Jacques Rancière (review)

Teaching in Flemish Leuven in the aftermath of the Bourbon Restoration, Joseph Jacotot’s inability to speak the language of exile led him to develop a pedagogical technique that did away with the need for the explanations he was unable to provide. By making his students endlessly repeat Fénélon’s Télémaque, Jacotot discovered that they could successfully internalize the text without having it explained to them. This instance of archival esoterica is typical of Jacques Rancière’s desire to detect the intellectual voices passed over by history. It also becomes the basis for his (debatable) ‘axiom’ of intellectual equality, namely the idea that all people are of equal intelligence; that it is the institutions of society — pedagogical ones very much included — that cause inequality: ‘Expliquer quelque chose à quelqu’un, c’est d’abord lui démontrer qu’il ne peut pas le comprendre par lui-même’, as Rancière puts it at the start of Le Maître ignorant (Paris: Fayard, 1987,p. 15). The same story comes at the start of Davis’s book, which from the outset acknowledges the awkward problem posed by this rejection of explanation for anyone writing an introduction to such a stylistically declarative philosophy. Davis adopts Rancière’s style only to the point of echoing the latter’s preference for ‘interventions’ over systematic unity. The result is an unusual structure, organized around five chapters (on ‘The Early Politics’, ‘History and Historiography’, ‘The Mature Politics’, ‘Literature’, ‘Art and Aesthetics’), with a Preface preceding the Acknowledgements and substituting for an introduction, and a two-page Afterword in which Davis briefly offers the kind of eulogy helpfully absent from the rest of the text. He is being modest when the Preface attempts to justify the ‘presumptuousness’ of his own understated refusal of Rancière’s pedagogy. Far from just repeating Rancière à la Jacotot, the book is an absolute model of explanatory clarity, with a level of critical distance made all the more impressive by this being the first monograph on Rancière in any language. But Davis perhaps also commits the kind of ‘overcorrection’ for which he rightly takes Rancière to task when the latter fails to recognize the virtues of interlocutors including Althusser and Bourdieu. His commentaries are replete with brilliantly perceptive observations and a combination of astute local and general criticisms, but are sometimes rather short, and stand in for lengthier quotations that would have given a better sense of Rancière’s key texts. One might have wished to see more of the writer whose thinking of politics and aesthetics as eruptions of equality within policed states of inequality have brought him to the fore-front of a new and more explicitly political generation of poststructuralism. We nonetheless get a suggestive glimpse of the debates emerging between Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Davis also situates him elegantly in relation to psychoanalysis, literature, and film through (Rancière’s own) readings of Flaubert and Mallarmé. Reading between the lines, though, one wonders whether the performative departure from Jacotot’s pedagogical technique doesn’t constitute more of an indictment of Rancière than Davis wants to let on.