Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 6, Page 743-766, December 2021.

I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs but my body and mind won’t allow me to take them. I like passion. I like things that are built well. I like innocence. I like and am grateful for the blue collar worker whos existence allows Artists to not have to work at menial jobs. I like killing gluttony. I like playing my cards wrong. I like various styles of music. I like making fun of musicians (...) who I feel pladgerise or offend music as art by exploiting their embarrassingly, pathetic versions of their work. I like to write poetry. I like to ignore others poetry. I like vinyl. I like nature and animals. I like to swim. I like to be with my friends. I like to be by myself. I like to feel guilty for.. (shrink)

Badiou's philosophy of the ‘event’ has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou might call ‘the state of the situation’. After briefly outlining the manner in which Badiou's reinvigoration of the concept of ‘truth’ constitutes a serious challenge for (...) the politics of difference and the ethics of alterity, this paper explores the significance for educational philosophy of what, borrowing from Jacques Rancière, Badiou calls the ‘axiom of equality’, or the notion that, in democratic politics, ‘equality must be postulated not willed’. I suggest that this axiom is best understood when read in relation to Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and thus explore an intrinsic link between Badiou's more obscure philosophical claims and political assertions on the one hand, and the question of education on the other. I further propose that the limitations of Badiou's criticism of Rancière's work, which suggests that he stops short of locating an effective political subject who might oppose the parliamentary state, are revealed most explicitly when we reassess Rancière's approach to education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and in his more recent work on political aesthetics. Ultimately, however, I conclude that a truly democratic approach to education will have to learn from both Badiou and Rancière, and take seriously the ‘axiom of equality’. (shrink)

Is the primary function of an educator to elucidate and convey their own knowledge? French philosopher Jacques Rancière demonstrates that an incidental experiment by Joseph Jacotot presents an alternative paradigm: the ignorant schoolmaster. In his work The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation [Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle], Rancière posits that the ignorant schoolmaster is equally, if not more, capable of instructing students compared to the knowledgeable educator. Rancière examines (...) two educational methodologies: the conventional approach of the knowledgeable educator who explicates and imparts knowledge, and the experimental approach of the ignorant schoolmaster who refrains from explanation and primarily focuses on verifying attentiveness. By providing a brief analysis of these two methodologies, this article aims to demonstrate how Rancière’s work can be utilized to construct a model for articulating the implicit theoretical principles in educational practices. This model is predicated on the following premise: by taking either a successful or a problematic educational practice as an example, one can articulate the theoretical principles inherent within it. The article hopes to facilitate a shift in focus from practices to principles, thereby offering a novel perspective on educational practices and enabling its theoretical explication......... [In Dutch: Bestaat de kernactiviteit van de meester erin om zijn eigen kennis uit te leggen en over te dragen? De Franse filosoof Jacques Rancière laat zien dat een gelegenheidsexperiment van Joseph Jacotot ons een ander voorbeeld aanreikt: de onwetende meester. In zijn boek De onwetende meester: vijf lessen over intellectuele emancipatie (Le maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle) stelt hij dat de onwetende meester evengoed of zelfs beter in staat is leerlingen iets te leren dan de wetende meester. Rancière neemt in feite twee onderwijspraktijken als voorbeeld: de traditionele praktijk van de wetende meester die uitleg geeft en kennis overdraagt en de experimentele praktijk van de onwetende meester die geen uitleg geeft maar vooral gericht is op de verificatie van aandacht. In dit artikel wil ik op basis van een korte analyse van deze twee praktijken laten zien hoe we uit Rancière’s boek een model kunnen afleiden voor het articuleren van de theoretische principes die impliciet in onderwijspraktijken werkzaam zijn. Dit model is gestoeld op het volgende uitgangspunt: door een succesvolle of juist problematische onderwijspraktijk als voorbeeld te nemen kunnen we de theoretische principes articuleren die erin werkzaam zijn. Dit schept de mogelijkheid om de focus van de van de praktijken naar de principes te verleggen. Hierdoor wordt de onderwijspraktijk op een nieuwe manier inzichtelijk en kunnen we haar theoretisch expliciteren.]. (shrink)

This article examines the significance of Jacques Rancière’s work on pedagogy, and argues that to make sense of Rancière’s ‘lesson on the lesson’ one must do more but also less than merely explicate Rancière’s texts. It steadfastly refuses to draw out the lessons of Rancière’s writings in the manner of a series of morals, precepts or rules. Rather, it is committed to thinking through the ‘lessons’ of Rancière in another sense. Above all, Rancière wants to ‘teach’ his readers something absolutely (...) crucial about teaching. In making this claim the article emphasizes the extent to which Rancière advocates an utterly radical pedagogy, one that completely reconceives all the central elements of ‘schooling’, including teacher, student, intelligence and knowledge. Rancière thinks it possible to teach without knowing; he believes that the best schoolmasters can operate not on the assumption of their expertise, but on the equality of intelligence; and this means ultimately that Rancière contends that we can ‘teach what we do not know’. The best schoolmasters are ignorant schoolmasters. Rancière’s radical pedagogy depends upon, just as it consistently advances, a thoroughgoing resistance to a certain form of epistemological and ontological mastery. The rejection of mastery—of schoolmasters who would know it all, and convey this knowing to their students—forms the very backbone of all of Rancière’s writings and critical investigations. This is the chief reason why Rancière is, in a way, always talking about pedagogy, even when his subject matter appears to be something else entirely. (shrink)

This article argues that the concept and practice of ‘self-organized learning’, as pioneered by Sugata Mitra (and his team) in the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiments (1999–2005) that inspired the novel Q & A (2006) and the resulting movie, Slumdog millionaire (2008) bear direct, but not uncritical comparison with Jacques Rancière’s account of ‘universal teaching’ discovered by maverick nineteenth century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. In both cases, it is argued, there is a deliberate dissociation of two functions of ‘teaching’ that are often conflated: (...) knowledge and mastery. Mitra’s development of computer-mediated learning among the supposedly ‘ignorant’ of India’s slums, and Rancière’s insistence on equality as a presupposition rather than a goal, both emphasize the agency of the student at the centre of learning, but in ways that displace both established pedagogical methods of ‘explication’ and the neoliberal ideology of ‘schooling’ as the harmonizing of individual and social functions of education. (shrink)

This paper investigates the philosophical method of Jacques Rancière, with special attention to use of the 'presumptive tautology'. It distinguishes between the Enlightenment conception of method as universally applicable technique, and the philosophical conception of method as a certain style that has been invented by a certain person. Ultimately, the paper puts the methodology of Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster under scrutiny.

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s (...) work offers crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms. (shrink)

This article contends that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic understanding of corporeality is central to his interpretation of intellectual emancipation. Concretely, I will argue that Rancière’s aesthetic understanding can be viewed as a torsion of a body that affects its vital arrangements, which thereby open paths for political emancipation. I will support my claim with Rancière’s reading of the plebeian philosopher Gauny, as well as works that have not been sufficiently considered in secondary literature, such as The Nights of Labor and The (...) Ignorant Schoolmaster. My reading will, I maintain, help to question common interpretations of emancipation in Rancière that tend to read this notion either in dichotomous terms or as a merely ephemeral, evental practice with no concrete conditions of possibility and without long-lasting or verifiable effects in the world. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière’s conception of equality as an axiomatic presupposition of the political is important, because it bypasses the tradition which defines equality in terms of Aristotle’s conception of geometric equality. In this paper, I show that Rancière’s theory both espouses a monism, according to which inequality implies equality, and relies on a concept of the free will, which is incompatible with monism. I highlight this tension by bringing Rancière’s theory into conversation with the great monist of the philosophical tradition, Baruch (...) Spinoza. (shrink)

This article contains four criticisms against Jacques Rancière's philosophy of education, insofar as his philosophy is written in his work The Ignorant Schoolmaster. In the first criticism, Rancière's presupposition of equality of intelligence would be framed as a truth claim and to the extent that it can be treated as such, Rancière's argument contains a number of defects. The second criticism underscores the distinction between inequality of intelligence and inequality of knowledge Rancière confuses. The third (...) criticism concerns the contradiction between what Rancière has written and what he practiced and also the weakness of the defense provided by his supporters on this point. Fourth, Rancière's redefinition of “emancipation” as verification of the equality of intelligence turns out to strip away the very idea of emancipation of what makes it meaningful for many people. Abstrak: Tulisan ini berisi empat kritik terhadap filsafat pendidikan Jacques Rancière sebagaimana tertuang dalam karyanya The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Dalam kritik pertama, pengandaian kesetaraan akal budi Rancière akan dikemas sebagai klaim kebenaran dan sejauh itu dapat diperlakukan sebagai klaim kebenaran, argumen Rancière mengandung sejumlah kecacatan. Kritik kedua menggarisbawahi perbedaan antara ketidaksetaraan akal budi dan ketidaksetaraan pengetahuan yang dirancukan Rancière. Kritik ketiga berkaitan dengan adanya kontradiksi antara apa yang Rancière tuliskan dan apa yang ia praktikkan serta kelemahan pendukung Rancière dalam membela butir ini. Keempat, pendefinisian ulang Rancière atas “emansipasi” sebagai verifikasi atas kesetaraan akal budi justru melucuti ide emansipasi dari apa yang membuatnya bagi banyak orang berarti. (shrink)

“Rhetoric,” Jacques Rancière pronounces in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, “is speech in revolt against the poetic condition of the speaking being. It speaks in order to silence. You will speak no longer, you will think no longer, you will do this: that is its program”. Rhetoric, he suggests, understood in its classical formulation as the art of persuasion, stages a particular relationship of power between the speaker and the listener: one of hierarchy and inequality. It has “war as its (...) principle,” and it aims at “the annihilation of the adverse will”. The speaker speaks in order to silence the listener, indeed, in order to prohibit the listener from even thinking and willing. Rhetoric divides... (shrink)

The dissonance experienced by the French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot in 1818 and collected by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster in 1987, could be considered not only as the proposal of a new educational paradigm or the criticism of some pedagogical models, but also as an invitation to think the notion of ‘emancipation’ and to examine further assumptions in some theories of emancipation. Accepting this challenge by Rancière and Jacotot, this article pursues a double aim: on the one (...) hand, I present Rancière’s critique against the dominant form in which emancipation has been thought; on the other hand, I evince two aspects that, according to Rancière, are crucial in the emancipatory process. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Of Masters, Intellectuals and Inequality On Lessons, Equality, Democracy Focus and Contributions to the book Notes Acknowledgement References Bibliography Jacques Rancière.

“Pedagogics of Unlearning”: this phrase obviously echoes a notion and a figure that I had set up in my own way when I published a book entitled The Ignorant Schoolmaster with the subtitle “Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation”.1 Both entail the idea of a specific form of learning, which is a negative one: learning how to unlearn, teaching as an ignoramus, learning the emancipatory virtue of ignorance. This idea raises two interrelated problems. First, how are we to understand (...) the type of negativity at work in this unlearning or this ignorance? Secondly, what is the exact target of this negative action? What is the positivity that is under attack? In other words, what is at stake in matters of... (shrink)

Para além de O mestre ignorante - O encontro entre filosofia e educação como questão filósofico-política a partir da obra de Jacques Rancière Resumo: Este artigo busca situar, a partir da filosofia de Jacques Rancière, em que medida a educação se constitui um verdadeiro problema à filosofia política. A partir da análise que o filósofo francês faz do encontro polêmico entre filosofia e democracia na filosofia platônica, buscamos traçar alguns paralelismos com relação ao encontro, também polêmico, entre filosofia e educação. (...) Pretende-se, assim, lançar novas luzes sobre o que poderíamos chamar de uma filosofia política da educação. Para isso sustentamos duas hipóteses de trabalho: a primeira, de que o lugar da educação no pensamento de Rancière precisa ser compreendido para além de Le maître ignorant (1987); a segunda, de que a filosofia política de Rancière busca uma superação dos impasses gerados pela lógica da emancipação intelectual de Jacotot. Assim, pensar com Rancière o uso pedagógico em política e em estética pode nos auxiliar a situar a relação entre educação e democracia em outras bases. Palavras-chave: Filosofia política da educação; Jacques Rancière; Filosofia política; Emancipação intelectual; Democracia. Beyond The Ignorant Schoolmaster – The encounter of Philosophy and Education as a philosophical-political question from Jacques Rancière's work Abstract: Based on Jacques Rancière's philosophy, this article seeks to determine the extent to which education constitutes a real problem for political philosophy. From the French philosopher's analysis of the controversial encounter between philosophy and democracy in Platonic philosophy, we seek to draw some parallels with regard to the also controversial encounter between philosophy and education. This is intended to shed new light on what we might call a political philosophy of education. For this we support two working hypotheses: first, that the place of education in Rancière's thought must be understood beyond Le maître ignorant (1987); second, that Rancière's political philosophy seeks to overcome the impasses generated by Jacotot's logic of intellectual emancipation. Thus, thinking with Rancière about pedagogical use in politics and aesthetics can help us situate the relationship between education and democracy on other grounds.Keywords: Political philosophy of education; Jacques Rancière; Political philosophy, Intellectual emancipation; Democracy. Au-delà de Le maître ignorant – La reencontre de la philosophie et de l'éducation en tant que question politico-philosophique de l'œvre de Jacques Rancière Résumé: Basé sur la philosophie de Jacques Rancière, cet article cherche à déterminer dans quelle mesure l'éducation constitue un problème réel pour la philosophie politique. À partir de l'analyse du philosophe français entre philosophie et démocratie dans la philosophie platonicienne, nous cherchons à établir des parallèles avec la rencontre également controversée entre philosophie et education. Cela vise à jeter un nouvel éclairage sur ce que nous pourrions appeler une philosophie politique de l'éducation. Pour cela, nous soutenons deux hypotheses de travail: premièrement, la place de l'éducation dans la pensée de Rancière doit être comprise au-delà de Le maître ignorant (1987); deuxièmement, que la philosophie politique de Rancière cherche à surmonter les impasses générées par la logique d'émancipation intellectuelle de Jacotot. Ainsi, réfléchir avec Rancière à une utilisation pédagogique en politique et en esthétique peut nous aider à situer la relation entre éducation et démocatie sur d'autres bases.Mot-clé: Philosophie politique de l'éducation; Jacques Rancière; Philosophie politique; Emancipation intellectuelle; Démocratie. Data de registro: 10/02/2020 Data de aceite: 29/09/2021. (shrink)

This article first locates Jacques Rancière’s account of politics in the context of French thinking in the second half of the 20th century. It then summarizes how Rancière defines politics in terms of an originary equality that supports all orders of command and obedience. For Rancière, also, the world as a ‘whole’ does not add up. It is characterized by ‘paradoxical magnitude’. Paradoxical magnitude means that every regime of politics will nonetheless also be a miscount, a ‘wrong’ that will in (...) particular fail to satisfy the originary equality that is supposed by all ‘partitions of the sensible’. Since there is no metric by reference to which the ‘whole’ of the world can be made to add up, politics cannot be an epistemological question. For Rancière it is a matter of the polemical practices by which equality is verified through emancipation. The complex ‘taking place’ of emancipation is the theme of teaching what we do not know that preoccupies Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Here, the article argues, emancipation also finds a distinctly messianic expression. The aporetic difficulty of teaching what we do not know as an emancipatory practice is explored by reading The Ignorant Schoolmaster with and against Stanley Rosen’s reading of Plato’s Statesman, which poses the same problem but resolves it differently. The article concludes by asking what is at stake in this messianic expression of emancipation. (shrink)

In this article, I turn my attention to the figure of the ignorant master, Joseph Jacotot, that is depicted in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991). I will show that the voice of Jacotot can actually be read as a reaction against the progressive figure of the teacher which, following Rancière's view, can be seen as effecting a stultification. In some respects, however, Rancière's analysis of the pedagogical order no longer seems to (...) be valid in today's partly reconfigured, pedagogical order that depicts the teacher in terms of facilitation. Yet, the figure of the facilitator can be seen as effecting a stultification as well. Therefore, I will stress that Jacotot's voice is highly relevant today. The most important difference between the figure of the (old and current) figure of the stultifyer and that of the ignorant master is identified in their starting point. The stultifying master starts from the assumption of inequality. S/he transforms taught material (words, text, images, etc.) into objects of knowledge or resources for competence development that open the door to another world. The ignorant master (Jacotot) assumes equal intelligence and draws attention to a thing in common. According to Rancière, the ignorant master keeps the door closed and puts his/her students in the presence of a thing in common. (shrink)

Thayer-Bacon uses this opportunity to further explore Rancière's ideas concerning equality as described in The Ignorant Schoolmaster and their connection to democracy, as he explains in Hatred of Democracy. For Rancière, intelligence and equality are synonymous terms, just as reason and will are synonymous terms. Rancière recommends the only way to really teach a student is by viewing the student as an equal. Thayer-Bacon learned to view students as equals through her experience as a Montessori teacher, and (...) so she brings Montessori into conversation with Rancière to further explore the idea of equality between teachers and students, as well as between citizens in a democracy. There are problems with both Rancière's perspective and Montessori's that feminist theory, in the form of a relational ontology and epistemology, can help us solve by finding our way out of the paradoxes of democracy and on to trusting our students, our future democratic citizens. (shrink)

In this paper, I endeavor to evaluate the ethical-political consequences of the metaphor of "teacher-midwife" awarded to Plato’s Socrates in Theaetetus and its use by different scholars to describe the role of teacher in a Philosophy with/for children context. The paper is divided into three sections: first an approach is made to the figure of Socrates in Meno, to the critique of his method as expressed by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and to the echoing of that (...) critique by Walter Kohan in his evaluation of the pedagogy of Pf/wC. Next, different descriptions of the teacher’s role in Pf/wC are reviewed, emphasizing the elements that emphasize the Socratic figure. For Matthew Lipman, one of the keys to turning classrooms into communities of philosophical inquiry was to substantially modify the teaching role. Because, on Lipman’s account, the teacher should not teach in the traditional sense, different metaphors have been sought to describe her role. In section, I argue that a description of the teacher as "guide" can be applied to many features that characterize Socrates. I analyze in depth the metaphor of the "teacher-midwife" establishing the links with those developed in and. Emphasis is placed on the ethical-political consequences of equating the teacher with a "teacher-midwife", especially if we take into account Plato's complete description of pedagogical maiusis in Theaetetus, and the centrality of the metaphor in Pf/wC pedagogical practice. Finally, I consider the very different image of the “birth” metaphor that is suggested by Hannah Arendt’s concept of “natality,” and explore its implications for a pedagogical alternative to the Socratic. (shrink)

La question de la traduction est au cœur de « l’enseignement universel » ou « panécastique » de Joseph Jacotot tel que l’expose Jacques Rancière dans Le Maître ignorant. Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle. L’article présente l’ouvrage et montre les liens entre émancipation et théorie de la traduction. Il montre également comment la « pan-traductibilité » défendue par Jacotot et Rancière est non seulement une réponse politique à la question de l’émancipation, non seulement la vision messianique d’une humanité égale (...) dans la pratique universelle et réciproque de la traduction et de la contre-traduction, mais aussi une proposition de solution pour plusieurs paradoxes théoriques en théorie de la traduction, notamment celui de l’exceptionnalité de l’apprentissage de la langue maternelle. (shrink)

In this article I discuss how Jacques Rancière’s thought invites us to re-conceptualize the education–emancipation nexus. The primary goal of traditional approaches to emancipatory and anti-oppressive education has been to empower the oppressed so that the latter can (re)gain their voice and transform their situations. Building on Rancière’s ideas, I argue that the processes of empowering the oppressed imply that one has the power to empower the other, and thus start with an assumption of inequality. I conclude the article with (...) a call for a pedagogy of ignorance. Grounded in Rancière’s thought, this pedagogy is ignorant of any division and hierarchy of intelligence. (shrink)

In this essay Sarah Galloway considers emancipation as a purpose for education through examining the theories of Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière. Both theorists are concerned with the prospect of distinguishing between education that might socialize people into what is taken to be an inherently oppressive society and education with emancipation as its purpose. Galloway reconstructs the theories in parallel, examining the assumptions made, the processes of oppression described, and the movements to emancipation depicted. In so doing, she argues that (...) that the two theorists hold a common model for theorizing oppression and emancipation as educational processes, distinguished by the differing assumptions they each make about humanity, but that their theories ultimately have opposing implications for educational practices. Galloway further maintains that Freire and Rancière raise similar educational problems and concerns, both theorizing that the character of the relations among teachers, students, and educational materials is crucial to an emancipatory education. Galloway's approach allows discussion of some of the criticisms that have been raised historically about Freire's theory and how these might be addressed to some degree by Rancière's work. Taking the two theories together, she argues that the possibility for an emancipatory education cannot be ignored if education is to be considered as more than merely a process of passing down the skills and knowledge necessary in order to socialize people into current society. (shrink)

In this paper we look at the relations between knowledge and thinking through the lens of ignorance. In relation to knowledge, ignorance becomes its “constitutive outside,” and as such it may be politically organised in order to delimit the borders of the right to knowledge [the “ignorance economy,” see Roberts and Armitage : 335–354, 2008)]. In this light, the notion of a knowledge-based society should be understood as a society structured along the lines of knowledge distribution: the rights of possession (...) of and access to knowledge demand that ignorance is planned and executed as the condition of their establishment. In relation to thinking, ignorance appears differently. According to Rancière, the teacher's ignorance conditions the student's appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? Hence, we are dealing with the ambiguity of ignorance which seems to be both the criterion of social exclusion, and the condition of emancipation. Following this thread with reference to Heidegger's discourse on thinking, we would like to explore the possibility of comprehending knowledge and education beyond the relations of ownership and demands of productivity. Following Rancière, we may say that thinking—as displacing the notion of ignorance—stands in the position of “politics” and questions the ways knowledge societies are structured as “police orders” along the lines of knowledge possession and exclusion. (shrink)

Daha önce Jean-Luc Nancy gibi isimlerle de röportajlar yayımlamış olan Le Philosophoire'ın 2000 yılında yayımlanan bu on üçüncü sayısında, Paris VII Denis Diderot Üniversitesi'nde akademisyen olan Nicolas Poirier, bu defa röportajlarına Jacques Rancière'i ekliyor. Röportajın öne çıkan özelliklerinden birisi, ve belki de en önemlisi, Rancière'in başta Michel Foucault ve Cornelius Castoriadis olmak üzere; Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron, Gilles Deleuze gibi Fransız filozofları, ve yine İtalyan filozof Antonio Negri'yi, iktidar, halk, özneleşme, kendilik teknikleri, polis ve politika kavramlarına yaklaşımları bakımından (çoğunlukla da (...) eleştirerek) analiz ediyor olması. Rancière, eleştirilerini, özellikle Cahil Hoca'dan (Le Maître Ignorant) beridir izini sürdüğü "entelektüel özgürleşme" meselesiyle bağlantılı olarak ele alırken okul, pedagoji, eğitim, öğretmen, bilgi aktarımı ve öğretmenin sembolik konumu gibi kavramları, çağın güncel siyasi meseleleri ışığında ele alıyor. (shrink)

Research in business ethics has largely ignored questions of equality and dissensus, raised by theorists of radical democracy. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work has been very influential in business ethics, has developed a novel approach to virtue ethics rooted in both Aristotelian practical philosophy and a Marxian appreciation of radical democracy. In this paper, we bring MacIntyre into conversation with Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe and argue the following: first, MacIntyre’s work has significant similarities with Rancière and Mouffe, thus suggesting that (...) MacIntyrean business ethics has the potential to address the concerns of radical democrats; second, the MacIntyrean business ethics literature has not adequately incorporated the aspects of Macntyre’s work addressing concerns regarding equality and dissensus and future work should pay more attention to these concerns. (shrink)

Theorists, who broadly subscribe to Claude Lefort’s characterization of democracy as the dissolution of the markers of certainty, disagree over the proper enactment of democracy. In this article, I consider the possibility of narrowing the gap by attending to the ignorance advocated by each of the two approaches – the disruptive radical route Jacques Rancière describes and the reformist approach of Richard Rorty. I highlight the attributes and shortcomings of the positive link between practices of ignorance and democracy in the (...) work of the two theorists, and explore how the practices they describe can complement each other in the enactment of democracy. (shrink)

A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows – since he knows it, there is no need to search – nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.The master always keeps a piece of learning – that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance – up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You (...) think so, corrects the master. In fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. … Thus does the... (shrink)

The article offers a conversation with the ghost of the madman ‘Jacotot/rancière’: one of the possible dialogues between the ignorant schoolmaster and my own perplexities in what I feel to be an endgame. Is there any point at the present time, in the declining mercantilist university, in pondering once again the issue of the place of philosophy in institutions responsible for training people who will work in the sphere of education? ‘We’ knew the old words, so the article (...) goes, but now we are no longer sure they mean anything. And we are not keen to learn the new ones: we do not trust them, they are irrelevant to us. Moreover, we are sad and tired. All we feel is rage and impotence. Will we be capable of trying all the words once again: university, philosophy, education? Will we be capable of trying all the verbs once again: reading, writing, conversing, perhaps thinking? (shrink)

When postgraduate researchers’ interests lie outside the body of knowledge with which their supervisors are familiar, different supervisory approaches are called for. In such situations, questions concerning the appropriateness of traditional models arise, which almost invariably involve a budding candidate’s relationship with a knowing-established researcher/supervisor. Supervisory relationships involving creative practice-led research in particular confront significant challenges by new and emerging themes, questions, processes and practices. My lack of disciplinary knowledge regarding two PhD candidates’ projects led me some years ago to (...) question the effects of this lack and to search for effective ways of dealing with it. A subsequent commitment to different modes of candidate/supervisor collaborations was based on three assumptions: One, a supervisor is not, in the first instance, a conveyor or purveyor of knowledge. Two, postgraduate researchers already have substantial and refined pockets of relevant knowledge to draw on. Three, and very importantly, they are able to activate networks of distributed knowledge, often outside of the University. The argument presented in this article draws theoretically on Jacques Rancière and Hannah Arendt’s ideas of pedagogy and public space, as well as notions of cosmopolitics, mode 2 knowledge and not-knowing in Art & Design. Reflections on my experiences of supervising PhD and Master of Art & Design candidates, together with ideas offered by contributors to a book I have recently edited, will locate moments of choice and the emergence of the unforeseeable, of vigilance towards singular events as much as collective understanding. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper explores two emancipatory ways that the struggle over recognition can take under conditions of social invisibility and hyper-visibility: that of social visibilization, and that of a dialectical interplay between invisibility and visibility. The theories of recognition of Honneth and Rancière acknowledge that recognition is based on socially mediated perceptual processes that enable or prevent recognition: whether and how subjects become socially visible or remain invisible. For Honneth, social invisibility is a marker of misrecognition and consists of deliberate (...) inattention and ignorance of others, so that struggles over recognition must take place, in part, through making previously invisible subjects visible. I argue here that Honneth’s account of social (in)visibility and his corresponding view of recognition in terms of properly formed visibilization, while valuable, prove insufficient when considering how racialized societies are underpinned by the power dynamics of invisibility and hyper-visibility. I turn to the works of Fanon, Ellison, and Rancière to illustrate these dynamics and to offer an account of how struggles over recognition requires practices of dis-identification from these dynamics that involve attempts to create interstices within dominant orders of (in)visibility where subjects might appear on their own terms. (shrink)

"Recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot" -- vii.

In our paper we aim at reflecting upon the extent to which educational theory may be used as a framework in the analysis of policy documents. As policy texts are ‘heteroglossic in character’ (Lingard and Ozga, in The Routledge Falmer reader in education policy and politics, Routledge, London and New York, 2007 , p. 2) and create “circumstances in which the range of options available in deciding what to do are narrowed or changed” (Ball in, Education policy and social class: (...) The selected works of Stephen J Ball, Routledge, London and New York, 2006 , p. 46), they need to be theoretically tackled in their underlying assumptions and implications. This proposal draws on an analysis of two sets of documents of the European Union: texts produced between 2000 and 2006, underlying the European Union programmes; and texts produced by a working group focusing on the key competences of Lifelong Learning (2003–2006). Initially, the framework for the analysis of different documents was grounded on the existing research in the field of educational policy. Now we attempt a secondary analysis of the collected data by transposing the borders of this particular and highly prolific field. We argue that what is outside the texts may reshape what is inside the texts. Educational theory allows us to define some conceptual tools in order to question the documents as political apparatus which open and constrain possibilities. Therefore, we will use educational theory as an arena where different matters, perspectives and possibilities may be explored and assembled. We have engaged in a conversation with both the data and some theoretical approaches. Central to this conversation are the concepts of “ignorant schoolmaster” (Rancière, in The ignorant schoolmaster five lessons in intellectual emancipation, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991 ), “learning contexts” (Edwards, in Rethinking contexts for learning and teaching, Routledge, Oxon and New York, 2009a , b ), and “experience” (Larrosa, in Revista Brasileira de Educação, 19:20–28, 2002 ). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 113-126 [Access article in PDF] Dissenting Words:A Conversation with Jacques Rancière 1 Davide Panagia:In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History, for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an "excess of words" that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth century. Similarly, in On The Shores of Politics, (...) you begin your discussion with an excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you speak of "the part of those who have no-part" as voicing a "wrong" for the sake of equality.In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more generally) is very different from those thinkers of the "linguistic turn" in political philosophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democracies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus on the aporias of language as such.Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about democratic politics?Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic thinking as a "poetics of politics"?Rancière's Reply:In order to address your question adequately, it would be wise to enlarge the sense of "linguistic turn" you invoke. In its most generally accepted sense, the linguistic turn in philosophy consists in ascribing to linguistic processes certain phenomena and specifiable modes of relating objects attributed, in a previous instance, either to factual processes or lines of thought. This approach is not limited to the two figures you invoke in your question. The linguistic turn also has two stages of development that, from my experience, have been more noticeable in France than in the United States. The first phase, then, emerged with Lévi-Strauss and his structural approach to social relations founded on a linguistic model of relationality, subsequently reprised in Lacan's psychoanalytic notion that "the unconscious is structured like a language" that, in its turn, conjoins the energetic mental processes Freud discusses to linguistic practices. The primacy of "the linguistic" thus granted language all the properties of the Freudian unconscious [End Page 113] along with those of a Marxist notion of infrastructure. The Saussurian opposition between langue and parole provided a privileged status to a linguistic model whose role was that of a general law that unconsciously structures the behavior of individuals and societies. It is on the basis of these parameters that the structuralist moment of the linguistic turn was constituted. At one and the same time, the analysis of speech acts became first and foremost a "symptomatic" analysis of those procedures of misrecognition that linguistically structured both the behavior of individuals and social relations. When we "read" Le Capital with Althusser, the interpretive and methodological schema for linguistic phenomena operated like a kind of "policing of the enunciated": that is, a search for those unsuccessful (i.e., inadequate) modes of expression that exemplify such symptomatic procedures of misrecognition.The second phase of the linguistic turn constituted itself more ambiguously. For those who shared intellectual experiences similar to my own, this version involved a critique of the langue/infrastructure model; that is, a further and more favorable consideration of the value of the political and the linguistic games therein that, according to the Althusserian/Marxist model (and, indeed, with structuralism more generally), were to be treated as ideological artifacts. In a very real sense, it all began with the May '68 assertion that "we are all German Jews"--an entirely ideological statement, the validity of which, if analyzed at the level of its content, one finds to rest entirely on the capacity to overturn the political relationship between the order of designations and that of events by emphasizing the gap that separates subject and predicate. From there, an entire field of understanding speech acts as political gestures opened up: a field that reconfigured the division between words and things while rearranging the distinction between legitimate... (shrink)

When I first contacted Jacques Rancière in March 2017, nearly three-and-a-half years before the completion of this interview, a few basic questions were growing heavy. Questions limited to current political climates, trending philosophical systems, specific literary works, designated historical shifts, or particular Rancièrean terms would be reluctantly put aside in pursuit of certain elemental distinctions that might better inform the rest. The original proposal was to work around such slippery paradoxes as resistance, and to readdress tangible material like the letter, (...) but the overall idea, communicated from the start, was to produce a sort of reintroduction to Rancière's thought, for myself and an intended... (shrink)

Translator's introduction -- Preface -- Part I: The aesthetics of politics -- Ten theses on politics -- Does democracy mean something? -- Who is the subject of the rights of man? -- Communism : from actuality to inactuality -- The people or the multitudes -- Bio-politics or politics -- September 11 and afterwards : a rupture in the symbolic order -- Of war as the supreme form of advanced plutocratic consensus -- Part II: The politics of aesthetics -- The aesthetic (...) revolution and its outcomes -- The paradoxes of political art -- The politics of literature -- The monument and its confidences or Deleuze and Art's capacity for resistance -- The ethical turn of aesthetics and politics -- Part III: Response to critics -- The usage of distinctions. (shrink)

A lesson in orthodoxy : M. L. teaches John Lewis that it is the masses which make history -- A lesson in politics : philosophers do not become kings -- A lesson in self-criticism : class struggle rages in theory -- A lesson in history : the damages of humanism -- A discourse in its place -- Appendix. For the record : on the theory of ideology.

This book is not concerned with the use of Freudian concepts for the interpretation of literary and artistic works. Rather, it is concerned with why this interpretation plays such an important role in demonstrating the contemporary relevance of psychoanalytic concepts. In order for Freud to use the Oedipus complex as a means for the interpretation of texts, it was necessary first of all for a particular notion of Oedipus, belonging to the Romantic reinvention of Greek antiquity, to have produced a (...) certain idea of the power of that thought which does not think, and the power of that speech which remains silent. From this it does not follow that the Freudian unconscious was already prefigured by the aesthetic unconscious. Freud's 'aesthetic' analyses reveal instead a tension between the two forms of unconscious. In this concise and brilliant text Rancière brings out this tension and shows us what is at stake in this confrontation. (shrink)

Y a-t-il un art communiste? was given as a talk at the Grand Palais in Paris on 10 April 2019 on the occasion of a special exhibition, Red: Art and Utopia in the Land of the Soviets (Rouge: Art et utopie au pays des Soviets). The exhibition ran from 20 March 2019 to 1 July 2019. Red displayed works produced in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. This covers early experiments (...) by avant-garde artists such as Vladimir Mayokovsky and Kazimir Malevich, the grand-scale construction of public monuments, and the mass-produced art of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Like many of Jacques Rancière’s recent publications on art, this article closely engages the material of its source exhibit, and, in it, he addresses the full range of art staged by the Grand Palais, offering a direct and provocative confrontation with the question of whether there can be a communist art. (shrink)

Philosopher and literary theorist, Jacques Rancière, has argued that Marcel Proust’s work as a novelist enables us to understand how modern literature articulates and largely resolves a specifically aesthetic crisis. From Rancière’s standpoint, Proust shows us how the dominant conflict in nineteenth-century French literature was carried beyond a mere opposition and given a new aesthetic significance in the modern novel. In this paper, I will discuss Jacques Rancière’s attempt to assess Proust’s contribution to literature in the wake of the aesthetic (...) tradition epitomized by Kant and Schiller. Crucial to this attempt is the deployment of aesthetics as a historical discourse that introduces the possibility of variation in relation to the real. More specifically, I will examine Rancière’s argument that metaphor in Proust’s work has the capacity to transform a sense of doubleness into a new understanding of the real. (shrink)

Althusser's entire theoretical undertaking has one objective and can be summarized in a single paradox. The objective is defined in 1965 in the opening lines of Pour Marx: “the research into Marx's philosophical thought, which is indispensable if we are to emerge from the theoretical impasse that history has left us in” (Althusser 1965, p. 11). The paradox is recalled in his lecture on “La Transformation de la Philosophie”: “Marxist philosophy exists, and yet it was not produced as philosophy” (Althusser (...) 1994, p. 149). (shrink)

Representation and Sensibility. The Rancière-Lyotard Debate on Art If representation means making something present again, what is its relationship to sensibility, especially in art? Could the work of art represent our sensory inputs, or does such representation always fall short of the adequate re-presentation of the sensory? The debate on representation and sensibility has been reopened within a new framework with Rancière’s distinction between three historical regimes of art. This article sets out by casting doubt on Rancière’s assumption that representation (...) could be reduced to one of these three regimes. Secondly, discussion turns to Rancière’s criticism of Lyotard’s notion of unrepresentability, particularly with regard to ‘Auschwitz’. Thirdly, the question is put why these two authors have such different readings of Kant’s aesthetics: Rancière’s choice for beauty is actually a choice for representation, whereas to Lyotard, the unrepresentable sublime creates the space for the event in our sensibility. Finally, it is shown that Rancière, though acknowledging a tension between ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’, ignores the meaning of avant-garde art, whereas Lyotard distrusts realistic, representative art. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 2, Page 143-160, May 2022. Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented amount of conflict around visual representations in India. The field of the visual is the new terrain for rumour mongering and for maiming uncomfortable oppositional voices. With the fast-spreading mobile culture, penetrating social media and continued legacy of the pictorial as an embodiment of the real, the visual has taken over both the oral as well as the written words in its usefulness (...) to serve the political. Can we simply comprehend such a visual aggression by taking recourse in the enhanced role of visual media in our everyday life, along the lines of a ‘visual turn’? Is the visual sphere another surface of politics? With these key questions, this article revisits certain contemporary visual events by focusing on words that float in public spaces from streets to television screens. On a broader terrain, with an emphasis on aesthetics, the article relooks at an often-settled equation between the visual and the political on the one hand and the question of the visual as an archive of the contemporary on the other. Following Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as a field of the distribution of the sensible, this article has tried to focus on vernacular words circulating outside the confines of the literature and create a domain of political communication hitherto ignored by scholars. (shrink)