Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière (b. 1940) is a French philosopher and professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, professor emeritus at the Université de Paris, VIII.

Rancière was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was a student of Louis Althusser. With his professor, and other students of Althusser, namely Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, and Pierre Macherey, he composed and published the seminal Lire le capital, in 1965. Over the next few years, like many of Althusser’s students, Rancière was an active member of the Union des Étudiants Communistes, and constituted the famous cercle d’Ulm, out of which came the now canonical Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes and Cahiers pour l’Analyse. By 1974, however, Rancière formally broke away from his professor, a theoretical break that culminated in the publication: Althusser’s Lesson. In the same year, Rancière co-founded the journal Révoltes logiques.

Since the publication of Althusser’s Lesson, Rancière has published numerous books, including: The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, On the Shores of Politics, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, The Philosopher and his Poor, The Future of the Image, Hatred of Democracy, The Aesthetic Unconscious, The Emancipated Spectator, The Politics of Literature, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, and Béla Tarr, the Time After.