About our guests
Jacques Rancière is an Algerian-born French philosopher who significantly contributed to 20th century political philosophy, the philosophy of aesthetics and Marxist theory. Having studied under Louis Althusser at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm), he even contributed to Althusser’s 1965 Lire “Le Capital” (PUF, 1965), elucidating a scientific theory of history in the works of Karl Marx. He however split from Althusser by holding that workers could comprehend their own oppression and become emancipated without the guidance of elite theorists. Professor Emeritus at Paris VIII University (Vincennes – Saint-Denis) until 2000 and professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
He will also be at the Maison française d’Oxford on 11 November.
Oliver Davis is now Professor at University College Cork in Ireland, after eighteen years at Warwick University. He published the critical overview Jacques Rancière (2010) in Polity’s Key Contemporary Thinkers series, and Rancière Now (2013), an edited volume of critical essays on Jacques Rancière’s work. Oliver’s recent book, Hatred of Sex (2022), co-authored with Tim Dean, drew inspiration from Jacques Rancière’s approach in Hatred of Democracy [2005] to argue that our society is organised around an aversion to the disordering effects of sex, hating it as much as it hates democracy. Oliver is currently writing a history of French thought in the last four decades and has just completed a book on the political implications of the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’.
