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.
Blog
"Save the Greeks from their saviours!": Alain Badiou and others on the Greek bailout
In a fiery critical call for solidarity, rich with the language of class war, a number of European academics and artists call for a campaign of solidarity with the Greek people and a launch against the dehumanising and aggressive ideology of technocratic austerity.
"[T]he future of democracy and the fate of European nations are in question" under the restructuring of Greek debt and the "endless, devastating bailouts", according to the authors, who include French academics Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Ranciere and more. Public assets are being carved up for privatisation under the oversight of the troika, producing vast wealth for the international buyers but failing to address the sovereign debt crisis at all: "it has literally exploded into free fall in approaching 170% of GDP, while in 2009 it represented more than 120%".
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Jacques Rancière
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The Intellectual and His People
Rethinking the role of the radical public intellectual. -
The Emancipated Spectator
The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking. -
Staging the People
Rancière's classic essays from the 1970s, as he was developing his distinctive method.
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Hatred of Democracy
A vehement defense of the principle of democracy against neoconservative repression. -
The Future of the Image
A leading philosopher presents a radical manifesto for the future of art and film.
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On the Shores of Politics
Returning politics to its original and necessary meaning: the organization of dissent.