Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double

by Jacques Rancière

These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Rancière has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of “heretical” knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure. For the short-lived journal Les Révoltes Logiques , Rancière wrote on subjects ranging across a hundred years, from the California Gold Rush to trade-union collaboration with fascism, from early feminism to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” from the respectability of the Paris Exposition to the disrespectable carousing outside the Paris gates. Rancière characteristically combines telling historical detail with deep insight into the development of the popular mind. In a new preface, he explains why such “rude words” as “people,” “factory,” “proletarians” and “revolution” still need to be spoken.

Genres: Philosophy, History

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2011

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

[Rhys · Rating 2 out of 5]

The many faces of the proletariat. For me, kind of a weird level of detail given the theme.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 2 out of 5]

Borrowed the book from a friend. As an early collection of essays, it bears witness to Ranciere's disillusionment with Marxism as represented by the figures of Mao and Althusser and his turn to a more culturalist terrain. Through the investigation of the concrete forms which French working class organizations, politics, and cultures of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Ranciere proposes to unveil the real 'identity' of the working class as distinct from that envisioned by traditional Marxism. What hence appears in Ranciere's book are workers reveling in the spontaneous, the utopian, the anarchistic, the reformist, and localized struggles and thus cut off from becoming the revolutionary agency that Marxism imagines them to be. This is another example of the focus on the dizzying and convoluted overabundance of the representation of sensuous details of the everyday used to lock the reader entirely on the surface of the social terrain, concealing underneath the deeper relations between classes and the collective struggles to overturn these social structures.