Introduction: On the Edges of Jacques Ranciere

After the generation of Michel Serres, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu, a few French intellectuals, over the last ten or even twenty years, have developed original approaches to various objects of analysis (from aesthetics and literature to politics and science): Alain Badiou, Vincent Descombes, François Jullien, Jean-Luc Nancy, for example. Among them, Jacques Rancière occupies a remote position.

Coming from an Althusserian position, after years of archival work on nineteenth-century workers’ writings, Jacques Rancière began to wander between social history and the poetics of historiography, between politics and aesthetics, between poetry and news, between cinema and social scenography, between great names like Plato, Aristotle, or Friedrich Schiller, and unknown thinkers like Joseph Jaccotot or Gabriel Gauny.¹ For Rancière, one very fundamental motto is to take seriously, as equally intelligent, university professors and humble shoemakers. “Equally intelligent”—both terms are important: they lead the reflection towards the status of political equality, and the legitimacy of ordinary people appearing as intelligent. There should be a presumption of intelligence, just as we have conceived, as a right, a presumption of innocence. Unlike all the fearful pessimists who are anxious to keep everyone in his or her place in the city (artisans in their shops, and philosophers or the elite on the agora), and unlike all the happy pessimists who deconstruct and demystify subjective blindness, teaching poor people what they cannot know about themselves, Jacques Rancière is a confident critic: he simply assumes that everyone can think. It is true that people are denied the legitimacy to think (and they can internalize such a denial), but such a wrong must become a matter of litigation. The original wrong consists in hearing “noises” instead of voices, something “roaring” in place of someone speaking. This is where politics emerges.