Editing Jacques Rancière (section)

==Life and work==
Rancière contributed to the influential volume ''[[Reading Capital]]'' before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 [[French May|student uprising in Paris]]; Rancière felt Althusser's theoretical stance did not leave enough room for spontaneous popular uprising.<ref name="rancieredavis">Ben Davis. [http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/books/davis/davis8-17-06.asp Rancière, For Dummies.] The Politics of Aesthetics. Book Review.</ref>

Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up the understanding of political discourse, such as [[ideology]] and [[proletariat]]. He sought to address whether the working class in fact exists, and how the masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with [[knowledge]], particularly the limits of philosophers' knowledge with respect to the proletariat. An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled ''Le philosophe et ses pauvres'' (''The Philosopher and His Poor'', 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

From 1975 to 1981, Rancière was a figurehead for the journal ''Les Révoltes Logiques''. Forming partly out of a philosophy seminar on workers' history that Rancière gave at Vincennes, it drew together philosophers and historians for a radical political intervention into French thought after the [[May 1968 events in France|May 1968 uprisings.]]<ref>{{Cite book|title=May 1968 and its Afterlives|last=Ross|first=Kristin|publisher=University of Chicago Press|year=2002|isbn=0-226-72797-1|location=Chicago|pages=125}}</ref> Its title acting as both a reference to [[Arthur Rimbaud]]'s poem, "Democratie" (''Nous massacrerons les révoltes logiques'' – "We'll smash all logical revolts") and the [[Maoist]] [[Cultural Revolution]]ary slogan adopted by the ''Gauche Prolétarienne'' group, of which some of ''Les Révoltes Logiques''' members were active within,<ref>{{Cite book|title=May 1968 and its Afterlives|last=Ross|first=Kristin|publisher=University of Chicago Press|year=2002|isbn=0-226-72797-1|location=Chicago|pages=125}}</ref> 'On a raison de se revolter' – 'It is right to revolt.',<ref>{{Cite book|title=Jacques Ranciere: Key Contemporary Thinkers|last=Davis|first=Oliver|publisher=Polity|year=2010|isbn=978-0-7456-4654-1|location=Cambridge|pages=37}}</ref> the journal attempted to interrogate and contest the historiographic and political norms around the representation of workers' and social history. Writing, along with figures like feminist historian [[Geneviève Fraisse]], Rancière and others attempted to reveal the complexity, contradictions and diversity of 'thought and history from below'. In its fifteen ordinary issues, the collective wished to overcome the historiographic norms in which the working class were given historical treatment but rendered voiceless, homogeneous and pre-theoretical; instead, they allowed workers to speak for themselves, and interrogated their words seriously.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts|last=Deranty|first=Jean-Phillipe|publisher=Acumen|year=2010|isbn=978-1-84465-233-4|location=Durham|pages=18}}</ref>

More recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people, again the problem of masses, justify [[human rights]] interventions and even war.

Rancière's book, ''[[The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation]]'' (original title ''Le Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle'', published in 1987) was written for educators and educators-to-be.  Through the story of [[Joseph Jacotot]], Rancière challenges his readers to consider equality as a starting point rather than a destination.  In doing so, he asks educators to abandon the themes and rhetoric of cultural deficiency and salvation. Rather than requiring informed schoolmasters to guide students towards prescribed and alienating ends, Rancière argues that educators can channel the equal intelligence in all to facilitate their intellectual growth in virtually unlimited directions. The schoolmaster need not know anything (and may be ignorant). Rancière begins with the premises that all are of equal intelligence and that any collective educational exercise founded on this principle can provide the insights from which knowledge is constructed. He claims that the poor and disenfranchised should feel perfectly able to teach ''themselves'' whatever it is they want to know. Furthermore, anyone can lead, and the oppressed should not feel bound to experts or reliant on others for their intellectual emancipation.

Jacotot advocated the 'equality of intelligence' and claimed that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person. Rancière developed this idea in ''The Ignorant Schoolmaster'', saying that “there is stultification whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another ... whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies”.<ref>{{cite book|title=[[The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation]]|author=Jacques Ranciere |pages=13, 18|year=1981}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education |author=Molly Quinn |chapter=Committing (to) Ignorance |pages=31–52}}</ref>