Cover page

Title page

Copyright page

Foreword

Jacques Rancière is one of a generation of French philosophers who, in recent years, have been unstinting in giving interviews to people from all kinds of different fields. While this is noteworthy, it is no accident. As Rancière explains here, an interview is not to be confused with the research work it's always in danger of short-circuiting or over-simplifying, but it does nonetheless represent a non-negligible part of the ‘method of equality’ that provides the present work's title. It's a title chosen by the philosopher for a process he has tirelessly defended since the 1970s. The activity of thinking is no less effective in an interview than in a written work, and one of the characteristics of the method in question is to posit that ‘there is no proper place for thought. Thought is everywhere at work.’1 But why add another book-length interview to past interviews, some of which have already been brought together in book form?2

Two objectives guided our approach here. This long conversation, divided into four phases, is meant to provide an introduction to the thought of a present-day theorist who is abundantly read and commented on. The point was to spell out the origin, function and definition of certain concepts and catch phrases (the distribution of the sensible,3 dissensus, the ignorant schoolmaster, disagreement, the part of those who have no part ...) that are sometimes taken up by readers automatically and used without thinking. Beyond these now routine expressions, we asked Jacques Rancière to go into details on several issues in a bid to deepen or clarify certain elements of his thinking. That aim squared with our second goal, which was to restore the unity of Rancière's philosophical project, given that that project continues to be misread almost universally as being split into a so-called ‘political’ moment followed by a moment described as ‘aesthetic’. Ever since his masterwork, The Nights of Labour, came out in 1981, the whole of the French philosopher's œuvre has consisted, on the contrary, in contesting that opposition along with all a priori demarcations of fixed fields of competence, by working on regimes of interaction and circulation between different ways of seeing and thinking, different ways of coming together and doing battle. This also allows us to define a method of equality that is fleshed out in a reconfiguration of territory and capacity and in the shift in the meaning of words and things that follows from this. If Rancière's work is all of a piece in its perspective and its method, it has shown, and continues to show, different inflections, moments and reworkings, which are also dealt with in the pages that follow.

The first part of the book, ‘Geneses’, revisits the elaboration of Rancière's intellectual programme via the education he received, born as he was in 1940, as well as his early writing. The first known text that Rancière published under his name was a contribution to Reading Capital, edited by Louis Althusser and published in 1965. In 1974, the publication of Althusser's Lesson ratified a methodological and political break, obvious as early as 1969, with the Marxist philosopher of ‘the rue d'Ulm’ (the École normale supérieure). In 1980, under the supervision of Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Rancière defended his thesis, which was called La formation de la pensée ouvrière en France: le prolétaire et son double (The Formation of Working-Class Thought in France: The Proletarian and His Double). This was published the following year as The Nights of Labour. The problems orchestrating Rancière's thinking as a whole seem to have crystallized around that time. They also arose out of all he learned from the events of May 68 and the new diagnosis that ensued concerning the task of intellectuals and how far their knowledge and their discourse might extend.

The second part, ‘Lines’, tests the hypothesis that Rancière's œuvre is all of a piece by suggesting various ways of reading it that are internal to Rancière's research. It is not so much a matter of summing up or reiterating his thinking and its main categories, or of tracing its contours and compartments, as of seeking – as Rancière invites you to do in other forums – the transitions and various subterranean circuits. This sometimes happens by exposing the work to classical problems of philosophy. Particular attention has been paid to the philosophical utterance as such and this represents a way of raising a whole set of questions about Rancière's œuvre that Rancière has himself put to other producers of official discourses. More than a general philosophy, what we have tried to capture is a theoretical style.

The following phase of our interview, ‘Thresholds’, consists in comparing Rancière's work with that of other thinkers of the same period and subjecting it to some of the recurring objections it attracts, or, indeed, to new critical investigations. The possible connections or distinctions we could make between Rancière's œuvre and other significant bodies of work produced in his time are numerous and no doubt other researchers will work through these more systematically and precisely in future. For our part, we deliberately limited references to other authors, preferring to underscore, without attributing them, some of the controversies, misunderstandings or differences that have arisen. We locate ourselves here at the outer foothills of Rancière's conceptual mountain.

The last part of our interview, ‘Present Tenses’, aims to project Rancière's thought on to the current scene and the available possibilities. Various themes are dealt with, but the relationship the philosopher maintains with them is emphatically not one based on expertise or science, thanks to the method of equality. So the challenge is to isolate a way of viewing the times by posing a few unavoidable questions for contemporary liberation practices. This overview notes one thing in particular, which is the multiplicity of present tenses running through the current moment. As coherent and unified as it is, Rancière's intellectual programme continues to be endlessly renewed through the discordance between these various versions of the present.

The four moments of our interview describe one possible reading of this book. But nothing would be more in keeping with a theoretical approach that has stood from the outset for ‘rejecting hierarchical thinking’ than to work through them any way you like.

Laurent Jeanpierre

Dork Zabunyan

Notes