Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière (born in Algiers in 1940) is a French philosopher, Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris VIII and at the European Graduate School. Trained within the orbit of structuralist Marxism, his work questions notions such as ideology, the working class and emancipation. He is a central figure in contemporary post-Marxist thought, in both politics and aesthetics.

A student of Louis Althusser, he contributed to the collective work Reading Capital (1965). After the events of May 1968 he broke with his teacher, whose theoretical framework, in his view, left too little room for spontaneous popular uprising. His early books, such as The Nights of Labor and The Philosopher and His Poor (1983), looked at the voices and experiences of workers and at the relationship between philosophers and those who worked with their hands.

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987) he revisited the pedagogue Joseph Jacotot, who held that a person can teach what they do not know, provided they start from an equality of intelligence rather than treating it as a distant goal. From there, equality became the axis of his political thought: politics is the activity that brings into view those who were not counted, while the "police" is the order that decides who may speak and act. He developed this idea of the distribution of the sensible in The Politics of Aesthetics.

He has also written widely on art, from Malaise in Aesthetics to Aisthesis, and on cinema, with books such as The Cinematographic Fable and Béla Tarr, the Time After. His influence reaches film theory, literary studies, where critic Rita Felski names him a precursor of postcritique, and debates on contemporary art.