Proletarian Nights: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France
Proletarian Nights, previously published in English as Nights of Labor and one of Rancière’s most important works, dramatically reinterprets the Revolution of 1830, contending that workers were not rebelling against specific hardships and conditions but against the unyielding predetermination of their lives. Through a study of worker-run newspapers, letters, journals, and worker-poetry, Rancière reveals the contradictory and conflicting stories that challenge the coherence of these statements celebrating labor.
This updated edition includes a new preface by the author, revisiting the work twenty years since its first publication in France.
Paperback, 478 pages
ISBN: 9781844677788
April 2012
$29.95 / £19.99 / $37.50CAN
Reviews
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“With its innovative approach, Rancière's difficult and provocative interpretation is essential reading.”
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“Rancière’s brilliant book … locates the nineteenth-century origins of European socialism not in the noble desire of artisans to control their own labor but in the utopian visions of working-class poets who wanted to be free of labor altogether ... This is a powerful, piercing, and radical argument ... Rancière has merged his philosophical and historical interests into a profound commentary on the possibilities of human freedom and of the violence done to those possibilities in freedom’s name.”
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“Drury's translation puts it into English as directly and comprehensibly as possible. It's a difficult job to do well, and the translator's work goes a long way toward making the book more readable.”
Blog
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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.
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"The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass": Jacques Rancière on Populism
Writing in Libération, Jacques Rancière talks about populism and French politics today.
The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass
Not a day goes by without the risks of populism being denounced on all sides. But it is not so easy to grasp what the word denotes. What is a populist? Despite various fluctuations of meaning, the dominant discourse seems to characterize it in terms of three essential features: a style of speech addressed directly to the people, bypassing representatives and dignitaries; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with feathering their own nest than with the public interest; a rhetoric of identity that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners. -
Jacques Rancière: “old fart” or man of the hour?
Discussing the critique of “the new communism” in the Guardian recently, Stuart Jeffries wrote that the fear is that “nasty old left farts” such as Jacques Rancière “will corrupt the minds of the innocent youth.” In conversation with Jeffries, however, Rancière himself defends the relevance of his and his contemporaries’ thinking in 2012, explaining:
“The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today’s popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there’s a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people.”
Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.
