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Aesthetics against Incarnation: An Interview by
Anne Marie Oliver
Jacques Ranci`re
A NNE M ARIE O LIVER : I thought it might be interesting, particularly in light
of problems of translation, to put into action in this interview the major
principle behind your book The Ignorant Schoolmaster : verification by
the book, for the book, of the book, and the idea of the book as a leveler
of sorts, the basis of improvisation. 1 I want to start with the subtitle, Five
Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation . The word lesson has a hortatory
tone that seems to contradict the spirit of the book as a whole; and I
wonder if youmight say something about the idea of a lesson, given that
it implies something preprogrammed or ready-made on the part of the
writer, a path already hewn for the reader.
J ACQUES R ANCI ` RE : Of course, there is a kind of contradiction. It may seem
strange to have given the subtitle Five Lessons to such a book. Joseph
Jacotot opposed the intellectual emancipation that puts at play the ca-
pacity of anybody to learn from any kind of situation to the pro-
grammed practice of the lesson that sets towork the “right” way of going
from a situation of ignorance to a situation of knowledge. I played on
the contradiction because the book is about what a lesson means. The
ignorant master, too, gives a “lesson” since he is the cause of somebody
else learning something. So the first point was, What kind of a lesson is
this? The second point is that nobody at the time of the book’s publica-
tion knew anything about Jacotot and intellectual emancipation. It had
Thanks to Anna Gray for help with transcribing this interview.
1. See Jacques Ranci`re, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation , trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, Calif., 1991); hereafter abbreviated IS .
Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008)
© 2008 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/08/3501-0008$10.00. All rights reserved.
172
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008
173
been entirely forgotten, and still today you can’t find any of his books. So I
had tomake an introduction in the same way as the teacher who introduces
a matter that is entirely unknown to the students. But I had to make it in a
different way. I created a kind of fiction. Intellectual emancipation subverts
the role of the master; he is no longer the one who knows and transmits his
knowledge but rather the one who tells his intellectual adventure. In a les-
son, you are supposed to transmit your knowledge, but in a fiction you tell
an intellectual adventure. The book was my intellectual adventure with
Jacotot. I told the reader I met this person, and I tried to translate his work.
Jacotot wrote in a kind of language within an intellectual framework that is
now very far from us. And so it was necessary that I do precisely this sort of
translation. The word lesson is an ironic one, which makes reference to the
titles of many books, but, of course, the book is a series of lessons about the
question of what exactly a lesson means.
O LIVER : I wonder if a book can ever truly function as a leveling materiality,
the basis of an emancipatory exchange, given that words are so deter-
mined and overdetermined. I think we hit here upon what you call
“poetic virtue,” the kind of improvisation and “de-idiomatization” of
language that constitute poetic force—that which moves language and
reconfigures it ( IS, p. 64). Still, the fact remains that virtually every word
can be put in quotation marks because of its long history, and learning
through the leveling materiality of the book still basically takes place
through language, through words.
R ANCI ` RE : Emancipation does not hinge on the power of words as such. It
hinges on the power of the relation with the book. The materiality of the
book is opposed to the position of the master; the book is in your hands,
and nobody is there to tell you how you have to understand words.
There is the possibility of a lot of translations being made by the reader
so that, in a certain way, it is the reader who transforms the book. And
even if you put the words in a certain order to convey a certainmeaning,
and even if words are overdetermined, it’s up to the reader to change the
rules of the game. This is the first point.
FIVE and research scholar at the Orfalea
Center for Global and International Studies, University of California, Santa
Barbara. She is coauthor of The Road to Martyrs’ Square (2004) and is currently
working on a study of contemporary forms of literalism and the question of
style. Her email is amoliver@pnca.edu
J ACQUES R ANCI ` RE is professor of aesthetics at the University of Paris-VIII,
St. Denis. His most recent book is The Future of the Image .A NNE M ARIE
O LIVER is assistant professor of intermedia and contemporary theory at the
Pacific Northwest College of Art
174
Jacques Ranci`re / Aesthetics against Incarnation
The second point is that I used a strange idiom in this book, an idiom
in between the language of Jacotot and the language of our contempo-
raries. The language of Jacotot is not the one used today to discuss issues
of education. His lexicon is not the lexicon that is now used. There is a
kind of linguistic strangeness in my book that makes it very difficult to
read. Readers have to do something; they have to muddle through a
kind of strangeness. These are not the words that are usually used for
speaking about matters of education and politics. On the one hand, I
bridged the two languages and the two epochs. But, on the other hand,
I wanted to keep that strangeness, to throw a strange object into the
middle of the debate in France between the sociological view of educa-
tion and the view of education that says that it is knowledge that eman-
cipates; I threw into the debate this object with both its intellectual and
linguistic strangeness. Initially, the book was not read at all by profes-
sors. It was read mostly by social workers, artists, and psychoanalysts.
Academics read it only ten or twenty years after it was written, which
means precisely that it demanded a different treatment. The book was
addressed to people who try to find not a new doctrine but a new way of
dealing with words—with words and meanings.
O LIVER : I’m curious as to what you see is the difference between the spoken
word and the written word, the mode of the teacher and that of the
writer, perhaps even command and commandment, two words that
appear in The Ignorant Schoolmaster .
R ANCI ` RE : I gave a positive turn to the Platonic criticism of writing. What
writingmeant, according to Jacotot, is that words are like orphans. They
are not carried by the master of the word or by the person who is able to
put them in the right way in the soul of the student. So, there is this idea
of writing as a certain status of words when they are made available to
anybody for any kind of reading, transformation, reappropriation.
O LIVER : Is that the role of art in your opinion—transformation?
R ANCI ` RE : Well, I think so, but I would say that the role of art or the practice
of art is a transformation of a certain state of relations between words
and things, between words and the visible, a certain organization of the
senses and the sensory configuration of what is given to us and how we
can make sense of it. I’m not giving you a definition of art. There is also
a poetics of politics that consists in reframing the relation between
words and things. Let us think about the old polemic against democracy
that I studied in The Names of History. It is a polemic against some
“empty” words like people, freedom, and equality . The polemic has it that
those empty words are circulating, and anybody can appropriate them
to frame political subjects. This circulation of the written word has
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2008
175
always been viewed as a threat by all powers. But the issue of emptiness
is not a linguistic one. As a matter of fact, those words are not empty at
all. They carry a history, and they reframe the landscape of collective
experience.
O LIVER : What, then, is the process of producing a solecism, a word that a
writer, a poet, does something to and with, makes his or her own? How
do you see that process working, and what does it mean to take a word,
particularly a religious remnant like parousia, incarnation , miracle, sac-
rilege, epiphany, chalice, or commandment, and to apply it to another
context, give it a different affect? What does it mean to make a word
strange?
R ANCI ` RE : It is actually a two-way process. Parousia is not in origin a reli-
gious word. It is a common word that took on whatever religious mean-
ing is in it and modifies it, but it is not in origin a religious word. What
interested me was precisely that circulation between empirical meaning
and theological meaning. I did not decide to use religious words, and I
did not use them in an innocent way, but, well, what is interesting,
what’s interesting for me, is that there are a lot of connections between
theological concepts or religious expressions and the way in which we
speak about art or literature. Theology, in fact, is about the modes of
presence of the divine. And literature consists in changing the forms of
presence evoked by words.
Incarnation, for instance, refers to the Christian religion, but, at the
same time, it has been used as a common word, as when one says that an
actor incarnates a character. The point is that when we describe what
happens in a novel, or when we describe what happens on the surface of
a painting, there is this lexicon that reappears and sometimes takes on a
mystical and theological dimension, while at other times a word is used
just as a common word. What, of course, interests me is that we live in
a civilization that was structured by Christianity, and so there is a long
tradition of interpretation of literary words in relation to the Scriptures,
in relation to incarnation, the physical presence of God, and so forth. In
The Flesh of Words , I start with the end of the Gospel of John and the way
in which the text describes the miracle of the fish with very familiar
details and touches so as to translate the presence of the Word made
flesh into a matter of everyday experience. My interrogation has to do
with how we consider the physicality, the corporeality, of the words of
the novel in relation to this model of the Word made flesh. There is a
long tradition of thinking literature as a kind of making flesh of the
Word. What interests me is the way in which literature plays precisely
with this temptation and at the same time dismisses it.
176
Jacques Ranci`re / Aesthetics against Incarnation
There is always in literature and in poetry this promise or this temp-
tation: now, the words will bemore than words. As poetry and literature
consist in exceeding the ordinary use of words, the ultimate goal of that
excess is precisely for words to become physical reality. We can think of
this theme in the nineteenth century—for instance, the Whitmanian or
Rimbaldian idea of a new language, the idea that poetry must be a lan-
guage accessible to all the senses. We can think also of the twentieth-
century idea that theatre must no longer be just words but rather must
become a kind of physical reality, and even words on the stage of the
theatre often become physical reality. Think, for instance, of Artaud’s
theatre of cruelty. It is a temptation, and, at the same time, the tempta-
tion is always postponed or dismissed.
O LIVER : In what ways and under what conditions should it be resisted?
R ANCI ` RE : It is not that it should be resisted. On the one hand, the point is
that this dream of fusion is an impossibility because, ultimately, words
are still words. But, on the other hand, the will to overstep the separation
rests on a simplistic vision of the opposition between words and things.
There is something biased in the very idea of having words on one side
and reality on the other side because words are a certain kind of reality,
and they create a certain kind of materiality.
O LIVER : In translating Jacotot, you make the point that it is the very arbi-
trariness of language that causes people to try to communicate at all. So
much of language is not meant to be taken literally. Can we say that the
desire for the collapse of words and things is a kind of literalism, the
temptation of literalism?
R ANCI ` RE : I would say that literalism is only one among several different
kinds of transformation of words, of words into things. I referred pre-
viously to the Rimbaldian idea of a language that would speak to all the
senses. You cannot call this literalism . For it involves not only the fact
that your sentence is taken at its word or at face value but also the idea of
words becoming more than words. In what you call literalism , in a cer-
tain way, words remain words, but in many political or literary dreams
and, of course, in religion, the distance of the word is supposed to be
abolished; the letter disappears in its spirit, the spirit becomes flesh. It is
a matter of transformation as if precisely there were a kind of sensory
reality that would abolish the very distance between words and things
and also the distance between one speaker and another speaker.
O LIVER : Delay and distance.
R ANCI ` RE : Yes.
O LIVER :In The Flesh of Words , speaking of Proust, you write of the blurring
of the line between art and life, “the lie of artistic truth, of art reduced to

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