Pathways of the method in Rancière:

from the critique of Althusser to Foucault’s archaeology

Abstract

The text intends to cover the construction of the method in Jacques Rancière based on a hypothesis: the author's approach, at the beginning of his theoretical journey, with Louis Althusser, would have left marks of a problem to be solved, for which Michel Foucault's thinking around archeology would have pointed a way. Noting, in Althusser, a politics of writing based on inequality, Rancière, would have been doubly influenced, on the one hand, by the experience of radical equality in Joseph Jacotot and, on the other, by the possibility of constructing a equality grounded method based on Foucault’s archaeology. The aim of the article will be, therefore, to analyze this path of approximation and distancing in relation to Althusser's thought, followed by the encounter with Jacotot's experiences and the encounter with Foucault's archeology, extracting from there the method that Rancière developed in his first texts, especially in Proletarian nights.