Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. His books include The Politics of Aesthetics, On the Shores of Politics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, The Nights of Labor, Staging the People, and The Emancipated Spectator.Blog
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No to the Return to Dictatorship in Greece - an open letter
by Étienne Balibar, and 47 other signatoriesWe, citizens of Europe and beyond, call on all our fellow citizens to support the Greek workers’ and journalists’ general strike.
At a moment when the IMF has implicitly admitted that the privatisations and restructuring imposed by the Troika in exchange for loans – supposedly meant to reduce Greek sovereign debt – have in fact driven the country to ruin, this same Troika (also including the European Commission and European Central Bank) has come to Athens to make fresh demands. Its terms were such that the Greek government has decided to speed up the enslavement of Greece to domestic and foreign neoliberal dictatorship.
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How can Democracy be Rejuvenated? Ideas for Transforming a Still-Oligarchic Society
Democratic malaise, political disarray and panic: a year after Francois Hollande’s election, things aren’t looking good. Jacques Rancière and Pierre Rosanvallon, two major thinkers and theorists of democracy, attempt to understand our moral and political predicament.
From the 7 May 2013 print edition of Le Monde
Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII. His books include On the Shores of Politics, Short Voyages to the Land of the People, The Nights of Labor, Staging the People, and The Emancipated Spectator. His next book, Aisthesis, is out in June by Verso.
Pierre Rosanvallon is a French center-left thinker, previously involved with François Furer in the Fondation Saint-Simon. His books in English include, amongst others, Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity; Democracy Past and Future; and The Demands of Liberty. In 2002 he founded the République des Idées.How did you make democracy and equality the central axes of your political concerns, inquiries and research ?
Pierre Rosanvallon: I became a full timer for the CFDT [union federation] when I finished at the HEC [business school] just after May ’68. At that time I began to read an enormous amount on the history of the workers’ movement. I had made contact with a publisher, Léon Centner, who had issued an impressive collection of hundreds of pamphlets on the building of the workers’ movement, Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle [‘The Revolutions of the Nineteenth Century’] in 48 volumes. Having got the CFDT to buy the lot, I dived into reading them. From that point on, I knew well that it is impossible to understand the tasks of the present – the project of self-management then being central – without a long-term perspective on the questions in hand. I wanted, besides, to understand the disorderly phenomena of democracy. To know why the structures of collective organisation did not work as well as expected. All these questions on the organisation of democratic life made for my first field of studies.
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Marx's Revenge: How Class Struggle is Shaping the World
Marx has appeared, of all places, in the Business and Money section of Time Magazine. In this week's issue, Michael Schuman describes how class struggle, rather than being rendered irrelevant by the spread of global capitalism, continues to impact our world in significant ways—and he cites Chavs author Owen Jones and Jacques Rancière (author of Aisthesis, The Intellectual and His People, Proletarian Nights, and many other works) to help him make his case.
With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx's biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world's wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes. "Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole," Marx wrote.
A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right.
Visit Time Magazine to read the article in full.
