The Political Unconscious of Education - an interview with Jacques Ranciere

Recently, I read Pierre Bourdieu's short Sketch Towards A Self-Analysis, which portrays his own passage through the French education system.   What jumps out from Bourdieu's book is the enormous ressentiment which drove him, a feeling based on his class location as a child, and his felt marginality vis-a-vis the Paris intelligentsia when at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.   The product, therefore, was a non-intellectual intellectual, or an intellectual who rejected the given French models of intellectuality.  It was enhanced further by Bourdieu's pursuit of a career in the discipline of sociology, as against the more prestigious philosophy, and it helped to make Bourdieu's rich and revealing work on education, culture, and the production of what he famously called 'cultural capital'.

This same outsider's scepticism is expressed in this short but very interesting interview with Jacques Ranciere.   Ranciere, a philosopher from the world which Bourdieu excoriated, has his own uneasy relationship with that world - part of the Althusser circle which produced Lire le Capital, he later made his own break with Althusser and forged his own path in a leftist philosophy based in archival research and a renewed sense of history.

This interview comes from the Verso website:

‘No institution emancipates people’: An interview with Jacques Rancière

Conor