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 Ranciere 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.


About the Authors:

Alain Badiou is Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School and teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the College International de Philosophie in Paris.

Judith Butler is the Maxine Eliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley.

Georges Didi-Huberman is professor at the Centre d'Histoire et Theorie des Arts at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Sadri Khiari is a Tunisian activist who has lived in exile in France since 2003 and is active in Indigenes de la Republique (Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic).

Jacques Ranciere is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Paris VIII.

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) served as chair of sociology at the College de France.