IAPL2012-CB-0531-052.. - The International Association for ...

PLENARIES
PLENARY SPEAKER
JACQUES RANCIÈRE
TALLINN UNIVERSITY, TALLINN HALL (M-218)
WEDNESDAY, 30 MAY
17:00-19:00
Jacques Rancière (b. 1940 in Algiers) is Professor Emeritus
at the Université de Paris (St. Denis). He first came to
prominence under the tutelage of Louis Althusser when he
co-authored Reading Capital (1968). After the calamitous
events of May 1968 however, he broke with his teacher
over his reluctance to allow for spontaneous resistance
within the revolution. Jacques Rancière is known for
his sometimes remote position in contemporary French
thought, operating from the humble motto that the
cobbler and the university dean are equally intelligent.
Jacques Rancière has freely compared the works of such known luminaries as Plato,
Aristotle, Gilles Deleuze and others with relatively unknown thinkers like Joseph
Jacototy and Gabriel Gauny.
In Jacques Rancière’s vision, one finds a surprising level of trust in the word and
the image, one of an almost anti-hermeneutical structure. Rancière is confident in
language as a structure for identifying things and events in the world, while at the
same time identifying the distance between words and things. Democracy then is the
experience of the distance of things. Man acts as though his voice can be heard, but
is always a proper distance from it. The problem, then, is not knowing what you are
doing—the problem is to think about what you are doing, to remember yourself.
Rancière’s books have covered pedagogy, the writing of history, philosophy, cinema,
aesthetics and contemporary art. His critics have had a hard time defining him, placing
him at different points as a philosopher, a literary critic, an art theorist and a Marxist.
In Rancière’s words, thought is an expression of a condition. His work does not belong
to a discipline but rather attempts to break the borders of a discipline. Therefore like
Michel Foucault, Rancière has returned to the archives in order to re-examine the
practices of historiography pitting the ideas of Plato on labor-time against the writings
of a nineteenth-century worker about his own sense of time.
Jacques Rancière’s translated works include: Reading Capital (1968), The Nights
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