The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People Volume 2
Paperback, 184 pages
ISBN: 9781844678600
June 2012
$29.95 / £19.99 / $37.50CAN
Other Editions
Ebook, 176 pages
ISBN: 9781844679218
June 2012
$14.99
Reviews
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“In the face of impossible attempts to proceed with progressive ideas within the terms of postmodernist discourse, Rancière shows a way out of the malaise.”
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“Rancière’s writings offer one of the few consistent conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist.”
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.
