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Reading Rancière: critical dissensus

Reading Rancière is a book-length collection of essays in English on Rancière's work. At the time, there was no other book. We commissioned original essays from leading experts and theorists with the brief to engage critically with his work. Rancière gave us permission to include his much-cited but previously unpublished paper, ’The Thinking of Dissensus’, presented at the first UK conference on his work (2003); and agreed to be interviewed for the book. The interview was an important piece of research practice. It was intended to elicit his responses to a number of recent attempts to contextualise and criticise his work, such as his relation to anarchism and his philosophical peers or predecessors. Many of the questions were drawn directly from my own work, particularly my essay 'Of Slumdogs and Schoolmasters' (2013), which I have been invited to present at a number of conferences, and remains my most frequently read article on Academia.edu (984 views). Rancière usually gives interviews in English, but he chose to respond to our questions in French for greater precision. Making a translation of someone else's words, especially when they shift quickly between critical and autobiographical registers, entails a responsibility not to speak for another, but to draw my own words as closely as possible from the other’s particular combination of sense and tone. The choice of title, ’Against an ebbing tide', depicts the common thread throughout his work. Rancière describes his thinking as 'the refusal to follow an ebbing tide [le refus de suivre la vague du reflux]'; a refusal to abandon a politics of equality for any form of political consensus.