Kristin Ross on Jacques Ranciere

In the spring of 2005 in the village of Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, a group of scholars met for three days to celebrate the work of Jacques Ranciere. In France, a colloquium held in one's honor at Cerisy is acknowledgment of a major contribution to philosophical thought, and among the participants were prominent French philosophers: Alain Badiou was a featured speaker, for instance, while Jean-Luc Nancy contributed an essay to the published proceedings. Yet as the weekend progressed, it was clear that what had brought thinkers from Brazil, England, the United States, Greece, and elsewhere to Cerisy was not the need to bear witness to the replacement of one epistemological theory by another, or to celebrate some other step in the development of a specialized science. Cinema, sociology, literature, politics, and aesthetics were all topics of discussion; Heidegger's name, I believe, was never mentioned. This list of fields gives some idea of the range of thinking Ranciere's work has touched and invigorated, but it does not explain the contingencies and detours that have caused him to become, at different moments, a historian, a critic of social science, a philosopher, or a commentator on cinema, on current politics, or, more recently, on contemporary art practices. Such concerted forays into the terrains of different knowledges are not very fashionable in France today, where the policing of disciplinary borders and a defensive retreat within them on the part of those certified to profess "art history" or "literature" has, regrettably, become more pronounced in recent years. Sartre once remarked that the most challenging and productive exercise a writer can perform is to write for (or speak to) two widely different audiences simultaneously. If true, then for Ranciere that exercise has lasted a career. His books address readers intimately aware of issues in local French politics and people who have never set foot in France; academic philosophers and amateurs; professionals trained in various fields and autodidacts. His art lies in being true to the rigor of his argument--its careful, precise unfolding--and at the same time not treating his reader, whether university professor or unemployed actress, as an imbecile.

Ranciere was born in 1940, and his political formation was marked by the Algerian War and above all by the eruptive force of May '68, when student protests and a general strike of more than nine million people brought France to a standstill for over three weeks. Along with the work of a few others--some of them former Althusserians, like himself--and unlike that of a whole raft of more heavily mediatized French penseurs, his thinking has retained the political inflection and thematics of those times. His work has addressed the critique of specialization, and the relationship of knowledge (its forms of authority) and the masses. Above all, it shows an overriding concern with equality and a particularly disruptive version of democracy. Yet his intellectual agenda has been anything but nostalgic. In fact, the originality of his intellectual and political trajectory might best be thought of, as Badiou suggested at Cerisy, as a kind of prolonged formalization of the experience of 1968, when students like Ranciere, trained in the Althusserian science of revolution (a knowing science that must be transmitted to an unknowing "people") watched Althusserianism go up in flames on the barricades, as the "people" themselves took collective matters into their own hands.

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. His first major book, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (La Nuits des proletaires: Archives du reve ouvrier, 1981), gave voice to the wild diaries of artisans, to the daydreams of anonymous thinkers, to worker poets and philosophers who devised emancipatory systems alone in the dim early morning hours their work schedules allowed them. For these poets, Ranciere argued, emancipation did not mean seizing control of the workplace, but rather seizing the right to dead time, the right to think, the right to occupy the terrain the bourgeoisie had carefully preserved for itself: the terrain of aesthetic pleasure. In this initial isolation of a group of individuals--individuals, by the way, whom an army of social historians busy combing the archives of nineteenth-century workers had failed to notice--and a set of gestures, we can already see the intricate relation of aesthetics and politics that Ranciere would theorize more explicitly in later works like The Politics of Aesthetics and Disagreement (La Mesentente: Politique et philosophie, 1995). We can see how politics and aesthetics each occupy the terrain of the other and even then are not where one expects to find them. "The worker who had never learned how to write and yet tried to compose verse to suit the taste of his times," Ranciere wrote in a 1978 essay, "was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailing ideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs." This emancipatory moment, a scene delineated and highlighted by Ranciere with all the care of a dramaturge, this profound gesture of nonidentification with one's supposed being or condition, this refusal to be contained by the confines of what a worker is, or is supposed to be, do, or say, lies at the heart of all Ranciere's subsequent reflection, whether his object is the films of Anthony Mann or the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.