Jacques Rancière (b. 1940) is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, and professor emeritus at the Université de Paris, VIII. He has cast a long shadow over the fields of politics, aesthetics, and education, well beyond the borders of France, in particular, and across the Anglo-American world. Yet the overarching political project of Rancière does not, however, only consist of these three categories independently but is constituted by their entanglement; as for Rancière, aesthetics and politics are intrinsically linked, and “true” education must be emancipatory, an objective that demands equality not as an end but as a point of departure.

Rancière has published numerous books including The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France; The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation;  The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, On the Shores of Politics; Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy; Short Voyages to the Land of the People; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible; The Philosopher and his Poor; The Future of the Image; Hatred of Democracy; The Aesthetic Unconscious; The Emancipated Spectator; The Politics of Literature; Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double; Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics; Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art and Béla Tarr, the Time After.

In 2013, ICAST invited Jacques Rancière to give the lecture “The Politics of Aesthetics: Equality as a Method” at the China Academy of Art.