What Is a People?

ISBN-13: 9780231168762 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 176 str.

Alain Badiou; Judith Butler; Georges Didi-Huberman

Opis

What Is a People? seeks 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 as 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," while 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, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations.

Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time.

Recenzje

"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

O autorze

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. 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. 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.