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Is there any such thing than political philosophy?
Jacques Rancière
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.
Jacques Rancière
There are no thieves in the city of the sociologist-king, only the possessors and the disposed.
Jacques Rancière
It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around: it is he who constitutes the incapable as such.
Jacques Rancière
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.
Jacques Rancière
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.
Jacques Rancière
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.
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?
Jacques Rancière
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.
“Our police order: What can be said, seen, and done”, an interview with Rancière
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