The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People Volume 2

by Jacques Rancière

Following the previous volume of essays by Jacques Ranci re from the 1970s, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, this second collection focuses on the ways in which radical philosophers understand the people they profess to speak for. The Intellectual and His People engages in an incisive and original way with current political and cultural issues, including the discovery of totalitarianism by the new philosophers, the relationship of Sartre and Foucault to popular struggles, nostalgia for the ebbing world of the factory, the slippage of the artistic avant-garde into defending corporate privilege, and the ambiguous sociological critique of Pierre Bourdieu. As ever, Ranci re challenges all patterns of thought in which one-time radicalism has become empty convention.

Genres: Philosophy, 21st Century, Theory, Nonfiction, France

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading "Capital" (though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris.
Since then, Rancière has departed from the path set by his teacher and published a series of works probing the concepts that make up our understanding of political discourse. What is ideology? What is the proletariat? Is there a working class? And how do these masses of workers that thinkers like Althusser referred to continuously enter into a relationship with knowledge? We talk about them but what do we know? An example of this line of thinking is Rancière's book entitled Le philosophe et ses pauvres (The Philosopher and His Poor, 1983), a book about the role of the poor in the intellectual lives of philosophers.

Most recently Rancière has written on the topic of human rights and specifically the role of international human rights organizations in asserting the authority to determine which groups of people — again the problem of masses — justify human rights interventions, and even war.

In 2006, it was reported that Rancière's aesthetic theory had become a point of reference in the visual arts, and Rancière has lectured at such art world events as the Freize Art Fair. Former French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal has cited Rancière as her favourite philosopher.

Reviews

[Jake Rubenstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

picked this up on a whim last summer, finished recently

Rancière is the golden boy of modern French post-structuralism— the next generation; this comes across in his daringness to pull together wildly different domains of popular criticism and thread the argumentative needle in places you wouldn't expect

what results though is a jumble of jargon-y, award-winningly complex sentences that get in the way of the points he tries to make.
listen i'm an undergrad philosophy student — this review is proof of my lack of expertise in communicating complex ideas as succinctly and clear as possible — but i'm Jake not Jacques ... there's more on the line for Rancière here

regardless, plenty of thoughtful connections between social democratic movements and the history and pedadgogy of disciplines like Sociology [which continues to frustrate me]

the marxian language in this often serves as a hindrance more than an argumentative boost — how many things can you tie back to Brecht??! not enough Frankfurt school!! less Durkheim and Weber more Adorno and Marcuse!!!!!!!

[Kassandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very French, even in translation. To appreciate it one must have some awareness of French theory, French theater and film, French intellectual-celebrity culture (the overlap is practically unthinkable to most Anglophones), French politics (including the micropolitics of gauchiste groupuscules), and French educational and cultural institutional bureaucracies. If one can navigate these hazards to comprehension, however, then it has some sharp insights into the relationship between intellectuals and "the people" that help one make sense of the decay of mass left politics and the rise of right-wing nationalist populism, neither of which are exclusively French phenomena.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like this better than the first volume. I found his critique of the nouveau philosophes in "The Philosophers' Tale" and "Joan of Arc in the Gulag" on spot.