And so I had to set out without a guide—without a thread, one master of the art said to me—on the territory of the historian. There the study of a single case, it seemed to me, would help to advance my research: the years 1830 to 1850 witnessed the flowering of utopian socialism and, at the same time, a wide range of working-class expression from ethereal poetry to combative pamphlets and doc...
I MIGHT AS WELL say it straightaway: this book forms part of an inquiry that will not end with its final period. Proceeding, by way of Marx’s suspended revolution, from the Platonic philosopher-king to what reigns today as the sociological conception of the world, I will try to indicate here some of the milestones and retrace some of the paths I pursued in asking two or three questions that ar...
Dirk Rembrantsz was a Dutch peasant, a native of the village of Nierop in the northernmost part of Holland bordering on Frisia. Practicing the shoemaker’s trade in his birthplace barely provided him with the necessities of life. But he found a way to vanquish fate through his exceptional knowledge of mathematics, which he could not refrain from cultivating though often at the expense of his li...
And the shoemaker? He is, surprisingly, everywhere in the history this book surveys. He is introduced in the Republic “whenever it becomes necessary to think about the division of labor” (4); he becomes “the generic name for the man who is not where he ought to be if the order of estates is to get on with the order of discourse” (48); he leads the way in the nineteenth century in the battle...
Where Gaston Bachelard proclaimed that “there is no science but the science of the hidden,” Rancière responds by saying that distinctions between mere appearance and concealed truth reflect only the needs of those who profit from maintaining these distinctions: does mystification exist anywhere but in the words of the demystifier? (170, 173). For this very reason The Philosopher and His Poor...
For Pierre Bourdieu as well, “the poor” can do only one thing at a time—and this even though he is widely known as a critic of class privilege. Though Bourdieu’s sociology is hostile to Plato and to philosophy’s masking of social distinction, Rancière argues that this sociological reversal of Platonism is “only the confirmation, indeed the radicalization, of its interdictions” (204). As...
Rancière was in his early forties when the book appeared in France, and he alludes in his foreword to the twenty years’ worth of “detours” that interrupted his progress: “a seminar on Capital called to an unexpected notoriety; a thesis on Feuerbach interrupted by the din of the street; some time spent circulating between university halls and factory doors; ten years of research in worker a...
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