Jacques Ranciere b. 1940

Jacques Ranciere is a French philosopher, a former pupil of Althusser who broke decisively with his master in his collaboration with workers' archives in the 1970s. The Ignorant Schoolmaster recounted the story of the eighteenth-century pedagogue Joseph Jacotot to advance the radical thesis of intellectual equality as a starting point rather than an outcome of education. Disagreement and The Politics of Aesthetics developed his account of politics as the disruption of the established distribution of the sensible by those who have no part in it, and have made him one of the most read political philosophers of our time.

Jacques Rancière was born in Algiers, in French Algeria, in June 1940. He entered the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d'Ulm in 1960, took the agrégation in philosophy, and as a young pupil of Louis Althusser contributed to the collaborative Reading Capital of 1965. The events of May 1968 led him to a public break with Althusser, whose theoretical anti-humanism Rancière now read as a sophisticated way of keeping the workers' own thought at arm's length. From 1969 he taught at the experimental University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, and later at Saint-Denis, where he held a chair in philosophy until 2000.

His major works are La Leçon d'Althusser (1974), the great archival study La Nuit des prolétaires (1981), The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Le Maître ignorant, 1987), Disagreement (La Mésentente, 1995), The Politics of Aesthetics (Le Partage du sensible, 2000), Hatred of Democracy (2005), The Emancipated Spectator (2008), and the long study of nineteenth-century aesthetic modernity Aisthesis (2011).

Rancière defends a radical egalitarian thesis: politics begins from the unverified presupposition of the equality of any speaking being with any other, and appears wherever those whom the social order counts as having no part disrupt the established 'distribution of the sensible' by claiming a part. The aesthetic regime of art, on his account, is the long modern extension of that same egalitarian principle into the field of perception itself.