Jacques Rancière - Quotes

Is there any such thing than political philosophy?
Rancière, Jacques.

Years of work on working-class archives taught me that… 'working-class proletarian' is primarily a name or a set of names rather than a form of experience, and that those names do not express an awareness of a condition. Their primary function is to construct something, namely a relationship of alterity. That, then, was the starting point. I then slowly went back to asking questions about a certain number of concepts from within the philosophical tradition. The essential matrix for what I have been doing since then was supplied by the writings of a carpenter called Gauny. They take the form of an experiment in what might be described as `wild philosophy'. The most significant of his writings deal with his relationship with time and speech. What did this mean? I had been working on these texts, and when I looked again at certain texts from within the philosophical tradition, and especially Plato's Republic, I realized that this self-taught nineteenth-century carpenter had given philosophy the same conceptual heart as Plato, namely the fact that the worker is not primarily a social function, but a certain relationship with the logos, and that he is assigned to certain temporal categories.
Rancière, Jacques.

There are no thieves in the city of the sociologist-king, only the possessors and the disposed.
Rancière, Jacques.

It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around: it is he who constitutes the incapable as such.
Rancière, Jacques.

It is the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy that became the new paradigm for revolution, and it subsequently allowed for the brief but decisive encounter between the artisans of the Marxist revolution and the artisans of forms for a new way of life.
Rancière, Jacques.

It is a matter of knowing if absolutely anyone can take over and redirect the power invested in language. This presupposes a modification in the relationship between the circulation of language and the social distribution of bodies, which is not at all in play in simple monetary exchange.
Rancière, Jacques.

Understanding is never more than translating, that is, giving the equivalent of a text, but in no way its reason. There is nothing behind the written page, no false bottom that necessitates the work of an other intelligence, that of the explicator; no language of the master, no language of the language whose words and sentences are able to speak the reason of the words and sentences of a text.
Rancière, Jacques.

The “nothing" here is not a deconstructed emptiness but rather an "everything" that could never be said(a la Merleau-Ponty)—and certainly not by an explicator. This statement has fundamental methodological implications for all sciences of the human when they claim a better (rather than different) understanding of humanity than any of those given the special human beings that may be granted the status of “philosopher," “intellectual," “scientist." It is not that texts produced by those are any less valuable than those produced by everyone else but that the very claims made by them must be based on the reality of their “otherness" rather than their greater access to the “real" or the “true." The methodological question, eventually, is the translation problem: how do we, analysts, legitimize our claims that our new text is somehow closer to the original text than other texts that were written by another one us.
Rancière, Jacques

Aesthetics is not a discipline dealing with art and artworks, but a kind of, what I call, distribution of the sensible. I mean a way of mapping the visible, a cartography of the visible, the intelligible and also of the possible. Aesthetics was a kind of redistribution of experience, the idea that there was a sphere of experience that didn't feed the traditional distribution, because the traditional distribution adds that people have different senses according to their position in society. Those who were destined to rule and those who were destined to be ruled didn't have the same sensory equipment, not the same eyes and ears, not the same intelligence. Aesthetics means precisely the break with that traditional way of embodying inequality in the very constitution of the sensible world.
Rancière, Jacques.

The fact is that in France in the 1830s there were a lot of workers doing verse, doing literature, and I think the bourgeoisie felt that there was a danger when the worker entered the world of thought and of culture. When workers are only struggling, then they are supposed to be in their world and in their place. Workers were supposed to work and be dissatisfied with their wages, their working conditions and possibly still work again, struggle again and again. But when workers attempt to write verses and try to become writers, philosophers, it means a displacement from their identity as workers.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

It all depends on what you understand by the word impossibility. It was only not about looking for something which was absolutely impossible, I was looking at situations as the distribution of positions. It means what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought of as being possible. A situation determines a set of possibilities, and the impossible is the limit. I was looking at the idea of the emancipated worker, where the question is always of crossing the borders of the impossible.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

I was looking at the idea of the emancipated worker, where the question is always of crossing the borders of the impossible. Because what was ironically possible was the improvement of the conditions of work and wages, but it was not enough. What they wanted was to become entirely human, with all the possibilities of a human being and not only having what is possible to do for workers. So that there is not necessarily an opposition between material improvement, and this attempt.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

... I think the intellectual impossible and the material impossible are connected with one another.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

You must not go towards equality, but must start from equality. Starting from equality does not presuppose that everyone in the world has equal opportunities to learn, to express their capacities. That's not the point. The point is that you have to start from the minimum equality that is given. The normal pedagogic logic says that people are ignorant, they don't know how to get out of ignorance to learn, so we have to make some kind of an itinerary to move from ignorance to knowledge, starting from the difference between the one who knows and the one who does not know.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

The idea of Jacotot and the idea of intellectual emancipation was that there is always some point of equality. There is always something that is shared, for instance when the teacher is explaining something to the student, on the one hand it supposes that he has something to explain, that the student is unable to understand by himself or herself etc, so this is a relationship of inequality, but it can work only if the master supposes that that the students can simply understand the explanation, understand what the master is telling him. So there is a kind of equality in the fact that they atleast share the same language.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

... it is the idea that education first means enablement, that you first deal with the capacity possessed even by the oppressed, or by the lower class people. But at the same time, it is true that intellectual emancipation means that there is no specific pedagogy of the oppressed, that there is no specific education for poor people or oppressed people etc. If there is a specific pedagogy of the oppressed, then it must be thought of as a specific case in the general idea of intellectual emancipation, because basically the idea of emancipation is the same for rich people and for poor people.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

The art of emancipation is precisely to get out of this relationship between means and ends, which in the leftist tradition is based on the idea that now we create the conditions for a better future, we are preparing the weapons for the future, which means a certain phase in historical necessity.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

...the question of time is not to be thought of in terms of present and future, it has to be related to the partition between here and now, between time as a form of constraint and time as a possibility of freedom.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

What is different now of course is that the internet exists, so a lot of thoughts and writings that would have entirely disappeared in other contexts can now remain, be written, be exchanged.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

Finding pleasure in sorrow, finding pleasure in pain is indeed the very definition of a certain form of aesthetic pleasure.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

The important thing is the possibility to exchange one sorrow for another, and in a sense the pleasure in literature and culture is the ability to exchange one sorrow for another sorrow.
Rancière, Jacques and Lawrence Liang. "Interview with Jacques Rancière." in: Lodi Gardens, Delhi. February 2009. (English).

Historians ask you: what is your historical method? You have to apply a historical method. My question became: what is historical method? You only try to understand something; therefore you go to materials that may help you to understand. Then you try to make sense of them. What kind of method is this? You use your brains. You try to find something and you use your brains to make sense of it. Historical method does mean something; I am not saying it does not mean anything. It means you have to be located in this place, because this object is social history.
Rancière, Jacques and Sudeep Dasgupta. "Art Is Going Elsewhere. And Politics Has to Catch It." in: Krisis. Issue 1, 2008 (English).

I am not arguing for people or against the elites. I argue about two forms of structuration of the community. The logic of police versus the logic of politics does not mean the elites are the bad ones and the people are good.
Rancière, Jacques and Sudeep Dasgupta. "Art Is Going Elsewhere. And Politics Has to Catch It." in: Krisis. Issue 1, 2008 (English).

What should be understood by the invocation of an 'aesthetics of knowledge?
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

The thesis that I would like to present is simple: to speak of an aesthetic dimension of knowledge is to speak of a dimension of ignorance which divides the idea and the practice of knowledge themselves.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

... aesthetics is not the theory of the beautiful or of art; nor is it the theory of sensibility. Aesthetics is an historically determined concept which designates a specific regime of visibility and intelligibility of art, which is inscribed in a reconfiguration of the categories of sensible experience and its interpretation. It is the new type of experience that Kant systematised in the Critique of Judgement.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

The object of aesthetic apprehension is characterised as that which is neither an object of knowledge nor an object of desire.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

The reasons of the beautiful are thus separate from those of art. They are also separate, though, from the reasons which render an object desirable or offensive. Now, this double negation is not only defined by the new conditions of appreciation of art works. It also defines a certain suspension of the normal conditions of social experience.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

It is the judgement of the petit-bourgeois intellectual who, free from worries about work or capital, indulges himself by adopting the position of universal thought and disinterested taste.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

Bourdieu's judgement, and that of all those who denounce the aesthetic illusion, rests on a simple alternative: you know or you do not [on connaît ou on méconnaît]. If you do not know [méconnaît], it is because you do not know [sait] how to look or you cannot look. But to not be able to look is still a way of not knowing how to look. Whether philosopher or petit-bourgeois, those who deny this, those who believe in the disinterested character of aesthetic judgement do not want to see because they cannot see, because the place that they occupy in the determined system, for them as for everyone else, constitutes a mode of accommodation which determines a form of misrecognition [méconnaissance].
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

Now the aesthetic neutralisation of knowledge [savoir] suggests that this schema is too simple. It suggests that there is not one knowledge but two, that each knowledge [savoir] is accompanied by a certain ignorance, and therefore that there is also a knowledge [savoir] which represses and an ignorance which liberates.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

But to say that they “know" [sait] this is in fact to say that it is not they who know what the system of roles must be.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

Plato has explained this once and for all. Artisans cannot be occupied with the common matters of the city for two reasons: firstly because work does not wait; secondly, because god has put iron in the souls of artisans as he has put gold in the souls of those who must run the city. In other words, their occupation defines aptitudes (and ineptitudes), and their aptitudes in return commit them to a certain occupation. It is not necessary for artisans to be convinced in the depths of their being that God has truly put iron in their souls, or gold in those of their rulers. It is enough for them to act on an everyday basis as though this was the case: it is enough that their arms, their gaze and their judgement make their know-how [savoir-faire] and the knowledge of their condition accord with each other, and vice versa. There is no illusion here, nor any misrecognition. It is, as Plato says, a matter of 'belief'. But belief is not illusion to be opposed to knowledge and which would hide reality. It is a determined rapport of the two 'knowledges' and the two 'ignorances' which correspond to them.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

Knowledge, Plato says, requires stories because it is in fact always double. However, he aims to comprehend these stories within an ethical framework. 'Ethics', like aesthetics, isa word whose meaning must be specified.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

Before recalling law, morality or value, ethos indicates the abode [séjour]. Further, it indicates the way of being which corresponds to this abode, the way of feeling and thinking which belongs to whoever occupies any given place.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

A discipline is always something other than an exploitation of this territory, and therefore a demonstration of an idea of knowledge.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

To speak of war is not to disqualify the disciplines in question. It is to recall that a discipline is always much more than an ensemble of procedures which permit the thought of a given territory of objects.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

They must therefore engage in a war against the claim that there is another knowledge and another ignorance than that which belongs to their condition. In other words, they must engage in a war against the war that the worker is himself fighting. A well-ordered society would like the bodies which compose it to have the perceptions, sensations and thoughts which correspond to them. Now this correspondence is perpetually disturbed.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

Disciplinary thought must ceaselessly hinder this haemorrhage in order to establish stable relations between states of the body and the modes of perception and signification which correspond to them. It must ceaselessly pursue war but pursue it as a pacifying operation.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

No well-defined boundary separates the discourse of the woodworker who is the object of science from the discourse of science itself. After all is said and done, to trace these boundaries is to trace the boundary between those who have thought through this question and those who have not. This boundary is never traced other than in the form of a story. Only the language of stories can trace the boundary, forcing the aporia of the absence of final reason from the reasons of the disciplines.
Rancière, Jacques and Jon Roffe (Translator). "Thinking between disciplines: an aesthetics of knowledge." in: Parrhesia. Vol. 1, 2006. (English).

"Infinite Justice". This was the initial name given to the Pentagon's offensive against that fuzzy-contoured enemy, referred to by the term of 'terrorism'. As we know, the name was quickly changed.
Rancière, Jacques. "Prisoners of the Infinite." in: CounterPunch. April 30, 2002. (English).

It had been, as we were told, a case of language excess on the part of a president still inexperienced in the art of nuances. If he had wanted bin Laden "dead or alive", it was obviously due to having seen too many Westerns at too young an age.
Rancière, Jacques. "Prisoners of the Infinite." in: CounterPunch. April 30, 2002. (English).

Ethical symbolization has substituted the political symbolization of power and its limits, and the law's ambivalence. What's now familiar to us is a relation of consensual inter-expression between the fact of a society's state and the norm of the law.
Rancière, Jacques. "Prisoners of the Infinite." in: CounterPunch. April 30, 2002. (English).

What the American response asserts is the unmediated likeness of law and fact in the way a community lives. Yet this is also what the American Constitution's dominant representation symbolizes: the ethical identity between a particular lifestyle and a universal system of values.
Rancière, Jacques. "Prisoners of the Infinite." in: CounterPunch. April 30, 2002. (English).

Yet for some time already this rise of ethics to the detriment of justice has characterized the forms by which the Western powers have intervened abroad. Blurring the limits between fact and law has taken on another face, one opposite and complementary to consensual harmony, i.e. the face of the humanitarian and 'humane interference'.
Rancière, Jacques. "Prisoners of the Infinite." in: CounterPunch. April 30, 2002. (English).

The ultimate consequences of the excess of ethics over law and politics is the paradoxical constitution of an individual's absolute right whose rights have, in fact, been absolutely negated. This individual actually appears as the victim of an infinite Evil against which the fight is itself infinite. This is the point at which the one defending the victim's rights inherits absolute right.
Rancière, Jacques. "Prisoners of the Infinite." in: CounterPunch. April 30, 2002. (English).

Legal and political symbolization has been slowly substituted by another ethical and police symbolization of the lives of so-called democratic communities and of their relations with another world, identified by the sole reign of ethnic and fundamentalist powers. In the one corner, the world of good: that of consensus eliminating political litigation in the joyous harmonizing of right and fact, ways of being and values. In the other: the world of evil, in which wrong is made infinite, and where it can only be a matter of war unto death.
Rancière, Jacques. "Prisoners of the Infinite." in: CounterPunch. April 30, 2002. (English).