Jacques Rancière and History: an introduction

Abstract

The present article intends to introduce the theme of the contributions that the French philosopher Jacques Rancière makes to think questions of the contemporary French historiography. Inspired by a model inherited from the writing of Jules Michelet during the nineteenth century, the Nouvelle Histoire – as well as the social/cultural History of the last decades – is established in the current scenario in rupture with the rules of old rhetoric and poetics, in convergence with the aesthetic program of nineteenth-century Romantic poetics, thus bringing history and literature closer in the same regime of truth: that of democratic historicity, which considers the “excessive speech” on the same level as that of orators and “winners”, in the same plane of aesthetic equality.