Jacques Rancière, the philosopher who thinks from the equality of intelligences

Does equality exist? Many voices on both sides of the political aisle are likely to answer that question in the negative. On the right, because they believe that inequality defines us as individuals and, therefore, equality does not exist, nor can it exist; to the left, because inequality is so evident that only by admitting it will we be able to fight for true equality tomorrow. Against this collective agreement, the work and life of the philosopher Jacques Rancière responds in a way that is as surprising as it is elegant: equality exists, of course, here and now, and emancipation consists in demonstrating it, not in seeking it. The equality movement is demonstrated by walking.

Translated into 30 languages, retired professor of Aesthetics at the Paris VIII University and visiting professor in Switzerland and the United States, Rancière (Algiers, 83 years old) does not consider himself an “intellectual” and always remembers that he owes his most original idea—the equality of intelligences—to a 19th century teacher whose students learned alone. Author of more than 30 works—his last essay translated into Spanish, The inglorious thirty (Katakrak, 2023), presented in January in Barcelona, ​​Bilbao and Pamplona, ​​his position contradicts the idea of ​​the intellectual: the one who rises above the community that experiences ignorance due to lack of time and talent. This is what the Marxist tradition considered him, at least the current of which he was part in the sixties, when his professor at the École Normale Supérieur (ENS) Louis Althusser led a rereading of Marx. In his first book, however, Althusser's lessonRancière broke with his old teacher, with Marxism and with that exemplary student who wanted to be an archaeologist.

Son of a French civil servant and a housewife stationed in Algeria, Rancière was born the day his father died in combat in France, on June 10, 1940. He arrived in Paris once the Second World War had ended, with his widowed mother converted. became a civil servant, and grew up in Neuilly-sur-Seine, “the banlieue most bourgeois in Paris,” as Rancière himself recalls via video call. If he wanted to be an archaeologist, they taught him, he had to go to the ENS, a breeding ground for the French academic elite since the Revolution and which did not admit women… until 1985.

If the years in the ENS, at that time very theoretically left-wing, meant a certain break with the Catholic environment of its origins, Althusser's lesson It served to distance himself from the ambient Marxism that considered that the veil of false consciousness of the masses had to be torn. The May 1968 revolt had sown discord in the exemplary student: where the official left saw frivolous and petty-bourgeois youth, he, without participating directly, glimpsed “a movement of equals, not of a particular class, that faced all hierarchies of society” and that, in fact, forged alliances between faculties and factories. “That continues to be what works in current movements, such as the occupation of the squares or 15-M. Of course, we can say that they have not triumphed, but at the same time I would say that something more happened there than what the left-wing parties want to see and recognize, says Rancière, author of several essays on one of his passions, cinema. .

The following year, he participated in the founding of the University of Vincennes (today Paris VIII), which brought together many of those called to reign from the margins in French philosophy, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. From there and for a decade he immersed himself in the archives, especially of the 19th century labor movement, marking a change of direction in his research without turning back.

The correspondence, articles and magazines, pamphlets and poems produced by those workers in whose name intellectuals would speak a century later reflected lives and sensitive experiences as complex as those of any professional thinker. The night of the proletarianshis doctoral thesis, published in 1981, and in whose pages quotes from Plato and the workers are compared, he organizes and exposes much of that archival work and includes in the dedication to his mother, “who made it possible.”

He found the thesis on the equality of intelligences in the adventure of a French teacher in exile. Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840), revolutionary and deputy, had to go into exile after the Bourbon Restoration and ended up teaching French in Belgium in 1808. But neither he knew Flemish, the language of his students, nor did they know French. A bilingual edition of Telemachus Published at that time in Brussels, it appeared as the only thing in common, and through an interpreter he asked his students to read the French version, comparing it with the Flemish one. At the end of the course, they wrote in French better than many cradle French people.

They had learned how any language is learned: paying attention, repeating, imitating, without explanations. To explain is to simplify for the inferiors. Jacotot limited himself to verifying that they correctly repeated the model, and understood something unattainable for the order of the explanatory system: if everyone learns on their own to speak and reason, equality of intelligence is the starting point, not the goal. “Rancière realized that any programmatic equality ends up infinitely reproducing the distance that he intends to suppress,” summarizes Javier Bassas, author of Jacques Rancière: rehearsing equality (Gedisa).

Rancière developed Jacotot's lesson in The ignorant teacher (1987; Spanish edition, Libros del Zorzal, 2022), and applied that view to politics. “Equality is not a right, it is not something substantial, anthropological, of the human being: it is a hypothesis. We don't carry rights with us either, they exist when they are carried out,” says Bassas, co-author of The dispute of words (Ned Ediciones), a book of conversations with Rancière, which he has also translated.

The result is a conception of democracy, not as a form of government, but as “the power of anyone” that since Greece in the 5th century BC has been interrupting the usual order of inequality, with the equality that it exercises without permission. . “The power of the demos is not the power of the population or its majority, it is rather the power of anyone. “Everyone has the same right to govern as to be governed,” states political scientist Kristin Ross, commenting on the confluence of Jacotot and Ranciére, in Democracy on hold (Casus Belli). The people of democracy are just a figure that in each era the rebels will fill with words to redefine them as subjects of politics: of the sans culottes to the workers, from women to those without papers.

Rancière has led by example, participating in collective struggles like anyone else, sometimes taking the floor. On January 16, 2020, at an assembly of railway workers on strike against pension reform, for example: “Retirement is the way in which work time generates life time and the way in which each of us is connected to a collective world,” he said.

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