Rancière, Jacques (1940–)

Jacques Rancière was born in Algiers in 1940 and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he participated in French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s seminar reading Marx’s Capital in the mid-1960s. Rancière then taught in the Philosophy Department of the experimental Vincennes campus of the University of Paris and its successor institution, Paris 8. His work is rooted in a radically egalitarian critique of Althusser and other leading theorists of the French left, in particular philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and inspired by his singular encounter with the archives of the nineteenth-century French workers’ movement. Since his first publication in 1965 he has ranged widely across philosophy, politics, history, historiography, pedagogy, literary studies, film studies and aesthetics. It is for his work on politics (his account of radical equality and his anti-foundationalist, anti-consensualist and anti-institutional critique of political theory) and aesthetics (his reformulation of Modernism as ‘the aesthetic regime of art’) and for writing which moves back and forward between these two domains that he is best known today. Rancière is sometimes described as a post-Marxist philosopher and his work likened to that of his contemporaries on the French theoretical left, Alain Badiou and Étienne Balibar.