Oral History Association

Review
Author(s): Gary Gerstle
Review by: Gary Gerstle
Source: The Oral History Review, Vol. 20, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1992), pp. 123-126
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3674866
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 Book Reviews 123

fashionable in Paris. Furthermore, Mortley rightly stresses the impor-

tance of Heideggerian ontology (doctrine of being) for postwar French
philosophy; but aside from a passing remark by Levinas, he fails to broach
the "Heidegger Affair" with any of the philosophers interviewed. Sparked
by Victor Farias's 1987 book investigating Heidegger's anti-Semitism, this
controversy provoked responses by many French intellectuals, including
Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu. Such important contem-
porary issues could have been raised in a more comprehensive in-
troduction.

Taken on their own terms, these interviews are important documents

of intellectual history that should encourage further reading. Each inter-
view is prefaced with a brief biographical sketch placing the subject in
the context of his or her intellectual development. Also useful for scholar-
ship is the select bibliography of French texts and available English trans-
lations. Regrettably, however, the reader is not informed of the dates and
places of these interviews. In addition, the conversations are presented
as continuous despite the often dramatic shifts in focus and direction ef-
fected by the interviewer, suggesting that each document had been abridged
from a longer transcript. More conspicuous editorial intervention and
commentary, therefore, would have rendered the texts more useful to the
oral historian.
Despite these criticisms, Mortley's book will be of interest to stu-
dents of philosophy, psychology, feminist theory, comparative literature,
and European intellectual life in general. While it is certainly a brief in-
troduction that raises more questions than it answers, it should nonethe-
less prompt deeper investigation into the work of these current French
thinkers.

Christopher E. Forth
Department of History
State University of New York at Buffalo

THE NIGHTS OF LABOR: THE WORKERS' DREAM IN

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE. By Jacques Ranciere. Trans-
lated by John Drury. Introduction by Donald Reid. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1989. 442 pp. Hardbound, $34.95.

Ranciere's brilliant book, originally published in France as La Nuit des

Proletaires in 1981, locates the nineteenth-century origins of European
socialism not in the noble desire of artisans to control their own labor
but in the utopian visions of working-class poets who wanted to be free

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124 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

of labor altogether. Ranciere wants not only to rescue these poets and
their dreams from obscurity, but also to explain how their socialism-
and, by extension, all socialisms since the late nineteenth century-came
to glorify the single-minded devotion to work they themselves so loathed.
Ranciere's painstaking textual analyses, his elaborate philosophical medi-
tations on the possibility of freedom in the modern world, and his ex-
tended experiments with the metaphorical, narrative, and historical uses
of language demand a great deal from readers. But those who persevere
will find themselves engaged by a most imaginative and provocative ar-
gument. Oral historians, whose task it is to reveal what is concealed in
the complex stories told to them, will be particularly intrigued by how
Ranciere retrieves, from the records of nineteenth-century working-class
movements, a vision of freedom very different from the one remembered
by generations of French labor militants and left intellectuals.
La Nuit des Proletaires was born of Ranciere's frustration with the
French Left, especially with its failure to anticipate, direct, or ultimately
benefit from the revolutionary ferment of May 1968. A committed leftist
himself-an Althusserian in philosophy, a Maoist communist in politics-
Ranciere, in the wake of 1968, subjected the "truths" of his politics to
relentless critique. He targeted those beliefs the Left held most dear: that
"man" was a homer faber for whom satisfaction would come through
self-directed labor; that emancipation could be achieved through the ra-
tional, collective action of workers organized into unions and political
parties; that revolutionary movements required a vanguard of intellectu-
als or labor militants distinguished by their clairvoyance, courage, and
selfless dedication to the cause.
An adequate critique of these beliefs, Ranciere soon concluded, could
not come from within philosophy, his own discipline. Reliance on con-
ventional forms of philosophical discourse-rationalist, esoteric, elitist-
would implicate him in the production of precisely the kind of privileged
knowledge that for too long had legitimated a vanguard role for intellec-
tuals; worse, it would deny him the fresh perspective on human essence
and aspiration that he desperately needed. Ranciere's desire for an
epistemological break led him to history, specifically to the history of
French workers in the twenty years preceding the revolution of 1848, a
period in which class conflict was sharpening but had yet to assume its
modern organizational and discursive forms. Here Ranciere saw an
opportunity to recover authentic working-class voices, voices not yet sub-
sumed into myths about the nobility of labor and the emancipatory pow-
er of the working class that socialists would later elaborate. The voices
on which Ranciere focuses belonged to a few hundred Parisian working-
class men, most of them artisans or workshop workers of one sort or
another, who took little pride in their craft, despised the discipline, bore-
dom, and servitude of their work, and longed for the night - when they

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 Book Reviews 125

could read, write, drink, and thereby achieve an aestheticized release from
the interminable, grinding hardship of their days of labor.
These are Ranciere's working-class heroes. He affectionately ana-
lyzes (and John Drury, the translator, ably renders in English) the dreams,
metaphors, and meanings that animate their poetry and prose. What makes
these radicals distinctive is neither their place in the class or occupation-
al structure nor their cultural background, but rather their determination
to position themselves at real and metaphorical boundaries: between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie, materialism and aestheticism, work and
leisure. They long for circumstances-even economically harsh ones-
that will release them from the deadening weight of routine. Better to
be an itinerant, underemployed tradesman than a secure, respectable
craftsman; better to own one's time than to own one's tools or workshop.
In a scene reminiscent of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Ranciere recounts
how one of his unemployed worker-poets transforms his search for work
into a joyous celebration of the sights and sounds of city life. It is in these
"dead times of no work, on the roads and squares of the space allotted
to the possession of all," through chance encounters with "individual
members of the working class" (120), that happiness will be achieved and
the human spirit satisfied.
Kerouac comes to mind repeatedly as a latter day example of the
kind of worker-poet Ranciere so admires. Like Kerouac, Ranciere's
worker-poets were truly radical figures whose penchant for trespassing
constantly threatened to expose the artificiality of social boundaries, the
dark desires that the bourgeoisie and workers alike had repressed, and
the disciplinary devices society erected simply to perpetuate itself.
Ranciere's depiction of nineteenth-century artisanal revolutionaries
as eccentric poets can be interpreted as a frontal assault on a powerful
Euro-American historiographical school that has represented these same
individuals as "labor-loving" and "honor-craving" craftsmen. Ranciere
certainly wants to unsettle the certitude of this school and to alert its mem-
bers to the oppositions, silences, and exclusions inscribed in nineteenth-
century artisanal testaments to the glory of work. But discrediting this
school is not Ranciere's major aim, and he would probably admit that
its larger claims- especially the centrality of craftsmen and the free labor
ideal to anticapitalist agitation-cannot be shoved aside without a far more
systematic analysis of the economics and politics of the urban trades than
the one he has prepared for this book.
His major aim is, rather, to challenge the Left's sacred belief that
man, by nature, is a homerfaber who finds freedom and spiritual nourish-
ment through self-directed labor. Speaking through his worker-poets, Ran-
ciere insists to the contrary that freedom, defined as the opportunity to
experience truth and beauty, cannot come through work or through any
social arrangement oriented toward stability, order, or rationality; it can

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126 ORAL HISTORY REVIEW

only erupt spontaneously at the unpoliced, unregulated boundaries that

separate organized realms of social interaction.
If these are the conditions of freedom, how is it that socialism, for
Ranciere the grandest movement for freedom in modern times, came to
define itself through its commitment to "unfreedom," through what Ran-
ciere calls "the objectification of the kingdom of work" (415)? This ques-
tion, more than any other, has unsettled Ranciere's nights, and it haunts
his long, sad chronicle of the worker-poets' political fate. Unlike Kerou-
ac, who believed that freedom was too unpredictable and fragile ever to
be encased in a political ideology or organization, Ranciere's poets en-
thusiastically inscribed their revolutionary message into a series of
working-class movements-St. Simonianism, Fourierism, the revolution
of 1848, utopian communism-only to experience bitter failure and dis-
illusionment.
To a certain extent, Ranciere ascribes these failures to political com-
promises forced on the radicals by their desire to align themselves with
the Parisian masses. But ultimately, he argues, the radicals were done
in by contradictions internal to their own emancipatory programs. He
brilliantly deconstructs a series of radical political experiments to reveal
the destabilizing oppositions intrinsic to them: anticapitalism warred with
petty capitalism in the worker cooperatives of 1848; selfless dedication
vied with boundless egotism in the Icarian utopian communities of Texas
and Louisiana. The radicals expressly committed themselves only to the
first element in these oppositions, Ranciere argues, and were usually un-
aware of the silent, subversive work of the second. But awareness would
not have altered the fate of their radical experiments for, in truth, the
contradictions allowed no escape. There was, and there is, no solution
to what Ranciere ultimately calls "the impossible problem of communism,
the problem of getting the progress of production and the progress of
human spirits to coincide in a flash" (416). This impossibility explains
why noble dreams of emancipation hatched in the freedom of working-
class nights metamorphosed over the next century into a series of Fou-
cauldian disciplinary nightmares.
This is a powerful, piercing, and radical argument; it is not always
easy to grasp, but it is never easy to dismiss. Ranciere has merged his
philosophical and historical interests into a profound commentary on the
possibilities of human freedom and of the violence done to those possi-
bilities in freedom's name; it is a commentary, moreover, that helps to
explain the fury of eastern Europeans not only at their former socialist
rulers but at the very notion that socialism is, or can be, a philosophy
of freedom.

Gary Gerstle
Department of History
The Catholic University of America

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