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Reviewed by:
  • Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation
  • Oliver Davis
Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation. By Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta, with a new essay by Jacques Rancière. London: Continuum, 2010. 170 pp.

The highlight of this book is its first chapter, a new piece by Jacques Rancière in which he adds yet another layer to the disarmingly proximate reflection on Joseph Jacotot's pedagogical experiments he first essayed at length in Le Maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1987). That chapter could be read alongside a comparable interview discussion by Rancière on the same topic reprinted in his Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués: entretiens (Paris: Amsterdam, 2009; pp. 118-28) and the entirety of the special issue of the education journal Le Télémaque (27 (2005)) devoted to Le Maître ignorant. These references do not appear in Bingham and Biesta's study; French-language material has not generally been consulted. While they rightly spot that the closing paragraph of Rancière's piece (pp. 15-16) raises key questions not only about his view of education but also about what he means by politics, there [End Page 426] was room for a much fuller discussion of this point. Ensuing chapters, which are very heavy on quotation, strive to bring Rancière's thought into dialogue with that of some of his natural interlocutors on the Left (Paulo Freire, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser). Some alarmingly wishful conclusions are drawn, however, in particular when the authors read Jacotot's suggestion that emancipated learning is like learning one's mother tongue (as reported in Le Maître ignorant) alongside Rancière's discussion of the emergence of political subjects in La Mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995) and conclude that Rancière's work shows 'that the child has already been political' (p. 71). This produces an edulcorated, depoliticized Rancière. Disconcertingly, the concluding chapter opens by reproducing in extenso a decidedly nonplussed review, written by Laurence Brockliss for this journal, of Le Maître ignorant (French Studies, 68 (1994), 104-05). Certainly, Brockliss's prediction that the work was unlikely to be read widely has been proven wrong, for, quibble though one may about the size of the audience, it is significant and continues to grow. Yet what exactly the reproduction of the review is supposed to show is not made nearly as clear as it could have been, mainly because the authors seem anxious not to get caught in what they assume would be a performative contradiction; they refuse to argue directly with the review since to do so would, they claim, be 'to enact the explanatory order that we wish not to enact' (p. 147). Would it? Why? The question of what education becomes when the teacher refrains from explaining, as Rancière and Jacotot seem to suggest she or he should, is one that this book could have begun to answer by extrapolating from Rancière's theoretical writing; instead, it too often turns with self-conscious anguish around the bare terms in which Rancière articulates his own aversion to the pedagogical. The book would also have benefited from considerably more rigorous copy-editing.

Oliver Davis
University of Warwick
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