The Method of Equality

Interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan

Jacques Rancière, Julie Rose

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745680637, 9780745680620
• eBook ISBN: 9780745684321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The development of Rancière's philosophical work, from his formative years through the political and methodological break with Louis Althusser and the lessons of May 68, is documented here, as are the confrontations with other thinkers, the controversies and occasional misunderstandings. So too are the unity of his work and the distinctive style of his thinking, despite the frequent disconnect between politics and aesthetics and the subterranean movement between categories and works. Lastly one sees his view of our age, and of our age's many different and competing realities. What we gain in the end is a rich and multi-layered portrait of a life and a body of thought dedicated to the exercise of philosophy and to the emergence of possible new worlds.

Part One
Geneses

Childhood and Youth

Let's start with your formative years and the building blocks of your thinking, up to when The Nights of Labour was published in 1981. Tell us firstly what you remember of the period before you went to the École normale supérieure.¹ Whether we like it or not, for most of us in France the years of preparatory classes for the grandes écoles and exams often remain important elements in our intellectual trajectories. Maybe that means something to you too?

I got into the École normale sort of ‘automatically’, even if you had to sit for the exam and pass. When I was twelve, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I was told that, for that, you had to prepare for the École normale, you had to do Latin and Greek, so I started off in the Latin-Greek stream. I went off archaeology, but I forged ahead anyway. I was good at arts and I took the supposedly royal road. In the end, those years of preparation weren't especially traumatic for me apart from a few serious health problems, it was just a little strange as an experience. We had a fairly amazing number of bad teachers. I discovered for the first time that the pinnacle of the teaching hierarchy had nothing to do with any level of competence or ability to teach. I also discovered the strange law of exams and competitions, which is their ritualistic quality, both in terms of setting you up and then humiliating you. I remember this bigwig at the Sorbonne who cut me off at the first sentence to say, ‘Monsieur, this is a classic example of poor analysis,’ after which I got my certificate with second-class honours. But that's a part of my experience that only played a role much later on. Because, once I got into the École normale supérieure, I was able after all to quite easily slip into the character of a person who'd passed a very hard exam and so could speak in the name of knowledge, of science. You could say there was a certain contradiction between my experience as a student doing exams and competitions, confronted by all the mechanics of getting in and being humiliated, and then, later, my fairly unproblematic support for the Althusserian struggle of science against ideology.

Did you go to school in Paris?

Yes, I left Algiers at the age of two. I lived in Marseilles between 1942 and 1945. After that, I spent my whole childhood in Paris, more precisely at the Porte de Champerret, which played a certain role because it was the border between several worlds. Right at the Porte, there was a bit of the zone, the rough area, that hadn't been completely destroyed; and after that, on the left, there was Neuilly, the bourgeois town, and, on the right, Levallois, which was still a working-class town at the time. I went to school in Neuilly, but there weren't many children from Neuilly in the local lycée since the whole of the north-western suburbs went there, including suburbs that were still very working class. I lived my childhood in an atmosphere that was very IVth Republic. By that I mean in an immediate postwar atmosphere, with rationing and power cuts, blackouts and strikes (those days we went to school in a military truck) and in a social world that was still extremely mixed. There were communist councillors in Neuilly. At Pasteur, the local lycée of that posh suburb par excellence, people came from everywhere. And at soccer matches, on the Île de Puteaux, which was another kind of zone, you would go, from one week to the next, from the posh kids from Janson de Sailly to teams from the technical colleges. I lived in that world, which was both conflictual and mixed at the same time, though its memory has been crushed under the weight of the clichés about the Trente Glorieuses² and the baby boom.

My experience was filtered through a vaguely progressive Catholic conscience. I was in the Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne (JEC), the Christian Youth Organization, and I first came to Marx because the school chaplain showed me a book he was enjoying reading, Calvez's book on Marx (La Pensée de Karl Marx, 1956). That means I first got interested in Marx through all the themes that Althusserism later brushed aside, notably the critique of alienation. I also discovered Marx through Sartre, since my first way into philosophy was Sartre via Sartre's novels and protest plays. I'd read him as a philosophical writer before my final year of high school. Those were the days when people still engaged in the great philosophical debates about existence, its absurdity, commitment, and so on – the heyday of Sartre and Camus, if you like. The first book of philosophy I ever read was Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism. When I got to the philosophy class and I was subjected to courses on attention, perception, memory, etc., I was in complete despair. Luckily, the following year, in hypokhâgne³ at Henri IV, I had Etienne Borne's philosophy courses. That was a revelation for me, the discovery of the ‘great philosophers’ in a form that was at the same time very impassioned. Because of an essay I happened to have to do on the distinction between the body and the soul in Descartes, I threw myself into his Metaphysical Meditations and Objections and Replies. My philosophical culture, like my culture generally, has always been cobbled together in fits and starts; it's been local, localizable, sporadic, never encyclopedic, and very often developed either alongside official school courses, or based on specific projects I had to do for school but which I immediately took a lot further than was required.

You managed to reconcile those two things? After all, there is the entrance exam …

At first, I didn't understand how it worked. When we were in Henri IV, they made us think we were the best, that the rest were plodders, losers. Result: the exams were a bloodbath. When I got to Louis-le-Grand, where the teachers were very grey, where even the students mostly looked grey, I realized the problem was first and foremost to somehow manage to translate any random extract from Homer off-the-cuff. In the oral exam in Greek, there was a text you prepared and afterwards there was the killer question where you were given ten lines of Homer to translate – just like that. I understood that the great philosophical and literary production numbers were one thing, but that studying for the exam was a precise gymnastic exercise and you just had to do it. I did it, despite everything, and apparently I remember it, whereas all the people who now give fiery speeches about the republican education system and the great themes – being steeped in a humanist culture, learning to think, learning to be critical – have forgotten that, like me, they sat for their exams on the basis of a culture of lecture handouts (at the time the history syllabus meant lecture handouts) or index cards listing the meanings of all the Greek particles, and what was called at the time minor Latin and minor Greek, meaning daily drilling so as to be able to translate any text whatever off-the-cuff.

Before you penetrated the ‘fortress’ of the École normale, we should perhaps go back over your family background, which you glossed over so quickly. Was it a milieu in which people had already had careers in teaching at school or university?

No, my family had nothing to do with any university or academic milieu. My father had started studying German but gave it up for a career as a government official, but he was killed in France in 1940. I never knew him. And my mother was in the public service. My father had been in the public service, my uncle was in the public service, and my mother joined the public service when she had to go out and work. I didn't have an academic or university background at all.

Did you father die in combat?

Yes, in June 1940, just before the armistice. My mother never remarried. She had all the strength it took to raise three children on her own. I grew up in a very protective, close and loving environment. I didn't have a father, but I was never an unhappy child. The only time I felt miserable was when I started high school because, at home and at primary school, I'd lived in an essentially feminine world. The discovery of the masculine world was the main traumatism of my youth.

You mentioned Algiers. Well, before you went to the École normale, there was the Algerian War. Did that mean anything to you?

Let's say I had a split conscience when it came to Algeria. I lived surrounded by objects and documents from Algeria, books, postcards with coloured Algerian landscapes: Bougie Bay all in pink, Chréa all in blue, Timgad dun-coloured … I had a vision of Algeria as a kind of dreamland, as far as that went. Otherwise I lived through the Algerian War, after the war in Indochina, just as I was waking up to political life. But I didn't live through it as a native of Algeria. I lived through it as a young man of the times who read L'Express, with a mix of admiration for Mendès France and disgust for Guy Mollet. The Lycée Pasteur was pretty right-wing; I remember seeing extremely violent tracts for the defence of the Christian civilization of the West passed around in class. I wavered a bit, I have to say, but the kind of Catholic circles I hung out with were pretty progressive.

Later, when I was at the École normale, it was the days of the OAS⁴ and the big demonstrations against them. The year 1961–2 was vital from that point of view. One of the first demos following the violent attacks on North African immigrants started off from the École normale; there were a few dozen of us, a few hundred demonstrating in the boulevard Montparnasse the next day or the day after that. Before, I didn't belong to any political group. I was in various Catholic youth movements, but they weren't political even if there was a fairly left-wing sensibility. Once we were at the École, there was constant agitation, rallies. The people who organized the rallies were communists who would say the word and, after that, we'd either follow or not. So that was my experience and it wasn't linked to the fact that I was born in Algiers, except that when Algeria became independent I said to myself, why not go down there? I even put in a request to go to Algiers as a teacher, but that wasn't till 1965.

Education

By the time you got into the École normale supérieure, your dream of becoming an archaeologist was a thing of the past, but had you already decided on philosophy?

I hadn't decided. I started first year at the École normale supérieure without knowing whether I'd do literature or philosophy. I was enrolled in arts; I went to see Althusser, who didn't exactly wildly encourage me to do philosophy. So I hesitated for a long while and then, in my second year, I took the plunge, I had to make up my mind and I opted for philosophy. We went to the Sorbonne to enrol and to sit the exams. Otherwise we never set foot in there, with one exception: if you were doing arts, you went to the philology classes there, as that's something you can't make up and it takes up a lot of time if you want to do it without teachers. The first year, when I was still enrolled in arts, I took the courses for the grammar and philology degree, but otherwise we hardly ever went to the philosophy courses at the Sorbonne. There were no courses at the ENS either. Those were the days when there was no teaching profession. There were just the ‘crocs’,⁵ like Althusser, who was either th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword
• Part One: Geneses
• Part Two: Lines
• Part Three: Threshholds
• Part Four: Present Tenses
• Index
• End User License Agreement