disturbs the borders between genres and disciplines and the limits they define regarding what legitimately can be said (within the discipline) and what can’t, what can be done (within a genre) and what can’t. Moreover, this difficulty and uncertainty is increased by the fact that it is difficult to know who actually is speaking: Jacotot or Rancière? It is unclear who might be the author of the lessons, but it is equally unclear to whom the lessons might be addressed. There is no public that could be defined and positioned in relation to a science/knowledge that it would lack and need. The lessons have no real pupil/student. The book is not addressed to anyone in particular. It addresses individuals, not institutionalised actors (that is, actors defined by institutions as the school, scientific disciplines and departments, etc.). The lessons, thus, disturb the position of the author and of the reader, as well as the positions of the knowing and the ignorant. The question ‘who teaches who?’ loses its pertinence. The lessons are not teaching or explaining something, but are making something public, making it present so that we can relate to it, or not: ‘It sufficed only to announce it’ (Rancière, 1991, p. 18).

The lessons, then, are untimely and improper lessons in intellectual emancipation. But what is emancipation? Emancipation is not about becoming conscious of an exploitation, alienation or disregard of which one would not otherwise be aware. According to Rancière, those who emancipate themselves did, and do, so by claiming and practicing a way of thinking, of speaking, and of living, which was not or is not ‘theirs’, which was not or is not appropriated and does not correspond to their birth, their destination, their proper nature. The act of emancipation is the decision to speak and think starting from the assumption of the equality of intelligences, the decision that one has the capacity and the time that one does not have properly, according to the reigning order and the partition of the sensible. The act of emancipation is the act of departure from the way in which one is assigned to a place in the social order, the act through which one disrupts the configuration in which one has a certain position and can see, say and do something (this configuration relates to the aesthetic dimension of politics), and therefore an act in which one distances one from oneself. Emancipation is not a change in terms of knowledge, but in terms of the positioning of bodies. In and through that act one confirms the power of equality, of non-partition. Confirming equality is therefore also always a way of dissolving a connection or a disentanglement and unravelling: words are being separated from the things that they define, the text is separated from what it says or from the reader for which it was meant, a body is withdrawn from the place it was assigned to, the language and capacities that were ‘proper’ to it. The act of emancipation is therefore, according to Rancière, also political, as it changes the aesthetic dimension of the social order; it reconfigures the territory of the sayable, seeable, thinkable, and possible.4 It disrupts the consensus regarding the givens of the situation and simultaneously confirms and demonstrates the equality of a capacity: the intelligence as capacity to speak and to think.5 In so far as the act of emancipation is at the heart of ‘universal teaching’, this teaching is therefore itself indeed a fragment or moment of politics. Its political significance is not related to the fact that it would prepare for future citizenship (the acquisition of the necessary competencies and knowledge to participate in democratic deliberation). Education is not a condition for politics and does not prepare for it, but it contains a particular experience of ‘being able to’ or ‘potentiality’ (a pedagogic subjectivation—see Simons & Masschelein in this volume) that demonstrates equality. This pedagogic experience is itself also part of political moments as Rancière understands them, but does not coincide with them.

According to Rancière (1998), democracy should not be conceptualized as a political or governmental regime (of equal participation or representation) among other less democratic ones, but as the constitution of a political subject through a manifestation and demonstration of injustice or ‘a wrong’. For him, democracy is about the power of those who have no power, those who have no qualification in a particular social or governmental order and those who do not share what should be shared in order to partake in a society, community or social order. When these ‘unqualified’ or ‘incompetent’ people nevertheless do intervene they install a dissensus, that is, they demonstrate and verify that they are intellectually equal in the very act of intervention and that they are competent in view of the common from which they are nevertheless excluded.

Because the vita democratica refers to the power of the unqualified people or the capacity of those who are incapable (in view of the social order at stake) it is a life difficult to tame (Rancière, 2007b). Moreover, that is precisely the reason, according to Rancière, for there being a deep hatred or fear of democracy. From the viewpoint of the given social order, the ‘unqualified’ and ‘incompetent’ demonstrating their equality is perceived as dangerous, abusive or scandalous. Hence, the common reaction is to reinforce the link between ‘having power’ and ‘having particular qualifications or competencies’. These reactions, according to Rancière, seem to neutralise democracy, translate conflicts into policy problems (of conflicting interests for example) waiting for policy solutions (an agreement, for instance). It is this neutralisation that Rancière notices in today’s society and that he wants to question. This questioning is also a struggle over words. Against the old philosophical dream (which today is dreamt by analytical philosophy) of defining the meaning of words, Rancière underlines the need for the struggle for their meaning. In this sense democracy can mean many things and many different things (in Europe or Asia, for example) (Rancière, 2009a, 2009c). And the struggle for the meaning of democracy is particularly important for it is about the capacity of whoever speaks or acts (‘la capacité de n’importe qui de parler ou d’agir’). It is exactly the possibility of such a manifestation and demonstration of the capacity to speak and act (which interrupts the chain of reasons and consequences, causes and effects), which is eliminated through structural explanations of (new and old) sociologists, by the extreme contextualisations and ‘thick’ descriptions of culturalists and historians, and by the thinking in terms of catastrophes of some postmodern philosophers. Rancière states that he is no thinker of the event, but of emancipation. And emancipation has a tradition that is not made of spectacular acts, but is shaped by a search to create new forms of the common, which are not those of the state or of consensus. ‘I have never stopped fighting against the idea of historical necessity’, he writes (Rancière 2009a, p. 100, translation by authors). And Kristin Ross rightly underlines that Rancière’s idea of democracy relates to a notion of power that is neither quantitative nor oriented towards control, but refers to:

… a potentiality: the capacity of ordinary people to discover modes of action to act upon common affairs. The encounter of Rancière with Joseph Jacotot and his continuous return to this encounter have brought us again to what was in fact the original meaning of the word ‘democracy’, a broader and more evocative meaning: the capacity to make things happen, to do things (Ross, 2009, p. 109, translation by authors)

The capacity/power of the demos, which is not the power of the people or its majority, but the power or capacity of no matter who (of whoever). It is the hypothesis and confirmation of this potentiality/capacity/power, the rejection of the reign of necessity, this Jacotist hypothesis that makes the thought of Rancière so fruitful, provocative and promising for any philosophy of education today.

Focus and Contributions to the book

In view of Rancière’s concerns, the book has a particular focus. First, and at a general level, one concern is with whether the current attempts to enhance or develop democracy through procedures of negotiation and agreement and especially to bring about equality in/through education doesn’t turn into the exact opposite. Are the initiatives to promote and enhance democracy motivated by a hatred of democracy and a desire to get rid of politics? In this context, our hypothesis is that Rancière’s ideas help us to understand not only the hatred of democracy, but also what we want to call a deep fear of the school becoming a site of democracy or a ‘public place’. Hence, to rephrase this as question, we want to ask: could different initiatives in schools, related to organisation, curriculum or pedagogy, be explained by a deep fear towards ‘democracy’ in schools or, even more strongly, a deep fear towards the school as essentially and primordially a democratic or public place? In this context it is perhaps interesting to note that shortly after Le maître ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] appeared in French (1987), Rancière published another text École, production, égalité [School, Production, Equality] (1988) in which he sketched the school as being pre-eminently the place of equality. It appears, therefore, that in order to address our general question about the enhancement of democracy in/through education, we will have to deal with the issue of equality. This is the second main concern in this collection. Indeed, and in line with his earlier work on the ignorant schoolmaster, Rancière opens up a perspective to rethink manifestations of equality in education. Equality, according to him, should not be a policy concern or an issue of school reform, but something between master and pupils. What does this relation (and ‘opinion’) of equality look like? What are the conditions and consequences? Can we (empirically) observe and describe this? What could practices holding to the assumption of equality look like?

In line with this focus, the chapters collected in this book discuss, from different angles, Rancière’s work on education, politics and democracy. Several acts of translation and counter-translation, to use the words of Rancière himself, are adopted: a close rereading of Rancière in order to raise a voice in current debates on education, equality and democracy, rethinking specific issues and concerns in the field of education and educational philosophy and theory and in relation to other authors (Foucault, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Mouffe …), and reformulating the meaning and practice of (school) education elaborating on Rancière’s ideas. The order of the contributions is as follows: the first set of contributions discusses issues related to education, pedagogy and teaching, the second set focuses on issues of policy, planning and democracy in education, followed by contributions that address specific concerns at the intersection of education and politics (immigrants, queer politics, laughter, truth), and finally contributions that seek to rethink the specific form of the school and the university.

In a close rereading of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Goele Cornelissen clarifies how Rancière’s story of Jacotot is still able to intervene in current discourses on equal opportunities and on the teacher as facilitator. Her analysis shows how the figure of Jacotot, the ignorant master, differs from the progressive teacher and from the (current) figure of the teacher as facilitator. The ignorant master assumes equal intelligence and draws attention to a thing in common; she keeps the door closed and puts her students in the presence of a thing in common. In line with this, Cornelissen stresses that the teaching of the ignorant master is a public activity, and she discusses what can be done towards becoming a public teacher.

While the first contribution focuses on the teacher, Gert Biesta in his chapter rethinks emancipatory education by focusing on the different ways in which we refer to those we teach, that is, the subjects of education. Drawing on Rancière, Biesta argues that to call someone a learner suggests an inequality between those who have learned and now know, can, or are, and those who still need to learn in order to know, be able, or be. In order to interrupt this ‘explicative order’, he suggests that we call students ‘speakers’, and that we think of emancipatory education as education that starts from the assumption that all students can already speak. Hence, equality is not positioned at the end of education, but at the beginning. In line with Rancière, Biesta stresses that there is no emancipatory school, but an interruption of the ‘explicative order’ by seeing what can be done under the assumption of equality.

In his contribution, Marc Derycke also discusses the ‘explicative order’ and ‘passion with inequality’ and how the situation of apprenticeship can contain events of emancipation. In line with Rancière, Derycke argues that the master must articulate two complementary aspects in his relation with his apprentice: first, occupying a position of ignorance, and second, ascribing priority to the object to be known or to be listened to (the text, the words …). This is elaborated in a discussion of the acts of translation and counter-translation, and the importance of context. In line with both aspects, and in discussing courses of which he is master, Derycke explores how a double supposition of equalities is put to work (the equality of intelligences and the equality of the speaking beings) and how his students became involved (or not) in these courses.

The next contributions focus in detail on the relation between education, democracy and policy/planning. Daniel Friedrich, Bryn Jaastad and Thomas S. Popkewitz rethink the relationship between education and democracy by addressing current efforts to develop democratic schools. These efforts share both a mode of reasoning that ultimately wants to design society by designing the child, and the assumption of inequality in setting equality as a goal. Drawing on Rancière’s idea of democracy as repartitioning the consensual partition of the world under the assumption of equality, the authors challenge the dogma of planning, the comparative mode of thought in education, and the related negation of democracy. By introducing Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and Derrida’s justice, Rancière’s idea of democracy is extended in order to formulate the idea of democratic education as an (im)possible promise.

Starting from a Foucaultian perspective, Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein draw attention to current developments that neutralise democracy through the ‘governmentalisation of democracy’ and processes of ‘governmental subjectivation’. Here, Rancière’s political work is closely reread in order to clarify how democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of ‘political subjectivation’, that is, a disengagement with a governmental regime through the verification of one’s equality in demonstrating a wrong. Furthermore, a thesis on ‘pedagogic subjectivation’—to be understood as the experience of potentiality or the ability to speak, think and act—is formulated. It is argued that there is a fear for both political and pedagogic subjectivation that leads to a neutralisation of democracy and a taming of the public role of schools. The chapter closes with a short note on reading Foucault’s work from the viewpoint of Rancière.

The work of Rancière offers valuable perspectives to discuss critical issues at the intersection of education and politics as the next contributions show in great detail. In his contribution, Carl Anders Säfström rethinks the status of immigrants in Swedish society, and the role of education in their exclusion, discrimination or assimilation. He clarifies how the myth of schooling as the normalization of an arbitrary distribution of wealth and power, and the idea of a consensual democracy, result in a particular idea of what it is to be Swedish—that which the immigrant is not. But Säfström also argues that the immigrant—as someone who has no proper name—can intervene in such a way in the existing consensual order of society that a dissensus is introduced. Furthermore, the chapter elaborates the idea of a ‘pedagogy of dissensus’ that works by undoing the supposed naturalness of any social order and strives to create the conditions for the equality of relationships.

Focusing on queer politics in education, Claudia Ruitenberg draws in a similar way on Rancière to analyse critically the demanded perceptibility and intelligibility of queer students and teachers in education. Discussing specific initiatives, she explores the extent to which queer visibility and intelligibility is actually political in Rancière’s sense of the term, that is, whether it is a ‘disruption of the sensible’. At this point, the distinction between ‘identification’ (and inclusion in the social order) and ‘subjectivation’ (political disruption) is introduced to explore the politics in queer politics. Finally, Ruitenberg elaborates the ideas of Judith Butler in order to grasp the promise of ‘insurrectionary speech’ in queer politics and explores the role of allies in political interventions (related to Gay-Straight Alliances in schools) that shift the distribution of the sensible.

Tyson Edward Lewis draws on Rancière to explore an enigmatic reflection of Paolo Freire on the necessary role of laughing in the pedagogy of the oppressed. In his examination of the structural relationships between jokes and critical thinking, Lewis argues that critical laughter is transformative because it embodies the r(u/a)pture of joy accompanying any verification of equality. The laugh, according to Lewis, is not so much the proclamation of a wrong (spoken through argumentative reason, which gives the noise of pain a logos) but rather the affective verification of a surplus equality—it is the sensual pleasure of democracy. Thus joke-telling and laughing emerge as integral parts of the aesthetics of critical pedagogy, redistributing the sensible that underlies educational relations between ‘masters’ and ‘pupils’ in the classroom.

Another critical issue is discussed in the contribution of Charles Bingham. He draws on Rancière’s language theory to rethink the role of truth in education as well as the perspective on truth taken by the educational researcher writing about Rancière. According to Bingham, in the traditional, progressive and critical accounts of truth, education is regarded as a way to approach pre-existing truths (or lack of pre-existing truths). The work of Rancière is used, then, to offer an educational understanding of truth that comes from within education. The point of departure for Bingham is the arbitrary nature of language. The school often does not allow that language’s arbitrariness be exposed, however, because such exposure would undermine its explanatory teachings on truth. Bingham argues, therefore, that the (educational) researcher must, like the work of a political actor or a poet, break with language’s privileged status in order to embrace the arbitrariness of language.

The final contributions explore, in line with Rancière, what a school and what a university could be (today), and what education and philosophy could mean. Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons take up a text that Rancière published shortly after The Ignorant School Master appeared in French, École, production, égalité [School, Production, Equality] (1988), in which he sketched the school as being pre-eminently the place of equality. In this vein, and opposed to the story of the school as the place where inequality is reproduced and therefore in need of reform, they recount the story of the school as the invention of a site of equality and as primordially a public space, which therefore has to be defended as a democratic infrastructure in itself. Inspired by Rancière, they indicate first how the actual (international and national) policy story about the school and the organizational technologies that accompany it install and legitimate profound inequalities, which consequently can no longer be questioned (and become ‘invisible’). Second, they recast and rethink different manifestations of equality and of ‘public-ness’ in school education and, finally, indicate various ways in which these manifestations are neutralized or immunized in actual discourses and educational technologies.

In his chapter Jorge Larrosa offers his conversation with the ghost of the madman ‘Jacotot/Rancière’: one of the possible dialogues between the ignorant schoolmaster and his own perplexities in what he feels to be an endgame. Is there any point at the present time, in the declining mercantilist university, in pondering once again the issue of the place of philosophy in institutions responsible for training people who will work in the sphere of education? He formulates his question in the first person plural, which is intended to do nothing other than build a ‘we’ with that odd and small collective without which it would be impossible even to begin. ‘We’ knew the old words, so he says, but now we are no longer sure they mean anything. And we are not keen to learn the new ones: we do not trust them, they are irrelevant to us. Moreover, we are sad and tired. All we feel is rage and impotence. Will we be capable of trying all the words once again: university, philosophy, education? Will we be capable of trying all the verbs once again: reading, writing, conversing, perhaps thinking?

Acknowledgement

We want to thank Naomi Hodgson for her help with editing the language of some of the chapters collected in this book.

Notes

1. We do not intend to review and situate Rancière’s work and comment on his biography extensively. For an excellent introduction and contextualisation taking into account the French intellectual and political scene, and especially the importance of revolutionary times such as the French Commune and May 68, see: Ross 1991, 2002, 2006; see also Mouriaux et al., 1992; Bosteels, 2006.

2. The name, Les révoltes logiques, was borrowed from a poem by Rimbaud written shortly after the end of the Paris Commune and entitled ‘Democracy’. The text was edited by a collective that, inspired by Rimbaud, wanted to be a continuation of the intellectual scene of the May revolt of 1968, which it conceived as a popular resurrection in which the very notion of ‘people/popular’ itself was brought into play. It consisted, besides Rancière as the director, of Jean Borreil, Geneviève Fraisse, Pierre Saint-Germain, Michel Souletie, Patrick Vauday and Patrice Vermeren. These were mainly philosophers and historians connected to the famous Université Paris VIII in Vincennes. One could more generally state that the May revolt of 1968 constituted a major event for Rancière and that its revolutionary and democratic energy is still fuelling his work today. For a more extensive analysis of the role of this event for Rancière, but also for many other French intellectuals such as Nancy, Blanchot, Sartre, etc. see Ross, 2002; and most recently, Crowley, 2009.

3. In one of the most recent texts regarding democracy and equality he once more confirms being an heir of Jacotot: ‘No, it is not an ideal, because I always work under the Jacotist assumption that equality is an assumption and not an aim to be reached’ (Rancière, 2009a, p. 98, our translation).

4. Rancière’s work, and certainly his later work, testifies to his central interest in this crucial aesthetic dimension of politics. In fact his thesis here is that art, and more generally aesthetic practices, play an eminent role in the way the partition of the sensible is shaped. Art practices are modes of action that interfere in the general partition of modes of action and in their relationships with modes of being and forms of visibility and sayability. They contribute to the shaping of the forms that define what we can experience (what we can see, hear and say). Politics refers to what we see and what we can say about it, to who has the capacity to see and the talent to speak, and to the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time (e.g. The Politics of Aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (2006a); The Aesthetic Unconscious (2009b)).

5. Rancière’s own work could be seen as such a permanent unsettling of borders between disciplines and genres: he constantly breaks through the fences and barriers that protect disciplines and institutions (philosophy, sociology, history, politics, education, art …). As a researcher he decides that he has the competencies that he does not have (e.g. according to his ‘education’ or ‘institutional affiliation’); he decides that he can transgress the borders because they do not exist. And he verifies their non-existence by moving freely over their territories and by thinking for himself, i.e. by practising the activity that is nobody’s property, which he calls a ‘treasure which we have to conserve’ (Rancière, 2006b, p. 514). The work of thinking, thereby, is not to abstract, but to tie and untie, to connect and disconnect (words to/from bodies, bodies to/from places …). One could say that it dissolves the assignation and appropriation (i.e. the privatisation) of words, bodies, places and makes them public, or at least reconfigures the territories. Thinking itself has no ‘proper’ place and is no privilege: everybody thinks or can think.

References

Badiou, A. (2006) Les leçons de Jacques Rancière: Savoir et pouvoir après la tempête, in: L. Cornu & P. Vermeren (eds), La philosophie déplacée. Autour de Jacques Rancière. (Paris, Horlieu), pp. 131–167.

Bosteels, B. (2006) La leçon de Rancière: malaise dans la politique ou on a raison de se mésentendre, in: L. Cornu & P. Vermeren (eds), (2006) La philosophie déplacée. Autour de Jacques Rancière. (Paris, Horlieu), pp. 49–70.

Collectif Révoltes Logiques (ed.) (1984) L’empire du sociologue (Paris, La Découverte).

Crowley, M. (2009) L’homme sans. Politiques de la finitude (Paris, Lignes).

Faure, A. & Rancière, J. (1976) La Parole ouvrière, 1830/1851 (Paris, 10/18).

Mouriaux, R., Percheron, A., Prost, A. & Tartakowsky, D. (eds) (1992) 1968: Exploration du Mai français (2 vol.) (Paris, L’Harmattan).

Rancière, J. (1974) La leçon d’Althusser (Paris, Gallimard).

Rancière, J. (1981) La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris, Fayard).

Rancière, J. (1985) Louis-Gabriel Gauny. Le philosophe plébéien (Paris, La Découverte/Presses Universitaires de Vincennes).

Rancière, J. (1987) Le Maître ignorant. Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris, Fayard).

Rancière, J. (1988) École, production, égalité, in: X. Renou (ed.), L’école contre la démocratie (Paris, Edilig), pp. 79–96.

Rancière, J. (1990) Courts voyages au pays du peuple (Paris, Seuil).

Rancière, J. (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press).

Rancière, J. (1998) Disagreement: Politics and philosophy, J. Rose, trans. (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press).

Rancière, J., (2004) The Philosopher and his Poor, A. Parker, Trans. (Durham, NC, Duke University Press).

Rancière, J. (2006a) The Politics of Aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (G. Rockhill, Transl.) (London, Continuum).

Rancière, J. (2006b) La méthode de l’égalité, in: L. Cornu & P. Vermeren (eds), La philosophie déplacée. Autour de Jacques Rancière (Paris, Horlieu), pp. 507–523.

Rancière, J. (2007a) On the Shores of Politics, L. Heron, Trans. (London/New York, Verso).

Rancière, J. (2007b) Hatred of Democracy, S. Corcoran, trans. (London/New York, Verso).

Rancière, J. (2009a) Les démocraties contre la démocratie, in: G. Agamben et al., Démocratie dans quel état? (Paris, La Fabrique), pp. 95–100.

Rancière, J. (2009b) The Aesthetic Unconscious (Cambridge, Polity Press).

Rancière, J. (2009c) A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière, Parallax, 15:3, pp. 114–123.

Ross, K. (1991) Translator’s Introduction, in: J. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press), pp. vii–xxiii.

Ross, K. (2002) May ‘68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press).

Ross, K. (2006) Rancière à contretemps, in: L. Cornu & P. Vermeren (eds), (2006) La philosophie déplacée. Autour de Jacques Rancière (Paris, Horlieu), pp. 193–206.

Ross, K. (2009) Démocratie à vendre, in: G. Agamben et al., Démocratie dans quel état? (Paris, La Fabrique), pp. 101–122.

Bibliography Jacques Rancière

[We do not aim at a complete bibliography but offer an overview of important texts in French and English. There remain other texts (interviews, essays) which are not mentioned here and, moreover, a lot of work has been translated or is only published in other languages. We thank Goele Cornelissen for her help in putting together this bibliography.]

Primary Texts in French

Books

Althusser, L., E. Balibar, R. Establet, P. Macherey, J. Rancière (1965) Lire le capital. I–IV (Paris, Maspero).

Rancière, J. (1974) La leçon d’Althusser (Paris, Gallimard).

Rancière, J. (1981) La nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris, Fayard). (new edition: Hachette, Collection Pluriel, 1997).

Rancière, J. (1983) Le philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris, Fayard).

Rancière, J. (1987) Le maître ignorant. Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris, Fayard). (new edition: 10/18, 2004)

Rancière, J. (1990) Courts voyages au pays du peuple (Paris, Seuil).

Rancière, J. (1992) Les noms de l’histoire. Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris, Seuil).

Rancière, J. (1995) La mésentente. Politique et philosophie (Paris, Galilée).

Rancière, J. (1998) Mallarmé. La politique de la sirène (Paris, Hachette) (new edition: Hachette, Collection Pluriel, 2006).

Rancière, J. & Comolli, J-L. (1997) Arrêt sur histoire (Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou).

Rancière, J. (1998) Aux bords du politique (Paris, La Fabrique) (new edition: Collection Folio essais).

Rancière, J. (1998) La parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris, Hachette). (new edition: Hachette, Collection Pluriel, 2005).

Rancière, J. (1998) La chair des mots. Politiques de l’écriture (Paris, Galilée).

Rancière, J. (2000) Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique (Paris, La Fabrique).

Rancière, J. (2001) L’inconscient Esthétique (Paris, Galilée).

Rancière, J. (2001) La fable cinématographique (Paris, Seuil).

Rancière, J. (2003) Le destin des images (Paris, La Fabrique).

Rancière, J. (2003) Les scènes du peuple (Lyon, Horlieu).

Rancière, J. (2004) Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris, Galilée).

Rancière, J. (2005) L’espace des mots. De Mallarmé à Broodthaers (Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts).

Rancière, J. (2005) La haine de la démocratie (Paris, La Fabrique).

Rancière, J. (2005) Chroniques des temps consensuels (Paris, Seuil).

Rancière, J. (2007) Politique de la littérature (Paris, Galilée).

Rancière, J. (2008) Le spectateur émancipé (Paris, La Fabrique).

Rancière, J. (2009) Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens (Paris, La Fabrique Paris).

Rancière, J. (2009) Moments politiques—Interventions 1977–2009 (Paris, La Fabrique Paris).

As Editor

Faure, A. & Rancière, J. (1976) La parole ouvrière, 1830/1851 (Paris, 10/18).

Rancière, J. (1985) Louis-Gabriel Gauny. Le philosophe plébéien (Paris, La Découverte/Presses Universitaires de Vincennes).

Rancière, J. (1992) La politique des poètes. Pourquoi des poètes en temps de détresse? (Paris, Albin Michel).

Primary Texts in English

Books

Rancière, J. (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five lessons in intellectual emancipation, K. Ross, trans. (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press).

Rancière, J. (1994) The Names of History: On the poetics of knowledge, H. Melehy, trans. (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press).

Rancière, J. (1998) Disagreement: Politics and philosophy, J. Rose, trans. (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press).

Rancière, J. (2003) Short Voyages to the Land of the People, JB. Swenson, trans. (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press).

Rancière, J. (2004) The Flesh of Words. The politics of writing, C. Mandell, trans. (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press).

Rancière, J., (2004) The Philosopher and his Poor, A. Parker, trans. (Durham, NC, Duke University Press).

Rancière, J. (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible, G. Rockhill, trans. (London, Continuum).

Rancière, J. (2006) Film Fables, E. Battista, trans. (Oxford, Berg Publishers).

Rancière, J. (2007) On the Shores of Politics, L. Heron, trans. (London/New York, Verso).

Rancière, J. (2007) Hatred of Democracy, S. Corcoran, trans. (London/New York, Verso).

Rancière, J. (2009) The Future of the Image, G. Elliott, trans. (London/New York, Verso).

Rancière, J. (2009) The Aesthetic Unconscious, D. Keates & J. Swenson, trans. (Cambridge, Polity Press).

Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, G. Elliott, trans. (London/New York, Verso).

Rancière, J. (2010) Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics, S. Corcoran, trans. (London, Continuum).

Rancière, J. (2010) Aesthetics and its Discontents, S. Corcoran, trans. (Cambridge, Polity Press).

Articles (online)

Rancière, J. (1992) Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization, The Identity in Question, 61, 58–64. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778785?cookieSet=1

Rancière, J. (1997) Democracy Means Equality, Radical Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2190&editorial_id=10429

Rancière, J. (2000) Biopolitique ou politique, Multitudes. Retrieved from http://multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php?article210

Rancière, J. (2000) Dissenting Words. A conversation with Jacques Rancière, Diacritics, 30:2, pp. 113–126. Retrieved from www.muse.uq.edu.au/journals/diacritics/summary/v030/30.2ranciere.html

Rancière, J. (2001) Ten Theses on Politics, Theory & Event. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae5.3.html

Rancière, J. (2002) The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, New Left Review. Retrieved from http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2383

Rancière, J. (2003) Comments and responses, Theory & Event. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae6.4.html

Rancière, J. (2004) Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103: 2/3, 297–310.

Rancière, J. (2004) The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller. Two readings of Kant and their political significance, Radical Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&editorial_id=16052

Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Literature, Substance. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v033/33.1ranciere01.html

Rancière, J. (2006) Thinking Between Disciplines, Parrhesia, 1, 1–12. Retrieved from http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia01/parrhesia01_ranciere.pdf

Rancière, J. (2007) The Emancipated Spectator. Retrieved from