Jacques Rancière

Biography

French philosopher, born in 1940 in Algiers, then French Algeria. A student of Louis Althusser, he contributed to Reading Capital (Lire le Capital, 1965) before breaking publicly with Althusser over their divergent readings of May 1968. He taught for many years at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes–Saint-Denis, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, and also holds a professorship in philosophy at the European Graduate School. His work ranges across political philosophy, aesthetics, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education and cinema. In 1987 he published Le Maître ignorant, later translated as The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which draws on the nineteenth-century teacher Joseph Jacotot and his method of universal teaching to argue that intellectual equality is a presupposition rather than a goal and that explanation produces stultification. That argument became the point of departure for his later work on politics and aesthetics.