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It would not be completely implausible to view Jacques Rancière's entire career as a series of — mostly veiled — critiques of Karl Marx; at any rate, we can notice Marx circulating in the background of much of Rancière's work as the figure who connects a number of otherwise disparate critiques of post-"68 French intellectual culture.¹ This is perhaps explicable in part by the importance of Marx to many of Rancière's contemporaries; but beyond this contingency there is, as we shall see, a deeper coherence to Rancière's targeting of Marx, because Marx is implicated in and Marxism unites the two forms of "mastery" that Rancière opposes: pedagogy and sociology. Marxism, in Rancière's handling, is accused of a covert attachment to hierarchy in which an elite, gifted with special (philosophical or sociological) knowledge, directs and educates the masses. It is against this interpretation that Rancière develops an understanding of politics based around an axiomatic equality and a particular logic of visibility. This represents a challenge to Marxism, but it also, as I attempt to show, depends on a particular and partial construal of Marxism; Marxism in fact contains a strong critique of the form of equality championed by Rancière and an interesting if perhaps underdeveloped strand of thought around questions of visibility and the aesthetics of politics. Because of this, it may turn out that Rancière's challenge to Marxism provides an occasion to reactivate certain elements of the Marxist tradition.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137352835_10

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