The Philosopher and His Poor - Hardcover

Ranciere, Jacques

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822332612 ISBN 13: 9780822332619

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them? Why is the history of philosophy—from Plato to Karl Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre to Pierre Bourdieu—the history of so many figures of the poor: plebes, men of iron, the demos, artisans, common people, proletarians, the masses? Why have philosophers made the shoemaker, in particular, a remarkably ubiquitous presence in this history? Does philosophy itself depend on this thinking about the poor? If so, can it ever refrain from thinking for

them?

Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role—sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument. Published in France in 1983 and made available here for the first time in English, this consummate study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato’s admonition that workers should do “nothing else” than their own work. It offers innovative readings of these thinkers’ struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor. Presenting a left critique of Bourdieu, the terms of which are largely unknown to an English-language readership, The Philosopher and His Poor remains remarkably timely twenty years after its initial publication.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jacques Rancière is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris–VIII (St. Denis). His many books include The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France; The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation;and Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy.

Andrew Parker is Professor of English at Amherst College. He is a coeditor of Nationalisms and Sexualities and Performativity and Performance.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""The Philosopher and His Poor "is a remarkable work. Jacques Ranciere demonstrates the recurrence throughout the history of western thought of a particular self-constituting move: the freedom and the right to think are premised upon a situating and excluding of those whose task is other than to think, what Ranciere calls 'the poor.'"--Derek Attridge, author of "The Singularity of Literature"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Philosopher and His Poor

By Jacques Ranciere

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Jacques Ranciere
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822332619

Chapter One

The Order of the City

In the beginning there would be four persons. Maybe five. Just about as many as the needs of the body. A farmer for food, a mason for housing, a weaver for clothing. To these let us add a shoemaker and some other worker to provide for material necessities.

That is how Plato's republic presents itself. Without a deity or founding legend. With individuals, needs, and the means to satisfy them. A masterpiece of economy: with its four or five workers Plato founds not only a city but a future science, sociology. Our nineteenth century will be grateful to him.

His own century had a different judgment of it. His disciple and critic Aristotle put it succinctly: a city is not simply a concentration of needs and a division of the means of production. Right from the start something else is needed-justice, the power of what is better over what is less good. There are greater or less noble tasks, jobs that are more or less degrading, natures appropriate for one group or for another, and all these must be distinguished. Even in a republic of four or five citizens, there must be someone to represent and ensure respect for the common good that defines the aim [la fin] of the city above and beyond the satisfaction of needs. How else could justice ever come about from simply gathering together equally indispensable workers?

There must be a misunderstanding somewhere. Or a trick. For justice is, precisely, the subject of Plato's dialogue, and in order to define it he constructs his society as a magnifying glass. So justice must be there already in his egalitarian gathering of workers, or else it will never turn up at all. It is up to us to look for it.

The Fifth Man

A first clue might be a slight fluctuation concerning the number of equals. Four or five, we do not know exactly. But whether the number is even or odd ought to have some consequence for a philosopher infatuated with mathematics. Later on he will subject even the couplings of his warriors to the golden number, but for the moment he seems indifferent to the details of his inventory. In the city of necessity he leaves open the possibility that there is one person too many.

That may be a first reply to our question and to Aristotle's objection. No one among the equals is superior, but one of them could be less indispensable than the others. Could it be the fifth man, whose essential function is not spelled out any further? Or could it be the shoemaker? Is a specialist in footwear really needed when a single worker suffices to handle all aspects of building houses? It is no big deal to provide Attic peasants with footwear, and Plato himself tells us later on that they will carry on their work in summer "for the most part unclad and unshod." If so, should one-fourth of this primitive labor force be assigned to that office? Or should we assume, rather, that the shoemaker is also there for something else? The fact is that at every strategic point in the dialogue-whenever it becomes necessary to think about the division of labor, to establish difference in natures and aptitudes, or to define justice itself-the shoemaker will be there in the front line of the argument. As if he were doing double duty behind the scenes. As if this worker who is not to judge anything but footwear retained some usefulness for the philosopher that goes far beyond the products of his trade: the marginal and at first glance paradoxical function of allowing a doubt to hover about the actual utility of useful workers.

And yet our shoemaker and his fellow tradesmen are there to teach us a fundamental principle: a person can do only one thing at a time. It would be inconvenient for the farmer to stop his labor in the fields and devote three-fourths of his time to repairing his roof, making his clothes, and cutting out his shoe leather. The division of labor will take care of that problem. It will assign a specialist exclusively to each activity, and all will be for the best: "More things are produced, and better and more easily, when one man performs only one task according to his nature, at the right moment, and is excused from all other occupations."

Many things in such few words. First, a question: it is true that more will be produced under this system, but why is it necessary to produce so much? Apparently these people are already living within a market economy, even if this market is quite limited. And one need not have read Adam Smith to realize that such a division of labor will quickly produce unexchangeable surpluses. Starting with shoes, of course. With such a limited population and such limited needs, the division of labor is an absurdity. It may not be "more convenient" for the shoemaker to cultivate a plot of ground, but it is certainly a safer bet for him to do so.

So argues the economy of Adam Smith. Plato's economy differs in that the needs of the first members of his society are not restricted-indeed, at the beginning they are infinite. He tells us at the start that these men need many things. Later he will tell us that these workers need many tools. From the very outset it is necessary to make more, and for that, time is lacking. It is not that the worker must work all the time, but he must always be available to do his work at the right moment, and that is why he must have only one job. An observation then occurs to Socrates just in the nick of time: experience shows that nature provided for this necessity by distributing diverse aptitudes to different individuals. These aptitudes will be suited in turn to various occupations and everything will run smoothly.

Though not very clearly. The argument about time is itself already not so simple. If it is true that the job does not wait for the worker, the converse is not true as well. Nature may have given the farmer exactly the right dispositions for working in the fields, but it has also given vegetables their growing cycles. And it has made the seasons, which put unequal demands on the exercise of these agricultural dispositions. Is the farmer really supposed to spend the whole off-season and bad-weather days waiting for the right moment to turn over the soil? Isn't there a right moment for him to cultivate his field and another moment, just as right, for him to make his clothes and those of others? That is what many farmers still will think in the very midst of the Industrial Revolution, without agriculture or industry having anything to complain about-except wages. But that is a different matter.

Would a philosopher so expert at describing for purposes of comparison the operations of artisans be so ignorant of the conditions surrounding their exercise? That is highly unlikely. If he pretends not to know whether nature leaves the farmer and the mason with sufficient leisure, and whether society does the same for their fellow workers, it is because he has decided that they should not have all the time that circumstances, sometimes too generously, have given them. The very principle of a social nature shaping temperaments to functions could be the price of this omission. Behind the apparent paradoxes of this economy another game is being played, slightly askew, as four terms arrange themselves into a pattern: countless needs, time in short supply, workers who are more or less indispensable, and aptitudes among which we do not know how to distinguish. For while we readily admit that nature gives...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822332612
• ISBN 13: 9780822332619
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar