Jacques Rancière's The Philosopher and His Poor narrates the history of the separation between philosophy and artisans and workers. This separation is articulated paradoxically in philosophy’s endeavour to make time for the poor, while the poor are identified as those who, according to philosophy's judgement, do not have time for philosophy since they are allegedly consumed by work. Moreover, philosophy's assertion of a division of manual and intellectual labour is based on supposedly strictly separated, hierarchically structured natures codifying artisans (and workers) as simply lacking the capacity for philosophical reflection. This naturalisation of the division of labour proves to be a kind of internal exclusion of artisans through and in philosophy: an internal exclusion that serves not only as the condition of the possibility for pure philosophy, but at the same time as a restriction obliging artisans to a monotechnics, imbuing them with a capacity to do only one thing and to be only in one place, implying that artisans cannot and must not participate in other activities. Thus, artisans cannot and must not be anything else but artisans, and their identity as artisans bars them from participating in other practices of sensemaking such as philosophy or politics.

However, the utility of artisans consists not only in illustrating one of the lessons of philosophy, according to which one can do one and only one thing at a time, but also in complying with the necessity of differentiating philosophy from its doubles. This task is assigned not simply to the artisan in general, but rather to the ‘shoemaker’ who, according to Rancière, ‘is the generic name for the man who is not where he ought to be if the order of estates is to get on with the order of discourse’. The shoemaker serves thus as what is at stake for, and the supplement of, a position that is supposed to guarantee that the philosopher can be strictly distinguished from the sophist, the poet and the artist.