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Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher 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.

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. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? 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.

Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.

One of the few philosophers to write so influentially on a egalitarianism education and pedagogy besides Paulo Freire (see Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Ranciere’s book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, published in 1991, has earned its reputation as a must-read for educators and educators-to-be. In the text, through the story of Joseph Jacotot, Ranciere challenges his readers to consider equality as a starting point rather than a destination. In doing so, readers are asked to abandon all of the cultural deficiency and salvation themes so pervasive in educational rhetoric today. Rather than requiring informed schoolmasters to guide students towards prescribed and alienating ends, Ranciere 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 (i.e., s/he may be ignorant). No longer should the oppressed feel bound to experts or reliant on others for their intellectual emancipation. Because all are of equal intelligence, and everything can be found in everything, the poor and disenfranchised should feel perfectly able to teach themselves whatever it is they want to know. Anyone can lead. One need not let one’s ignorance stand in the way of embarking on the journey towards personal and/or collective intellectual emancipation.

In 2003 Rancière co-signed, with other French intellectuals, a letter, addressed to Putin, protesting the illegitimacy of the 2003 Chechen referendum.

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 has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.

Aesthetics and Its Discontents

Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation.

Aesthetics and Its Discontents is translated by Steven Corcoran. Only yesterday aesthetics stood accused of concealing cultural games of social distinction. Now it is considered a parasitic discourse from which artistic practices must be freed. But aesthetics is not a discourse. It is an historical regime of the identification of art. This regime is paradoxical, because it founds the autonomy of art only at the price of suppressing the boundaries separating its practices and its objects from those of everyday life and of making free aesthetic play into the promise of a new revolution. Aesthetics is not a politics by accident but in essence. But this politics operates in the unresolved tension between two opposed forms of politics: the first consists in transforming art into forms of collective life, the second in preserving from all forms of militant or commercial compromise the autonomy that makes it a promise of emancipation. This constitutive tension sheds light on the paradoxes and transformations of critical art. It also makes it possible to understand why today’s calls to free art from aesthetics are misguided and lead to a smothering of both aesthetics and politics in ethics.