A classic collection of essay by Jacques Ranciere, that 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, Rancière challenges all patterns of thought in which one-time radicalism has become empty convention.

This extraordinary book can be read on several levels. Primarily, it is the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiled French schoolteacher who discovered in 1818 an unconventional teaching method that spread panic throughout the learned community of Europe.

Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who know no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn. The results of this unusual experiment in pedagogy led him to announce that all people were equally intelligent. From this postulate, Jacotot devised a philosophy and a method for what he called "intellectual emancipation"--a method that would allow, for instance, illiterate parents to themselves teach their children how to read. The greater part of the book is devoted to a description and analysis of Jacotot's method, its premises, and (perhaps most important) its implications for understanding both the learning process and the emancipation that results when that most subtle of hierarchies, intelligence, is overturned.

The book, as Kristin Ross argues in her introduction, has profound implications for the ongoing debate about education and class in France that has raged since the student riots of 1968, and it affords Ranciere an opportunity (albeit indirectly) to attack the influential educational and sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu (and others) that Ranciere sees as perpetuating inequality.

Between 2006 and 2020, French photographer and artist Bruno Serralongue conducted a prolonged engagement with the community of refugees on their last stop in a long journey to reach England. The resulting photographs, which formed the basis for an exhibition at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 2019, are published here for the first time. Serralongue captured disparate moments in the lives of the exiles, their attempts to reach England and their provisional camps which were dismantled by the French government in 2020. Serralongue’s images employ a suspended temporality that contradicts the sensationalised images broadcast by the mass media, recalling the visual traditions of history painting more than photojournalism. The slowness of his photography, a characteristic of working with a view camera, requires both a distance from, and a proximity with, the subjects photographed, achievable only due to a relationship of trust built with the inhabitants of the ‘Jungle’.

History in our day is still a story, and yet one from which we expect to tell the truth - not just the facts, the names and events of the past, but the invisible order and forces behind them. How can the language of history balance these seemingly contrary tasks - the narrative, the scientific, and the political? This is the question Jacques Ranciere explores in "The names of history", a meditation on the poetics of historical knowledge. In the works of writers from Jules Michelet to Fernand Braudel, Ranciere traces an ongoing revolution in historical study, a movement that challenged, in the practice of language, the opposition of science and literature. By way of a commentary on Erich Auerbach, he shows how fictional narrative intertwines with historical narrative to produce a "truth" that retains mythical elements. The poetics of knowledge Ranciere develops here is an attempt to identify the literary procedures by which historical discourse escapes literature and gives itself the status of a science. His book is also an appreciation of Braudel, whose work in the Annales school greatly advanced this project. Ranciere follows and extends Braudel's discursive production of new agencies of history, which accounts for both the material conditions in which history takes place and the language in which it is written.

“Music is the brute that shows. It is the avowal of materials, And stutters between its clanging of things.� How should one think this musical groove of the poem whose back and forth motion shuffles the material of ordinary language and revives the frozen speech of old chants? This question by renowned French thinker Jacques Rancière is the entry point for his earnest and careful reading of one of France’s most singular and important contemporary poets. For Rancière, Philippe Beck sets himself the task of a poetry after poetry whereby Beck re-writes and transforms the poems of the past, reanimating faded genres, poetizing the prose of popular tales and even commentaries regarding poems. To read and follow this groove traced as such cannot simply be done by way of taking the poems as objects of study. It supposes a dialogue regarding what these poems attempt to do as well as an idea of a poetry which serves as their foundation. This book on Philippe Beck is thus also a book made with him.

The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers represent social structures or political struggles. The expression 'politics of literature' assumes that there is a specific connection between politics as a form of collective practice and literature as a historically determined regime of the art of writing. It implies that literature intervenes in the parceling out of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and the invisible, that is the arena of the political. This book seeks to show how the literary revolution shatters the perceptible order that underpinned traditional hierarchies, but also why literary equality foils any bid to place literature in the service of politics or in its place. It tests its hypotheses on certain writers: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hugo, Mallarmé, Brecht and Borges, to name a few. It also shows the consequences of this for psychoanalytical intepretation, historical narration and philosophical conceptualization.

What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them? Why is the history of philosophy—from Plato to Karl Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre to Pierre Bourdieu—the history of so many figures of the poor: plebes, men of iron, the demos, artisans, common people, proletarians, the masses? Why have philosophers made the shoemaker, in particular, a remarkably ubiquitous presence in this history? Does philosophy itself depend on this thinking about the poor? If so, can it ever refrain from thinking for them?Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role—sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument. Published in France in 1983 and made available here for the first time in English, this consummate study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato’s admonition that workers should do “nothing else� than their own work. It offers innovative readings of these thinkers’ struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor. Presenting a left critique of Bourdieu, the terms of which are largely unknown to an English-language readership, The Philosopher and His Poor remains remarkably timely twenty years after its initial publication.

Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it-time to get serious once again!-Slavoj Zizek Responding to Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis', the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.