History

Rancière’s critiques of Marxism and sociology clearly raise major questions as regards his understanding and practice of history. These questions are posed in tangible form, first, by his critique of historiography in The Names of History and, second, by his own work in labour history in Proletarian Nights. In each case, what is at stake is what Rancière terms ‘the poetics of knowledge’, namely how historical discourse, through its use of tense, narrative voice, literal, and figurative language, constructs past events as objects of knowledge. The chapter first examines the poetics of knowledge Rancière finds at work in the Annales school of history, a school decisively influenced by Durkheimian sociology. We explore his claims that this sociologically informed school of history is characterised by its inability to account for genuinely historical events and the role of ordinary people in their genesis. As such, Rancière argues, the logical conclusion of the Annales school’s Durkheimianism can be found in François Furet’s revisionist history of the revolution of 1789. The chapter then analyses how Rancière sets out to avoid these pitfalls in his own work of labour history, Proletarian Nights, examining the idiosyncratic poetics of knowledge he employs in reconstructing the thoughts, words, and deeds of his nineteenth-century worker-poets and intellectuals.