THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION of Jacques Rancière’s Le Philosophe et ses pauvres has had, already, a curious history. In the mid-1990s Books in Print announced that it was available from Temple University Press in a translation by John Drury, who earlier had translated Rancière’s first book for that press, The Nights of Labor. When, after making repeated inquiries, I found it impossible to obtain the new book, Temple admitted that it had never gone into production and subsequently voided the contract—though as of today it retains a Temple isbn and is listed as available for purchase on Amazon.com. (A strange way for a book to be ahead of its time.) No one seemed to know, moreover, whether a copy of Drury’s manuscript existed and, if so, where it could be located. At Rancière’s suggestion I contacted Donald Reid, the University of North Carolina historian who had written the introduction to The Nights of Labor; he discovered in his files what was, perhaps, the only extant copy of Drury’s work—an initial draft, with some of Rancière’s emendations, of the first two-thirds of the book. That early partial version was then corrected by Corinne Oster, a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who also drafted the book’s remaining chapters. Encouraged that the manuscript finally was nearing completion, I revised it in its entirety with the goal of making Rancière’s highly allusive prose sound as English as possible.
Though perhaps not too English. If, as Jonathan Rée has suggested, “thinking only becomes philosophical when familiar words grow strange,” then “serious philosophical writing” can be recognized by its propensity to read “like a translation already.”1 One mark of this seriousness may be the ways such writing exploits as a resource its non-self-identity, a possibility embraced by Le Philosophe et ses pauvres in the scrupulousness with which it measures not only the distance between its own French and Plato’s Greek or Marx’s German, but also that between “its own French” and itself. Rancière often presses hard on a number of terms whose polyvalency will be lost or neutralized by any single English equivalent. Thus partage is “division” and “sharing,” and both of these antithetical senses must be kept in mind even when, depending on context, we opt in the translation for one or the other.2 Similarly, a savant can be an expert, a scholar, or a scientist; though we limit ourselves in each chapter to using only one of the three, the different nuances between them resonate in the original. Fin is translated generally as “end,” though on occasion it will also appear as “aim,” “goal,” “purpose,” or “conclusion.” The neutral “actor” and the more pejorative “comedian” are both renderings of comedién; Rancière plays systematically with this tension which, again, is unavailable in the English cognates. These are only a few of the many problems that we simply record in our translation rather than resolve. However inelegant it may be to insert a number of bracketed French phrases in our text, we do so to remind our English-language readers of what they are missing.
We employ whenever possible published English translations of the texts Rancière discusses, though on occasion these have been altered tacitly to conform to the terms of his usage. Parenthetical interpolations are always by Rancière, while those placed between square brackets—whether in the text proper or the notes—are by the translators.
This project was underwritten in part by an Amherst College Faculty Research Grant. Many individuals also provided indispensable aid: I am happy to acknowledge various debts to Derek Attridge, Judith Butler, John Drury, Maud Ellmann, Robert Gooding-Williams, Rick Griffiths, Margaret Groesbeck, Nat Herold, Fredric Jameson, Michael Kasper, Nancy Kuhl, Meredith McGill, Corinne Oster, Catherine Portuges, Lisa Raskin, Donald Reid, Bruce Robbins, Robert Schwartzwald, Anita Sokolsky, and Abby Zanger. My greatest debt of course is to Jacques Rancière, who was never stinting in his kindness, enthusiasm, or patience. Despite so much excellent assistance, this translation remains, perforce, imperfect. Its flaws are mine alone.