Democracy means equality

Jacques Ranciere first came to prominence as one of the co-authors, with Louis Althusser, of the original two-volume edition of Lire le Capital (1965), to which he contributed an essay on Marx's 1844 Manuscripts (trans. `The Concept of "Critique" and the Critique of "Political Economy"', in Ali Rattansi, ed., Ideology, Method and Marx, Routledge, 1989). However, he soon broke with Althusser (see Ranciére, La Lecon d'Althusser, 1974), becoming an influential figure in French Maoism. This break, at once political and theoretical, was focused on what Ranciere has described as `the historical and philosophical relations between knowledge and the masses'. Developing out of a critique of Althusser's theory of ideology (see Ranciere, `On the Theory of Ideology - Althusser's Politics', RP 7, Spring 1974; reprinted in R. Edgley and R. Osborne, eds, Radical Philosophy Reader, Verso, 1985), it led to a series of reflections on the social and historical constitution of knowledges: La Nuit des proleétaires, 1981 (trans. Nights of Labour, Temple University Press, 1989); Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, 1983; and Le Maître ignorant, 1987 (trans. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford University Press, 1991). More recently, since 1989 Rancieère has broadened his canvas to engage the constitution of `the political' within the Western tradition (Aux bords du politique, 1990; trans. On the Shores of Politics, Verso, 1994) and the poetics of historical knowledge (Les Noms de l'histoire, 1992; trans. The Names of History, Minnesota University Press, 1994). His latest books are Le Mesentente, 1995 and Mallarme - la politique de la sirene, 1996.

Passages: Jacques Ranciere, for more than twenty years you have been following a somewhat unusual philosophical itinerary. It is obvious that what you are doing has nothing in common with traditional academic work. Most of your books reveal philosophical thought in unexpected contexts or in contexts that have been reformulated in atypical fashion.

Rancière: Given the historical and political conjuncture of the 1970s, which I certainly did not foresee, I wanted to look again at certain of the concepts and conceptual logics that Marxism used to describe the functions of the social and the political. For me, that wish took the form of a decision, which might be described as purely empirical, to look at the contradiction between the social and the political within the working-class tradition. Basically, I wanted to know how Marxism related to that tradition. I wanted both to establish what that working-class tradition was, and to study how Marxism interpreted and distorted it. For many years I took no more interest in philosophy. More specifically, I turned my back on what might be called political theories, and read nothing but archive material. I posited the existence of a specifically working-class discourse. I began to suspect that there was once a socialism born of a specifically working-class culture or ethos. Years of work on working-class archives taught me that, to be schematic about it, `working-class proletarian' is primarily a name or a set of names rather than a form of experience, and that those names do not express an awareness of a condition. Their primary function is to construct something, namely a relationship of alterity.

That, then, was the starting point. I then slowly went back to asking questions about a certain number of concepts from within the philosophical tradition. The essential matrix for what I have been doing since then was supplied by the writings of a carpenter called Gauny. They take the form of an experiment in what might be described as `wild philosophy'. The most significant of his writings deal with his relationship with time and speech. What did this mean? I had been working on these texts, and when I looked again at certain texts from within the philosophical tradition, and especially Plato's Republic, I realized that this self-taught nineteenth-century carpenter had given philosophy the same conceptual heart as Plato, namely the fact that the worker is not primarily a social function, but a certain relationship with the logos, and that he is assigned to certain temporal categories.

At this point, I stumbled across the famous passage in Book II of The Republic where Plato speaks of the workers who have no time to do anything but work, and the passage in Book VI where he criticizes the `little bald tinker' and those with `disfigured bodies' and `battered and mutilated souls' who `betake themselves to philosophy'. I recognized that the structure was the same. It was a largely empirical structure relating to the temporality of the worker's activity. And there was a close correspondence between that structure and the fully elaborated symbolic structure that denied the worker access to the universal logos and, therefore, to the political. That is what I was trying to conceptualize in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres, but it also provided the main guidelines for my later research into how the ascription of any relationship with language is also the ascription of a type of being.

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