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These outspoken intellectuals seek to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we." Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, these scholars help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction: This People Which Is Not One, by Bruno Bosteels
1. Twenty-Four Notes on the Uses of the Word "People", by Alain Badiou
2. You Said "Popular"?, by Pierre Bourdieu
3. "We, the People": Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly, by Judith Butler
4. To Render Sensible, by Georges Didi-Huberman
5. The People and the Third People, by Sadri Khiari
6. The Populism That Is Not to Be Found, by Jacques Rancière
Conclusion: Fragile Collectivities, Imagined Sovereignties, by Kevin Olson
Notes
Index
About the author
Alain Badiou, geb. 1937 ist Philosoph, Mathematiker, Dramaturg und Romancier. Seine politischen Aktivitäten drücken sich in der von ihm mitbegründeten 'Organisation politique' aus. Er lehrt an der Universität Paris VIII-Vincennes und am Collège International de Philosophie.
Judith Butler, geb. 1956, ist Professorin für Rhetorik und Komparatistik an der University of California, Berkeley. Sie ist eine der einflussreichsten Philosophinnen der Gegenwart und gilt als wichtigste Theoretikerin der Geschlechterforschung und Begründerin der Queer Theory. 2012 wird Judith Butler mit dem Theodor W. Adorno-Preis ausgezeichnet.
Georges Didi-Hubermann, geboren 1953, ist Philosoph und Kunsthistoriker und lehrt an der Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). Er ist Träger des Hans-Reimer-Preises der Aby-Warburg-Stiftung (Hamburg). Er veröffentlichte zahlreiche Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Theorie der Bilder.
Summary
These outspoken intellectuals seek to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, these scholars help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations.
Report
"The central ambition of this powerful book is to leverage the term "people" away from its conservative recuperations in order to maintain it in the lexical war chest of the politics of emancipation. All of the authors address, in this regard, the same central issue of the problematic status of this category, even though their perspectives and approaches diverge significantly, ranging from linguistic and conceptual analysis to a concern with implicit racial and nationalist politics. The book as a whole thereby makes a major contribution to the critical debate on the category of the people in all of its conceptual extensions: popular sovereignty, populism, popularity, and ambiguous expressions like "we the people."" - Gabriel Rockhill, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop at the Sorbonne
