Jacques Rancière, these days an august professor of rebel philosophy, was in the 1970s a militant theorist of the far-left Gauche Prolétarienne. Rancière had been a follower of the structuralist and Communist Party supporter Louis Althusser, but decided that Althusser’s rigid ‘scientific’ philosophy ‘described the agents of capitalist relations of production as necessarily caught in the mesh of the ideology produced by the system that kept them in their place’. Rancière rebelled against the idea that the working-class people were ‘blind, trapped by the dominant ideology, and that only scientists [read, Althusserian structuralists] were able to perceive the logic of this circle and could lead them out of their subjection’.
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