Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double

Summary

These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Ranciere has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven themes: the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of hereticalA knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure. For the short-lived journal Les Revoltes logiques, Ranciere wrote on subjects ranging across a hundred years, from the Californian gold rush to trade-union collaboration with fascism, from early feminism to the dictatorship of the proletariat,A from the respectability of the Paris Exposition to the disrespectable carousing outside the Paris gates. Ranciere characteristically combines telling historical detail with deep insight into the development of the popular mind. In a new Preface, he explains why such rude wordsA as people,A factory,A proletariansA and revolutionA still need to be spoken.