A Verification of Equality: Emancipation from Jacotot to Rancière

Abstract

Rancière looks at the conditions of an emancipation that he means, in a Kantian way, as emergence from nonage; and he considers such an emergence starting from a notion of formal equality to be verified in the field in which a natural inequality is presumed, as the social field. However, instead of thinking such a field as a place from which the claim of emancipation is spread, Rancière focuses on the critique of social sciences which epistemologically constituted it. This setting of his reflection depends on how the author, in a certain phase of his theoretical path, had made use of Jacotot. In the first half of the 19^th century Jacotot envisioned, by practicing it, a concept of emancipation of which the article proposes a historical-theoretical mapping. The latter will show that Jacotot was critically dealing with the evolution of 18^th century French materialist thought which, from a certain perspective, is the source of 19^th century positivism. Rancière took up and even embedded Jacotot’s thought in order to address the stakes of his present and to develop an idea of equality as a «method» of emancipation.