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Introduction by Bruno Bosteels

Conclusion by Kevin Olson
 W h at I s a P e o p l e ?

New Directions in Critical Theory

 New Directions in Critical Theory

Amy Allen, General Editor

New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts
in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and
advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing con-
temporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their com-
plex interconnections.

For a complete list of the series see page 165

W h at I s a P e o p l e ?
Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler,
Georges Didi-Huberman,
Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière

Introduction by Bruno Bosteels

and Conclusion by Kevin Olson

Translated by Jody Gladding

Columbia University Press New York

 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu
Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple? © 2013 La Fabrique-Éditions
English translation © 2016 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Badiou, Alain, author.
Title: What is a people? / Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler,
Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière ;
introduction by Bruno Bosteels and Conclusion by Kevin Olson ;
translated by Jody Gladding.
Other titles: Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple? English
Description: New York : Columbia University Press,
2016. | Series: New directions in critical theory |
Translation of: Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple? |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042650 | ISBN 9780231168762
(cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541718 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Democracy. | Populism. | Group identity. | People
(Constitutional law) | Political science—Philosophy. | Social
classes—Political aspects. | Nation-state.
Classification: LCC JC423 .Q46513 2016 | DDC 320.56/62—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042650

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cover design: David Drummond

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
 CONTENTS

preface vii

Introduction: This People Which Is Not One

bruno bosteels 1

1. Twenty-Four Notes on the Uses of the Word “People”

alain badiou 21

2. You Said “Popular”?

pierre bourdieu 32

3. “We, the People”: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly

judith butler 49

4. To Render Sensible
georges didi-huberman 65

5. The People and the Third People

sadri khiari 87

6. The Populism That Is Not to Be Found

jacques rancière 101

Conclusion: Fragile Collectivities, Imagined Sovereignties

kevin olson 107

notes 133
index 153

v
 PREFACE

“The child is the interpreter of the people. What am I saying? He is

the people itself, in its native truth, before it is deformed, the people
without vulgarity, without rudeness, without envy, inspiring neither
defiance nor repulsion.” Michelet’s words can make us smile, but
when we speak of popular (language) or of populist (discourse), isn’t
there a kind of defiance and repulsion there?
The plan for this book grew out of our anxiety at seeing the word
“people” hopelessly joined with the group of words like “republic” or
“secularism,” whose meanings have evolved to serve to maintain the
order. Despite their diversity, what the texts brought together here
have in common is demonstrating that people remains solidly rooted
on the side of emancipation.

vii
W h at I s a P e o p l e ?
 INTRODUCTION

This People Which Is Not One

bruno bosteels

To raise the question “What is a people?” always means at the same

time to make some statement, even if only implicitly, about who or
what is not a people. The six interventions collected in this slender
volume are no exception in this regard: while they all to a greater or
lesser extent plead in favor of the people as a political category that is
still valid today, they also at the same time draw a negative profile—
like a chalk outline at the scene of a crime—of whoever does not
constitute a people.
This negative delimitation in turn can be said to take two fun-
damental forms. On one hand, the category of the people is always
overtly or covertly opposed to a series of other categories in political
thought that by the same token we are invited to discard, criticize, or
overcome. Among such alternative options, we could mention not

1
only nation, state, or civil society but also races, masses, and classes,
as well as a whole slew of other terms more typically associated with
the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and so-called group or
mass psychology, such as horde, tribe, clan, pack, crowd, commune, or
community. To be sure, many of these concepts can and do enter into
systematic combinations and historical articulations, most notably
around the racialized triad of people, nation, and state so central in
the constitution of the modern world-system. But even in such cases
where the term becomes part of a larger configuration, any strate-
gic privilege given to the concept of the people immediately causes a
chain reaction in the political evaluation of its alternatives. Already
the use of the indefinite article in the question “What is a people?”
invites us to abandon the essentialist presuppositions behind “the”
people and opens up the possibility of talking about “peoples” in the
plural. This may be linguistically awkward in English but in other
languages, such as Spanish, helps draw critical attention to the indig-
enous presence that continues to resist the colonial framing of the
capitalist world-system dominated by the West—with los pueblos origi-
narios, for example, constituting key political actors throughout much
of Latin America today. On the other hand, no sooner is the term
chosen than the people also begins to function as an exclusionary
category in its own right, always in need of being internally demar-
cated from that which is not yet or no longer part thereof and which
for this same reason tends to be relegated more or less violently to
the pre-political or nonpolitical realm indicated by the pejorative
use of terms such as plebs, populace, mob, or rabble.
Whichever way we designate those who are either not the peo-
ple or other than the people, there is no way of circumnavigating
the fact that, both historically and conceptually speaking, this cate-
gory is constituted on the basis of a necessary exclusion. Specifically,
the political logic of the people can be said to operate according to
the principle of a constitutive outside in at least a double sense: by
choosing the people, or a people, as a privileged term for articulating

2 introduction
the sphere of modern politics, contemporary thought inevitably
marginalizes or bans from the discussion a number of other terms,
while raising the even more troubling issue of how to name and take
stock of whoever falls outside of the political realm so designated
and often as a result no longer even appears as a “who” deserving of
calling itself a subject but ends up being targeted as a mere object
of denigration and exploitation. The fundamental decision to be
made in this context, however, is whether or not we take this logic of
exclusion to be capable of erecting insurmountable obstacles on the
path to the continued use of the people as a political category today.
For example, not everyone in today’s world of war-and-oil-driven
globalization will so readily identify with the seemingly egalitar-
ian and emancipatory invocation of “We, the people,” taken up here
by Judith Butler as the starting point for a wide-ranging reflection
on the self-constitution of political subjects, with a special eye on
the new era of protests and uprisings announced in the movements
in Tahrir Square in Egypt or Puerta del Sol in Spain. To the con-
trary, as the opening words of the preamble to the constitution of
one country in particular, this expression—at least in English—will
strike many as being all too deeply ensnared in the history of the
United States of America, from the early days of its independence
to its unbridled economic expansionism and military intervention-
ism today. However, does this mean that the subjective self-assertion
of any people whatsoever, as the embodiment of a plural “we” eman-
cipating itself from the instituted powers that be, should cease to
be prescriptive in general? And should the role of political theory
thenceforth be limited to the extreme vigilance with which one
points out, stands guard over, and endlessly deconstructs the inev-
itable hierarchies and exceptions without which no people has ever
been capable of constituting itself? Or else, without unduly general-
izing one nation’s particular history as our universal model, whether
that of the United States or France, can the category of the people
be salvaged from the combined wreckage of national chauvinism and

introduction 3
imperialist expansionism so as to be rescued for genuinely emanci-
patory purposes? And, in that case, whether it takes place in philoso-
phy or sociology, in political science or the study of language and art,
can the work of theory actually contribute to the sharpening of this
political potential, rather than shielding itself in the irrefutable rad-
icalism reserved for those rare ones who—standing on the sidelines
or tracking down one crisis after the other as so many ambulance
chasers—are uniquely capable of seeing through all the blind spots of
contemporary politics, whether on the left or on the right?

With the possible exception of Pierre Bourdieu’s intervention, which

was first published more than three decades ago and questions the sup-
posed univocity of the political valence attributed to what sociolinguists
define as “popular,” the unifying wager behind the texts collected in this
volume holds that, far from raising insuperable obstacles that should
render the category practically inoperative if not unavailable altogether,
the divisions and exclusions that keep the people from ever being one
are very much part and parcel of the category’s uncanny political efficacy.
In spite of certain quibbles between them, no doubt due more to the
narcissism of petty differences than to fundamental philosophical dis-
agreements, most contributors to the present volume in this sense could
be said to fall in line with the arguments of the late Ernesto Laclau, when
in On Populist Reason he posits that “the political operation par excellence
is always going to be the construction of a ‘people.’ ”1
Let us briefly consider, for example, what may well be the found-
ing text for understanding the people as a central political category in
the modern age: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 treatise The Social Con-
tract. Rousseau is the eighteenth-century philosopher who, no doubt
more than anyone, has given center stage to the coming into being

4 introduction
of a people as the modern political act par excellence. For him this
means above all to forego the search for the origins of political power
in a transcendent source such as the divine right bestowed on a king
or dynasty, to whom the people would then have no choice but to
devote itself in a blind pledge of allegiance: “Thus, before examining
the act whereby a people chooses a king, it would be well to examine
the act whereby a people is a people. For since this act is necessarily
prior to the other, it is the true foundation of society.”2 Such would
be the riddle of the people’s foundational act that Rousseau seeks to
solve in The Social Contract. In reality, despite the apparent tautology of
its formulation, this act is riven with paradoxical tensions.
If an act is involved to begin with, then clearly we are not deal-
ing with the evidence of an already given identity. Instead of refer-
ring us back to the self-sameness of an essential being, the people
is only ever the result of a process of political becoming. More so
than a single punctual act, situated at the mythic origin of a people,
such a political process involves a prolonged act or series of acts in
which a substantial yet immanent transformation takes hold of a col-
lective body. This is the strange magic whereby the whole becomes
more than the sum of its parts. Thus, in the distance between the
first and the second mention of “a people” in Rousseau’s formula, we
must assume the occurrence of a true metamorphosis—nothing less
than a change in human nature itself, as the young Marx was fond of
recalling in his reading of The Social Contract: “He who dares to under-
take the establishment of a people should feel that he is, so to speak,
in a position to change human nature, to transform each individ-
ual (who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole), into a part of a
larger whole from which this individual receives, in a sense, his life
and his being.”3 But this momentous change risks becoming obfus-
cated behind the use of the copula in “the act by which a people is a
people,” as if we were dealing not with a momentous transformation
but with a seamless tautology between subject and predicate.

introduction 5
 The same tension also lies in wait, phrased differently but like-
wise ready to explode, in the well-known solution offered in The
Social Contract to the fundamental problem of knowing how to
describe what constitutes a people, namely the sealing of an orig-
inary compact or contract: “If, therefore, one eliminates from the
social compact whatever is not essential to it, one will find that it is
reducible to the following terms. Each of us places his person and
all his power in common under the supreme direction of the gen-
eral will; and as one we receive each member as an indivisible part
of the whole.”4 The fact that Rousseau couches his solution in these
terms, borrowed from the juridical ideology of contract law, only
highlights the tension all the more. Indeed, as Louis Althusser has
shown in a painstaking analysis of the theoretical contradictions that
run through The Social Contract, the model of the contract is inade-
quate and fails to correspond to the terms of the problem for which
it is meant as the solution. This is because, even as a philosophical
fiction, a contractual exchange supposes a reciprocal relation of give-
and-take between two formally equal partners. In Rousseau’s formu-
lations, however, a barely disguised contradiction obtains between
the many parts (“each of us”) that enter into the bargain on one end
of the exchange and the indivisible whole (“we as one”) that emerges
on the opposite end.
Indeed, if, following Althusser’s lead, we ask ourselves who are
the recipient parties (RPs) in Rousseau’s formula of contractual
exchange, we can say: “On the one hand they are the individuals
taken one by one, and on the other, the ‘community.’ Hence RP1 "
the individual, and RP2 " the ‘community.’ ”5 In The Social Contract,
though, this second party—the “community” or “collective body” that
Rousseau proposes we may also call the “city,” the “body politic,”
or the “republic”—does not even exist before the act of association
itself. Here, Rousseau’s use of the contract model shows up its inad-
equacy for describing this originary association, as it cannot conceal
the profound imbalance or inequality between the two contracting

6 introduction
parties. Althusser describes this inequality as the first décalage, or “dis-
crepancy,” that begins to tear apart the entire conceptual scaffold-
ing in The Social Contract, the one from which, by an inevitable chain
effect, a whole series of further “discrepancies” will follow in Rous-
seau’s treatise. Althusser describes the problem as follows:

In a word, here is the difficulty: in every contract the two Recipi-

ent Parties exist prior to and externally to the act of the contract.
In Rousseau’s Social Contract, only the RP1 conforms to these
conditions. The RP2 on the contrary, escapes them. It does not
exist before the contract for a very good reason: it is itself the prod-
uct of the contract. Hence the paradox of the Social Contract is
to bring together two RPs, one of which exists both prior to and
externally to the contract, while the other does not, since it is the
product of the contract itself, or better: its object, its end.6

Rousseau, who certainly cannot be said to have been unaware of

this problem, nevertheless constantly tries to repress the force of
its paradoxical tension. We already saw one example of this effort
at denial and concealment in the original formulation of “the act by
which a people is a people,” with its obfuscating use of the copula.
In another formulation from The Social Contract the attempt to con-
ceal the discrepancy between the two contracting parties is both
partially avowed, by admitting to a certain play on words with a
fictive “as it were,” and promptly disavowed so as to reaffirm the
relation of reciprocity in terms of the apparent self-sameness of
an “individual contracting with himself,” as when Rousseau writes:
“This formula shows that the act of association includes a recipro-
cal commitment between the public and private individuals, and
that each individual, contracting, as it were, with himself finds himself under
a twofold commitment: namely as a member of the sovereign to
private individuals, and as a member of the state toward the sover-
eign.”7 And in his Émile, too, Rousseau suggests that the singularity

introduction 7
of his notion of the contract lies in the fact that we would be deal-
ing with a relation of such near-perfect exchangeability that the
two contracting parties would seem to be one and the same. Only
now he gives this party directly the name of the people and then
repeats this name on both sides of the contractual exchange: “The
nature of the social pact is private and peculiar to itself, in that
the people only contracts with itself.”8 Here, the philosophical fiction of a
contract with oneself comes to substitute for the political transfor-
mation that must be assumed to take place in the gap between two
fundamentally different terms.
Whether he chooses to generalize and reduplicate the name of
the first or the second partner in his model of the social contract,
Rousseau in each case is at pains to reach a formulation in which
the object or end of the political act par excellence would already
coincide with the very subject of this same act. Thus, the circle may
appear to be squared, but only at the cost of leaving the subject
itself split in a twofold commitment—fidelity both to the sovereign
body of the new collective and to each of its individual members—
that is immediately repressed and covered up by the repetition of
a single name.
As Althusser further suggests, in Rousseau’s hesitation between
the individual and the people as the privileged name for this entity
that would be contracting with itself, we can also locate the source
for the difference in orientation between two major trends in later
political philosophy, signaled by the respective names of Kant and
Hegel:

In the first case, the contract is an anticipation of a theory of

Morality, whose voice can be heard in certain already Kantian for-
mulations (liberty as obedience to the law one has given oneself,
etc.). In the second case, the contract is an anticipation of a the-
ory of the Nation as a totality, a moment of the Objective Spirit
which reveals its basic determinations on a number of occasions

8 introduction
 (the historical conditions of possibility of the contract, the the-
ory of manners and morals, of religion, etc.). In both cases the
philosophical object Social Contract is relieved of its primordial
function. Neither Kantian Morality nor the Hegelian Nation are
constituted by a “contract.” Besides, is it not enough to read Rous-
seau closely to see that his Contract is not a contract?9

Finally, if we consider how the political subject that emerges from

Rousseau’s treatise must split its commitment between its role as a
private individual and its role as a member of the new body poli-
tic, we might add to Althusser’s suggestion that this discrepancy in
The Social Contract also announces the Marxist critique of the limits
of modern politics. For instance, Marx will make a different formu-
lation of the same discrepancy, namely the split between “man” and
“citizen” in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citi-
zen,” into the pivot around which he organizes his critique of merely
“political emancipation” as opposed to “human emancipation” in
“On the Jewish Question.”10 Kant, Hegel, and Marx’s future paths
thus would already be contained conceptually in the hollow spaces
carved out in The Social Contract.

We need not follow Althusser’s entire analysis in detail to draw the con-
clusion that Rousseau’s answer to the question “What is a people?”—an
answer that by the same token lays the ground for many of the funda-
mental orientations in political philosophy that are still with us today—
reveals the inescapable play of difference at the heart of this fundamental
category of modern politics. However, the more important question
concerns once again what is to be done with this revelation.
For the canonical Althusser, the one who devoted his 1965–66
seminar to The Social Contract right after having made a major name

introduction 9
for himself with the publication in 1965 of both his own collection of
signature essays in For Marx and the collective volume Reading Capital,
the answer to this question demands a form of symptomatic read-
ing that is not unlike the exercise of deconstruction that around the
same time his younger colleague Jacques Derrida was inaugurating—
incidentally also on the basis of some of Rousseau’s writings. What
is different from the orientation of the author of Of Grammatology is
that for Althusser the task of symptomatic reading in the end still
amounts to a form of ideology critique. His analysis of the textual
discrepancies and theoretical differences that from beginning to end
traverse The Social Contract thus concludes by pinpointing the place
where Rousseau himself finally hesitates between a flight forward
into sheer ideology (with a theory of morals, education, and civil
religion centered on the protection of the concept of liberty) and a
regression or flight backward into the economy (with the factual rec-
ognition of the realities of the class struggle in the form of different
group, class, or party interests whose existence nevertheless cannot
be allowed to undermine the general will).
Rousseau, at the very moment when in defense of the will of
the people he seeks to silence or suppress all groups, orders, fac-
tions, classes, parties, and so on, cannot help but accept their exis-
tence: “The true Social Contract, now a ‘legitimate’ one, thus finds
at the end of the displacement of its concepts the very same realities
whose existence and implacable logic had been described in the Dis-
course on Inequality.”11 The tensions in Rousseau’s treatise at this point
are no longer purely theoretical but concern the discrepant rela-
tion of theory itself with respect to the real; they thus become an
eminently practical affair. “The solution to the existing ‘theoretical
difficulties’ is entrusted to practice. It is a question of managing to
suppress, in the reality which can no longer be avoided, the social
groups and their effects: the existence of orders, of social classes, of
political and ideological parties and of their effects,” Althusser con-
cludes. “As we are now in reality, and can only turn round and round

10 introduction
in it (ideology-economy-ideology, etc.), there is no further flight
possible in reality itself. End of the Discrepancy.”12 The only further
option for Rousseau, at least according to Althusser, is to transfer
the impossible theoretical solution to the realm of literature as an
alternative to theory, in the writing of such masterpieces as La Nou-
velle Héloïse and the Confessions, whereas presumably for the author of
For Marx and Reading Capital himself, the only valid option is to refuse
the temptations of both literature and ideology by offering a scien-
tific investigation into the positivities of the class struggle following
the laws of motion of capital described by Marx.
In stark contrast to this form of ideology critique performed in
the name of Marxism as the science of history, for Althusser’s better-
known students, many of whom were able to start out on their own
only after breaking with the stifling authority of their former teacher
in the way Jacques Rancière did in 1974 with Althusser’s Lesson and
Alain Badiou two years later in Of Ideology, what otherwise appears
to be the effect of a theoretical inconsistency or shortcoming, due
to the inevitable play of difference within the text of modern polit-
ical theory, is the belated attempt to give a name to the real efficacy
of actual politics. Thus, contrary even to Marx’s critical reading of
the gap between “man” and “citizen,” the distance of the people from
itself—the internal difference that keeps it from ever being one—is
not an impediment but rather the very key to unlock its true politi-
cal effectiveness. “For politics, the fact that the people are internally
divided is not, actually, a scandal to be deplored. It is the primary
condition of the exercise of politics,” Rancière proposes in his most
systematic book on the subject, Disagreement: Philosophy and Politics. He
goes on to explain:

There is politics from the moment there exists the sphere of

appearance of a subject, the people, whose particular attribute is to be
different from itself, internally divided. So, from the political point
of view, the inscriptions of equality that figure in the Declaration

introduction 11
 of the Rights of Man or the preambles to the Codes and Con-
stitutions, those that symbolize such and such an institution or
are engraved on the pediments of their edifices, are not “forms”
belied by their contents or “appearances” made to conceal reality.
They are an effective mode of appearance of the people, the min-
imum of equality that is inscribed in the field of common expe-
rience. The problem is not to accentuate the difference between
this existing equality and all that belies it. It is not to contradict
appearances but, on the contrary, to confirm them. Wherever the
part of those who have no part is inscribed, however fragile and
fleeting these inscriptions may be, a sphere of appearance of the
demos is created, an element of the kratos, the power of the people,
exists. The problem is to extend the sphere of this appearance, to
maximize this potential.13

For Rancière, moreover, the same reasoning about the political

efficacy of what from a logical point of view may appear to be sheer
paralogisms, theoretical inconsistencies, or speculative impasses
holds true not only for “people” but also for many other gros mots
in our political lexicon—including “worker” and “proletarian” that
would have been the dominant terms in the heyday of Marxism.
This is why in the eyes of the author of Proletarian Nights there is noth-
ing obsolete about continuing to insist on such terms, even long after
Marxism has entered into a definitive crisis. As Rancière also argues
in the presentation of Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, a
collection of writings for the most part published between the late
1970s and early 1980s in the journal Les Révoltes Logiques: “To insist
on the overly broad words of people, worker, and proletarian is to
insist on their inherent difference, on the space of dissenting inven-
tion that this difference offers.”14 Here, instead of functioning as a
form of antipolitical leverage that allows the superior intellects of
deconstructive theory to unmask the ideological illusions of auton-
omy and self-presence at work in all modern politics, the difference

12 introduction
or discrepancy inherent in categories such as the people is precisely
what offers a place for political inventiveness—a heterotopian space
or stage where the “play” that such words give, like a door that stands
ajar or a window that cannot be shut tight, opens itself up to produc-
tive displacements and transformations.
Another way of stating this difference in approach between
Althusser and some of his ex-students whose work is featured in the
present collection would require that we interpret “play” not just in
the linguistic or mechanical but also in a theatrical sense. This inter-
pretation in turn presupposes that we abandon the quintessentially
philosophical oppositions between ideas and reality, between form
and content, or between appearance and essence. “There is not, on
the one hand, the ideal people of the founding texts and, on the
other, the real people of the workshops and poor neighborhoods”
but only a mixed scene to be staged and interpreted in between:
“And so it is no longer a matter of interpreting the difference
between one people and another according to some kind of symp-
tomatology. It is a matter of interpreting, in the theatrical sense of
the word, the gap between a place where the demos exists and a place
where it does not, where there are only populations, individuals,
employers and employees, heads of households and spouses, and so
on.”15 To adopt a theatrical interpretation of the staging of the peo-
ple in politics, moreover, in retrospect gives a whole new meaning to
the fact that at the heart of For Marx we already find a text dedicated
to the theater, in which Althusser makes the rather condescending
claim that being on the side of the people always involves playing at
being the people: “One makes oneself ‘one of the people’ by flirta-
tiously being above its own methods; that is why it is essential to
play at being (not being) the people that one forces the people to
be, the people of popular ‘myth,’ people with a flavor of melodrama.
This melodrama is not worthy of the stage (the real, theatrical
stage). It is savored in small sips in the cabaret.”16 For someone like
Rancière, who decided to collect many of his best writings under the

introduction 13
title Les Scènes du peuple, or for the seasoned playwright that Badiou
also is, this provocative claim by no means should be read as an
all-out condemnation of the politics of the people. On the contrary,
if the people can only ever be staged, this is because there exists no
necessary or natural connection between a particular actor or agent
and its assigned role in history. Hence the need for what Laclau,
making a similar argument from within a slightly different tradition,
calls a contingent hegemonic articulation: “This relationship by
which a sector takes up tasks that are not its own is what the Russian
social-democrats called hegemony.”17 In fact, had the role of certain
actors been wholly predetermined and transparently inscribed in
the forward march of history, there would be no need for a political
articulation to begin with.
Between the social category of the working class and the polit-
ical operator of the proletariat, for instance, there exists no essen-
tial connection or linear relation of transitivity according to Badiou,
Laclau, or Rancière. Instead, in every case such a connection must be
interpreted, staged, and acted out—Butler might say performed—
according to the singular demands of the situation at hand. Therein
lies precisely the crux of any political action. “Politics consists in
interpreting this relationship, which means first setting it up as the-
ater, inventing the argument, in the double logical and dramatic
sense of the term,” in a way that differs both from classical theories
of sovereignty based on the people’s self-alienation, as in Hobbes or
Rousseau, and from their scientific critique in the name of the social
positivity and consciousness of the working class, as in Marx: “This
invention is neither the feat of the sovereign people and its ‘repre-
sentatives’ nor the feat of the nonpeople/people of labor and their
sudden ‘awareness’ or prise de conscience.”18 Instead, Rancière prefers
to speak in terms of a “third people,” incidentally using the same
French expression, le tiers peuple, that appears in the title of Sadri
Khiari’s contribution to the present volume.

14 introduction
 4

In sum, as both Georges Didi-Huberman and Sadri Khiari also insist in

nearly identical terms, the people as one and indivisible simply does not
exist. Instead, to use the words of Rancière, there are always several peoples
in the plural, none of which is so stable and straightforward as to corre-
spond, for example, to the simplified schemes of workerism, economism,
or orthodox Marxism. This is why Rancière, in Staging the People, affirms the
intimate link between the people’s theater, including its inevitable flavor of
melodrama, and the people as theater, with history as its stage: “The peo-
ple’s theater, like the people’s revolution, has always had several peoples,
equally irreducible to the simplicity of the Marxist proletarian, the trade
unionist, or the plebs that intellectual fashion formerly celebrated.”19
Here we are asked to acknowledge the extent to which the eval-
uation of keywords such as people, proletariat, or plebs—we might
add the notion of the multitude, favored by authors such as Anto-
nio Negri and Michael Hardt—is always open to changing histori-
cal trends. Clearly the meaning of these terms cannot be ascertained
once and for all. But their rise to fame, or alternatively their fall
from grace, far from being the direct effect of this or that think-
er’s otherwise admirable efforts at theoretical systematicity, should
be interpreted as the specific result of social, material, and political
developments. Thus the revalorization of the category of the people,
in which the present volume marks a significant moment, can be said
to be due to passing intellectual fashions only if the latter in turn are
seen as ways of fighting out the meaning of changing historical cir-
cumstances. In particular, the timing of the interventions that follow
coincides with a twofold phenomenon: not only the rise of various
left-wing populisms in Latin America, from Hugo Chávez in Vene-
zuela to Evo Morales in Bolivia, but also, and above all, the declining
belief in the proletariat’s capacity for revolutionary politics, symp-
tomatic of the crisis of orthodox Marxism.

introduction 15
 However, aside from a paradigm shift from the proletariat to the
people, which every day risks pushing more and more post-Marx-
ists into the open arms of neo-populists, there also exists a very dif-
ferent tradition in thinking of the people that would appear to be
almost completely absent from the present volume and is only indi-
rectly alluded to in the language of the Volk. The latter, in fact, is not
just the common German word for “people,” it arguably also serves
as an untranslatable code word to refer to the closed communitarian
understanding of the Volksgemeinschaft in Nazi Germany. Philosoph-
ically, this tradition no doubt finds its most troubling expression
in the work of Martin Heidegger, whose National-Socialist com-
mitment—no matter how brief it may have been in the official
record—still has not ceased provoking polemical demarcations and
painstaking explanations from his critics. Among post-Heideggerian
thinkers in France, such as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc
Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot, whose work for the same reason per-
haps should have been represented more fully in the present vol-
ume than what a brief mention in Didi-Huberman’s essay alone
can do justice to, we can thus situate a radical effort at deconstruct-
ing the twin categories of the people as Volk and the community as
Gemeinschaft.
Let us recall how in an important section of his 1927 Being and
Time (§74, “The Essential Constitution of Historicity”), Heidegger
had tried to project the authentic existence of the human being
qua Da-sein, or “being-there,” onto the sphere of world history. For
the thinker from Todtnauberg, authenticity at the level of history
requires a decisive readiness to retrieve the existential possibilities
handed down from tradition and appropriate them as formative of
one’s own fate: not as the inherited legacy of what is merely past and
bygone but as the possibility of a genuine choice that comes to exis-
tence out of the future. Such an anticipatory resoluteness, by which
famously “Da-sein may choose its heroes,” is what Heidegger sees as
grounding a community or a people’s innermost “destiny”:

16 introduction
 With this term, we designate the occurrence of the community,
of a people. Destiny is not composed of individual fates, nor can
being-with-one-another be conceived of as the mutual occurrence
of several subjects. These fates are already guided beforehand in
being-with-one-another in the same world and in the resolute-
ness for definite possibilities. In communication and in battle the
power of destiny first becomes free. The fateful destiny of Da-sein
in and with its “generation” constitutes the complete, authentic
occurrence of Da-sein.20

Admittedly, all these terms—resoluteness, authenticity, choice,

decision, fate, freedom, and so on—may seem part of a vocabulary
that is all too susceptible to psychological and moral-anthropolog-
ical interpretations, to the point where Heidegger himself came to
feel the need, after the so-called Kehre or “turn” in his thinking, to
move away from the emphasis on the authentic human being to the
event of being as such. And yet, even while pointing out the danger
of misinterpreting Being and Time in an overly existentialist or human-
ist direction, in his later writings this same thinker does not stop
pondering what constitutes a people as a crucial part of the proposed
turn toward being. Thus, in his private musings from 1936 to 1938,
published posthumously under the title Contributions to Philosophy (Of
the Event), for example, Heidegger explicitly asks the very same ques-
tions that form the starting point for the interventions in the pres-
ent volume: “How does a people become a people? Does a people
become only that which it is? If so, then what is it? How can we know:
(1) What a people in general is? (2) What this or that people is? (3)
What we ourselves are?”21
In other words, Heidegger’s emphasis may have shifted from the
human being’s resolute decision to its meditative rootedness in being
as such, but even his later thinking remains inseparable from the
mission to give shape to a people endowed with the world-historical
task of preparing those essential occurrences that alone might be able

introduction 17
to change the nihilist course of the West, for example, by giving us a
glimpse of the coming of the last God. “The selfhood of the human
being—of the historical human being as the selfhood of a people—is
a realm of occurrences, a realm in which human beings are appropri-
ated to themselves only if they themselves reach the open time-space
wherein an appropriation can occur,” Heidegger still muses in Con-
tributions to Philosophy. “The most proper ‘being’ of humans is there-
fore grounded in a belonging to the truth of being as such, and this is
so, again, because the essence of being as such, not the essence of the
human being, contains in itself a call to humans, as a call destining
them to history.”22 Even Lacoue-Labarthe, who in his lifelong inves-
tigation into the matter never accepted the charge of Heidegger’s
anti-Semitism and passed away before the publication of the noto-
rious Black Notebooks might have changed his mind, had to admit that
the notion of a turn in the fundamental orientation of Heidegger’s
thinking was more wish-fulfilling fantasy than reality on the part
of the German thinker. “Between 1933 and 1967, the tone has obvi-
ously changed: the pathos of meditation has been substituted for the
pathos of resolution and there is no call for a national revolution. . . .
Yet the ‘message’ is the same and the—now veiled—injunction is
identical: the leap called for (breach and leap into the origin) is now
called ‘step back,’ but it is still the destiny of Western Europe that is
at stake in it,” Lacoue-Labarthe concludes in Heidegger, Art, and Politics:
The Fiction of the Political. “It is clear, then, that Heidegger never ceased
to connect the possibility of History (historiality) with the possibil-
ity of a people or of the people. Which always meant conjointly, as
we know, with the possibility of an art (a Dichtung), a language and a
myth (a Sage, i.e., a relation with the gods).”23
For those thinkers who nonetheless are prepared to stay within
a certain Heideggerian mind-set in order to offer their critique,
the lesson that we are expected to draw from this line of thinking
holds that the deconstruction of metaphysics must be pushed to
the limit so as to tackle the hegemonic desire of and for philosophy

18 introduction
still present in Heidegger’s own thought in its disastrous affiliation
with Nazism. Thus a radical critique not only of Heidegger’s per-
sonal commitments but also of all hitherto existing forms of polit-
ical subjectivization, whether they go by the name of the people or
not, should serve as a constant reminder to renounce the misguided
hopes placed in philosophy’s ability to provide spiritual guidance or
leadership to the political guide or leader. “The commitment of 1933
is founded upon the idea of an hegemony of the spiritual and the
philosophical over political hegemony itself (this is the theme of a
Führung of the Führung or of the Führer) which leads us back at least to
the Platonic basileia,” but which in Heidegger’s case becomes compat-
ible with Nazism through the supporting reference to the rootedness
of a particular people, i.e., the German Volk. “In Heideggerian terms,
the question is, as I have indicated, the following: why is historial
Dasein determined as the Dasein of a people?” asks Lacoue-Labarthe.
“In more banally political terms, we may transcribe this question as
follows: why was Heidegger committed to the idea of a national Rev-
olution and why did he never repudiate that commitment?”24
Faced with the legacy of Heidegger’s undeniable political com-
promises, thinkers such as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call for an
interruption of the general logic according to which philosophy
would be able to lead the way to the resolute appropriation of an
authentic destiny, whether by a solitary individual or a historic peo-
ple. After Auschwitz, all such fictive “putting to work” of the people
or of the community must be broken off, emptied out, and rendered
inoperative. And if the ultimate workability of politics is what phi-
losophy has always desired, from as early as Plato to as late as Hei-
degger, then perhaps we should in all modesty be without the desire
for philosophy: “A very obscure imperative, beyond or beneath the
mere refusal of what is dominant, commands that we let philoso-
phy collapse within ourselves and that we open ourselves up to that
diminishing, that exhaustion of philosophy, today. We must no lon-
ger have the desire to philosophize.”25 From a post-Heideggerian

introduction 19
point of view, in other words, the issue is not to decide between the
people, the proletariat, or any other privileged name for the political
subject today but instead to come to grips with the notion that the
will to subjectivity in general is nothing but the modern culmination
of Western metaphysics.
To understand the texts that follow, by contrast, we have to
assume that the category of the people already has undergone a pains-
taking internal critique or deconstruction. As I have tried to show
via one line of thinking that links Rousseau to some of Althusser’s
best-known disciples, this also means that there is no people before
the act by which a people becomes a people in the first place; and,
even afterward, the people are never one or homogeneous but many
and internally divided. In sum, far from constituting a stable identity
derived from a preordained essence that would have been racially,
ethnically, linguistically, culturally, or ontologically definable, “peo-
ple” here serves as a name—one name among others—for the polit-
ical process that produces its own subject, while reminding us that
without an element of subjectivization there can be no politics.

20 introduction
 1

TWENTY- FOUR NOTES ON THE

USES OF THE WORD “PEOPLE”

alain badiou

Even if we can only nod, time and again, to the “we are here by
the will of the people” of the nascent French Revolution, we must
acknowledge that “people,” by itself, is not in the least a progressive
noun. When Mélanchon’s posters proclaim “a place for the people!”
it is only unreadable rhetoric today. Likewise we must acknowledge
that neither is “people” a fascist term, even if the Nazi uses of the
word Volk seem inclined in that direction. When Marine Le Pen’s
“populism” is denounced almost everywhere, this only adds to the
confusion. The truth is that “people” is now a neutral term, like so
many others in the political lexicon. Everything is a matter of con-
text. Thus we will have to examine it a bit more closely.

21
 2

The adjective “popular” is more connotative, more active. We have

only to look at what was meant by expressions like “popular commit-
tee,” “popular movement,” “popular tribunal,” “popular front,” “popular
power,” and, even on the state level, “popular democracy,” to say nothing
of “popular liberation army,” to observe that the adjective aims at polit-
icizing the noun, at conferring upon it an aura that combines the break-
ing off of oppression and the light of a new collective life. Of course if a
singer or a politician is “popular,” it is only a statistical fact without real
value. But not if a movement or an insurrection is so classified exactly like
such episodes in areas of history where it was a question of emancipation.

On the other hand, we distrust the word “people” when it is accompa-

nied by an adjective, especially an adjective of identity or nationality.

We know of course that there was nothing legitimate or politically pos-

itive about the “heroic war of liberation of the Vietnamese people.”
It seems that “liberation” in the context of colonial oppression, indeed
even in the context of an intolerable foreign invasion, confers upon
“people”—accompanied by an adjective that characterizes said people—
an undeniable liberating touch. And all the more so when the imperial
colonial camp would prefer to speak of “tribes” or “ethnic groups,” if not
“races” and “savages.” The word “people” was only suitable for the con-
quering powers, elated by the conquest itself: “the French people,” “the
English people,” yes. . . . But the Algerian people, the Vietnamese peo-
ple? No! And even today for the Israeli government, “the Palestinian

22 notes on the uses of the word “people”

people”? An even louder no. The period of the wars of national libera-
tion sanctified “national adjective + people,” by establishing the right—
often at the cost of armed struggle—to the word “people” for those to
whom the colonizers refused its use, considering only themselves to be
“true” peoples.

But beyond the violent process of liberation, beyond the movement

to appropriate a forbidden word, of what value is “national adjective
+ people”? Not much, let’s admit it. And especially now. Because now
is the time when the truth of one of Marx’s powerful maxims asserts
itself, a sentence as forgotten as it is forceful, even though it was cru-
cial in the eyes of its author: “The workers have no country.” This is even
more true because although they have always been nomads—since they
had to uproot themselves from the land and rural poverty to be enlisted
into capitalism’s workshops—workers are more nomadic now than ever.
No longer are they just moving from the country to the city but from
Africa and Asia to Europe and America, even from Cameroon to Shang-
hai or from the Philippines to Brazil. Thus to what “national adjective +
people” do they belong? Much more than when Marx, that great prophet
of the future of the classes, was forming the First International, now is
the time when the workers are the living body of internationalism, the
only territory where something like a “proletariat” can exist, “proletariat”
understood here as the subjectivized body of communism.

We must abandon to their reactionary fate expressions like “the French

people” and other phrases in which “people” is saddled with an iden-
tity. Where “the French people” in reality means nothing more than

notes on the uses of the word “people” 23

“the inert mass of those upon whom the state has conferred the right to
call themselves French.” We will accept this yoking only in cases where
that identity is in reality a political process under way, as with “the Alge-
rian people” during the French war in Algeria, or the “Chinese people”
when the expression is pronounced from the communist base of Yan’an.
And in these cases we should note that “adjective + people” derives its
reality only in violent opposition to another “adjective + people,” the
one with a colonial army breathing down its neck that claims to refuse
insurgents any right to the word “people,” or the army of a reactionary
state that desires the extermination of “anti-national” rebels.

Thus “adjective + people” is either an inert category of the state (like

“French people” today from the mouths of politicians on both sides) or a
category of wars and political processes associated with situations of so-
called national liberation.

In parliamentary democracies in particular, the “people” has in fact

become a category of the right of state. Through the political sham of the
vote, the “people,” composed of a collection of human atoms, confers the
fiction of legitimacy on the elected. This is the “sovereignty of the peo-
ple,” or more exactly the sovereignty of the “French people.” If for Rous-
seau sovereignty still meant a live and effective popular assembly—let us
recall that Rousseau considered English parliamentary government to
be a sham—it is clear today that such sovereignty, with its multiplicity
of inert and fragmented opinions, constitutes no true political subject.
As legal referent for the representative process, the “people” means only
that the state can and must persist in its being.

24 notes on the uses of the word “people”

 9

“What being?” we will ask. And so without going into detail here we
will propose that our states do not in the least derive their reality from
the vote but rather from an insurmountable allegiance to the necessi-
ties of capitalism and the antipopular measures (let us stress in pass-
ing the undoubtedly strained values that derive from the adjective
“popular”) that those necessities constantly require. And this is hap-
pening more and more overtly, more and more shamelessly. And that
is how our “democratic” governments make the people, whom they
claim to represent, into a substance we may call capitalized. If you don’t
believe it, if like Saint Thomas you believe only in what you can see,
look at Hollande.

10

But can’t the “people” be a reality that underlies the progressive virtue of
the adjective “popular”? Isn’t a “popular assembly” a kind of representa-
tion of the “people” in a different sense than the closed, state-controlled
one masked by adjectives of nationality and the “democratic” legalization
of sovereignty?

11

Let us return to the example of the wars of national liberation. In this

context, “the Vietnamese people” means in effect the existence of a peo-
ple just as it was refused status as referent for a nation, which can itself
only exist on the global scene insofar as it is granted a state. Thus it is in
the retrospective effect of the nonexistence of a state that the “people” can be part
of the naming of a political process and thus become a political category.
As soon as the state in question is formed, regulated, and enrolled in the

notes on the uses of the word “people” 25

“international community,” the people it claims as its authority ceases to
be a political subject. It becomes a passive mass that the state configures,
universally, no matter what the form of the state.

12

But within this passive mass, can’t “people” designate something

singular? If we consider, for example, the great strikes in France dur-
ing the Occupation in June 1936 or in May 1968, don’t we have to
say that a people—a “working people”—emerged there as a kind of
immanent exception to the constitutional inertia designated by the
expression “the French people”? Yes, we can, we must say it. And
as early as Spartacus and his rebellious companions, or Toussaint
Louverture and his friends both black and white, we must say that
in ancient Rome or on the colonial island of Haiti, they configured
a true people.

13

Even the dangerous inertia of the word “people” modified by a national

adjective can, despite the contradiction, be subverted by pressure from
within this national and lawful “people.” What did those who occupied
Tahrir Square in Egypt at the height of the “Arab Spring” mean when
they asserted, “We are the Egyptian people”? That their movement,
their own unity, their slogans configure an Egyptian people free from its
established national inertia, an Egyptian people with the right to actively
claim the national adjective, because the nation of which they speak is yet to come.
Because it only exists in the dynamic form of a vast political movement.
Because, in the face of that movement, the state that claims to represent
Egypt is illegitimate and must disappear.

26 notes on the uses of the word “people”

 14

From which we see that “people” here takes on a meaning that implies
the disappearance of the existing state. And, beyond that, the disappear-
ance of state itself, from the moment that political decisions are in the
hands of a new people assembled on a square, assembled right here. What
is affirmed in vast popular movements is always the latent necessity of
what Marx made the supreme objective of all revolutionary politics: the
demise of the state.

15

Let us note that in all these cases, in the place of the electoral pro-
cess’s majority representation, which shapes the state-controlled inertia of
the people through the legal means of state legitimacy, and also in the
place of submission, always half consensual and half forced, to a despotic
authority, we have a minority detachment that activates the word “people”
according to an unprecedented political orientation. The “people” can
once again designate—in a context completely different from the one of
struggles for national liberation—the subject of a political process. But
it is always in the form of a minority that declares not that it represents the
people but that it is the people as it destroys its own inertia and makes
itself the body of the political precedent.

16

Let us note that this minority detachment can only enforce its decla-
ration (“we are the people, the true people”) insofar as, beyond its own
strength, beyond the small numbers that make it the body of the politi-
cal precedent, it is constantly tied to a living popular mass by a thousand

notes on the uses of the word “people” 27

channels and actions. Speaking of that specific and specialized detach-
ment that called itself “the Communist Party” in the last century, Mao
Zedong indicated that his legitimacy was at every moment suspended
from what he called the “mass liaison,” which was in his eyes the alpha
and omega of the possible reality of a politics. Let us say that the imma-
nent exception that is the people in the sense of an active detachment
only supports its claim of being the provisional body of the true people
in a lasting way by validating that claim at any moment within the wide
masses, by deploying its activity in the direction of those whom the inert
people, subject to its configuration by the state, keeps forever at a dis-
tance from their political capacity.

17

But isn’t there also the “people” in the sense that, even without ever acti-
vating an assembled detachment, is nevertheless not truly included in
the contingent of “the sovereign people” as constituted by the state? We
will answer “yes.” It makes sense to speak of “the people’s people” as they
are what the official people, in the guise of the state, regards as nonexistent. Here we
arrive at the margins of objectivity, the social, economic, and state mar-
gins. For centuries the “nonexistent” mass was the mass of poor peasants,
and the existent society properly speaking, as deemed by the state, con-
sisted of a mix of hereditary aristocracy and the nouveaux riches. Today
in the societies that grant themselves the title of “advanced” societies or
“democracies,” the central core of the nonexistent mass is composed of
newly arrived workers (those called “immigrants”). Around them is a
loose composite of provisional workers, the underemployed, displaced
intellectuals, and the entirety of exiled, segregated youth on the periph-
eries of large cities. It is legitimate to speak of the “people” with regard
to this ensemble, insofar as, in the eyes of the state, it has no right to the
consideration the official people enjoys.

28 notes on the uses of the word “people”

 18

Let us remark that in our societies, the official people is given the very
strange name of the “middle class.” As if what is “middle” could be
admirable. . . . That is because the dominant ideology of our societies
is Aristotelian. Counter to the obvious aristocratism of Plato, Aristo-
tle established the excellence of what cleaves to the golden mean. That
is the grounds for the creation of a significant middle class as the neces-
sary medium for a democratic-style constitution. Today when the offi-
cial propaganda newspapers (that is to say, nearly all the newspapers)
rejoice over the growth of the Chinese middle class—they have counted,
feverishly . . . —to five hundred million people, consumers of new prod-
ucts who want to be left in peace, they are the unknowing followers of
Aristotle. Their conclusion is the same as his: in China, a democracy—
the happy medium . . . —is in sight, for which the “people” is the sat-
isfied ensemble of the middle class that constitutes the masses so that
the power of the capitalist oligarchy can be considered democratically
legitimate.

19

The middle class is the “people” of capitalist oligarchies.

20

From this perspective, the Malian, Chinese, Moroccan, Congolese,

or Tamil who is refused legal status, to whom papers are denied, is the
emblem of the people in that he is and can only be what is rescued of
the word “people” from the false people composed of those who form
a consensus around the oligarchy. Moreover, that is why the process of

notes on the uses of the word “people” 29

political organization around the issue of papers, and more generally
around the issues related to the newest arrivals among workers, is cen-
tral to all progressive politics today; it can configure the new people as it
is constituted on the margins of the official people in order to rescue for
it the word “people” as a political word.

21

Thus we have two negative senses of the word “people.” The first and
most obvious is the one saddled with a closed—and always fictive—
racial or national identity. The historical existence of this type of “peo-
ple” requires the construction of a despotic state, which brings its
founding fiction violently into existence. The second, more subtle one,
though on a large scale even more harmful—because of its adaptabil-
ity and the consensus that it fosters—is the one that subordinates the
recognition of a “people” to a state that is assumed to be legitimate and
beneficent by the sole fact that it organizes when possible the growth,
and in any case the persistence, of a middle class, free to consume the
empty products that capitalism force-feeds it and free as well to say
what it wants, provided that this free speech has no effect whatsoever
on the general mechanism.

22

And finally we have two positive senses of the word “people.” The first
is the constitution of a people in pursuit of its historical existence, inso-
far as that aim is denied by colonial and imperial domination or by the
domination of an invader. Thus the “people” exists according to the
future perfect of a nonexistent state. The second is the existence of a
people who declares itself as such, beginning from its central core, which
is precisely what the official state excludes from its supposedly legitimate

30 notes on the uses of the word “people”

“people.” Such a people asserts its existence politically in the strategic
aim of abolishing the existing state.

23

The “people” is therefore a political category, either leading up to the

existence of a desired state denied existence by some power or in the
aftermath of an established state of which a new people, both interior
and exterior to the official people, requires its demise.

24

The word “people” has a positive sense only with regard to the possible
nonexistence of the state. Either the forbidden state whose creation is
desired. Or the official state whose disappearance is desired. The “peo-
ple” is a word that takes all its value either, in transitory forms, from
the wars of national liberation or, in definitive forms, from communist
politics.

notes on the uses of the word “people” 31

 2

YOU S AID “POPULAR”?

pierre bourdieu

POPULAR. Adj. (Populeir, XIIe; lat. popularis). 1: What belongs to the peo-
ple, emanates from the people. Popular government. “The Greek politics that lived
in the popular government” (Montesquieu). See Democratic. Popular democracies.
Popular demonstration, insurrection. Popular front: the union of leftist powers
(communists, socialists, etc.). The popular masses. 2: Belonging to the people.
Popular belief, traditions. Popular good sense. — Ling. What is created and used by
the people and rarely used among the bourgeoisie and cultivated classes.
Popular word, expression. Popular Latin. Popular expression, locution, turn of phrase. For
the use of the people (and emanating from them or not). Popular novel, show.
Popular songs. Popular art (See Folklore). — (Individuals) Who address them-
selves to the people. “You must not be successful as a popular speaker” (Maurois).
Who is recruited among the people, what the people frequent. Popular
circles, classes. “They found a new formula: to work for a downright popular clientele”
(Romains). Popular origins. See Plebeian. Popular balls. Popular soups. 3: (1559)
What pleases the people, in the greatest number. Henri IV was a popular
king. Popular measure. “Hoffmann is popular in France, more popular than in Germany”
(Gautier). 4: Noun (Vx). The popular, the people. ANT. (of 3:) Unpopular.
—Le Petit Robert (1979)

32
The idioms that include the magic epithet “popular” are protected
from scrutiny by the fact that all critical analysis of a notion touching
closely or distantly on the “people” is subject immediately to being
identified as a symbolic aggression against the reality so designated—
and thus immediately denounced by all those whose duty it is to
defend the cause of the “people” and to thus ensure themselves the
profits that defending “good causes,” especially in favorable circum-
stances, can also procure.1 That is the case with the notion of
“popular language,” which, in the manner of all expressions in the
same family (“popular culture,” “popular art,” “popular religion,” and
so on) is only defined relationally, as is the whole of what is excluded
from legitimate language by, among other things, the durable action
of inculcation and imposition matched with sanctions exercised by
the school system.
As slang or “nonconventional French” dictionaries clearly reveal,
the so-called popular lexicon is nothing other than the whole of the
words that are excluded from the dictionaries of legitimate language
or that only appear there accompanied by negative “usage marks”:
fam., familiar, “that is to say commonly used in ordinary spoken lan-
guage and in casual written language”; pop., popular, “that is to say
commonly used among the urban popular or working classes but
reproved or avoided by the cultivated bourgeoisie.”2 In order to
define with utmost rigor this “popular” or “nonconventional” lan-
guage, better referred to as pop. henceforth, lest we forget the social
conditions of its production, we must thus specify what is meant by
the expression “popular or working classes” and what is to be under-
stood by “commonly used.”
Like the variable geometry concepts of the “popular classes,” the
“people,” or the “workers,” which owe their political virtues to the
fact that their referents can be expanded as desired—in election peri-
ods for example—to include rural populations, managerial staff, and
small business owners or, on the contrary, restricted to include just
industrial workers or even just steelworkers (and their appointed

you said “popular”? 33

representatives), the notion of “popular or working classes,” with its
indeterminate extension, owes its trickster virtues, in scholarly pro-
duction, to the fact that anyone can, as in a projective test, uncon-
sciously manipulate that extension to adjust it to one’s own interests,
prejudices, or social fantasies. That is why, when it is a matter of des-
ignating the speakers of the “popular language,” everyone agrees to
consider the “lowlife,” given the idea that the “toughs” play a deter-
minant role in the production and circulation of slang, resolutely
excluded from legitimate dictionaries. We must be sure to include as
well the indigenous workers of urban stock that the word “popular”
almost automatically evokes whereas rural workers will automatically
be excluded with little more justification (no doubt because they are
known to be destined for the usage mark of region., regional). But the
question will not even arise—and this is one of the most precious
functions of these catchall notions—if the small business owners
must be excluded or not, especially the café owners whom the popu-
list imagination will undoubtedly exclude, whereas, for the culture as
for the language, they are indisputably closer to the workers than the
middle-level management and employees. And it is certain in any
case that the fantasy, nourished more on Marcel Carné films than
on observation, that most often directs the folklorist recollection
of nostalgic renegades toward the “purest” of the most “authentic”
representatives of the “people” excludes without consideration all
immigrants, Spanish or Portuguese, Algerian or Moroccan, Malian
or Senegalese, whom we know occupy a more important place in the
population of industrial workers than the imaginary proletariat.3
It would be sufficient to submit to similar examination the popu-
lations that supposedly produce or consume so-called popular culture
to find the same confusion in the partial coherence that the implicit
definitions almost always conceal: the “lowlife,” which plays a central
role in the case of “popular language,” would be excluded here, as
well as the lumpenproletariat, while the elimination of rural work-
ers would no longer be a given, even though the coexistence of the

34 you said “popular”?

inevitable urban working class and the rural populations is not with-
out difficulties. In the case of “popular art,” as an examination of this
other objectification of “popular” would clearly show, the “people,”
those “muses of the popular arts and traditions” at least until recent
times, are reduced to peasants and rural artisans. And what does
“popular medicine” or “popular religion” mean? In these cases, we
can no more do without the rural populations, men or women, than
we can do without the “toughs” in the case of “popular language.”
In their efforts to treat it as a “language”—that is to say with all
the rigor ordinarily reserved for the legitimate language—all those
who have tried to describe or to write in the pop., linguists and writ-
ers alike, have condemned themselves to producing artifacts bear-
ing almost no relationship to the ordinary speech that the speakers
most estranged from the legitimate language use in their inter-
nal exchanges.4 So it is that, in order to conform to the dominant
dictionary model whereby only words attested “with appreciable
frequency and over long durations” are included, the authors of non-
conventional French dictionaries rely exclusively on texts.5 And thus
by making a selection within a selection, they subject the speech in
question to an essential alteration with regard to the frequencies that
make all the difference between the kinds of speech and the more
or less strained markets.6 They forget, among other things, that to
write speech, like that of the working classes, that is without literary
intention (and not to transcribe it or record it), it is necessary to be
outside of situations and even of the social condition in which it is
spoken, and that interest in the “coinages,” or even the very fact of
selective recollection, excluding all that is encountered in the stan-
dard language as well, overturns the structure of frequencies.
If, despite their incoherences and their uncertainties, and also
thanks to them, the notions belonging to the family of the “popular”
can prove so useful, and even in scholarly discourse, it is because they
are deeply entrenched in the network of confused representations
that social subjects engender, for the needs of ordinary knowledge

you said “popular”? 35

of the social world, and for which the logic is that of mythical rea-
son. The vision of the social world, and above all the perception of oth-
ers, of their corporal hexis, the form and volume of their bodies, and
especially of their faces, and also their voices, their pronunciation
and vocabulary, is organized in effect according to interconnected
and partially independent oppositions, about which one can get an
idea by making an inventory of the expressive resources collected
and preserved in the language, especially in the system of adjective pairs
that users of the legitimate language employ to classify others and to
judge their quality, and in which the term designating the properties
attributed to the dominants always represents positive value.7
If the social sciences must make a privileged place for the sci-
ence of ordinary knowledge of the social world, it is not only in crit-
ical intention and in view of ridding the thinking about the social
world of all the presuppositions that it tends to accept through ordi-
nary words and the objects that they construct (“popular language,”
“slang,” “patois,” and so on). It is also that this practical knowledge,
against which the science must be constructed—and first of all by
endeavoring to objectify it—forms an integral part of the very world
that the science aims to know: it contributes to the making of that
world by contributing to the vision that agents can have of it and by
thus orienting their actions, in particular those that aim at conserving
or transforming it. That is why a rigorous science of the spontaneous
sociolinguistics that agents put to work to anticipate the reactions
of others and to impose the representation that they want to give of
themselves would permit, among other things, an understanding of
a good part of what, in linguistic practice, is the object or the prod-
uct of conscious intervention, individual or collective, spontaneous
or institutionalized: as for example all the corrections that speakers
impose on themselves or that are imposed on them—at home or
at school—on the basis of practical knowledge, partially registered
in the language itself (accent pointu—“northern accent,” marseillais—
“Marseilles accent,” faubourien—“Paris working-class accent,” and so

36 you said “popular”?

on), of the correspondences between linguistic differences and social
differences and beginning with a more or less conscious pinpointing
of linguistic traits marked or remarked upon as imperfect or incor-
rect (notably by the form, “Say . . . , don’t say . . .” in all linguistic cus-
tomaries) or, alternatively, as distinguishing and refined.8
The notion of “popular language” is one of the products of the
application of the dualist taxonomies that structure the social world
according to categories of high and low (“low” language), delicate or
coarse (coarse words) or crude (crude jokes), distinguished or vul-
gar, rare or common, formal or casual, in short, categories of culture
and nature (don’t we speak of slang as langue verte—literally “green
language” and “raw words”?). These are the mythical categories that
introduce a distinct cleavage in the continuum of kinds of speech,
ignoring, for example, all the overlapping between the casual speech
of the dominant speakers ( fam.) and the strained speech of the dom-
inated speakers (that observers like Bauche or Frei list as pop.) and
especially the extreme diversity in the kinds of speech that are uni-
versally consigned to the negative category of “popular language.”9
But through a sort of paradoxical reduplication, which is one of
the standard effects of symbolic domination, the dominated them-
selves, or at least certain fractions of them, can apply to their own
social universe principles of division (such as strong vs. weak or sub-
missive; intelligent vs. sensitive or sensual; hard vs. soft or flexible;
straight or direct vs. crooked, sly, or false; and so on) that repro-
duce in their order the fundamental structure of the system of dom-
inant oppositions in matters of language.10 This representation of
the social world adopts the essence of the dominant vision through
the opposition between virility and docility, strength and weakness,
real men (the durs, the mecs) and the other feminine or effeminate
beings doomed to submission and contempt.11 Slang, which has been
made into the “popular language” par excellence, is the product of
this reduplication that brings to bear on “popular language” itself the

you said “popular”? 37

principles of division of which it is a product. There is a vague feel-
ing that linguistic conformity conceals a form of acknowledgment
and submission, enough to call into doubt the virility of those men
who conform.12 Added to that is the active pursuit of a distinctive
deviation that constitutes style. And together these lead to refus-
ing to “overdo it,” which leads to rejecting the most strongly marked
aspects of the dominant speech, and notably the pronunciations
and the most strained syntactical forms, as well as simultaneously
pursuing expressiveness, based on the transgression of dominant
censures—notably in matters of sexuality—and with the intention of
distinguishing oneself from the ordinary forms of expression.13 The
transgression of official norms, linguistic or otherwise, is directed at
least as much against the “ordinary” dominated who submit to them
as it is against the dominant or, a fortiori, against the domination as
such. Linguistic license is part of the work of representation and of pre-
senting what the “toughs,” especially adolescents, must provide to
impose on others and themselves the image of the mec who has seen
it all and is ready for anything and who refuses to give in to feelings
or submit to the weaknesses of feminine sensitivity. And in fact, even
if it can, in divulging itself, encounter the proclivity of all the domi-
nated to return the distinction, that is to say the specific difference,
to the common genre, that is to say to the universality of the biolog-
ical, through irony, sarcasm, or parody, the systematic degradation of
emotional, moral, or aesthetic values, where all the analysts have rec-
ognized the deep “intention” of the slang lexicon, is first of all an
affirmation of aristocratism.
As a distinguished form—even in the eyes of some of the
dominants—of “vulgar” language, slang is the product of a search for
distinction but dominated and condemned by this fact to produce
paradoxical effects, which we cannot understand when we want to
contain them within the alternative of resistance or submission that
controls ordinary thinking on “popular language” (or “popular cul-
ture”). Indeed it is enough to exit the logic of the mythical vision

38 you said “popular”?

to perceive the counterproductive effects that are inherent to any
dominated position: when the pursuit of the dominated for distinc-
tion leads them to affirm what distinguishes them, that is to say,
whatever it is in the name of which they are dominated and consti-
tuted as vulgar, according to a logic analogical to the one that leads
stigmatized groups to claim the stigmata as fundamental to their
identity, is it necessary to speak of resistance? And when, alterna-
tively, they work to lose what marks them as vulgar, and to appropri-
ate what would allow them to be assimilated, is it necessary to speak
of submission?



In order to escape the effects of the dualistic mode of thought that leads
to opposing a “standard” language, the measure of all language, to a
“popular” language, it is necessary to return to the model of all linguistic
production and rediscover there the principle of the extreme diversity
in kinds of speech that results in the diversity of possible combinations
among the various classes of linguistic habitus and markets. Among the
determining factors of the habitus that seem relevant from the perspec-
tive, on the one hand, of the propensity to recognize (in both senses)
the constituent censures of the dominant markets or to profit from the
obligatory freedoms that certain free markets offer and, on the other hand,
of the capacity to satisfy the requirements of one or the other, we can
thus retain: the sex, a principle of very different relationships in various
possible markets—and in the dominant market in particular; the gener-
ation, that is to say the familial and especially scholastic mode of gener-
ation of linguistic competence; the social position, characterized notably
from the perspective of the social composition of the work environ-
ment and the socially homogeneous (with the dominated) or hetero-
geneous (with the dominant—in the case, for example, of service staff )
exchanges that they foster; the social origin, rural or urban and, in this
case, old or recent; and finally the ethnic origin.

you said “popular”? 39

 It is obviously among men and, within that group, among the
youngest and—at present and especially potentially—the least inte-
grated into the economic and social order, like the adolescents com-
ing from immigrant families, that we encounter the most marked
refusal of the submission and docility that adopting legitimate ways
of speaking implies. The moral code of force that finds its fulfillment
in the cult of violence and semi-suicidal games, motorcycles, alco-
hol, or hard drugs, where the relationship to the future for those who
have nothing to look forward to in the future is affirmed, is no doubt
only one of the ways of making a virtue of necessity. The flaunted
stance of realism and cynicism, the rejection of feeling and sensitiv-
ity, identified with feminine or effeminate sentimentality, the kind of
duty to be tough, for oneself as for others, that leads to the desper-
ate effronteries of the aristocratism of the pariah, are a way of tak-
ing one’s part in a dead-end world dominated by poverty and the
law of the jungle, discrimination, and violence, where morality and
sensitivity are entirely without profit.14 The moral code that consti-
tutes transgression imposes the duty of displaying one’s resistance
to the official norms, linguistic or otherwise, which can only be con-
tinually sustained at the cost of extraordinary tension and, espe-
cially for adolescents, with the constant reinforcement of the group.
Like popular realism, which assumes and produces the adjustment
of hopes to chances, it constitutes a mechanism of defense and sur-
vival: those compelled to position themselves outside the law to
obtain satisfactions that others obtain within the limits of legality
know only too well the cost of revolt. As Paul E. Willis has clearly
seen, the poses and postures of bravado (toward authority, for exam-
ple, and above all toward the police) can coexist with a deep con-
formism to all that concerns hierarchies, and not only between the
sexes, and ostentatious toughness that human respect imposes does
not in the least exclude nostalgia for solidarity, indeed even for affec-
tion, which, simultaneously fulfilled and repressed by the highly cen-
sored exchanges of the gang, is expressed or revealed in moments of

40 you said “popular”?

abandon.15 Slang—and this, along with the effect of symbolic impo-
sition, is one of the reasons for its diffusion well beyond the limits
of the “lowlife” strictly speaking—constitutes one of the exemplary,
and if we may say so, ideal, expressions—which political expres-
sion proper must be able to reckon with, indeed even employ—of
the vision, essentially constructed against feminine (or effeminate)
“weakness” or “submission,” that the men most lacking in economic
and cultural capital hold of their masculine identity and of a social
world entirely situated under the sign of toughness.16
All the same we must be careful not to ignore the profound trans-
formations in function and meaning undergone by borrowed words
or phrases when they pass into the ordinary speech of everyday
exchanges. That is why some of the most typical products of the aris-
tocratic cynicism of the “toughs” can, in their common use, func-
tion as kinds of neutralized and neutralizing conventions that allow
men to express, within the limits of a very strict propriety, affection,
love, and friendship, or simply just to name beloved beings, parents,
son, or wife (the more or less ironic use of reference terms like “the
old lady,” “queen mother,” or “the missus” allowing men to avoid, for
example, expressions like “my wife” or the simple first name, felt to
be too familiar).17
At the opposite extreme in the hierarchy of dispositions toward
the legitimate language, we would no doubt find the youngest and
most schooled among the women who, however tied by occupation
or by marriage to the universe of agents weakly endowed with eco-
nomic or cultural capital, are clearly sensitive to the demands of the
dominant market and are able to respond to it, which makes them
similar to the petite bourgeoisie. As for the effect of generation, it
essentially merges with the effect of changes in the mode of gener-
ation, that is to say, access to the school system, which clearly rep-
resents the most important differentiation factor between the ages.
All the same, it is not certain that the action of schooling exer-
cises the effect of homogenization of linguistic abilities that it

you said “popular”? 41

assigns itself and that one would be tempted to attribute to it. First,
because the scholastic norms of expression, when they are accepted,
can remain circumscribed in their application to school products,
oral and especially written; second, because school tends to distrib-
ute students in classes as homogeneous as possible with regard to
scholastic criteria, and as a correlative, from the perspective of social
criteria, in such a way that the peer group tends to exercise effects
that, as one descends in the social hierarchy of educational estab-
lishments and sections and thus in social origins, are more and more
strongly opposed to those that pedagogical action can produce; and
finally, because paradoxically, by creating long-lasting, homogeneous
groups of adolescents at odds with the school system and, through it,
with the social order, and placed in a situation of semi-inactivity and
prolonged irresponsibility,18 the sections to which the children of
the most destitute classes are relegated—notably the sons of immi-
grants, especially North Africans—have undoubtedly contributed to
providing the most favorable conditions for the development of a
kind of “delinquent culture” that, among other ways, is expressed in
speech at odds with the norms of legitimate language.
No one can completely ignore linguistic or cultural law, and every
time they enter into an exchange with those who possess legitimate
competence, and especially when they find themselves in official sit-
uations, the dominated are condemned to a practical, corporal rec-
ognition of the laws of price formation most unfavorable to their
linguistic productions, which condemns them to a more or less des-
perate effort toward correction or toward silence. It remains true
that the markets they confront can be classified according to their
degree of autonomy, from the most completely subject to the dom-
inant norms (like those that are imposed in relationships with the
legal, medical, or school systems) to the most completely free of
those laws (like those that are constituted in prisons or youth gangs).
The affirmation of a linguistic counter-legitimacy and, at the same

42 you said “popular”?

time, the production of discourse founded on the more or less delib-
erate ignorance of conventions and proprieties characteristic of the
dominant markets are only possible within the limits of the free mar-
kets, regulated by the laws of price formation that are exclusive to
them, that is to say, in the spaces belonging to the dominated classes,
haunts or refuges of the excluded from which the dominant are in
fact excluded, at least symbolically, and for the appointed possessors
of the social and linguistic competence that is recognized in those
markets. The slang of the “lowlife,” as actual transgression of the
fundamental principles of cultural legitimacy, constitutes an affirma-
tion consistent with a social and cultural identity not only different
but opposed, and the vision of the world expressed by it represents
the limit toward which the (masculine) members of the dominated
classes tend in linguistic exchanges internal to the class, and most espe-
cially in the most controlled and sustained of those exchanges, as
those in bars and cafés, which are completely dominated by the val-
ues of force and masculinity, one of the only principles of effective
resistance, along with politics, against the dominant ways of speak-
ing and acting.
The internal markets distinguish themselves according to the ten-
sion that characterizes them and, at the same time, according to the
degree of censorship that they impose, and one can hypothesize that
the frequency of the most affected forms (of slang) declines as the ten-
sion of the markets and the linguistic competence of the speakers
decline. It is minimal in private and familiar exchanges (exchanges
within the family ranking first among these) where independence
in relationship to the norms of legitimate speech is marked espe-
cially by the more or less complete freedom to ignore the conventions
and proprieties of the dominant speech, and it undoubtedly reaches
its maximum in public exchanges (almost exclusively masculine) that
impose a veritable stylistic affectation, as in the verbal jousts and osten-
tatious outbidding of some café conversations.

you said “popular”? 43

 

Despite the enormous simplification that it assumes, this model makes

apparent the extreme diversity of the discourses that are practically
engendered in the relationship between the various linguistic compe-
tences corresponding to the various combinations of characteristics
attached to the producers and the various classes of markets. But more
importantly, it allows us to draw up the program of methodical observation and
to constitute as such the most significant scenarios in which are situ-
ated all the linguistic productions of the speakers most lacking in lin-
guistic capital. That is, first of all, the forms of discourse presented by the
virtuosos in the most strained—that is to say public—of the free mar-
kets and, in particular, slang; secondly, the expressions produced for the
dominant markets, that is to say the private exchanges between domi-
nated and dominant, or for official situations, and that can take the form
of embarrassed or broken speech through the effect of intimidation or
of silence, the only form of expression that is left, very often, to the dom-
inated; and last of all, the discourses produced for familiar and private
exchanges—for example between women—these last two categories of
discourse always being excluded by those who, characterizing linguistic
productions by the characteristics of the speakers alone, must according
to good logic put them into the category of “popular language.”
The effect of censorship that any relatively strained market exer-
cises is seen in the fact that the words exchanged in public places
reserved in fact (at least during certain hours) to adult men of the
working classes, like some bars or cafés, are heavily ritualized and
subject to strict rules: one does not go to the bar just to drink but
also to participate actively in a collective diversion capable of provid-
ing the participants with a feeling of freedom in relationship to the
daily necessities, and of producing an atmosphere of social eupho-
ria and economic license to which the consumption of alcohol can
clearly only contribute. One is there to laugh and to make others
laugh, and each participant must, according to his means, throw

44 you said “popular”?

into the exchange his jokes and witticisms, or at the very least make
his contribution to the festivities by reinforcing others’ successes
with his laughter and his approving exclamations (Ah! celui-là!—
“Yes! That’s it!”). Possessing a talent for always being good for
a laugh, being able to embody, at the cost of the conscious and con-
stant work of pursuit and accumulation, the ideal of the “life of the
party” who brings to his accomplishment an approved form of socia-
bility, is a very precious form of capital. That is what the good bar
owner finds in the mastery of expressive conventions suitable to this
market, jokes, good stories, wordplay, that his permanent and cen-
tral position allows him to acquire and display, and also in his special
knowledge of the rules of the game and distinctive characteristics of
each player, first names, last names, odd habits, shortcomings, spe-
cialties, and talents that he can turn to good account, the resources
necessary for prompting, maintaining, and also containing, through
incitements, boasts, or discrete calls to order, the exchanges capa-
ble of producing the atmosphere of social effervescence that his cli-
ents are seeking and that they themselves must supply.19 The quality
of the conversation provided depends upon the quality of the par-
ticipants, which itself depends upon the quality of the conversation,
and so upon the one who is at the center of it and who must know
how to deny the mercenary relationship by affirming his will and his
ability to join the circuit of exchanges as an ordinary participant—
with a “free round” or a “drink on the house” offered to regulars—
and thus to contribute to the suspension of economic necessities and
social constraints that is expected from the collective worship of the
good life.20
We understand that the discourse that circulates on this mar-
ket only gives the appearance of total freedom and absolute natural-
ness to those who are unaware of its rules or principles. That is why
its eloquence, which an outside perspective apprehends as a kind of
unbridled verve, is neither more nor less free within its genre than
the improvisations of academic eloquence. Neither is it unaware of

you said “popular”? 45

trying for effect, or of the audience’s attention and reactions, or of
rhetorical strategies aimed at winning the audience’s favor or indul-
gence. It relies on proven but appropriate schemas of invention and
expression to give those who do not possess them the feeling of wit-
nessing dazzling displays of analytical acuity or political or psycho-
logical lucidity. Through the tremendous redundancy tolerated by its
rhetoric, through the place it gives to the repetition of ritual forms
and formulas that are the required demonstrations of a “good edu-
cation,” through its systematic recourse to concrete images from
the familiar world, through the obsessional obstinacy that it takes
to reaffirm, even in their formal renewal, the fundamental values of
the group, this discourse expresses and reinforces a profoundly stable
and rigid vision of the world. In this system of obvious facts, tirelessly
reaffirmed and collectively guaranteed, that assigns to each class of
agents its essence, and thus its place and rank, the representation of
the division of labor between the sexes occupies a central place, per-
haps because the cult of masculinity, that is to say of toughness, phys-
ical force, and gruff coarseness, established by elective rejection of
effeminate refinement, is one of the most effective ways of struggling
against the cultural inferiority in which all those who feel deprived of
cultural capital find themselves, whether they are otherwise rich in
economic capital, like the merchants, or not.21
At the opposite extreme in the class of free markets, the market
of exchanges among familiars, and especially among women, distin-
guishes itself in that the very idea of affectation and effect is almost
absent there, so that the discourse circulating in it differs in form, as
we have seen, from that of the public exchanges in bars and cafés; it
is in the logic of deprivation, more than of rejection, that it defines
itself in relation to legitimate discourse. As for the dominant mar-
kets, public and official or private, to the most economically and cul-
turally deprived, they pose problems so difficult that if we confined
ourselves to the definition of speech based on the social characteris-
tics of the speakers, the definition implicitly adopted by the tenants

46 you said “popular”?

of “popular language,” we would have to say that the most frequent
form of this language is silence. In fact, it is again according to the
logic of the division of labor between the sexes that the contradic-
tion resulting from the necessity to confront the dominant mar-
kets without conforming to the affectation of correction is resolved.
Because it is acknowledged (and first of all by women, who can pre-
tend to deplore it) that a man is defined by the right and duty of con-
stancy to himself that is a component of his identity (“he is the way
he is”) and that he can confine himself to a silence that allows him
to safeguard his masculine pride, it often becomes incumbent upon
the woman, socially defined as flexible and submissive by nature, to
make the necessary effort to confront perilous situations, to meet
with the doctor, to describe symptoms and discuss treatments, to
approach the school teacher or Social Security, and so on.22 It follows
that the “mistakes” that are based on an unfortunate affectation of
correction or a misdirected concern for distinction and that, like all
distorted words, especially medical ones, are mercilessly picked out
by the petite bourgeoisie—and by “popular language” grammars—
are undoubtedly very often owed to women (for which they can be
mocked by “their” men—which is again a way of relegating women
to their “nature” as fusspots).23
In fact, even in this case, demonstrations of docility are never
without ambivalence, and they always threaten to revert into aggres-
siveness at the least rebuff, at the least sign of irony or distance, which
converts them into the tributes required by statutory dependence.
One who, upon entering into too unequal a social relationship, too
visibly adopts the appropriated language and manners exposes one-
self to being forced to conceive of and experience elective reverence
as obligatory submission and self-interested servility. The image of
the domestic, which owes its conspicuous conformity to the domi-
nant norms of verbal etiquette and service uniforms, haunts all rela-
tionships between the dominated and dominant, and notably the
service exchanges, as made evident by the almost insoluble problems

you said “popular”? 47

that “remuneration” poses. That is why ambivalence toward domi-
nants and their lifestyle, so common among men performing service
functions, which wavers between the inclination to nervous con-
formity and the temptation to allow themselves familiarities and to
degrade the dominants by raising themselves to their level, undoubt-
edly represents the truth and the limit of the relationship that the
men most lacking in linguistic capital and vowed to the alternative
of coarseness and servility maintain with the dominant mode of
expression.24 Paradoxically, it is only when the solemnity of the occa-
sion justifies, in their eyes, situating themselves within a more noble
register, without feeling ridiculous or servile, that they can adopt the
language that is more conventional but the only one suited to their
meaning, to saying serious things; for example, to express their love
or display their sympathy in mourning. That is to say, in the very
cases when the dominant norms require that one abandon ready-
made conventions and formulas for demonstrating the strength and
sincerity of one’s feelings.



Thus it appears that the linguistic and cultural productions of the dom-
inated vary profoundly according to their inclination and aptitude for
taking advantage of the regulated freedoms that the free market offers or
for accepting the restraints that the dominant markets impose. Which
explains how, in the polymorphous reality obtained by considering all
the kinds of speech produced by all the markets through all the catego-
ries of producers, all those who feel they have the right or duty to speak
of the “people” can find an objective medium for their interests or their
fantasies.

48 you said “popular”?

 3

“We, the People”

T h o u g h t s o n F r e e d o m o f A s s e m b ly

judith butler

There are many examples of people coming together, forming a way

of speaking as a collective, and demanding a change in policy or a
dissolution of a government. Tahrir Square has become emblem-
atic of this assembly of bodies on the street who first demanded the
dissolution of the Mubarak regime and then continued, in different
configurations, to arrive on the street en masse to object to various
policies of the transitional regime, to the appointment of officials
known to have engaged in torture in the previous regime, oppos-
ing the accelerated pace by which a new constitution was forged and
objecting most recently to the dissolution of the court system by the
president’s unilateral decree. What kind of “we” is this who assem-
bles in the street and asserts itself sometimes by speech or action,
by gesture, but more often than not by coming together as a group
of bodies in public space, visible, audible, tangible, exposed, persis-
tent, and interdependent. Although we often think that the speech
act by which “we, the people” consolidates its popular sovereignty
is one that issues from such an assembly, it is perhaps more appro-
priate to say that the assembly is already speaking and is already an

49
enactment of popular sovereignty. The “we” voiced in language is
already enacted by the assembly of bodies, their gestures and move-
ments, their vocalizations, and their ways of acting in concert, to cite
Hannah Arendt.1
The right to exercise the freedom of assembly, sometimes under-
stood as the freedom of association, is by now well documented in
international law.2 The International Labour Organization makes
explicit that the right of assembly (or association) is tied to the rights
of collective bargaining.3 In some human rights discourses, the free-
dom of assembly is described as a fundamental form of freedom that
deserves protection by any government without interference (the
use of police and judicial powers to enact indefinite detention or
arrest, harassment, assault, or disappearances). Freedom of assembly
does not depend upon that protection in those cases when the pro-
tective power of the state is contested by such an assembly or when
a specific state has contravened the right of assembly such that its
population can no longer freely congregate without threat of state
interference. So the freedom of assembly is something other than
a specific right protected by existing national or international law,
including human rights law. Indeed, the freedom of assembly may
well be a precondition of politics itself.
How, then, do we think about the freedom of assembly and pop-
ular sovereignty? Although elected officials are supposed to repre-
sent popular sovereignty (or the “popular will” more specifically)
by virtue of having been elected by a majority of the population, it
does not follow that popular sovereignty is in any way exhausted by
the electoral process or that elections fully transfer sovereignty from
the populace to its elected representatives. The populace remains
separate from those elected and can continue to contest the con-
ditions and results of elections, as well as the actions of elected offi-
cials. So “popular sovereignty” certainly translates into elected power
on the occasion of a vote, but that is never a full translation. Some-
thing remains untranslatable about popular sovereignty since it can

50 “we, the people”

surely bring down regimes as well as elect them. As much as pop-
ular sovereignty legitimates parliamentary forms of power, it also
retains the power to delegitimate those same forms. If parliamentary
forms of power require popular sovereignty, they also surely fear it,
for there is something about popular sovereignty that runs counter
to, and exceeds, every parliamentary form that it institutes. Even an
elected regime can be brought to a halt or overcome by that assem-
bly of people who speak “in the name of the people,” enacting the
very “we” that holds final legitimating power under conditions of
democratic rule. In other words, the conditions of democratic rule
depend finally upon an exercise of popular sovereignty that is never
fully contained by any particular democratic order. Popular sover-
eignty might be understood as an extra-parliamentary power with-
out which no parliament can function, and which threatens every
parliament with dysfunction or even dissolution. We can call it an
“anarchist” energy or a permanent principle of revolution within
democratic orders. In either case, it depends upon a set of bod-
ies assembled and assembling, whose actions effectively constitute
themselves as “the people.”
Of course, it is never really the case that all of the possible people
who are represented by “the people” show up to claim that they are
the people! So “we, the people” always has its constitutive outside, as
we know. It is thus surely not the fact that the “we” fairly and fully
represents all the people; it cannot, even though it can strive for more
inclusive aims. Indeed, those who assemble as the “we” who are “the
people” are not representing the people but providing the legitimat-
ing ground for those who do come to represent the people through
elections. The people who are the “we” do something other than rep-
resent themselves; they constitute themselves as the people, and this
act of self-making or self-constitution is not the same as any form of
representation. Something nonrepresentative and nearly tautolog-
ical thus becomes the basis of democratic forms of government—
popular sovereignty is thus a way of forming a people through an act

“we, the people” 51

of self-designation. This act of self-designating and self-constituting
forms an assembly that articulates itself as the “people.” Popular sov-
ereignty is thus a form of reflexive self-making that is separate from
the very representative regime it legitimates. It cannot do this work
of legitimation unless it is independent of any particular regime.
In what sense is popular sovereignty a performative exercise?
It would seem, then, that “we, the people” is first and foremost
a speech act that is self-designating and self-constituting. Someone
says “we” along with someone else, or some group says it together,
and when they say it, they seek to constitute themselves as “the peo-
ple” at that moment. So, considered as a speech act, “we, the peo-
ple” is an enunciation that seeks to bring about the social plurality
it names. It does not describe that plurality but seeks to bring about
the social plurality that speaks it. It would seem, then, that a linguis-
tic form of autogenesis is at work in the expression “we, the peo-
ple”; it seems to be a rather magical act, or at least one that compels
us to believe in the magical nature of the performative.4 Of course,
“we, the people” starts a longer declaration of wants and desires, or
intended acts, and political claims. It is a preamble, so it prepares the
way for a specific set of assertions. It is a phrase that gets us ready for
a substantive political claim, and yet, in this volume, we are asked to
pause at this way of starting up the sentence and ask whether a polit-
ical claim is already being made, or is in the making. It is perhaps
impossible for all the people who might say “we, the people” at the
same time to speak that phrase in unison. And if somehow an assem-
bled group were to yell out “we, the people,” as sometimes happens
in the assemblies of the Occupy movement, it is a brief and transi-
tory moment, one in which a single person speaks at the same time
that others speak, and some unintended plural sounding results from
that concerted plural action, that speech act spoken in common.
But let us admit that such a moment of literally speaking in uni-
son, and naming ourselves as “the people,” rarely happens quite like
that—simultaneous and plural. After all, the declaration of “we, the

52 “we, the people”

people” in the United States is a citation, and the phrase is never
fully freed of its citationality. The Constitution begins with such a
phrase, one that authorizes the writers to speak for the people more
generally. It is a phrase that establishes political authority at the same
time that it declares a form of popular sovereignty bound by no one
political authority. Popular sovereignty can give itself (in assent) and
withdraw itself (in dissent or in revolution), which means that every
regime is dependent upon popular sovereignty being given if it hopes
to base its legitimacy on something other than coercion.
The speech act, however punctual, is nevertheless inserted in a
citational chain, and that means that the temporal conditions for
making the speech act precede and exceed the momentary occasion
of its enunciation. And for yet another reason, the speech act, how-
ever illocutionary, is not fully tethered to the moment of its enunci-
ation: the plurality designated and produced by the utterance cannot
all assemble in the same place to speak at the same time, so it is both
a spatially and temporally extended phenomenon. When and where
popular sovereignty—the self-legislative power of the people—is
“declared,” or rather “declares itself,” it is not exactly at an instant but
instead through a series of speech acts or performative enactments.
We can postulate the scene of a public assembly in which everyone
speaks in one voice, but this scene is both abstract and somewhat
frightening—invoking a kind of Gleichschaltung that suggests a fascist
march or militaristic chant of some kind. “We, the people” does not
presuppose or make a unity but founds or institutes a set of debates
about who the people are and what they want.
I take it that we do not really want every person speaking in the
exact same way when popular sovereignty is being asserted, or even
“saying” the same words. (Which language would be used for such
an idea of concerted plural expression? And what form of hegemony
would that install?) And yet, “we, the people” is a phrase that we take
to be emblematic of a form of popular sovereignty that assumes that
the people can and do act together to name themselves and so to

“we, the people” 53

collect themselves in a plural political form. This does not mean that
they agree with one another but only that they understand that the
process of self-making is a collective or shared one. When someone
tries to mobilize “we, the people,” we look over to see who says it,
whether they have a right to say it, but whether, in saying it, their
speech act will be effective, gathering forth the people in the very
saying. The phrase does not tell us who the people are, but it marks
the form of self-constitution in which that debate over who they are
and should be begins to take place.
So if we were following J. L. Austin, “we, the people” would be
considered an illocutionary speech act that constitutes its object
(itself ) at the moment of its enunciation.5 And yet, as citational, I
would suggest that is actually constituted time and again, and always
only partially, through a sequence or a cluster of performative enact-
ments that turn out not always to be a simultaneous and plural form
of self-designation. As we perhaps can see, “we, the people” is a
phrase, then, that conducts an implicit critique of the magical pow-
ers of the enunciatory act, the illocutionary performative. It is rarely
spoken as such, and yet it speaks through other acts. And if we imag-
ine that a group must first assemble in a particular place, a public
square or some equivalent, in order to proclaim “we, the people,”
then we fail to recognize that the act of assembling and reassembling is already doing
the work of the phrase; in other words, assembling is already a perfor-
mative political enactment even if it is prior to, and apart from, any
particular speech act. Implied by such a notion is that bodies assem-
bled together to assert their plural existence are already engaged in
self-designation and the exercise of popular sovereignty, lending or
withdrawing their support, declaring their independence from the
regimes that depend upon it for legitimacy. The performative is thus
outside of electoral power at the same time that it functions as its
legitimation. Enacted by bodies arriving in a space and time together,
or through circuitries that connect diverse spaces and times, polit-
ical performatives do not have to be spoken in unison, or even in

54 “we, the people”

the same language, to be constituting themselves as “a people.” And
when they assemble, or scatter and then reassemble, the performa-
tive is no longer a punctual “act” or discrete occasion of enunciation
(although it can sometimes surely take that form). So, then, we are
left with this question: does the speech act by which “we, the people” is declared
finally not take place in speech, and prove to be something other than a single act?
I propose to think about the assembly of bodies as a performative
enactment and so to suggest not only that (a) popular sovereignty is
a performative exercise, but (b) it necessarily involves a performa-
tive enactment of bodies. First, I propose that we have to understand
the idea of popular sovereignty that “we, the people” seeks to secure.
In the Declaration of Independence, as Derrida has shown, there is
already a kind of stumbling that takes place.6 If the “we” who hold
these truths to be self-evident are the people, then we are already in
a bit of a bind. A performative declaration seeks to bring about those
truths, but if they are “self-evident” then they are precisely the kinds
of truths that do not need to be brought about at all. Either they are
performatively induced or they are self-evident, but to bring about
that which is self-evident seems paradoxical. We could say that a
set of truths is being brought into being, or we could say that we
found those truths somewhere and that we did not bring them into
being. Or we can say that the kind of truths at issue here have to be
declared as self-evident for that self-evidence to be known. In other
words, they have to be made evident, which means that they are not
self-evident. This circularity seems to risk contradiction or tautol-
ogy, but perhaps the truths only become evident in the manner in
which they are declared. In other words, the performative enactment
of the truth is the way of making evident that very truth, since the
truth in question is not pre-given or static but enacted or exercised
through a particular kind of plural action. If it is the very capacity
for plural action that is at stake in claiming popular sovereignty, then
there is no way to “show” this truth outside of the plural and invari-
ably conflictual enactment we call self-constitution.

“we, the people” 55

 If the plural subject is constituted in the course of its perfor-
mative action, then it is not already constituted, which means that
whatever form it has prior to its performative exercise is not the
same as the form it takes as it acts, and after it has acted. The “we”
effects a certain gathering. At the same time, it is only when bod-
ies gather in some particular configuration of space and time that
the “we” comes into being, even if it is not explicitly spoken. So how
do we then understand this movement of gathering, which is dura-
tional and implies occasional, periodic, or definitive forms of scatter-
ing? It is not one act, but a convergence of actions different from one
another, a form of political sociality irreducible to conformity. Even
when a crowd speaks together, they have to gather in close enough
proximity to hear another’s voice, to pace one’s own vocalization, to
achieve rhythm and harmony to a sufficient degree, and so to estab-
lish a relation both auditory and corporeal with those with whom
some signifying action or speech act is undertaken. We start to speak
now and stop now. We start to move now, or more or less at a given
time, but certainly not as a single organism. We try to stop all at
once, but some keep moving, and others move and rest at their own
pace. Temporal seriality and coordination, bodily proximity, auditory
range, coordinated vocalization—all of these constitute essential
dimensions of assembly and demonstration. And they are all presup-
posed by the speech act that enunciates “we, the people”; they are the
complex elements of the occasion of its enunciation.
The body has always been part of that occasion. Let us recall that
the illocutionary act is characterized as one that brings about effects
on the occasion of its enunciation. This does not mean that enunci-
ation is its own occasion, since any enunciation presupposes a spe-
cific convergence of spatial, temporal, and sensible fields. Indeed,
the occasion in which “we, the people” is enunciated presupposes an
embodied and plural political sociality. Even when we thought, if we
ever did, that the speech act was purely linguistic, it depended upon a
model of vocalization that required the throat and mouth, breathing,

56 “we, the people”

a bodily organism comported in a given way, a circumscribed audi-
tory field, a zone of proximity such that bodies close enough to hear
or see or sense in some other way what each was doing and saying
in order to try to do and say something together; speech is itself a
movement, and “movement” carried two basic senses: bodily mobil-
ity and political organization.
Is there, then, any speech act that brings forth “we, the people”
that is not a bodily and political movement of some kind? Does that
speech act always presuppose, gather, and enact a body politic? On
the one hand, if we take vocalization as the model of the speech act,
then the body is surely presupposed as the organ of speech, both
the organic condition and vehicle of speech. The body is not trans-
muted into pure thought as it speaks, but signifies the organic con-
ditions for verbalization. So if speech is conceptualized restrictively
as a vocalized speech act, there is no speech without the organ of
speech, which means that there is surely no speech act without the
organic. But what does the organic dimension of speech do to the
claims made in speech, and on behalf of speech? If one assumes
that speech reflects consciousness and, in particular, the “intention”
of the speaker, then intention is figured as a cognitive moment re-
presented by speech; in turn, speech is understood as corresponding
to this prior cognitive content. Shoshana Felman has made this clear
in the Le scandale du corps parlant that precisely because speech is impos-
sible without the organic, even the speech act that seeks to convey a
purely cognitive intention cannot circumvent the organic body.7 The
most purely ideal intention manifest in speech is impossible without
its organic condition.
So just as there is no purely linguistic speech act separated from
bodily acts, there is no purely conceptual moment of thought that
does away with its own organic condition. And this tells us some-
thing about what it means to say “we, the people” since whether it is
written in a text or uttered on the street, it designates an assembly
in the act of designating and forming itself. It acts on itself as it acts,

“we, the people” 57

and a corporeal condition of plurality is indexed whether or not it
appears on the occasion of the utterance. That bodily condition, plu-
ral and dynamic, is a constitutive dimension of that occasion.
And we can add the following: the “organic” is no more pure than
the conceptual intention it seeks to convey, since it is always orga-
nized in some way, belonging not to this or that discrete substance
but to a cluster of relations, gestures, and movements that consti-
tute its social sense. So, then, what other kinds of bodily actions and
inactions, gestures, movements, and modes of coordination and
organization can condition and constitute the speech act, no longer
understood restrictively as vocalization? Sounds are but one way to
signify in common—singing, chanting, declaring, beating drums or
pots, or pounding against a prison or separation wall. How do all
these kinds of acts “speak” in ways that index another sense of the
organic and the political, one that might be understood as the per-
formative enactment of assembly itself?



The performative enactment of “we, the people” happens prior to any

vocalization of that particular phrase. The phrase is embodied before it
is spoken, and even when it is spoken, it remains embodied. The phrase
cannot be thought apart from its embodiment. And though “we, the
people” is that act, or series of acts, by which an assembly of some kind
designates and forms itself in space and time, it is also prior to any spe-
cific demand for justice or equality. So demands emerge only after an
assembly designates itself as a people, and that self-formation is prior to
any particular claim made in the name of the people. “We, the people” is
a performative enactment without demands, though it surely gives rise
to demands that depend fundamentally upon that embodied and per-
formative institution of the people in its plurality.8
The embodied character of the people proves quite important
to the kinds of demands that are made. When, for instance, wealth

58 “we, the people”

is accumulated among 2 percent of the population and increasing
numbers of people lose their homes and employment, then the peo-
ple are clearly divided along class lines and economic power is dis-
tributed in radically unequal ways. When those who face accelerating
prospects of precarity take to the streets and begin their claim with
“we, the people,” then they are asserting that they, those who appear
and speak there, are identified as “the people.” They are working
against oblivion. The phrase does not imply that those who profit are
not “the people,” and it does not necessarily imply a simple sense of
inclusion: “we are the people, too.” Rather, it asserts a form of equal-
ity in the face of increasing inequality, and it does this not simply by
uttering that phrase but by embodying equality to whatever extent
that proves possible, constituting an assembly of the people on the
grounds of equality. One might say they are asserting inequality in
the midst of inequality, and this is vain and useless, since their act
is only symbolic, and true economic equality continues to become
more elusive for those whose debts are astronomical and employ-
ment prospects foreclosed. And yet it seems that the embodiment
of equality in the practices of assembly, the insistence on interde-
pendency, the commonly held ground, all start to put into the world
a version of equality that is rapidly vanishing in other quarters. The
point is not to regard the body merely as an instrument for making a
political claim but to let this body, the plurality of bodies, become the
precondition of all further political claims.
Indeed, in the politics of the street that has been with us in the last
years, in the Occupy movement, Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol, the
basic requirements of the body are at the center of political mobili-
zations—those requirements are, in fact, publicly enacted prior to any set of polit-
ical demands. And we could certainly make a list of those demands:
bodies require food and shelter, protection from injury and violence,
the freedom to move, to work, to have access to health care; bod-
ies require other bodies for support and for survival. It matters, of
course, what age those bodies are, and whether they are able-bodied,

“we, the people” 59

since in all forms of dependency, bodies require not just one other
person but social systems of support that are complexly human and
technical.
In a world in which the bodily life of increasing numbers of peo-
ple is proving to be highly precarious, bodies emerge together on
the pavement or the dirt or along the wall that separates them from
their land—this assembly, which can include virtual participants,
still assumes a set of interlocking locations for a plural set of bodies.
And in this way, the bodies belong to the pavement, the ground, the
architecture, and the technology by which they live. Thus we cannot
speak about bodies without the environments, the machines, and the
complex systems of social interdependency that are their conditions
of support; no body survives, much less flourishes, without condi-
tions of support. This fact, the condition of life, is enacted, shown; it
emerges from the oblivion to which it is increasingly relegated. And
though it seems to imply several political claims, the making of the
plural body in plain view, and in defiance of those forms of police
and economic power that would sequester it again, lays down the
basic conditions for further political claims. If we were to come to
enumerate all the requirements of the body, would we struggle only
for those requirements to be met? Or do we struggle as well for bod-
ies to thrive and for lives to become livable?
Perhaps it is possible to distinguish between a condition of pol-
itics and its various demands. Arendt famously remarks that there
must be a “space of appearance” for the actor for politics to come
into being.9 But what she did not imagine is that it might be a space
of appearance for the abiding requirements of the body itself. The
body that appears is not only comported toward speech but to show-
ing what is required in order to survive, to work, and to live. In the
recent public assemblies of those who call themselves “the people,”
attention is brought to bear on the basic needs of bodily survival,
for survival is surely a precondition for all the other claims we make.
Survival is a precondition of politics, but not its aim. We survive

60 “we, the people”

precisely in order to live, and life, as much as it requires survival,
must be more than survival in order to be livable.10 So a demand that
follows from this basic condition is precisely for a livable life—not so
much equally livable (where equality and livability are reconciled).
How, then, do we think about a livable life without positing a single
or uniform ideal for that life? It is not a matter, in my view, of finding
out what the human really is, or should be, since it has surely been
made plain that humans are animals, too, and that their very bodily
existence depends upon systems of support that are both human
and nonhuman. So to a certain extent, I follow my colleague Donna
Haraway in thinking about the complex relationalities that consti-
tute bodily life and suggest that we surely do not need any more ideal
forms of the human but rather more complex ways of understanding
that set of corporeal relations and interdependencies without which
we do not exist at all.11
The body is not only a discrete entity with fixed boundaries; it is
also a set of relations to food, shelter, sexuality, appearance, mobility,
audibility, and visuality. One that is embedded in, or disembedded
from, a set of social relations and institutional forms that determine
in part whether a bodily life will persist. One body does not really
exist without another, and the “dyad” implied by the framework
of self and Other cannot do justice to the plurality of bodies that
constitute the people. How, finally, do we understand this embod-
ied people, whose vulnerability and agency are conditioned by their
environment, technology, sociality, and access to power?
Although there are those who will say that active bodies assem-
bled on the street constitute a powerful and surging multitude, one
that in itself constitutes a radical democratic event or action, I can
only partially agree with that view. When the people break off from
established power, they enact the popular will, though to know that
for certain, we would have to know who is breaking off, and where,
and who does not break off, and where are they. There are, after all,
all sorts of surging multitudes I would not want to endorse (even

“we, the people” 61

if I do not dispute their right to assemble), and they would include
racist or fascist congregations and violent forms of anti-parliamen-
tary mass movements. I am less concerned with the vitality of surg-
ing multitudes or any nascent and promising life-force that seems to
belong to their collective action than with joining a struggle to estab-
lish more sustaining conditions of livability in the face of increas-
ing precarity. The final aim of politics is not simply to surge forth
together (though this can be an essential moment of affective inten-
sity within a broader struggle against precarity), constituting a new
sense of the “people” even if sometimes, for the purposes of radical
democratic change—which I do endorse—it is important to surge
forth in ways that claim and alter the attention of the world for some
more enduring possibility of livable life for all.
After all, something has to hold such a group together, some
demand, some felt sense of injustice and unlivability, some shared
intimation of the possibility of change, and that change has to be
fueled by a resistance to, minimally, existing and expanding inequal-
ities, ever-increasing conditions of precarity for many populations,
both locally and globally, forms of authoritarian and securitarian
control that seek to suppress democratic processes and mass move-
ments. On the one hand, there are bodies that assemble on the street
or online or through other less visible networks of solidarity, espe-
cially in prisons, whose political claims are made through forms of
solidarity that may or may not appear directly in public space; on
the other hand, there are mobilizations that emerge in public that
make their claims through language, action, gesture, and movement,
through linking arms, through refusing to move, to forming bodily
modes of obstruction to police and state authorities. A given move-
ment can move in and out of the space of heightened exposure,
depending upon its strategies and the military and police threats it
must face. In each of these cases, however, we can say that these bod-
ies form networks of resistance together, remembering that bod-
ies are not just active agents of resistance but also fundamentally in

62 “we, the people”

need of support. Equally, they are not just in need of support but
also capable of resistance. To think politics in this sense is to think
through this plural predicament of requiring and demanding sup-
port for bodily vulnerability and this mobilization of bodies in the
plural in the practices of resistance.
When such movements work, they themselves provide provisional
support to facilitate the broader demand for forms of enduring sup-
port that make lives livable. The demand is at once enacted and
made, exemplified and communicated. Bodies assemble precisely to
show that they are bodies, and to let it be known politically what it
means to persist as a body in this world, and what requirements must
be met for bodies to survive, and what conditions make a bodily life,
which is the only life we have, finally livable.
It is not, then, exclusively or primarily as subjects bearing abstract
rights that we take to the streets. If we bear those rights to freedom
of assembly, to constitute ourselves as a people, then we enact them
in our bodily practices. They may well be stated, but the “statement”
is already in the assembly, signified by plural bodies coming together,
before anyone has to speak. We take to the streets because we need to
walk or move there; we need streets to be structured so that, whether
or not we are in a chair, we can move there, and we can pass through
that space without obstruction, harassment, administrative deten-
tion, or fear of injury or death. If we are on the streets, it is because
we are bodies that require infrastructural support for our continuing
existence, and for living a life that matters. Mobility is itself a right of
the body, to be sure, but also a precondition for the exercise of other
rights, including the right of assembly itself. Assembly is at once the
condition of any possible claim at the same time that it is a specific
right to which an assembly lays claim. That circularity is less a con-
tradiction than a founding condition of a political plurality, a people.
If the body were by definition active—always self-constituting,
never constituted—then we would not need to struggle for the con-
ditions that allow the body its free activity in the name of social

“we, the people” 63

and economic justice. That struggle presumes that bodies are con-
strained and constrainable. The condition of bodily vulnerability
is brought out into the open in those public assemblies and coali-
tions that seek to counter accelerating precarity. So it becomes all
the more imperative to understand the relation between vulnerabil-
ity and those forms of activity that mark our survival, our flourishing,
and our political resistance. Indeed, even in the moment of actively
appearing on the street, we are exposed, vulnerable to injury of one
kind or another. This is especially true for those who appear on the
street without permits, who are opposing the police or the military
or other security forces without weapons, who are transgendered in
transphobic environments, who are without documents in coun-
tries that criminalize those who seek rights of citizenship. Although
one may be shorn of protection, to be sure, one is not reduced to
some sort of “bare life.” On the contrary, to be shorn of protection
is a form of political exposure, at once concretely vulnerable, even
breakable, and potentially and actively defiant, even revolutionary.
The bodies that assemble designate and form themselves together as
“we, the people,” targeting those forms of abstraction that would cast
bodily requirements once again into oblivion. To show up is both to
be exposed and to be defiant, meaning precisely that we are crafted
precisely in that disjuncture, and that in crafting ourselves, we expose
the bodies for which we make our demand. We do this for and with
one another, without any necessary presumption of harmony or love.
As a way of making a new body politic.

64 “we, the people”

 4

TO RENDER SENSIBLE

georges didi-huberman

Representable People, Imaginary People?

Representation of the people comes up against a double difficulty, if

not a double aporia, that comes from the impossibility of our sub-
suming each of the two terms, “representation” and “people,” into
the unity of one concept. Hannah Arendt said that we will never
manage to think about the political dimension as long as we stub-
bornly persist in speaking of man, since politics is interested precisely
in something else, which is men, whose multiplicity is modulated dif-
ferently each time, whether it be in conflict or community.1 Likewise
we must say, and forcefully, that we will never manage to think about
the aesthetic dimension—or the world of the “sensible” to which we
are reacting at every moment—as long as we speak of the representa-
tion or the image: there are only images, images whose very multiplicity,
whether it be in conflict or connivance, resists any synthesis.

65
 That is why we can say that the people, quite simply—“the people”
as a unity, identity, totality, or generality—that it quite simply does
not exist. Supposing there was still a fully autochthonous popula-
tion somewhere—as we see, but it is no doubt one of the last known
examples, in the documentary images of First Contact where the first
exchanges, in 1930, were recorded between a group of adventur-
ers and a New Guinea population cut off from the rest of the world
since the dawn of time2—“the people” do not exist because even
in such a case of isolation, the term assumes a minimum of com-
plexity, of impurity represented by the heterogeneous composition
of those multiple and various peoples that are the living and their
dead, the bodies and their spirits, those of the clan and the others,
the males and the females, the humans and their gods or even their
animals. . . . There is not a people; there are only coexistent peoples, not
only from one population to another but even within—the social or
mental interior of—the same population, no matter how coherent
we would like to imagine it to be, which, moreover, is never the case.3
It is always possible to hypostatize “the people” into identity or even
into generality. But the first is a sham, devoted to glorifying populisms
of all kinds, while the second is not to be found, a central aporia for
all the “political” or historical sciences.4
It is not surprising that Pierre Rosanvallon entitled his historical
inquiry on democratic representation in France Le Peuple introuvable.
From the very beginning of this book appears “malaise,” spelled out:
the malaise of a democracy—that is, literally, the “power of the peo-
ple”—extended between the obviousness of its horizon as “political
good” and the glaring, often scandalous, incompletion of its reality as
“political disappointment.” It is very interesting, moreover, that this
malaise or this part of “obscurity” inherent to our democratic history
then comes back to the question of representation as the most necessary
but also the thorniest paradigm: “It is around the question of repre-
sentation, in its two senses as mandate and as figuration, that the diffi-
culties take shape.” But it seems odd—even disturbing—that Pierre

66 to render sensible
Rosanvallon, whose subject is democracy, only evokes this dialectic
of representation through an immediate reference to Carl Schmitt,
for whom political representation as Repräsentation or “symbolic figu-
ration” must indeed be distinguished from political representation
as Stellvertretung or “mandate.”5
We know that in his nostalgia for monarchic power, Carl Schmitt
could only play symbolic figuration against democratic mandate. In
his Verfassungslehre of 1928—one of his fundamental works—Carl
Schmitt does not fail to specify that representation

is not possible with just any type of being, and it presupposes a

special [exceptional] type of being (eine besondere Art Sein). Some-
thing dead, of lesser or no value, or vile (etwas Totes, etwas Minder-
wertiges oder Wertloses, etwas Niedriges) cannot be represented. It lacks
that superior type of being (gesteigerte Art Sein) that is capable of
being elevated to public being, of having an existence (Existenz).
Words like grandeur, eminence, majesty, glory, dignity and honor
attempt to convey that specialness [or exceptionality] (Besonderheit)
of an elevated being capable of being represented.6

From that angle, we cannot see how “the people” or “the peoples”
could be in any way representable. Carl Schmitt, we know, wanted to
unify the notion of the people in its very negativity and powerless-
ness; for him, the people is not. It is not this (not a magistracy or an
administration, for example); it is not that (not a political actor in the
full sense, for example); all that it knows how to do, according to him,
is acclaim the representation of power that is presented to it as Führertum,
as supreme “guidance.”7 Pierre Rosanvallon obviously restrains him-
self from the extremes of loathing displayed by Carl Schmitt toward
“democratic obviousness.”8 But he find himself prisoner of the dis-
junctive model established by the author of Political Theology between
Stellvertretung and Repräsentation. He no doubt inverts the hierarchy—
mandate taking precedence henceforth over symbol—but this is

to render sensible 67
once again to play the representation of the peoples against them-
selves. It is as if, figured, the peoples necessarily became imaginary; as if,
vowed to the image, they inevitably became illusory.
Three “imaginary peoples” thus appear in the eyes of Pierre
Rosanvallon: the opinion-people, when public opinion is defined as that
“inorganic way by which a people makes known what it wants and
what it thinks” (according to Hegel) or as the “modern form of accla-
mation” (according to Carl Schmitt, once again); the nation-people
that is obsessed with the “populist celebration” to the point of mak-
ing it an operator of exclusion of everyone from the barbarian to the
immigrant; and finally the emotion-people, where “the modern masses’
quest for identity” is expressed “in a pathetic mode. Lacking in con-
tent, these communities of emotion weave no solid bonds. They only
bring about fleeting ties and involve no obligations between men.
Nor do they involve any future. Far from embodying any promise for
change or power for action, as the event-people of the Revolution did
in the past, the emotion-people is not inscribed in history. It is only the
fleeting shadow of a lack and a difficulty.”9
No doubt Pierre Rosanvallon’s targets here are above all the “sta-
diums,” the “television screens,” and the “magazine columns.”10 But
his very expression, the “emotion-people,” committed as it is to so
harsh a diagnosis, is not without consequences for the two notions
it combines, that of the people and that of emotion, through that third
notion, which is, precisely, representation. Of course we understand
that representation can serve as a vehicle for the artificial emo-
tions of the television screens and the magazine columns; it can even
serve, undoubtedly, as a vehicle for the great totalitarian “guidances”
to which Carl Schmitt subscribed in 1933. But representation is pre-
cisely like the people: it is something multiple, heterogeneous, and
complex. Representation—and we know this a little more precisely
since Nietzsche and Warburg—brings with it antagonistic or par-
adoxical structural effects, which could be called “syncopes” on the

68 to render sensible
level at which they function semiotically, or symptomal “rips” on the
metapsychological or anthropological level.11 Thus the peoples and
their emotions ask much more of us than this condescending critique
that amounts to dismissal: a philosophically convenient dismissal—
essentially Platonic—of the perceptible world in general, of its own
motions and thus of its possible resources.

Rubbing One’s Eyes Before the Dialectical Images

Thus we must return a little less haughtily—a little less scornfully—to

what Hegel called, with regard to the people, that “inorganic way of mak-
ing known what it wants and what it thinks,” or to what Carl Schmitt
conceded to the masses under the category of “acclamation” (obviously
Carl Schmitt would have spoken much less of the peoples’ protest, their
“demonstrations” or their calls for emancipation). If the emotion-people is
an imaginary people, as Pierre Rosanvallon maintains, that neverthe-
less does not mean that it would be “lacking in content,” “without any
solid bonds,” doomed to “fleeting ties,” and “involving no future [or any]
power for action.” It only means that it “is not inscribed in history”—
and the simplest reason for that is that that emotions themselves, like images,
are inscriptions of history, its crystals of legibility (Lesbarkeit), to adopt here a
notion common to a whole constellation of thinkers who were reconsid-
ering the fundamental relationships between historicity and visibility of
bodies in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century, that is
to say in a context of struggles against fascism (I am thinking of course
of Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Carl Einstein, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried
Kracauer, even Theodor Adorno).12
Because the emotions themselves—like images, according to the
brilliant concept framed by Walter Benjamin—are dialectical. That
means first of all that they maintain a very specific relationship with
representations: a relationship of inherence and disjunction at the

to render sensible 69
same time, a relationship of expression and conflict at the same time.
At the very moment when Aby Warburg began to observe the play of
“polarizations” and “depolarizations” in “formulas of pathos” over the
long duration of images,13 Sigmund Freud was insisting, in his Traum-
deutung, on a major point that he had already recognized in observing
symptoms of hysteria: that the existence of the unconscious implies
that a complex dialectic exists—here expression and there conflict,
here congruence and there discordance—between affects and rep-
resentations.14 If it is true that the history of societies depends upon
the unconscious as well, then we must to bow to the evidence for-
mulated by Walter Benjamin in his Passagenwerk: “In the dialectical
image, the Past . . . can only be revealed as such at a very specific
period: the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, perceives pre-
cisely as such this dream image (Traumbild). It is at that moment that
the historian assumes, for that image, the task of interpreting dreams
(die Aufgabe der Traumdeutung).”15
When humanity does not rub its eyes—when its images, its emo-
tions, and its political acts find themselves divided by nothing—then
the images are not dialectical, the emotions are “lacking in content,”
and the political acts themselves “involve no future.” What makes
the people “not to be found” is thus to be sought in the crisis of their
figuration, as well as that of their mandate. That is what Walter Ben-
jamin understood perfectly clearly in his 1935 essay “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” “The crisis of democ-
racies,” he wrote, “can be understood as a crisis of the conditions of
exposure of the political man.” There, where “the champion, the star,
and the dictator emerge as victors” in the stadiums or on the screens
of commercial cinema, it would thus be necessary to dialecticize the visi-
ble.16 That is, to make other images, other montages; to look at them
differently; to introduce into them division and movement com-
bined, emotion and thought combined. In short, to rub one’s eyes, to
rub the representation with the affect, the ideal with the repressed,
the sublimated with the symptomal.

70 to render sensible
 A representation of the peoples becomes possible again beginning
from the moment we agree to introduce the dialectical division into
the representation of powers. It is not sufficient to do as Pierre Rosan-
vallon does and retrace the history of the political mandate begin-
ning from the democratic premises of Tocqueville; nor is it sufficient
to do what Giorgio Agamben does and rethink the archaeology of
“reign” and “glory” beginning first with the theological premises
of the church fathers, and then with the anti-democratic premises
of Carl Schmitt. On the contrary, for Walter Benjamin, to dialec-
ticize consisted of making appear in each fragment of history that
“image” that “passes into a flash of lightning,” that “arises and van-
ishes at the moment when it reveals itself to knowledge,” but that, in
its very fragility, engages the memory and the desire of the peoples,
that is to say, the configuration of an emancipated future.17 This is a
way of admitting that in such a domain, the historian must know how
to turn his gaze to the least “passing things” or fragilities that, coun-
ter to the “sense of history”—in which our “current events” wants so
much to believe—arise as if they were coming from very far away and
immediately vanish, like signals bearing a historicity unconceived of
until then.
Those signals or “dialectical images” are of course fragile. Such is
the fragility of the collective emotions as well, and that is neverthe-
less their great dialectical resource. “On the evening of the first day
of fighting [during the Revolution of July 1830],” Benjamin reminds
us, “in many places in Paris, at the same moment and without con-
sulting one another, men were seen firing at the clocks.” Wasn’t that
a way, a very “affective” way no doubt, of making “homogeneous and
empty time” explode, and of replacing it, through this interposed
signal, with a model of “materialist historiography” characterized by
the dismantling and rewinding of all temporality?18 Such is, in any
case, the fragility of the peoples themselves; the destruction of some
public clocks and the death of some eight hundred July insurgents
would not prevent the bourgeois and monarchist take-over of the

to render sensible 71
movement. But Walter Benjamin—who was writing these lines at
the moment of greatest danger for himself, that is in 1940—would
have wanted to conjure this sort of “dream image” in which all the
clocks would be shot, to rub his eyes before it, and to reformulate
in this very gesture of awakening the task of the historian that falls to
us still today in sentences that, for a long time now, I have not let
myself recopy:

To do the work of the historian does not mean knowing “how

things really happened.” It means seizing upon a memory (sich
einer Erinnerung bemächtigen), just as it arises at the moment of dan-
ger (wie sie im Augenblick einer Gefahr aufblizt). It is a matter for his-
torical materialism to retain an image of the past (ein Bild der
Vergangenheit) that reveals itself unexpectedly to the historical sub-
ject at the moment of danger. This danger threatens the contents
of the tradition as much as its addressees. It is the same for them
both, and consists for them of being made the instrument of the
dominant class. In each period, it is necessary to seek to wrench
the tradition once again from the conformism that is on the verge
of subjugating it.19

This insistence on the “tradition”—as distinguished from all cul-

tural “conformism”—ought not to surprise us in a context neverthe-
less dominated by immediate danger and the urgency of responding
to it politically. Benjamin shared with Freud and Warburg the acute
awareness of the anthropological effectiveness of relics; he shared with
Bataille and Eisenstein the cheerful perception of a political effective-
ness of relics, which came of rubbing one’s eyes before the animal car-
casses at the Villette slaughterhouses or before the skeletons moving
in a Mexican procession, and as later filmmakers such as Jean Rouch,
Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Glauber Rocha had to show with perfect clar-
ity. But that historical perception—and transhistorical as well, since
it grants a decisive place to the long durations and to the missing links,

72 to render sensible
to the heterochronies and to the returns of the repressed—depended
upon the division that supports and sustains any representation of the
peoples. Where Carl Schmitt was only interested in the tradition of
power, Benjamin firmly opposes to it the tradition of the oppressed: “The
tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in
which we live is the rule. We must achieve a conception of history
that is aware of this situation.”20
We understand better that Walter Benjamin was at the same
time locating the task of the historian—and no doubt of the artist
as well—through his desire to make the peoples represented, that is to say
to give a worthy representation to the “nameless” of history: “It is
more difficult to honor the memory of the nameless (das Gedächtnis der
Namenlosen) than the memory of the recognized [passage crossed out: cel-
ebrated, the poets and thinkers are not an exception]. The construc-
tion of history is dedicated to the memory of the nameless.”21 This
task is all at once philological—or “micrological” as Benjamin liked to
say—and philosophical. It requires exploring the archives into which
the “conformists” of history never stick their noses (or open their
eyes); at the same time it requires a “theoretical framework” (theo-
retische Armatur) and a “constructive principle” (konstructiv Prinzip) that
positivist history lacks completely.22
This “theoretical framework” presupposes not pledging the
allegiance of images to ideas, or ideas to facts. When, for exam-
ple, Benjamin speaks of the “tradition of the oppressed” (Tradition
der Unterdrückten), he is no doubt using a Marxist vocabulary refer-
ring directly to the class struggle, but he knows just as well that the
word Unterdrückung is part of the conceptual vocabulary of Freud-
ian psychoanalysis. Translated into French as répression, it designates
a type of psychological process for which refoulement (Verdrängung)
appears as a particular subcategory. Répression can be conscious, while
refoulement is always unconscious; répression can be applied to affects,
while refoulement operates only on representations.23 Thus it falls
to the historian to render the peoples “representable” by making

to render sensible 73
represented exactly that which is found to be “repressed” in their
traditional or, more accurately, conformist representations. Now,
what is “repressed” in such representations involves not only their
status of social invisibility—what Hannah Arendt wanted to exam-
ine, for example, in The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition, through the
figure of the pariah—but once again what Hegel called the “inor-
ganic way by which a people makes known what it wants and what
it thinks” by expressing affects through the intermediary of gestures
of the body and motions of the soul.24

Lifting the Lid, Making the Heterotopias Visible

The best historians are those who contribute most effectively to lifting
the lid—the lid of the repression, of the Unterdrückung, of the peoples. It
is not part of my intention here, of course, to offer a litany of the mas-
terpieces of the discipline of history, from Burckhardt and Michelet to
contemporary writings. But I would like to mention briefly three oeu-
vres thanks to which, it seems to me in an exemplary fashion, the lid was
not only lifted but smashed to pieces. The first is that of Michel de Cer-
teau: beginning with a history of solitudes—mystical solitudes in particular—
Michel de Certeau touched upon the “absent” in conventional history
and went so far as to explore the acts of social resistance inherent to certain
“arts of living” among the most “ordinary” people.25
As for Michel Foucault, he began, as we know, with a history of devi-
ances and their institutional treatments: psychological deviances and
the asylum, somatic deviances and the clinic, criminal deviances and
the prison, sexual and indeed even literary deviances (in the work of
Raymond Roussel, for example).26 Whereas he also finished, accord-
ing to his archivist (that is to say philological) inquiries equipped
with a critical (that is to say philosophical) framework and “construc-
tive principle,” by distinguishing certain places where such a “tradi-
tion of the oppressed” could be recognized, assembled, organized,

74 to render sensible
united. These places he called heterotopias. Not that such places can
exist as the functional settings of a fully guaranteed liberty:

I do not believe in the existence of something that would be func-

tionally—by its true nature—radically liberating. Liberty is a prac-
tice. Thus there can exist, in fact, a certain number of projects that
aim at altering certain constraints, at making them more flexible
or even at breaking them, but none of those projects can, simply by
its nature, guarantee that people will automatically be free, human
freedom is never ensured by the institutions and the laws whose
function it is to guarantee it. . . . If one found a place—and per-
haps it exists—where liberty is effectively exercise, one would dis-
cover that that is not thanks to the nature of the objects, but once
again, thanks to the practice of freedom. Which does not mean
that after all one can also just leave people in slums, thinking that
they only have to exercise their rights. . . . There are not, by defini-
tion, machines of freedom. . . . There are only reciprocal relation-
ships, and constant gaps between them.27

Heterotopias define the very space of these possible gaps—where

the lid trembles, moves a little, and lets escape the scalding steam
of freedom. Utopias function perfectly, but in an unreal way—and
a comforting way, adds Foucault elsewhere—whereas heterotopias
function in a very real way, although at the price of functioning in a
shaky, patched together, imperfect, never complete way. Heterotopias
bring into play “a space of dispute both mythical and real in the space
where we live,” says Foucault. They have “the power to juxtapose in a
single real place many spaces, many locations that are in themselves
incompatible,” indeed even many heterogeneous temporalities (one
would say in this sense that archives, museums, and libraries are, in
Michel Foucault’s eyes, heterotopias hidden beneath their own insti-
tutional paneling). As such they appear as a “great reserve of imagi-
nation,” and it is up to us to make liberal use of them.28

to render sensible 75
 It is on this school of freedom that Arlette Farge would also draw
for book after book with elegance and obstinacy. For her, the archives
would be the almost unhoped-for—but immediately inexhaust-
ible—opportunity for lifting the lid that the archivists themselves
no doubt believed to be irremovable.29 She laid claim to a sensation,
which is also a methodological principle, well described in the past
by Aby Warburg at the time of his tireless explorations into the ricor-
danze of the Florentine archive of the Renaissance: “The voices of the
deceased echo still in the hundreds of deciphered archival documents,
and in the thousands of others that are not yet deciphered; the histo-
rian’s devotion can restore the timbre of those inaudible voices (his-
torische Pietät vermag der unhörbaren Stimmen weider Klangfarbe zu verleihen), if
he does not shrink from effort of restoring the natural link between
word and image (die natürliche Zusammengehörigkeit von Wort und Bild).”30
It is equipped with this kind of methodical intuition that a history of
the peoples could commence or recommence. Arlette Farge renewed
one of Karl Marx’s gestures—his legal defense of those who stole wood
in 1842—by working first on the food thefts in eighteenth-century
Paris.31 She has renewed Benjamin’s injunction regarding the “tradi-
tion of the oppressed” by dedicating a large portion of her work to
the Parisian street peoples, but also to the heterogeneous dimensions
that are, on the one hand, “public opinion” and, on the other, “writing
of oneself” or “on oneself.”32 She has accompanied and extended the
work of Michel Foucault by interrogating the “fragile life” of the poor,
the marginal, and the oppressed.33 In doing so, she has lifted the lid of
the discourse generally held over—that is to say hanging over—social
conditions and allowed to escape in the representation of the peoples,
their symptoms and their affects, what she has described so well in her
book Effusion et tourment, whose preamble ventures this impossible feat:

It is the breath of the anonymous and hardly well-off bodies of the

eighteenth century that will be retranscribed here, those that think
and shake themselves, are charmed, disturbed, become violent.

76 to render sensible
 There exist in the most destitute bodies (as in those of others) the
will and the dream of multiple escapes, the invention of gestures
created or hinted at for them to succeed and words to name them,
thus to appropriate them. The mute physical and bodily power
of the anonymous, activated by the hope of the future and eas-
ily remembering what was, encounters power, responds to it, and
speaks with it to be integrated into it or to alter it. . . .
Something shivers there. The bodies hum and elaborate their
fates. Men and women, beings of the flesh, are “affectively in the
world.” They struggle constantly against their own bodies and are
in inevitable symbiosis with them, in order to banish not only cold,
hunger, and fatigue but also injustice, hatred, and violence. Acti-
vated by history and acting upon it, they are ordinary beings. . . .
This is a long way from wanting to define (as was often done) the
weakest ones solely by the primary needs and desires of their bod-
ies, which have elsewhere been called uncultivated. On the contrary,
attempting to approach historically and politically the “material
part of animate beings” [the usual definition of the body] confirms
the body’s infinite nobility, its rational and passionate ability to cre-
ate with history and despite it, since it is the seat of and party to sen-
sations, feelings, and perceptions. Ductile, it includes itself in the
world as much as that is possible for it. The price is laughter and
cries, gestures and loves, blood and sorrows, fatigue as well. The
body, its history, and history itself make up only one thing.34

To say, first of all, that bodies—bodies singular and multiple, not

“the body” in general—are “activated by history and act upon it” is
to adopt a historical position that was inaugurated by Jacob Burkhardt,
defended by Nietzsche, and confirmed by Warburg, as well as by
Marc Bloch and a number of great ethnologists and sociologists: a
position according to which history is not recounted solely through a
sequence of human actions but also through an entire constellation of
passions and emotions felt by the peoples. To say next that bodies are

to render sensible 77
“affectively in the world” is to assume a philosophical position informed
by the phenomenology of the sensible that is found in an exemplary
way in Erwin Straus, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It
is to open history to a whole anthropology of affected bodies, affec-
tive bodies.35 To say finally that “something shivers there” is to enter
into a literary position, since to write history so well is first of all to
write; this engages the historian in formal, stylistic, narrative, and
even poetic choices, choices that determine the content as well as the
style of one’s production of knowledge.
These three stances act indissociably in each attempt to give the
peoples a worthy historical representation. We find them, for exam-
ple, in the works of Jacques Rancière, where the historical position is
conveyed through his work on the archives of the peoples—a mod-
esty very rare in the practices of the philosophical community to
which Rancière belongs first—as seen for instance in the collection
assembled in collaboration with Alain Faure on La Parole ouvrière, as
well as the large book of archives entitled La Nuit des prolétaires.36 Now
this choice of method very much involves a literary position character-
ized by a concern for material detail and a respect for documents
and their concomitant editing. To do this, Rancière would draw
on the sources of French realism of the nineteenth century, from
the “micrologies” of Gustave Flaubert (this exact contemporary of
Karl Marx) to the Carnets d’enquêtes of Émile Zola, or from the texts
of Michelet to the Paris writings of Rainer Maria Rilke.37 He would
only lack, in all these ventures in historical immanence, the audacity
of a supplementary operation, precisely the one that a Walter Ben-
jamin or a Georges Bataille knew how to put to work—with the help
of Proustian memoire, surrealist encounter, or Freudian metapsy-
chology—in each historical document by detecting in it a sympto-
mal enactment requiring of the historian that “task of interpreting
dreams” of which the Passagenwerk speaks.38
Jacques Rancière has nonetheless lifted a few heavy “lids” off
historicist conformism, guided in that by a philosophical position that

78 to render sensible
owes much to the reading of Karl Marx most certainly, but also
in a quieter way—and perhaps by way of that other great political
philosopher in France, Claude Lefort39—by all that, in the work of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, could render evident the points of con-
tact between the dialectical, from which would proceed a philosophy
of history, and the sensible, upon which is founded all phenomenol-
ogy of the body. 40 Isn’t thinking about the relationships between
the political and the aesthetic from the angle of an “allotment of
the sensible,” as Jacques Rancière does, in effect rediscovering the
dialectical operations of the work in that “domain of the sensible”
that so many aesthetes would like to imagine pure of all conflictu-
ality and all negativity?41 By the same token, don’t we need to rec-
ognize in any political demonstration—this word may be understood
more concretely or more philosophically as one pleases—the very
encounter of a dialectical relationship and a sensible relationship,
as these lines by Rancière on the distinction between the political
and the police clearly remind us:

“Move on! There’s nothing to see.” The police says that there’s
nothing to see on a road, nothing to do but keep moving. Says that
the space of traffic is only the space of traffic. The political consists
of transforming that traffic space into a demonstration space of a
subject: the people, the workers, the citizens. It consists of refig-
uring the space, what there is to do there, to see there, to name
there. It is the litigation introduced over the allotment of the sen-
sible. . . . The essence of the political is dissensus. Dissensus is not
the confrontation of interests or opinions. It is the demonstration
of a gap in the sensible itself. The political demonstration makes
visible what had no reasons for being seen, it lodges one world
within another, for example the world where the factory is a pub-
lic place within the one where it is a private place, the world where
the workers speak, and speak of the community, within the one in
which they cry out to express their single pain.42

to render sensible 79
 Thus the demonstration is what happens when citizens declare
themselves oppressed by daring to declare their powerlessness, their
pain, and their concomitant emotions. It is what happens when a sen-
sible event touches the community in its history, that is to say, in the
dialectic of its evolving. Thus the affective and the effective are deployed
in it together. Where Alain Badiou wanted to postulate a sense of
history in which this concomitance would be “saturated, terminated”
and would have to give way to a “nonexpressive conception of the
philosophical dialectic,” we can, on the contrary, observe everywhere
the survival and effectiveness of the very oldest “formulas of pathos”:
lamentations that rise and become imprecations, screamed curses
that become actions. There is no “politics of the truth” as Badiou
says—qualifying it as “real and logical” to better disqualify, in an
entirely Platonic fashion, what would be on the order of the imag-
inary or the emotional—without the truth of the sensible.43 At the very
moment when I write these lines (June 2012), all that Eisenstein put
into images in the scenes of lamentations in Battleship Potemkin is find-
ing a new value of urgency in the concomitance of tears shed at all the
funerals of the victims of the Syrian regime of Bachar el-Assad, the
cries hurled in the face of the police, and the arms that it is becoming
necessary to procure to ensure a future—now that it is impossible to
have dialogue—to such protest.

Approaching, Documenting, Rendering Sensible

To approach politics through the multiple opportunities of a “litiga-

tion introduced over the allotment of the sensible,” as Jacques Rancière
would have it: isn’t this to end up by “aestheticizing the political”—the
worst thing in the eyes of Walter Benjamin (because that was what the
fascist regimes of his time did, with great pomp), something for which
we can, in any case, occasionally reproach the author of Partage du sensible?
The answer to this question is very simple: it is that aesthetics itself

80 to render sensible
designates a field of conflicts, a division that many other words have
crossed over, for example when we want to hear in the word people (the
famous, the overrepresented in the glitter market) all those from which
the peoples are, rightly, excluded; or when we want to hear in the word
image (the medium for fame, for overrepresentation in glitter) all that the
images know, rightly, to contest. What is the meaning then of the word aes-
thetic when Jacques Rancière does not hesitate to write that “the emanci-
pation of workers was first of all an aesthetic revolution: the gap opened
in relationship to the sensible universe ‘imposed’ by a condition”?44
We are a long way here from the aesthetic that chooses for its sub-
jects the “criteria of art” or of beauty—what Carl Einstein denounces
as the ridiculous “beauty contests”—dear to academic institutions.
The aesthetic we are talking about from now on is a kind of knowl-
edge that chooses for subjects the events of the sensible, regardless of
whether or not they are “artistic.” Now, to better describe them, we
need not only that philosophical criticism developed by Jacques Ran-
cière, among others, but also a true anthropology that would benefit
from being informed by the “techniques of the body” (according to
the lesson of Marcel Mauss), the “formulas of pathos” (according to
the lesson of Aby Warburg), or the “thymic moments” (according
to the lesson of phenomenological descriptions, like those of Ludwig
Binswanger for example). But in order to describe, one must first
know how to write, that is, to take a position—literary, aesthetic,
ethical—in the language, that vast field of conflicts where the most
reductive and most open usages are encountered, the worst slo-
gans and the best questionings. An anthropology of sensible events
begins from the moment when one agrees to approach through look-
ing, through listening, through writing, even if it means renouncing
the apodictic claims of the metaphysics of school:

Classical metaphysics was able to pass through a specialty where

only literature had done so because it functioned on a basis of
undisputed rationalism and because it was convinced of being able

to render sensible 81
 to make the world and human life understood through an orga-
nization of concepts. . . . That all changed when phenomenolog-
ical or existential philosophy chose for its task not to explain the
world or to discover its “conditions of possibility” but to formu-
late an experience of the world, a contact with the world that pre-
cedes all thinking about the world. . . . From then on the task of
literature and the task of philosophy could no longer be separated.
When it is a matter of articulating the experience of the world
and of showing how consciousness escapes into the world, we can
no longer profess to achieve a perfect transparency of expression.
Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary
expression, if the world is made in such a way that it can only be
expressed in “stories” and pointed to with the finger.45

In order to speak as I do of this “dialectic of the sensible,” I do

not know if Jacques Rancière would accept such a philosophical
intervention (intervention from a phenomenological perspective
in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, or even from an anthropological perspec-
tive in Mauss’s sense, revisited by Georges Bataille). But it is clear
that, right up to his recent work, Aisthesis, Rancière often proceeds
by “scenes” that are so many singular “stories” or objects “pointed to
with the finger” according to the characteristic gesture of an approach
that is as descriptive as it is problematized.46 If the last chapter of
this book is devoted to James Agee and his extraordinary study of
impoverished Alabama in the 1930s, it is obvious that the philo-
sophical position claimed here is inseparable from a literary posi-
tion meant to approach sensible phenomena (as a philologist or a
historian could do before a document, as an ethnologist would do
before a ritual gesture) as much as to discern in them the force lines
or the front lines (as a philosopher of the dialectic could do before
any given situation).47
This literary position has a long history henceforth, Walter Benja-
min and Ernst Bloch having known better than anyone in the 1930s

82 to render sensible
how to understand the full political as well as poetic scope of it: from
Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris and André Breton’s Nadja to Alfred
Döblin’s Alexanderplatz, from Brechtian montages to the scenaristic
writing of Moholy-Nagy, from Blaise Cendrars, Ilya Ehrenburg, or
Vladimir Mayakovsky—I am thinking for example of the extraordi-
nary “poem-reports” of 1925–192948—it is all a literary constellation
that, beyond the novelistic writings of the nineteenth century, would
seek to adopt the principle of documentary montage that we find later in
the works of W. G. Sebald, Charles Reznikoff, or closer to us, Jean-
Christophe Bailly.49
Now this principle of documentary montage—or remontage—is
inseparable from a cultural history profoundly marked, prior to the
cinema, by a certain use of photography.50 That was how the dialectic
encountered the sensible and how the political was embodied in the
new resources, including visual ones, of poetry. In 1924, for exam-
ple, Blaise Cendrars published a book entitled Kodak (documentaire);
the American firm having in the meantime asserted its rights, Cen-
drars had to reduce his title for the complete edition of his poems
in 1944 to simply Documentaires.51 In 1928, this principle entered into
the very poetics of the dreamy, amorous course of Nadja, the text of
which was punctuated by the urban photographs of Jacques-André
Boiffard and Man Ray.52 It was also necessary that the enterprise of
theoretical demontage conducted by Georges Bataille in the journal
Documents in 1929–1930 was not illustrated but very much supported
and required by the documentary iconography of Boiffard himself,
of Eli Lotar, and of many others as well.53 In those same years, the
sensible images of Germaine Krull came again to require the dialectical
thinking of Walter Benjamin on the Paris arcades (we can rediscover
some of those images in the archives of another great dialectician,
Theodor Adorno).54 When Ilya Ehrenburg published his book Mon
Paris in Moscow in 1933, he had his Leica photographed by El Lis-
sitzky—who was also the book’s designer—first facing forward with
himself in profile, then immediately photographed close up, a way of

to render sensible 83
saying that perhaps the Leica was the main author of this book com-
posed of an admirable series of images showing the diverse peoples
of Paris.55 And finally—to cut short this list that could go on very
much longer—how are we to understand Bertolt Brecht’s Work Jour-
nals or ABC of the War without their photographic montages, or James
Agee’s study without Walker Evans’s implacable photographs?56
Implacable images indeed.57 But not “insensible” for all that, not
in the least, these images that do not leave us insensible either. Of
course no one is crying in these images of poverty, in which unem-
ployment, hunger, and death as well lurk everywhere. One wife
almost seems to be biting her lower lip precisely in order not to cry; a
frantic child, squatting on ground, unable to play, looks into the void;
looking carefully, isn’t that other baby crying in its mother’s arms?
Thus in these images there is all possible dereliction and at the same
time all remaining dignity in the bond established with the photog-
rapher. As with August Sander, nothing was shot hastily, everything
results from a shared consideration, a mutual respect that took time to
be established. And that is how Walker Evans “renders sensible” to us
something crucial—and not only apparent—in the condition of the
American peoples of the Great Depression, something that remains
inseparable from the account James Agee would give of them.
In such a context then, what does the gesture of rendering sensible
mean? It does not mean to render unintelligible, whether the strict
versions of Platonism or of contemporary rationalism like it or not.
If Walter Benjamin constructed his whole approach of the “legibility
of history” around the notion of dialectical image—and not, for exam-
ple, on those of “dialectical idea,” or even “idea of the dialectic”—it is
very much because historical and anthropological intelligibility can-
not do without a dialectic of images, appearances, apparitions, ges-
tures, looks . . . all that could be called sensible events. As for the power
of legibility for which these events are the bearers, it is effective only
because it involves the very effectiveness of images to render accessi-
ble, to call up, not only aspects of things or states of phenomena but

84 to render sensible
also their sensible points, their “sore points,” as we so accurately say
to locate where sensitivity functions to excess, where something may
be wrong, where everything divides into the dialectical deployment
of memories, desires, and conflicts.
Thus to render sensible is also to render accessible that dialectic of
the symptom crossing through all history, usually without the knowl-
edge of official observers (I mean, for example, that James Agee and
Walker Evans would lay out before us certain aspects of the eco-
nomic crisis that the economists or historians of that era undoubt-
edly did not see so precisely). This could be a way of understanding
what Maurice Blanchot was saying when he evoked the “presence of
the people . . . not as the whole of social forces, ready for particular
political decisions, but in its . . . declaration of powerlessness.”58 In such a
way that “to render sensible” would mean, strictly speaking, to ren-
der sensible the faults, places, or moments through which, declaring
themselves “powerless,” the peoples affirm both what they lack and
what they desire. Walker Evans’s images (dry and yet so moving),
like James Agee’s descriptions (literal and yet so poetic), thus appear
as the rendering sensible and the declaration of powerlessness of those peo-
ples grappling with a historical and political situation that threatens
to destroy them.59
To render sensible thus would be to render accessible to the senses,
even to render accessible what our senses, like our intelligences, do
not always know how to perceive as “making sense”: something that
appears only as a flaw in the meaning, sign, or symptom. But in a
third sense, “to render sensible” also means that we ourselves, before
these flaws or symptoms, suddenly become “sensible” to something
of the life of the peoples—to something of the history—that escaped
us until then but that “regards” us directly. Thus, here we are “ren-
dered sensible” or sensitive to something new in the history of the
peoples that we desire, consequently, to know, to understand, and to
accompany. Here our senses, but also our significative productions
on the historical world, are moved by this “rendering sensible”: moved

to render sensible 85
in the double sense of putting into emotion and putting into move-
ment of thought.
Thus, here we are before the “declaration of powerlessness” of
the peoples—as it can be rendered sensible to us in the montages of
James Agee’s texts and Walker Evans’s images—left grappling with a
whole world of dialectical emotions, as if the legibility of history neces-
sitated that particular affective disposition that seizes us before such
dialectical images: the formula with the pathos that nevertheless divides
it, the intelligible with the sensible that nevertheless turns it upside
down.

86 to render sensible
 5

The People and the Third People

sadri khiari

You don’t have anything to do this Saturday? So go walk around

Saint-Denis—line 13 or RER C—and talk to the passers-by. Pick out
a French black or Arab and ask him, “What people do you belong
to?” If he answers you, “I belong to the French people,” you will
know that he is a flunky. If he answers you sincerely, he will say to
you, “I belong to the black people—or Arab or Berber, Malian, Mus-
lim, Senegalese, Algerian, African. . . .” Then pick out a so-called
stock Frenchman and ask him the same question. He won’t say to
you, “I belong to the white or European or Christian people”; he
will answer you, “I am part of the French people.” These distinc-
tions could be without great consequence if it were simply a mat-
ter of both parties defining one of the identities dear to them, as for
example with two Frenchmen, one of whom might be proud of com-
ing from Dunkirk, the other from Marseilles. But to claim to be part
of a people is much more than that. It is to establish the group to
which one belongs in society and to assert one’s privileged relation-
ship to the state, or to be more precise, to the nation-state. If two
large segments of the same French population, one a wide majority—

87
recognized by the state and recognizing itself in it—and the other a
minority—not recognized by the state and not recognizing itself in
it—have opposing responses, that poses a major strategic problem to
one as well as to the other.

Against Whom Are the People Constituted?

The question “What is the people?” must naturally be answered by

another question: against whom are the people constituted? Most of the
time we wonder what the immanent characteristics of the people are,
the “material” elements, the accounts or myths on which the conscious-
ness of the individuals belonging to a single people is based. We proceed
in the same way—and wrongly—for the nation. Whereas those elements
reputed to constitute the people do not assemble, do not coalesce, do
not consider themselves to be an articulated, coherent, indivisible whole,
all those elements only metamorphose into potential power for collec-
tive mobilization, only make political sense beginning from the moment
when an exterior to the people, potentially hostile to the people, becomes
apparent. In other words, if the elements that in some way constitute
the infrastructure of the people are neither contingent nor arbitrary,
they are not sufficient in themselves to constitute the people. Those ele-
ments only constitute the condition for the possible emergence of the
entity of the people. For the latter to be effectively crystallized, that hos-
tile exterior must exist, whether it is a matter of a feudal aristocracy, the
neighboring people, the oppressing people, or a segment of the people
considered harmful. The people: these are relationships of power, it is
a history, a history of power relationships. It is a history through which
the notion of people imposes itself on the universal scale. It is the history
of colonial and capitalist modernity. To say that is to affirm two things:
first, that the notion of people allows the expression of a political form
that colonized the whole of social relationships on the planetary scale;

88 the people and the third people

second, that it has a multitude of meanings that reflect the specific con-
texts in which it is mobilized.
The universe of meaning in which the notion of people is deployed
and takes on specific meanings is generally constructed on the artic-
ulation, never identical, of three other notions: the nation, citizen-
ship/sovereignty, and the classes that we call subordinate.1 What
can be retained of the plurality of the forms of articulation of these
notions is their plasticity, their permeability in relationship to one
another, and their capacity to metamorphose or even merge into one
another. Each term of this triptych can be absorbed by another or
disappear completely. I will offer as an extreme illustration the sit-
uation of national liberation movements or so-called national wars,
in the course of which the citizenship merges completely with popu-
lar sovereignty, which then becomes entangled in turn with national
sovereignty. In this case, the interclassist “national union” assim-
ilates, at least in the representation that it makes of itself, all the
components of the population into an indissociable people-nation.
Alternatively, an intensified class struggle or a revolutionary situa-
tion tends to identify the people with the subordinate classes. In that
situation, national sovereignty tends to dissolve into popular sover-
eignty. We can also cite the example of liberation movements that to
a greater or lesser degree cover forms of class struggle. The people-
nation thus identifies itself with the subordinate categories of the
population, while the dominant classes are likened to the foreigner,
exteriorized in relationship to the people-nation. To complete this
description, we can mention the case in which the people, even while
giving itself the same foundations as the nation, self-identifies as
“less” than the nation, generally in that even while being attached
to certain autonomous powers, particularly on the cultural plane, it
does not aspire to (or renounce) granting itself a state that would be
its own (we can mention in this regard the many “minority peoples”
in the European states).

the people and the third people 89

 The notion of people can thus be tied to particular positions
in the socioeconomic order. But these are hardly sufficient to give
meaning to the notion of people, at the heart of which there is the
allocation of political powers and honors, that is to say, statutory dis-
tinctions in the modern order of the state. It thus appears that the
notion of people is first of all a political notion. And thus it necessar-
ily has a strategic dimension. Power is always to be won or retained
against a real or imagined enemy or rival of the people.

The People With or Against the Race

This way of approaching the people remains very much incomplete, how-
ever, if we fail to add to the triptych already mentioned a fourth term
without which an understanding of power relationships in France would
be faulty. I am speaking of race. I maintain that the notion of people, in its
modern sense, was constructed in close connection with the social pro-
duction of races by colonization. In the history of modernity, some peo-
ples were thus explicitly affirmed as racial, and until very recent times (in
segregationist America, Hitler’s Germany, South Africa, and so on). The
racial dimension of the notion of people has generally been masked how-
ever by the dominant bourgeois universalism and egalitarianism. In the
abstract humanist notion of the people, there is in effect no question of
races; humanity is one, distributed into peoples-nations and not into races.
To avoid hasty accusations, I would nevertheless like to specify
what I mean by “race,” or more exactly by “social races,” since race is
nothing other than the relationship between domination and resis-
tance to oppression that exists between racialized human groups.
Sometimes, to better understand things, changing the words is
enough. Thus I propose systematically substituting the word “dis-
crimination” for its opposite, “privilege.” For some years, it has
generally been admitted that in France there exist forms of dis-
criminatory practices tied to skin color, origin, or culture. The law

90 the people and the third people

speaks of fighting them, of multiple public and private institutions
attempting to evaluate them, to understand the direct or indirect
logic of them, and to devise corrective mechanisms. We recognize
as well that they involve almost all areas of social life: economic
relationships, as much in the private sector as in the public sphere;
urban configurations; the law; education; access to housing, culture,
and leisure activities; representation in the various means of com-
munication; political participation; presence in institutions; and
so on. We similarly acknowledge that certain populations are dis-
crimination’s particular victims, populations descended from immi-
gration from the recent decades, natives of the Maghreb or black
Africa, and those of the “overseas territories.” Finally, we agree in
saying that these forms of discrimination are massive and persist
from generation to generation. Now let us take a chart or any sort of
diagram designed to establish these discriminatory practices and let
us reverse it. We had, for example, the following facts: “Among those
individuals twenty-five to fifty years old, for the whole French pop-
ulation, unemployment is 20 percent. It is 30 percent for those
French citizens born of Maghrebian, African, or overseas parent-
age” (the figures used here are completely arbitrary and the situation
described very oversimplified, but it is just to illustrate my remarks).
So let us reverse the chart. Now we have this: “Among those individ-
uals twenty-five to fifty years old, for the whole French population,
unemployment is 20 percent. It is 10 percent for the French citizens
born of parents of so-called French stock, whites, Europeans, Chris-
tians.” This chart would no longer be a chart involving discrimi-
natory practices but a chart of privileges. If we proceed in the same
manner in other areas of social life, we will have a clear image of
what a racial society is: a society characterized by privileges granted
to a category of the population defined or not by an officially rec-
ognized status: to be white, Christian, European. And I would add
that since this privilege involves access to state power as well, the
state plays a key role in permitting the racial system to continue.

the people and the third people 91

“Social races” must thus be understood as the existence of a conflic-
tual hierarchy of powers among social groups that are distinguished
by status, spoken or unspoken, that orders human beings according
to the criteria of colors and cultures, constructed in the European
colonization movement worldwide and perpetuated today in con-
temporary forms of empire.
In France, no doubt because its national ideology is constructed
around the universalizing—and civilizing—mission of the French
people, the masking of racial hierarchies is particularly evident. In
the period of the empire, the laws of the Republic established a
statutory distinction between the “true” French, granted citizen-
ship, and the “indigenous” subjects of the colonies, but the colonial
state itself preferred to conceal the racial density of the notion of
the French people. Outside of small groups on the extreme right,
the same denial persists, as much on the right as within the over-
whelming majority on the left. If I write, “the French people is the
white French people,” I will indeed find myself accused of using the
same language as the white-supremacist nationalists. Nevertheless I
can do nothing else but write: the French people is the white French people!
And I will add, to be more precise: of European and Christian origin.
The others, those who have not had the luck to be born white, Euro-
pean, and Christian, do and do not belong to the people: they are the
third-people. That is not to say what a militant neo-Nazi would say but
to say what all the French more or less clearly think. Above all, it is
to name the reality of power relationships and relationships to the
institutions of power of the white, European, Christian majority fac-
ing the minority descended from non-European immigration.
One more word. The “republican pact” in which the ideology
and the institutions constituting the French people coalesces, sol-
idly formed around democratic citizenship, a certain redistributive
social compromise, and national preeminence, was established at the
point where many stakes crossed: social and political conflicts within
France, competition with other empire states, and colonial expansion.

92 the people and the third people

The French people, the French state, and the French nation are the
products of it; that is to say, they were shaped by the power relation-
ships born of colonialization. Today various factors are jeopardizing
this structure: liberal and financial globalization, the institutionaliza-
tion of the European Union, the loss of influence of French imperial-
ism, and the growing presence of a nonwhite population native to the
colonies. For some years, one of the reasons, and not the least of them,
for the racialist policies of the state, whether led by the right or by the
PS [Parti socialiste], has been to reinforce the racial dimension of the
republican pact to compensate for the deleterious effects of those fac-
tors that undermine it and over which it has only very little control. In
the name of the incompatibility between the “values” of the Republic
and/or of the “national identity,” on the one hand, and the “cultures”
and beliefs of the French born of colonial immigration, on the other,
in the name of the “necessity” of controlling or interrupting migratory
flows, of protecting “French” employment, of fighting terrorism or lax
security, the notion of people has been drawn more narrowly around
the so-called French stock: white, European, Christian. In other words,
this policy seeks to revamp the very sorry state of the notion of French
people in the easiest possible way: against the nonwhites. If some of the
most nationalist movements put particular emphasis on “stock,” other
more liberal or more internationalist ones emphasize the reference to a
white European “identity,” always as opposed to the nonwhites, funda-
mental to what a European people would supposedly be.2
Faced with the crises of the republican pact, but also faced with
the racialist offensive of powers that are in the political majority, the
radical left is itself struggling hard to find its way.

The National Inflexion of the Radical Left

With the exception perhaps of ecologists and some sympathies on the

far left, a certain “sovereignist” discourse is now given voice by all the

the people and the third people 93

parties. Within the principal forces present on the electoral scene (the
UMP [Union pour un mouvement populaire] and allies, the PS and
allies, the FN [Front national]), this rhetoric is paradoxically in accord
with the defense of the principal mechanisms for liberal globalization. It
cannot be reduced to its demagogic electioneering nature, however; in
the case of race, it has a deeper function as well, without ambiguity in its
approach to the urban suburbs and immigration.
The majority of the organized powers of the radical left do not
themselves escape the revamping of the nationalist paradigm, artic-
ulated around the notions of people and popular sovereignty. The
most obvious expression of this inclination is undoubtedly the ral-
lying of the “left of the left” around the Left Front and Jean-Luc
Mélanchon, dissident of the Socialist Party and allied to the French
Communist Party, who developed his antiliberal and nationalist dis-
course around the theme of “popular sovereignty.” In the last pres-
idential election, Jean-Luc Mélanchon obtained 11 percent of the
vote thanks to a campaign that could be summed up in two slogans:
“Long live the French people” and “The people want the power.”
During his election campaign, he thus emphasized the sovereignty of
which the French people were dispossessed by the liberal reasoning
of globalization, international financial institutions, and the Cen-
tral European Bank. Although he carefully avoided substituting the
notion of popular sovereignty with that of national sovereignty, he
nevertheless endeavored to promote the principal symbols of French
nationalism (the tricolored flag, the Marseillaise, the myth of France as
the nation of the rights of man and of the universal . . . ), constantly
referring moreover to the notion of “homeland.” Furthermore he
indicated his desire to reassert France’s national independence,
which for him largely converged with restoring its role as an inter-
national power, with the expansionist strength of its economy, the
exploitation of its immense maritime space and its (colonial) pres-
ence throughout the world, the tools of its cultural influence like
French-speaking institutions, its military power, and its network

94 the people and the third people

of alliances, whose renewal in the direction of “emergent powers”
would supposedly allow it to counter its current subordination to
the United States.3 Of course Jean-Luc Mélanchon embraced cer-
tain social demands that emphasized his engagement with the left:
he opposed the liberal anarchy and unchecked financial globalization
with its disastrous effects on the working classes; he denounced as
well the expansionism and arrogance of the United States. His plan
nevertheless fell within the national-imperialist perspective of con-
stituting a new international pole within which France would play a
chief role. It could thus regain its lost splendor. This expresses the
equivocal nature of the notion of people as it figures into the dis-
course of the Mélanchon left. Citizenship and popular sovereignty
are strongly linked there with national sovereignty, itself the condi-
tion and end of a politics of power. Thus the people does not appear
to be synonymous with the subordinate classes but to be the form
through which the subordinate classes are joined in solidarity with
the imperial Republic, through the rehabilitation of the old repub-
lican pact—as it is idealized in any case, that is to say, combining
expansion of democratic rights, mechanisms of social redistribution,
and nationalism.
That is where Mélanchon’s policy toward the populations
descended from immigration and working-class neighborhoods
finds its coherence. Whereas the political formations backing neo-
liberalism, incapable of preserving the social systems, tend to rein-
force the racial dimension of the old republican pact, Mélanchon’s
strategy involves the inverse logic consisting of privileging those
dimensions of citizenship, redistribution, and nationalism rather
than its racial reasoning. Thus even if he does not abandon a cer-
tain prudence, no doubt to keep his white constituency happy, he
allows himself to defend the democratic and social rights of immi-
grants and those living in working-class neighborhoods, and in that
way he distinguishes himself from the right and from the Socialist
Party. At the same time, there is no question for him of tolerating the

the people and the third people 95

least calling into question of the “Republic one and indivisible” and
its “principles,” the inescapable foundations, according to him, of the
sovereignty of the people and the national French matrix.
Thus to French blacks, Arabs, and Muslims, Mélanchon can only
propose assimilation within the “people one and indivisible,” the
institutions that constitute it, its dominant culture, its “national”
history, and its norms. That is why, to cite only this example, he does
not hesitate to deny any relevance to the notion of Islamophobia and
to take over the campaign in defense of secularism, that is to say, an
instrument of relegation for Islamic populations and of stigmatiza-
tion for a religion judged to be invasive and threatening to the white,
Christian, European French norm. Now such an assimilationist pro-
cess, as it is carried out against the Muslims or other groups born
of colonial immigration, signifies in concrete terms their exclusion
outside of the people. In other words, even though its ambition is
to represent the whole of the disadvantaged populations in France,
the notion of people in its predominant sense within the Left Front
in fact contributes to preserving the status of noncitizen for blacks,
Arabs, and Muslims, that is to say the relegation outside of the polit-
ical field of a wide margin of the most disadvantaged social classes.
An eloquent example: the acerbic comments of the leader of the Left
Front with regard to a recent rebellion in the Amiens suburb where
populations descended from immigration are particularly present.
The grounds for the revolt, unleashed by a routine traffic inspec-
tion, was police harassment, of which the inhabitants of working-
class neighborhoods are constant victims, especially if they are not
white. As is often the case in circumstances like these, a school and
some cars were set on fire while sixteen police were wounded in
the violent confrontations. Without finding the least justification
for the rioters’ anger, Jean-Luc Mélanchon characterized them all
simply as “cretins,” “buffoons,” and “servants of capitalism.” During a
debate that took place at the “Estivales citoyennes 2012 de Front de
gauche,” Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Stella Magliani-Belkacem

96 the people and the third people

put their finger on the problem: “What is there behind the extremely
violent and discrediting terms of Jean-Luc Mélanchon? What is
behind these insults is the idea that these youth are not part of the
‘people’ that his project brings together, that this revolt is not legiti-
mate. That is already to sign up on the wrong side in relationship to
the demands expressed by these revolts.”4
From the point of view of a leftist politics attempting to bring
together “those at the bottom,” the reference to a homogeneous
or potentially homogeneous people is quite obviously a dead end.
Whereas for the populations descended from immigration, national
assimilation within a single “French people” is not the order of
the day, the potency of the national idea, with racial connotations,
remains extremely strong within the subordinate classes of “French
stock.” Refusing to take that into account, as the leftists militants do
who think that everything is resolved in the socioeconomic question
and that the evil ideologies—of the “communitarians” and national-
racists—will evaporate in the dynamic of social struggles, is hardly a
responsible position. This process is hobbled by the reasons that lead
so many workers and unemployed to vote against their “objective
interests,” reasons that have so much to do with notions of respect,
honor, dignity, and social recognition.

How to Be French Without Being French?

From the point of view of the “colonized within,” the strategic difficulty
is no less acute. It already arose in segregationist America. To the black
integrationist leaders, Malcolm X retorted, “But my old man, how can
you consider yourself an American when you have never been treated
as an American in this country? . . . Let us suppose that ten men were
sitting down, were in the middle of eating dinner, and I came in and
went to sit down at their table. They ate; but in front of me there was an
empty plate. Is the fact that we are all sitting at the same table enough

the people and the third people 97

to make us all diners? I am not dining since no one is letting me take my
share of the meal. It isn’t enough to be sitting at the same table as those
eating dinner to be a diner.”5 That is exactly what the November 2005
rioters were expressing in their own way by conspicuously tearing up
their French identity cards in front of the television cameras. Malcolm X
had many occasions for repeating this metaphor. We can find it again in
the speeches he made as the spokesperson for the Nation of Islam when
he defended a separatist perspective, but he would continue to use it
even after he had renounced separatism. From then on, he would use the
term “Afro-Americans,” not without ambiguity, to designate the blacks
of the United States, not to signify that henceforth blacks and whites
would be part of the same people, the same nation, but on the contrary
to mark the difference and assert the need for blacks to have forms of
autonomous authority available to them even while participating, with
whites, in the same popular sovereignty. Malcolm X died without having
resolved the questions that such a process raises.6
The same questions arise in France. When one is a racial minor-
ity, how does one conceive a politics for oneself in an institutional
space shared with the whole population?7 This strategic question
is all the more complicated as it arises differently depending upon
whose point of view one adopts, that of the white majority or that
of the neo-indigenous. It will find a response shared by all the
French population only as the result of a decolonialization process
that over a long transition period will involve a dynamic and con-
flictual compromise between the people and the peoples of France,
based on a reconstruction of the political community taking into
account and institutionalizing the multiple national, cultural, and
identitary references.
An alternative leftist politics would not know how to be satisfied
with a nonrepressive immigration policy or with taking measures
against racial discrimination. All that is imperative of course, as is
the necessary rupture with the French state’s engagement in impe-
rial politics. But if it wants to be effective, the left must also agree

98 the people and the third people

that it will not make the economy another political tool of “national
identity.” I am deliberately using this term that has been exploited
by the Sarkozy right to justify its racist politics. Because in truth, the
response that was made to it was very inadequate. Indeed it was not
adequate to reveal the aims or to denounce the mystifications. On the
contrary, it was necessary to seize the national question for reinterro-
gation from a decolonial perspective.8 It was necessary to introduce
the plural of the notion of people, to combine, within a revamped
definition of popular sovereignty, the redistribution of economic and
social powers and the redistribution of cultural and symbolic pow-
ers. To assert that in France all cultures now have the right to blos-
som hardly makes sense if, following the example of the dominant
“French culture,” those other cultures do not “penetrate” the state, if
legal forms of “self-determination” do not emerge as well, ensuring
minorities the necessary authority to develop their cultures and their
visions of the world. The principle of collective cultural rights, par-
tially recognized today for regional minorities, could be recognized
as well for the minorities without territory. To claim, moreover, that
in France all denominations have the same rights is a hoax that it is
urgent for the left to denounce, not to “radicalize” secularism but to
finally consider religious beliefs as legitimate social needs.
Another large question is surely that of “French history” and of its
nationalizing and racializing function. It is not a matter of granting
the history of minorities a small place in school textbooks, or of “rec-
onciling memories” (how can the memory of the colonists be recon-
ciled with the memory of the colonized?), or even less of abandoning
history to the historians, that is to say, removing it from politics. But
rather of returning to the multiple histories of the French popula-
tions their entire place in the state and in society.
These are only a few courses of action that need to be deepened,
widened, and clarified in such a way as to conceive of what, in the
area of “identity,” could be stated in terms of dynamic compromise,
capable of opening the horizons for decolonization.

the people and the third people 99

 For the left, the issue is not one of reforming itself, or of being
more radical within a matrix that finally remains unchanged, but of
engaging in a true cultural revolution from within. I do not doubt
the generosity of some of its elements, but in politics generosity is
never very far from paternalism or paternalism from domination.
Thus it will be necessary for it to break with the illusion of its own
universality, as it will be necessary for it to learn that it is not the
expression of a single oppressed people but an expression, among
other things, of white privilege that it must learn to fight if it aspires
to making a political alliance conceivable between the white working
classes and the working classes descended from immigration, around
a project capable of establishing the actual sovereignty of a people
both one and multiple.

100 the people and the third people

 6

T h e P o p u l i s m T h at I s

Not to Be Found

jacques rancière

A day does not go by when one does not hear denounced in Europe
the risk of populism. For all that, it is not easy to grasp exactly what this
word means. In Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s it served to des-
ignate a certain mode of government, establishing between a people and
its leader a relationship of direct embodiment, passing over and above
the forms of parliamentary representation. This mode of government
for which Vargas of Brazil and Perón of Argentina were the archetypes
was rechristened “twenty-first-century socialism” by Hugo Chávez. But
what in Europe today falls under the name of populism is something
else. It is not a mode of government. On the contrary, it is a certain atti-
tude of rejection in relationship to prevailing governmental practices.
What is a populist, as defined today by our governmental elites and their
ideologues? Through all the word’s vacillations, the dominant discourse
seems to characterize it by three essential traits: a style of speaking that
addresses itself directly to the people, going beyond its representatives
and notables; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more
concerned with their own interests than the state; an identitary rhetoric
that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners.

101
 It is clear nevertheless that these three traits are not necessarily
linked. An entity called the people exists that is the source of power
and the recognized interlocutor in political discourse: that is what
our constitutions assert, and it is the conviction that republican and
socialist orators of the past deployed without reservation. It is tied to
no form of racist sentiment or xenophobia whatsoever. Our politi-
cians think more about their own careers than the future of their cit-
izens, and our governments live in symbiosis with the representatives
of large financial interests: it takes no demagogue to proclaim that.
The same newspapers that denounce “populist” leanings provide us
with the most detailed evidence of it day after day. On their side, the
heads of the government and the state sometimes accused of pop-
ulism, like Berlusconi or Sarkozy, are very careful not to spread the
“populist” idea that the elite are corrupt. The term “populism” does
not serve to characterize a defined political force. On the contrary,
it benefits from the amalgams that it allows between political forces
that range from the extreme right to the radical left. It does not des-
ignate an ideology or even a coherent political style. It serves simply
to draw the image of a certain people.
Because “the people” does not exist. What exist are diverse or even
antagonistic figures of the people, figures constructed by privileging
certain modes of assembling, certain distinctive traits, certain capac-
ities or incapacities: an ethnic people defined by the community of
land or blood; a vigilant herding people by good pastureland; a dem-
ocratic people putting to use the skills of those who have no partic-
ular skills; an ignorant people that the oligarchs keep at a distance;
and so on. The notion of populism itself constructs a people char-
acterized by the formidable alloy of a capacity—the brute force of
great number—and an incapacity—the ignorance attributed to that
same great number. The third trait, racism, is essential for this con-
struction. It is a matter of showing the democrats, always suspected
of having their heads in the clouds, what is in truth the broad mass of
people: a pack possessed by a primary drive of rejection that is aimed

102 the populism that is not to be found

simultaneously at the rulers whom it declares traitors, lacking an
understanding of the complexity of political mechanisms, and at the
foreigners whom it fears through an atavistic attachment to a way of
life threatened by demographic, economic, and social change. The
notion of populism effects at the least cost this synthesis between
a people hostile to those governing and a people enemy to “oth-
ers” in general. To do so it must again present an image of the peo-
ple developed at the end of the nineteenth century by thinkers like
Hippolyte Taine and Gustave Le Bon, frightened by the Commune
of Paris and the rise of the workers’ movement: the one of ignorant
masses impressed by the resonant words of the “agitators” and led to
extreme violence by the circulation of uncontrolled rumors and con-
tagious fears.
These epidemic outbreaks by the blind masses led by charis-
matic leaders were clearly very far from the reality of the workers’
movement that they aimed at stigmatizing. But they are not any
more appropriate for describing the reality of racism in our societ-
ies. Whatever the grievances expressed daily regarding those called
immigrants, and especially the “suburban youth,” they are not
expressed in popular mass demonstrations. What earns the name
of racism today in our country is essentially the conjunction of two
things. First of all there are the forms of discrimination in employ-
ment and housing that are practiced perfectly in sterile offices, away
from any mass pressure. Then there is a whole panoply of state mea-
sures: restricted entry to the country; refusal to give papers to those
who have worked, participated, and paid taxes in France for years;
restrictions on the right of birthplace; double penalty; laws against
the foulard and burqa; imposed numbers of border escorts; break-
ing up nomadic camps. Some good souls on the left like to see these
measures as an unfortunate concession made by those in power to
the extreme “populist” right for “electioneering” reasons. But none
of them were taken under pressure from mass movements. They are
part of a strategy belonging to the state, belonging to the balance

the populism that is not to be found 103

that our states go to great lengths to maintain between free circula-
tion of capital and constraints on the free circulation of populations.
Their essential goal is indeed to jeopardize a part of the population
with regard to its rights to work and to citizenship, to put together
a population of workers who can always be sent back home and of
French who have no guarantee of remaining French.
These measures are supported by an ideological campaign, justi-
fying this reduction of rights by the evidence of nonadherence to the
traits characterizing national identity. But it is not the “populists”
of the National Front that unleashed this campaign. It is the intellec-
tuals of the so-called left who came up with the infallible argument:
those people are not truly French since they are not secular. The sec-
ularism that not so long ago defined the state’s rules of conduct has
thus become a quality that individuals possess, or that they lack by
reason of their belonging to a community. Marine Le Pen’s recent
“slip” regarding those Muslims at prayer occupying our streets like
the Germans between 1940 and 1944 is instructive in this respect.
It really only condenses into a concrete image a discursive sequence
(Muslim = Islamist = Nazi) that is present almost everywhere in so-
called republican prose. The so-called populist extreme right does not
express a specific xenophobic passion emanating from the depths of
the body popular; it is a satellite that profits from the strategies of the
state and the distinguished intellectual campaigns. Our states base
their legitimacy today on their ability to ensure security. But this legit-
imization has as its correlate the obligation to show at every moment
the monster that threatens us, to maintain the continual feeling of
an insecurity that mixes the risks of economic crisis and unemploy-
ment with those of black ice and formamide so that it can all culmi-
nate in the supreme threat of the Islamist terrorist. The extreme right
only has to fill in the colors of skin and blood on the standard portrait
drawn by governmental measures and ideological prose.
That is why neither the “populists” nor the people represented
by the ritual denunciations of populism truly correspond to their

104 the populism that is not to be found

definition. But that hardly matters to those who raise its specter.
Beyond the polemics on immigrants, communitarianism, or Islam,
their essential goal is to merge the very idea of a democratic people
with the image of the dangerous masses. It is to draw the conclusion
that we must leave matters up to those who govern us and that any
contestation of their legitimacy and their integrity is the open door
to totalitarianism. “Better a banana republic than a fascist France”
was one of the most grim anti-Le Pen slogans of April 2002. The
current campaign on the mortal dangers of populism aims to justify
in theory the idea that we have no other choice.

the populism that is not to be found 105

 CONCLUSION

Fragile Collectivities,

Imagined Sovereignties

kevin olson

Popular politics is based on a set of fragile, changeable associations:

forms of mobilization, collective action, public opinion, and sym-
bolic protest. These are framed as different forms of collectivity—
peoples, nations, publics, crowds, masses, mobs—which inhabit our
collective imagination in different ways. They differ in their durabil-
ity and rectitude: the composition of various groups, the ways they
act, their forms of association, the normative nuances of our atti-
tudes toward them. Among these, the people is one with a storied
and privileged history.
I would like to raise an issue that haunts many discussions of this
subject without making its presence fully felt. Others have man-
aged to talk around what is in many ways the key issue: the meaning
and significance of the people. The reason we ask “What is a peo-
ple?,” the reason we attach significance and meaning to this partic-
ular abstraction, is precisely because of its normative character. We
think of peoples as having powers, and we accord them a significance
not shared by other collectivities. Collectivities like “the people” are
surrounded by a complex aura of meaning. Clearly, if the answer to

107
the question “What is a people?” comes back only in the form of a
discussion about universality, incompleteness, the partitioning of
society, class and group fractions, and various other questions about
group composition, then the most important point is being missed.
That is the answer registered in terms of the meaning and norma-
tive force of the people. To address that question we must attempt to
capture something ineffable about our own thoughts and practices,
something that is both persistent and fleeting. These are the politi-
cal imaginaries that create “the people” and give it normative force.
To tease this important theme out of the discussion that has come
before, (1) I begin by examining the rather different concerns of
Alain Badiou and Pierre Bourdieu, both of whom focus on the com-
position and fragility of the people. (2) Judith Butler and Georges
Didi-Huberman move us beyond this focus on the composition of
collectivities, bringing important insights about performativity and
sensibility to our understanding of the people. (3) These insights set
the stage for my own concerns about the normative character of the
people, the senses in which it is imagined as having important forms
of power. Viewed from this perspective, the people can be thought of
as a kind of “imagined sovereignty,” one that combines ideas of col-
lectivity and normative force. Only by tracing the development of
these ideas in our collective imagination do we understand why the
people occupies such a special place in our political tradition.

Fragile Collectivities: Fractions, Distinctions,

and Parts with No Part

“The people” is a plastic and flexible notion that can be deployed in many
different ways. This is well documented in Alain Badiou’s “Twenty-Four
Notes on the Uses of the Word ‘People.’ ” He explores the grammar of
this term’s use, which allows it to be bent in a number of directions.
When this takes a nationalist form, it falls under suspicion. Locutions

108 conclusion
like “the French people” or “the Russian people” merely document the
inertia of a past political movement ossified in a state, according to
Badiou. This “national adjective + people” refers back to a historical past
of actual political energies that were dissipated in state formation. The
term is now deployed without actual referent to legitimate this state so
that it may serve the needs of capital. “The people” is deeply bound up
with the state in this sense, causing Badiou to give it the name “offi-
cial people.” By virtue of its depoliticization and orientation toward con-
sumption, Badiou dubs this the middle class. Thus in note 19 we find,
“The middle class is the ‘people’ of the capitalist oligarchies.”1 These are
the “false people,” Badiou says, because of their passive and diffuse non-
existence as a political force and their function in legitimating a system
that is, by implication, illegitimate.
A host of other categories stand in contrast. “The people’s peo-
ple” are the excluded and invisible; more specifically, they are invisi-
ble from the perspective of the official people. There are also people
who mobilize against colonization or empire, guided by a vision of a
national people. This is a different deployment of “national adjec-
tive + people.”2
Universalism hovers on the edge of Badiou’s discussion. A
fraction of the people mobilizes itself and overcomes the passiv-
ity of state cooptation by declaring itself “the people.” This is a
people defined by “the future perfect of a nonexistent state,” in
the case of an anticolonial struggle aiming at national liberation,
or “abolishing the existing state,” in the case of a group excluded
from the “official” people, one that Badiou claims would aim at
communist politics.3
Badiou maintains an awareness of the way modes of distinc-
tion shape this concept. Here his work intersects with that of Pierre
Bourdieu. Bourdieu is also interested in language in use. He parses
out the social dynamics underlying such usages, focusing on “pop-
ular” rather than “the people.” The shift from noun to adjective is
important. The grammar of “the people” is a constitutive grammar:

conclusion 109
it constitutes groups by naming them. “Popular,” in contrast, is a
weapon in the ongoing struggles of already-existing groups. It traces
the social dynamics through which groups are valued and revalued
in social space.4 Thus when we encounter difficulties in the use of
“popular,” its politics are already apparent. Those politics concern
the “proper” use of the adjective, where “proper” itself is a nexus of
dispute and is patterned by the very mechanisms of power and dis-
tinction that create groups. “Popular,” then, is an object of struggle
with constitutive significance.
The deployment of “popular” that most occupies Bourdieu’s
attention is to classify forms of language use. Here popular is defined
relationally as that which is excluded from “legitimate” language,
which is to say, language formed according to the “accepted” or
“proper” rules. It is also generated as an active strategy of defiance,
a refusal to interpolate oneself into the social order structured by
legitimate language. This is the choice to be a skilled speaker of a
devalued idiom rather than a poor speaker of an officially sanctioned
one. In these senses, language is both a marker of social difference
and a principal stake in struggles over it.
The people never becomes a political subject for Bourdieu. It
remains within the ambit of an ascribed category of social identity,
chiefly a devalued one. In this, he revitalizes a much older view, one
that had great currency in the France of the late ancien régime. Eigh-
teenth-century ironists like Voltaire and Gabriel-François Coyer
characterized the people as an abandoned, stigmatized class frac-
tion. Coyer’s 1755 Dissertation sur la nature du peuple, for instance, shows
a well-tuned sensitivity to the mechanisms of group distinction. Var-
ious occupational groups except themselves from “the people,” leav-
ing farmers, domestics, and artisans. Even among the artisans, those
who make luxury goods for the rich claim a refinement that excepts
them from the people. Left behind is “the mass of the people.”5
These are the ones, as Voltaire put it a decade later, “who have only
their arms for sustenance.”6

110 conclusion
 Coyer’s commentary is post-Marxist ahead of its time, tracing out
social distinction as a matter of group formation rather than class.
Like Bourdieu, Coyer understands these dynamics as moves in a
game of better-than and worse-than. They are attempts to consol-
idate group identities while simultaneously revaluing them. Coyer’s
greatest sensitivity is to the cultural politics of social classification.
Such was society at the end of the Bourbon monarchy; such is society
under global neoliberalism for Bourdieu. Plus ça change . . .
The similarities and contrasts between these trenchant social crit-
ics is an interesting one. Bourdieu recapitulates, with considerably
greater theoretical sophistication, insights from several centuries past.
(Here his position as a successor of Marx is a decided advantage.)
From this perspective, it is interesting to speculate about the paral-
lels between the ancien régime and our own: history recounts a time
when resentment at social distinction and dispossession explodes in
an orgy of political change, tearing down a decadent regime of aristo-
cratic privilege at the hands of the people. But that is a different topic.
For the moment, it is sufficient to note the form of political analysis
we get from this view, found in both its eighteenth-and twenty-first-
century variants. That is a pointed critique of the politics of margin-
alization and deprivation. It delineates the ways (“social”) distinction
is a mechanism of (“political”) depoliticization and exclusion. The
social is the political and vice versa. For Coyer, this results in an atti-
tude toward the people that, he ironically implies, leaves us wonder-
ing whether they are rational at all or simply animals.7 For Bourdieu,
it shows up in a kind of voluntary self-silencing, in which people con-
clude they are unqualified to participate in politics or even to have
political opinions.8 His analysis is particularly trenchant because he
shows how particular group identities are internalized as forms of
conscious self-exclusion from politics. In these cases, being a member
of the people is the opposite of being politically engaged.
It is equally important to note what we do not get here, something
that is more present for Badiou: attention to the ways collectivities

conclusion 111
function as political agents. There is no account of how “the peo-
ple” becomes . . . a people. Or, more rigorously, the people for Bour-
dieu remains a self-marginalized, devalued social remainder, not a
political agent. Bourdieu would likely argue that this is not a the-
oretical overstatement so much as a frank assessment of the ways
material dispossession takes on social, cultural, psychic, and political
form. Yet that answer is not good enough, because occasionally the
people do form a people; occasionally the marginalized and scattered
remainder becomes a unified, self-aware political force; and we leave
too much on the table to ignore such occurrences and blind ourselves
to this other important sense of the people.
Of course, the phenomenon of collective political action is not
well developed by Badiou either. He traces the attribution of people-
hood through a number of political uses, delineating its problematic
and progressive deployments. The paradigms he posits are rather
stylized, however: the state serves capital and is thus legitimated by a
passive mass. These paradigms nonetheless serve to draw important
lines between passive and active collectivities, which Badiou reads
as the distinction between (passive) legitimation and (active) mobi-
lization. Here the advantages of his approach are sold short by the
uses he makes of it: a grammatical analysis of the deployment of “the
people”-as-language is pressed into the service of a relatively heavy-
handed political analysis (though one not without merits). What
Badiou best captures is the mobile, malleable character of “the peo-
ple” as an element of language. He focuses thereby on the senses in
which the people can be symbolically represented and pressed into
various uses.

Two Moments of the People: Performativity and the Imaginary

Judith Butler’s thinking about the people traces a different arc. Rather
than examining the composition of peoples, she focuses on the acts and

112 conclusion
processes through which they are created. Performativity occupies cen-
ter stage here as the means by which peoples posit themselves.
Like Bourdieu and Badiou, Butler notes the constitutive effects of
language in the formation of groups. “We, the people,” for instance,
is an utterance with constitutive effects in the creation of a group.
Butler shows that language is not primary in such instances, however.
She notes that this kind of expression is not simply a speech act but
one preceded by action: “the assembly of bodies, their gestures and
movements, their vocalizations, and their ways of acting in concert.”9
It is a performative political enactment that is prior to the speech
act itself. This is a politics of bodies assembled in groups, one that
amounts to an act of collective self-constitution. It creates an “ ‘anar-
chist’ energy or a permanent principle of revolution within demo-
cratic orders,” a force that legitimates political representation but
always exceeds it.10 The performance of collectivity also creates the
basis for a more familiar and easily identifiable act of self-designation:
“we, the people.” Collective political action thus precedes the speech
act itself: a material performative goes hand in hand with a discur-
sive one. In this sense, Butler’s notion of performativity is simultane-
ously discursive and material. It does not reduce one to the other but
emphasizes their distinct and interlocking character.
The complex, discursive-material character of the people is an
important insight on Butler’s part. She corrects our distorting ten-
dency to see all politics through the lens of the linguistic turn, crit-
icizing the focus on claims and speech acts at the expense of bodies
and the politics of the street. The potent political force of people
assembled in the square, before the parliament house, in silent vigil,
in tent cities, in celebration, protest, or mourning—all of this goes to
the core of contemporary politics, and Butler does us the great ser-
vice of thematizing it as vital to our understanding of the people.
Yet Butler may overstate the importance of materiality in relation
to discourse. The discursive constitution of a people—“we [are] the
people”—is not necessarily preceded by its performative enactment.

conclusion 113
To claim otherwise overestimates the role of embodiment in rela-
tion to discourse, according one priority over the other. One phe-
nomenon that is well captured by the linguistic turn, by thinkers as
different from one another as Ernesto Laclau and Jürgen Habermas,
is the virtualization of the people in contemporary politics.11 There
is a tendency for politics to be sublimated into discourse through
forms of dispersed and abstract media. We might call this “the work
of politics in the age of its technical mediation.” This is not to say
that thinkers like Laclau and Habermas have the full picture. They
overstate the case in the opposite direction, dissolving material-
ity and practice into abstract forms of discourse, and are much in
need of Butler’s corrective. But neither should we follow Butler in
thinking that physical, corporal enactment must precede discur-
sive self-constitution. The people need not assemble before declar-
ing themselves a people. Rather, we might think of performativity
as including material and discursive elements of various kinds. The
people is performed, but that performance can take many forms: the
outdoor politics of the people in the square or the virtualized pol-
itics of public opinion formation in electronic media, for example.
These forms are mixed and combined in complicated ways—always
performed, but in a complex mélange of materiality and discourse.
As rich as Butler’s insights about performativity are, they do not
go far enough to explain how a people becomes a people. Not present
in this insightful analysis are our reasons for saying that an assembled
group should have any particular significance. Why should a given
group be interpreted as “the people” and accorded a special norma-
tive status? Why should we attribute particular force to the claims of
such a group? How do we distinguish the performative enactment
of the people from any other kind of assembly? Performativity is not
enough to account for this in itself, nor is discursive self-assertion.
Earlier generations of political thinkers would have said, “We
hold the people to be special and significant because they are sover-
eign.” They would agree with Butler about the anarchist energy and

114 conclusion
permanent revolution of the people, attributing it to a form of col-
lective self-direction that was held to be natural or self-evident. This
response is not satisfactory either, of course. It merely begs the ques-
tion, pushing the burden back another step. It does not explain why
we think that some particular group is the people, or why we think
that this people is sovereign.
Butler would not try to salvage this way of approaching the prob-
lem. She has strong objections to the idea of sovereignty, even though
her ideas about anarchist energy and permanent revolution invoke
similar associations. In the company of thinkers like Walter Benja-
min, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Carl Schmitt, she char-
acterizes sovereignty as a form of absolute mastery and control.12
Writing about performativity in language, for instance, she takes
pains to undermine what she has called “sovereign performatives.”
They are forms of “absolute and efficacious agency” in language, in
her view. To invoke them, Butler says, is to draw on a fantasy about a
return of sovereign power, a power that in language has always been
a fantasy.13 This fantasy invokes a conceptual frame that was rightly
rejected by Michel Foucault, she says, because it is built on a notion
of subjectivity that emphasizes the centrality of subjective agency
at the expense of diffuse relations of domination and control. Thus
she draws a sharp line between an absolutist conception of sover-
eignty and the more ineffable and diffuse power of the people that
she describes.
Butler’s objections to this notion of subjectivity lie in an insight-
ful analysis of the sense in which speech acts are insufficient to assert
peoplehood. A speech act is not a self-contained act. The conditions
for their assertion and acceptance are not given in the moment; “the
temporal conditions for making the speech act precede and exceed
the momentary occasion of its enunciation.”14 In other discussions
of performativity and language, she emphasizes the role of conven-
tion as that which stands outside of and beyond sovereign subjec-
tivity. The performative force of an utterance is generated from the

conclusion 115
conventions that it draws on. No one (singly, individually) exer-
cises sovereignty through speech. Because of the role of convention
in creating, stabilizing, and reproducing language, it is not possible
purely to exercise one’s own will in saying something. That utterance
depends upon a reservoir of convention for its meaning and force.
What then about performatives involving “the people”? Are those
also modeled on sovereign performativity? Here, Butler deempha-
sizes language to bring materiality more fully to the fore. In this
account, the performativity of the people is not linguistic and con-
ventional but performed through assembly. This does not seem quite
right, however. We should not be so quick to reject sovereignty as an
analytic concept, nor should we lose sight of convention as a vital part
of sovereign performatives. Political sovereignty is built on a long his-
tory of convention that has great currency in our culture. To object to
the intertwinement between subjectivity and sovereignty is to be dis-
tracted by intellectual constructs. The actually-existing commitments
of our culture contain many elements that, on closer scrutiny, fit
together poorly or do not make sense. A strong conception of subjec-
tivity associated with notions of absolute sovereign control is surely
one of those problematic ideas. However it is important to remem-
ber that there is much more in operation in our shared imagination of
politics than these (purified, rationally reconstructed) ideals.
Absolutist conceptions of sovereignty have always been coun-
terfactual assertions, more attempts to save some waning system
of authority than descriptions of reality. Thus, Hobbes and Filmer,
for instance, articulated powerful defenses of absolute monarchy as
a rearguard action against a seventeenth-century democratic revo-
lution. To dismiss sovereignty based on such narrow and counter-
factual conceptions is unfortunate. It singles out a small group of
(historically embattled) conceptions among many, only to dismiss
them, leaving aside the scattered plethora of other forms that prolif-
erated after the age of kings. Today, sovereignty is one of the princi-
pal ways we understand ideas like “the people,” which is not to say in

116 conclusion
any absolute or unitary form. Rather it gives us a historically situated
vocabulary for examining the genealogy of such ideas. It is precisely
this history that traces the conventions around the people. If we are
serious about bringing forward Butler’s admirable insights about the
people and performativity, we must view sovereignty (in piecemeal,
malleable, nonabsolutist form) as a principal locus of such conven-
tion. We must take a broader view of the noise and fiber of actu-
ally-existing cultural contents, including the ways that sovereignties
permeate our understanding of what it means to act as and declare
ourselves to be the people.
For help in this endeavor, let us turn to a second moment of the
people. Georges Didi-Huberman thematizes the ways the people
can be “rendered sensible,” which is to say brought to the focus of
our attention. For him, this is not necessarily a matter of making
present, in the sense of bringing into visibility something that is fully
there but obscure. Rather it is a critical and problematizing sensibil-
ity. This can be a matter of what he refers to, following Walter Ben-
jamin, as a dialectic of images, one that loosens our grasp on received
opinion by problematizing the sensible.15 It can also consist in open-
ing up alternative perceptions of history, critically interrogating the
representation of the people. Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault,
and Arlette Farge are put forward by Didi-Huberman as exemplary
of this problematizing practice. Rendering something sensible can
involve bringing to attention things lacked and desired. In the case of
the people, for instance, he follows Maurice Blanchot in noting that
the powerlessness of the people itself can be rendered sensible. Sim-
ilarly, for Didi-Huberman rendering sensible can involve bringing to
our senses something that does not make sense. In these cases, Didi-
Huberman characterizes rendering sensible as a twofold movement:
being moved emotionally and moved to thought.16 There is, in other
words, a motivational-critical force to rendering sensible, one that
challenges existing truths and images while rendering these prob-
lematizations vivid to us.

conclusion 117
 Didi-Huberman’s ethos of problematization holds particularly
for representative abstractions like “the people.” He is careful to
specify that the people does not exist “as a unity, identity, totality, or
generality”; it is a nonidentity that is always incomplete.17 Otherwise
put, the people should not be subsumed into the unity of one con-
cept. He sides with thinkers like Bataille, Blanchot, and Nancy, who
problematize notions of collectivity that are conceptualized as sim-
ple communion or substantial unity.18
Didi-Huberman’s focus thus falls on peoples in the plural,
by which he means specific and unique peoples. His attention is
directed to marginalized and invisible peoples, those without name,
without papers, without lodging, without rights, and without images.
He often refers to this in Jacques Rancière’s idiom of “the part with
no part.” His project of rendering the people sensible, he says, is to
return such peoples to the rank of full status as political subjects. In
this sense, his concerns intersect with those of Badiou, Bourdieu,
Coyer, and Rancière. Interestingly he does not characterize this
project as focusing on equality but on what he calls the upwelling of
heterogeneity (surgissement de l’hétérogène).19 The point is not to render
equal but to bring to the fore the wide variety of what is marginal-
ized and hidden from sensibility.
Didi-Huberman is careful not to hypostatize representation. His
reference to rendering sensible should be read as a careful choice:
not simply visibility but a broader form of sensibility that includes
aspects of attention, classification, and prioritization. It includes
practices that might otherwise be classified as cognition or percep-
tion, and it frames sensibility as an inherently intersubjective prac-
tice. It is no mistake, in this light, that Didi-Huberman refers at
various points to the imaginary character of peoples. He references
the differentiated, social character of this idea in Cornelius Castori-
adis’s work.20 Castoriadis talks about the imaginary without reduc-
ing it to a logic of identities or a positivist myth of representational
transparence. He renders the imaginary social, a space of community

118 conclusion
in which community itself is always under negotiation. By associ-
ating his project with the imaginary, on one hand, and community,
on the other, Didi-Huberman makes clear how rendering sensible
relates to peoples. First, he is interested in the broadest register of
the sensible world we share in common. Second, he frames a notion
of community in which imaginary classifications are always in play,
both potentially hypostatizing and always open to critique. And third,
he is keenly aware of the way these two things come together to ren-
der certain groups (“peoples”) marginal, of lesser value, or invisible.
Thus the political logic of rendering sensible has a strong, critical
focus on forms of social exclusion, picking up themes shared with
others but revealing their deployment and reproduction in the imag-
inary domain.
In this sense, Didi-Huberman’s critical focus on representations
in the broadest sense provides a corrective to a narrower emphasis
on language in the constitution of peoples. The world-constituting
power of language carries over to political collectivities, particularly
in the form of naming. This is reflected in the perspectives of But-
ler and Badiou. Bourdieu displays it in a different way: social iden-
tity is quietly duplexed onto language use, not in the form of naming
but in the minute variations of usage that code social identity. This
is a very incomplete picture, however. Without rejecting language,
Didi-Huberman pushes outside its bounds to reveal the symbolic
elements at work in the formation of political collectivities.
Didi-Huberman’s emphasis on forms of representation does
impose certain limits on his views, however. One of those is a ten-
dency to view peoples as objects of representation rather than as
subjects of politics. They are variously represented, hypostatized,
rendered sensible, and/or occluded from sensibility: objects of repre-
sentations. What Didi-Huberman thematizes much less (with some
exceptions)21 is the active, self-constituting dimensions of peoples—
the dimensions that capture Butler’s attention. This is likely a mat-
ter of his framing of the task rather than any deeper narrowness

conclusion 119
of his views: the idea of rendering sensible is implicitly structured
around the accessibility of objects of representation. It is an objecti-
fying perspective, one that comes to seem limited when the objects
are peoples.
What is arguably missing from Didi-Huberman’s reflections is a
particular sense of the people that takes it as a political collectiv-
ity with a special normative status. This problem manifests itself in
a second limitation of this perspective. Didi-Huberman asserts that
there is no “people,” only peoples. This is, in certain ways, an impor-
tant insight about the logic of collective identity and the dangers of
fixity and closure. Yet in seeking to prevent us from hypostatizing
the people, Didi-Huberman goes too far in the other direction. “The
people” has a vital reality in contemporary cultures and constitutes
an important part of our modern political imaginaries. To rule that
out-of-bounds is to fail to interrogate it as a rich source of meaning
in contemporary democratic societies. It is to impose a kind of con-
ceptual correctness where it may not be warranted. Better would be
to let the archive speak for itself, noting occasions when “the peo-
ple” is an organizing concept and others in which “peoples” is more
appropriate.
The importance of using both of these concepts in an interpre-
tively astute way is elegantly illustrated by the title of this book. The
question posed is not “What are peoples?” but “What is a people?”
The choice is an important one, since questions about “peoples”
tend to sound like episodes from the philosophical anthropology
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the peoples of the earth,
the natural characteristics that separate one people from another,
and so forth. The guiding impulse of that project was to catalog dif-
ferent human types. In contrast, investigating the meaning of “a peo-
ple” is at once vital for interpreting our received common sense and
an opportunity to problematize it. Implicit in this undertaking is the
idea that there is often some particular people, “the people,” that is
taken as having singular importance within a given context. This is

120 conclusion
the idea that guides Jacques Rancière, for instance, when he distin-
guishes between “the very idea of a democratic people” and polit-
ical attempts to subvert that idea by merging it with “the image of
the dangerous masses.”22 Rancière agrees with Didi-Huberman that
there is no “people” as such, yet he is also keenly aware that images of
the people circulate in our collective imagination, and some of them
exert a powerful normative force in politics. He has traced some of
these images in his own work, particularly the diverse essays pub-
lished in Les Révoltes Logiques between 1975 and 1985.23 Following the
consequences of this line of thought, we can say that the people is an
imaginary entity; it has a tangible reality for us because we imagine
it as such. Investigating the sources of its special, normative charac-
ter is to inquire into the intersubjective, shared, imaginary construc-
tion of the people.
When we ask “What is a people?” we are not asking a purely
socio-ontological question: about its formation in the social space
of our collective imagination. The social ontology of the people piv-
ots around a crucial, constitutive semantic element. What the people
is depends upon what the people means. Put otherwise, the most cru-
cial element is the way the people takes on shades of meaning in the
ongoing process of construction. To ask questions about the place
of the people in our shared imaginaries is thus to ask about the way
we construct visions of the people and endow them with meaning.
In this sense, the people goes beyond being a simple collective iden-
tity that assembles individuals into groups. It is a meaningful collec-
tivity that we endow with normative value. The people is important
in politics because it has these normative valences, ones that change
with time and context, and are thus all the more interesting.
Following Didi-Huberman’s inspiration, we should ask about the
diffuse and ineffable image of the people that we do share: one that
is part of our shared imaginary, our very conception of what poli-
tics is and how it functions. That is the question we could see being
posed, for instance, by Judith Butler’s evocation of the force of the

conclusion 121
people assembled. We think of such assemblies in some way as “the
people.” The question is how and why?
In this vein, one can imagine a different kind of rendering sensi-
ble of the people. It is something that groups do for themselves, a self-
reflexive practice that we might call a performative rendering sensible.
Such an idea expands Didi-Huberman’s insights in Butler’s direction.
Here we can point out that political demonstrations and other material,
public manifestations of the people render sensible and problematize
at the same time. They bring forth identities and claims into the public,
giving the lie to silences and omissions of public attention. At the same
time, the meaning of an assembly or public display is not entirely clear.
It has a nonverbal facticity that invites interpretation, just like an image
or object. As such, assemblies constitute a form of problematization.
They provoke and enter into the public construction of meaning rather
than unilaterally providing it. In all of these ways, a Butlerian perspec-
tive on performativity can be joined with Didi-Huberman’s insights
on interpretation and problematization. It turns our attention toward
issues of political imaginaries and self-constitution, and especially what
happens when the two come together. Didi-Huberman’s notion of
rendering sensible can be retasked in a project of critique connected to
our shared political imaginaries and the ways that they constitute the
normative bases for popular politics.

Imagined Sovereignties

A great deal of attention has been devoted to the fragile, fleeting nature
of the people as a collectivity. It is clear, however, that the instabilities
of the people are not simply a problem of composition. They are not a
problem of collectivity as such: of its unstable and shifting makeup, of
the tendency of the affluent to except themselves from the whole, leav-
ing only those who have no part. As we have seen in Didi-Huberman’s
work, the people is very much grounded in the way we perceive and

122 conclusion
value particular kinds of collectivities. This work insightfully thematizes
the representational, imaginary, and symbolic aspects of the people. To
elaborate the project I have been pointing toward so far, I would like
to push Didi-Huberman’s insights further in this direction, approaching
the people as a more general normative category.
We need to account for the ways that the people takes on nor-
mative colorations—the ways it becomes a politically significant
collectivity. This is tantamount to asking how we understand the
difference between a mere gathering of individuals—say, a bowling
league or a sales convention—and “the people” in its fully sanctified
sense. In Badiou’s language, we are trying to discern what changes
when a minority detachment declares itself the people. From But-
ler’s perspective, we are trying to determine what makes an assem-
bly into the people. In both cases, we are asking how a group adopts
the normative mantle of the people, claiming authorization to act in
the name of a collectivity with a special normative status. We are try-
ing to determine what act of transubstantiation creates these nor-
matively special collectivities, where otherwise we would see only
individuals assembled.
To understand this phenomenon, we need to examine the norma-
tive background that endows the people with its special status. There
is a host of historically specific terms that describe aspects of this:
popular sovereignty, “the power of the people,” constituent power,
the subtle normative shadings of related terms like nations, publics,
crowds, masses, and mobs. For shorthand, we might call these sov-
ereign imaginaries. They include the absolutist conceptions of sover-
eignty criticized by Butler, as well as various fragmentary, piecemeal,
part-wise authorizations that are ineffable because they are nowhere
explicitly granted. Such ideas are part of the reservoir of our back-
ground assumptions about political action: imaginaries about who is
entitled to act and on what basis.
At the center of this heterogeneous ensemble we find “the peo-
ple,” with all of the subtleties and instabilities of composition that we

conclusion 123
have already examined. Also revealed here are the constructions that
surround the people and invest it with normative powers: “the power
of the people,” the sanctity of foundings and new beginnings, as well
as other forms of rectitude and authorization. These powers accrete
through slow processes of formation that lead us to think of the peo-
ple as a distinctive collectivity and an important political actor.
To see how sovereign imaginaries develop over time, we must
examine them in their historical specificity. The notion of the peo-
ple takes on a politically significant role in modern Europe in the late
middle ages, when it functions to acclaim the king. With the gradual
disintegration of monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, the people first constitutes a euphemized criticism of royal
rule, then its competitor, and finally its replacement. These themes
transform in new ways in the early nineteenth century. In some
cases they furnish a basis for the progressive breakup of colonialism
and the host of new sovereignties that it spawned. In other ways,
nineteenth-century nationalism pushes the people aside in favor of
the nation as a collectivity of choice. At the same time, subnational
collectivities like crowds and masses become increasingly prominent,
largely as objects of fear in the barricade politics of revolutionary
Europe and the anxious imaginations of early social scientists.24
These imagined normativities enter a broad field of action as
they arrive in the twentieth century. There is the mobilization of the
people in the Russian Revolution and the subsequent formation of
Soviets that was celebrated by Hannah Arendt.25 More perversely,
there is the popular basis of National Socialism in Germany and
the widespread popular acclaim of fascism in Italy. There are pop-
ular insurgencies in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968,
then again across the whole Soviet empire in 1989. The unworking
of colonialism across the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies furnishes a whole different set of paradigms for imagining the
people and its powers. More recently, we have Tahrir Square and the
rest of the Arab Spring, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and

124 conclusion
anti-austerity demonstrations in Europe. The Internet and other
communication technologies have created wikis, blogs, and other
postindustrial knowledge projects of all kinds, in which the people
stands for new forms of decentralized, democratized epistemology.
In all of these instances, the people and its powers are imagined in
new and different ways.
This historical kaleidoscope reveals important aspects of the ways
that political collectivities are imagined. It includes not only notions
of collectivity itself—say, “peoples”—but also the normative statuses
with which they are endowed—their “powers.” Most prominently,
we see that the power of the people is an unstable set of histori-
cally contingent, changing cultural and material constructions that
are continually problematized even while they are being elaborated.
They are formed out of a complex web of symbolic contents, acts,
and practices of imagination. Such efforts of imagination are always
partial, incomplete, more a form of symbolic and material politics
than a fully worked out, coherent doctrine.
Consider, for instance, a pivotal moment in this history: the for-
mation of modern ideas of the people in eighteenth-century France.
Under the ancien régime, “the people” is a term of art in a genre
of political criticism. It used by public intellectuals like Voltaire
and Coyer to attack the monarchy in a backhanded way, euphemiz-
ing politics as a form of social critique and removing its sting with
humor and irony. These writings are very much a part of the intel-
lectual scene of salons and sociétés de pensée. As conditions change,
however, the monarchy weakens and the people is pressed into a dif-
ferent function. It now becomes a conceptual means to retheorize
sovereignty. Gone is the unified agency and will of the king; in its
place steps a rather problematic, fraught attempt to universalize the
people and endow it with the kind of normative status that the king
used to bear. Conceptual pieces and remainders of royal sovereignty
are repurposed to create new notions of the people, with somewhat
mixed and unstable results.26

conclusion 125
 In this era, the people and its powers are articulated within a set of
unresolved problematics. These ideas are created to take the place
of royal sovereignty; they try to respond to the problematic situa-
tion at the same time that they are inscribed within it. As a result,
there is continued unsettlement and controversy over the composi-
tion of the collective identities. Throughout this time period, there
is substantial disagreement about what the people actually means—
who it signifies, who is included, on what basis, by what right. This
includes often paradoxical attempts to claim its universal character
simultaneously with forms of differentiation. In this sense there is
a complex web of associations between sovereignty and collective
identity. Universalism and particularity compete with one another.
There is confusion whether sovereignty and power proceed from “all
the people” or various partisan movements, factions, or insurgencies.
There are questions whether parts of the people might be disqual-
ified from sovereignty, or by extension, certain material conditions
might disqualify specific groups. Such attempts to settle the meaning
and composition of the people are also attempts to settle the ques-
tion of sovereignty.
The doctrines descended from those revolutionary events in
eighteenth-century France imagine the people in an implicitly exclu-
sionist way conditioned by a history of colonialism that reaches
back before the Revolution. Thus we see the kinds of tensions that
Sadri Khiari identifies: constructions of the people that default to an
unmarked white European imaginary, requiring marked exceptions
for anyone of a different identity. Khiari notes the implicit exclusion
of black, Arab, and Muslim French citizens from “the French peo-
ple” because they do not fit the imagined identity category. This, he
says, happens in an almost subliminal way: someone descended from
“French stock” can easily identify with the French people by claiming
a privileged relation with the nation-state, whereas a Malian-French
or Senegalese-French citizen cannot make the same claim with-
out considerable cultural dissonance. To subvert these imaginaries,

126 conclusion
Khiari insightfully notes the need for a “redistribution of cultural
and symbolic powers” to bring nationality under interrogation from
a “decolonial” perspective.27 His work brings an important historical
element, the colonial history of Europe, to contemporary construc-
tions of the people. It thus draws attention to race as a principal way
of not having a part in contemporary societies. It is also implicitly
focuses attention on the ways that the people is imagined: in this case,
as durable, national-racial imaginaries that are warped by internal
tensions even though they are lived by millions of Europeans.
The value of tracing such transformations is to observe how the
power of the people is imagined as a normative construction—as having
an inherent value, natural rectitude, or obligatory force. The people
are imagined as having power, and that power can vary consider-
ably in its forms, sources, and concentrations. Attempts to settle the
meaning and composition of the people are also attempts to attach
normative connotations to them. Power is created with the people.
We can call the processes of constructing the normative back-
ground of sovereignties “normatization.”28 It creates value in the
political imaginary by forging connections between collectivities of
various kinds and other ideas and practices. These associations and
projections can be made with a space or territory; they can be coun-
terfactual or actual; they can be projected into the future or the past,
articulated across space, time, and collective identity in characteris-
tic, distinct, and variable ways. Such associations can include differ-
ent arrangements of national and territorial space, different appeals
to temporality, both in a past-oriented nostalgic mode and a future-
oriented, prospective one, or association with other normative val-
ues. What lies in common to all of these variations is the creation
of a collectivity as having a normative character. The form it takes
is a variable and characteristic feature of the particular case under
consideration.
In this sense, postulating a political identity can itself be a strat-
egy of normatization. It can project that identity into the past to

conclusion 127
naturalize it and give it value, or project it into the future as a goal
worthy of completion, one that has value now, counterfactually, by
virtue of the expectation that it will be completed in the future. A
whole set of fantasies and imaginations can be called into play in
complicated ways: heroic pasts, sanctified founding moments, future
ideal states. All of these play on identity within a politics of meaning.
In such cases political identity is less the point than are the processes
of normatization that invoke it. Demands for identity are a proxy
for the discursive and practical negotiation of sovereign imaginaries.
These are practices of imagination that articulate new visions of pol-
itics. They are a self-referential, self-reinforcing practice that creates
the imaginary bases of popular power.
Consider, for example, the creative ways that normatization
endows a collectivity with force by invoking time. Locating one’s
people or nation in an ancient past, for instance, gives it a kind of
naturalized value.29 More radically, such a community can be located
in an eternal past, as Emmanuel Sieyès does in his famous essay on
the Third Estate.30 Past-looking temporalities can also reference
a more specific point in time, drawing on the special character of
a privileged historical starting point, as in stories of revolutionary
founding. Employed in a more abstract sense, this is also the central
normative device of social contract theory.
Temporality can be used in a future-oriented sense as well. Here
the people defines a goal to be completed or a potential to be real-
ized. In this construction, the people is endowed with normativity
by virtue of its future promise.31 Something like this strategy oper-
ates implicitly in many criticisms of the fragmented and exclusion-
ary character of present peoples. It highlights forms of distinction
and exclusion as a way of pointing toward a world in which they will
be overcome.
The people can also be imagined as having a normative status by
associating it with concepts of space. This is particularly true when a
people alleges itself always to have existed on some territory. It puts

128 conclusion
into play a double strategy of normatization, in which time is com-
bined with space to naturalize the particular group in a double sense.
It taps into some notion, never well articulated, that ancient terri-
torial claims confer a material durability on that people, which in
turn creates a presumption of rectitude for its present and future
actions. Without trying very hard, one can think of many current
political conflicts that play on such ideas. Another way to give the
people power is to associate them with a bounded, sovereign ter-
ritory. This “Westphalian” strategy unifies populace, territory, and
jurisdiction in a way that taps into some of our most deeply held nor-
mative ideals. It forms the idea of a democratically self-regulating
people, one in which the subjects of the law are also its authors. Even
though such ideas are deeply entrenched in our current political tra-
dition, there is nothing natural or necessary about them. Like other
sovereign imaginaries, they have accreted over a long period of time
through processes of normatization.
There are many other ways in which the people can take on nor-
mative value, too many to detail here. What is important is the more
general point that the people acquires its normative force in con-
crete and often unexpected ways. The paths of normatization cannot
be exhaustively described because they are contingent improvisa-
tions within particular circumstances. Such improvisations have a
strongly practical and material character. Sovereign imaginaries are
articulated, inter alia, through particular understandings of time,
space, and collective identity, and through association with various
other normative concepts. Normativity, in this view, is not a natural
characteristic of certain political forms. Rather, it is constructed of a
piece with them. The “power of the people,” by extension, is a prod-
uct of particular ways of imagining politics. The normative force of
such ideas is created by summoning particular constellations of ele-
ments and constructing durable sovereign imaginaries out of them.
Performativity plays a large role in these processes of collective
imagination. Political acts and collectivities take their meaning from

conclusion 129
such imaginaries, which define who, collectively, counts as a politi-
cally significant actor. At the same time, such acts and collectivities
contribute to creating our sovereign imaginaries. The people takes
its power from performativity in a double sense: by drawing on nor-
mative imaginaries and by contributing to their creation. The power
of the people has a performative dimension, but it also contrib-
utes to the background of shared meanings against which other per-
formances are understood. Put otherwise, it helps to construct the
matrix of significations within which practice is perceived. When it
comes to collectivity, action can help to constitute the intersubjec-
tive, normative basis of reality. It does something in the (intangible,
intersubjective) world. Actions of certain sorts exercise a constitu-
tive influence on our political imaginaries.
With these insights, we are back to Butler’s idea of the peo-
ple assembled, but with a different angle of view. One of the most
potent effects of collective action, I believe, is to performatively cre-
ate the imaginary bases of popular politics. By acting together, we
build a normative basis of ideas about what it means to be a people.
Chief among these ideas are our images of the significance of collec-
tive assembly, popular voice, and the whole range of cases in which
we take collective action to have an important and sometimes deci-
sive significance in politics.
This happens in both a compositional and normative sense. It
affects what we think “a people” is and what significance we attach
to it. Acting like a people can precede and create the imaginary
preconditions for being a people. This is similar to the forms of
self-authorization described by Jacques Derrida, Jason Frank, and
Bonnie Honig.32 It is not self-authorization in a specific, narrow,
legal-political sense, however: not “we hereby create the legal bases
for our existence as a people” but rather the long, slow accretion
of normative expectations about collectivity and normativity. It is a
form of imaginary politics in the broadest, most cultural, and most
deeply shared sense.

130 conclusion
 Having said this, we have not yet erased the problems and ten-
sions that generate ideas of the people. As our ongoing controversies
about “the people” indicate, these ideas have never really settled into
place. They retain their chafing, problematic form. What it means
to be a people, and to act with the authorization of a people, is still
problematized and politicized. By exposing this to view, my inten-
tion is very much in sympathy with Didi-Huberman’s: a kind of ren-
dering sensible of the people and the politics surrounding it. By
bringing back to attention the still-problematic nature of the peo-
ple, we resist attempts to co-opt its special status while reopening
questions about the sources and nature of our sovereign imaginaries.
We can now return to the question “What is a people?” A geneal-
ogy of popular politics reveals a churning complexity just below the
surface of one of our most sacred political ideals. It has a specific
history, born out of problematics and remaining so today. The actu-
ally-existing imaginaries that populate this history can be quite mal-
leable and contingent. They envision agencies and authorizations in
a wide variety of forms. Yet their two crucial elements always travel
together: peoples have powers. They are imagined replete with nor-
mative force. The people, in short, is an imagined collectivity that
bears an imagined sovereignty.
The many different manifestations of the people at the turn of
the millennium—the people of the Berlin Wall, Tahrir Square, or
Zuccotti Park—all take on significance because of these sovereign
imaginaries at the same time that they performatively help to cre-
ate such imaginaries. The people is a potent creation of our collec-
tive imagination, one that is revitalized when it is enacted—and thus
reimagined—in new ways.

conclusion 131
 NOTES

Introduction: This People Which Is Not One

1. E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 153. For an over-
view of the frequently untranslatable meanings associated with “people”
in different European languages, see the entry “People/Race/Nation,”
in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. B. Cassin, trans.
J. Lezra, E. Apter, and M. Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2014), 751–63.
2. J.-J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right, in Basic
Political Writings, trans. D. A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 147.
3. Ibid., 163. See K. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings,
trans. R. Livingston and G. Benton (London: Penguin, 1975), 234.
4. Rousseau, Social Contract, 148.
5. L. Althusser, “Rousseau: The Social Contract,” in Politics and History, trans.
B. Brewster (London: Verso, 2007), 128–29. Georges Didi-Huberman,
who certainly cannot be suspected of Althusserian allegiances, uses the

133
 same term décalages (translated as “gaps”), citing the work of Michel de
Certeau, to draw attention to the dialectical divisions, fissures, and tears
that mark his proposed history of peoples in the plural.
6. Althusser, “Rousseau: The Social Contract,” 129. We should add, how-
ever, that the many individuals do not exist any more than the one-
ness of the people prior and externally to the political and ideological
processes that constitute the modern category of individuality, which
as the holder of inalienable rights would have to be historicized in
ways that Althusser is characteristically unwilling to do. Even later,
in his definition of ideology as the interpellation of individuals into
subjects, Althusser’s treatment strangely enough still refuses to insert
an element of history into the theory of the subject. See L. Althusser,
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 2001),
127–86.
7. Rousseau, Social Contract, 149 (emphasis added).
8. Rousseau, Émile, quoted in Althusser, “Rousseau: The Social Contract,”
130 (emphasis added).
9. Althusser, “Rousseau: The Social Contract,” 132–33.
10. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. R. C.
Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 46.
11. Althusser, “Rousseau: The Social Contract,” 154.
12. Ibid., 155, 159.
13. J. Rancière, Disagreement: Philosophy and Politics, trans. J. Rose (Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 87–88 (translation slightly
modified). We can compare Rancière’s argument with the way in which
another student of Althusser’s, Étienne Balibar, mobilizes the antinomy
between “man” and “citizen,” like the tension between “liberty” and
“equality,” not as an impasse but as the master key to unlock the poli-
tics of what he calls equaliberty, in É. Balibar, “ ‘Rights of Man’ and ‘Rights
of the Citizen’: The Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom,” in
Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans.
J. Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 39–59.

134 introduction
14. J. Rancière, “Preface to the English edition,” in Staging the People: The
Proletarian and His Double, trans. D. Fernbach (London: Verso, 2011),
18. In the French original, Rancière uses the expression les gros mots
(“coarse words”) to justify and explain the role of “words today seen as
awkward—people, poor, revolution, factory, workers, proletarians—and
wielded by outmoded characters.” See J. Rancière, “Préface: Les gros
mots,” in Les Scènes du peuple (Les Révoltes Logiques, 1975/1985) (Lyon: Horlieu,
2003), 16. Bourdieu uses the same expression below and adds a further
level of sociological reflexivity by studying how the binary distinctions
of high and low, delicate and coarse, etc., are very much part and parcel
of the linguistic and ideological construction of the “popular,” whose
“properly political” consequences are always unstable and open to mul-
tiple counter-finalities.
15. Rancière, Disagreement, 88 (translation modified).
16. L. Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht. Notes on a
Materialist Theatre,” in For Marx, trans. B. Brewster (London: Verso,
1969), 138n4.
17. E. Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” in The Rhetorical Foundations of Soci-
ety (London: Verso, 2014), 94. Laclau famously generalizes the logic
of hegemony as a way of overcoming the class essentialism of ortho-
dox Marxism in his book coauthored with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
18. Rancière, Disagreement, 88 (translation modified).
19. Rancière, “Preface to the English Edition,” in Staging the People, 15.
20. M. Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit,” trans.
J. Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 352.
21. M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. R. Rojcewicz
and D. Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012),
35. For a chronological interpretation of Heidegger’s different uses of
the term Volk that goes to great lengths to try and separate the philoso-
pher’s meditations from the racist biopolitics of Nazism, see H. France-
Lanord, “Peuple,” in Le Dictionnaire Martin Heidegger, ed. P. Arjakovsky,
F. Fédier, and H. France-Lanord (Paris: Cerf, 2013), 991–1012.

introduction 135
22. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 42.
23. P. Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans.
C. Turner (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 113–14. With the
mention of 1967 the author is referring to a talk from this same year
that Heidegger delivered in Athens, Greece, entitled “The Provenance
of Art and the Destination of Thought,” which Lacoue-Labarthe then
compares to Heidegger’s 1933 “Rectoral Address.” In this quote and the
next, Lacoue-Labarthe uses “historial” as the translation of the German
term geschichtlich, which in Heidegger’s lexicon refers to the history of
Being (Geschichte) as opposed to history or historiography in the com-
mon sense (Historie). At stake is not this or that historical occurrence
but the event of being as the ontological possibility of historicity or his-
toriality as such.
24. Ibid., 13 and 112 (translation modified).
25. Ibid., 4–5. See also J.-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Con-
nor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and Blanchot’s
response in The Unavowable Community, trans. P. Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.:
Station Hill, 1988). Georges Didi-Huberman’s idea of “rendering sen-
sible” the absence or powerlessness of the people is openly indebted to
this post-Heideggerian line of thinking.

2. You Said “Popular”?

This chapter was originally published in the French as “Vous avez
dit ‘populaire’?” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 46 (March 1983):
98–105; reprinted in Langage et pouvoir symbolique (Paris: Le Seuil, 2001).
1. The fact that the costs of scientific objectification are particularly ele-
vated for an especially weak—or negative—profit has nothing to do with
the state of our knowledge in these matters.
2. Petit Robert (1979), xvii.
3. We know the role that similar conscious or unconscious exclusions were
able to play in the use that National Socialism made of the word völkisch.
4. See H. Bauche, Le Langage populaire: Grammaire, syntaxe et vocabulaire du français
tel qu’on le parle dans le peuple de Paris, avec tous les termes d’argot usuel (Paris: Payot,

136 introduction
 1920); P. Guiraud, Le Français populaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1965); and also from the same perspective, H. Frei, La Grammaire
des fautes (Paris, 1929; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971).
5. See J. Cellard and A. Rey, Dictionnaire du français non conventionel (Paris:
Hachette, 1980), viii.
6. Let it suffice to note, for example, that in the discourse gathered on the
least strained market—a conversation between women—the lexicon
of slang is almost totally absent; in the case observed, it only appears
when one of the speakers quotes the words of a man (“tu va m’fout’ le camp
tout d’suite”) to which she immediately adds, “That’s how he talks, like an
old Parisian kid, yeah, he has a kind of hard luck look, his cap always to
one side, oh yeah, you can see!” A little later the same character repeats
the word “pognon”—slang for money, “dough”— right after having
related the words of a café owner in which it appeared. See Y. Delsaut,
“L’économie du langage populaire,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales
4 (July 1975): 33–40. Empirical analysis ought to attempt to determine
the speakers’ feelings about a word belonging to slang or legitimate lan-
guage (instead of imposing the observer’s definition); among other
things, that would allow us to understand numerous traits described as
“errors” that are the product of a misplaced sense of distinction.
7. That is what makes the legitimate language, in the guise of going in cir-
cles or nowhere, so often turn to the advantage of the dominants, like so
many circular definitions or tautologies of vulgarity and distinction.
8. Given the role played by spontaneous sociolinguistics and express inter-
ventions by families and schools that they prompt and direct in the
maintenance or the transformation of the language, a sociolinguistic
analysis of linguistic change cannot ignore this sort of linguistic custom or
right that in particular determines pedagogical practices.
9. Even as he accepts the division that is fundamental to the very notion of
“popular language,” Henri Bauche observes that the “bourgeois speech
in its familiar use presents numerous traits in common with popu-
lar language” (Bauche, Langage populaire, 9). And later, “The boundaries
between slang—the various slangs—and popular language are sometimes

2. you said “popular”? 137

 difficult to determine. Quite vague as well are the lines between popu-
lar language and familiar language, first, and second, between popular
language strictly speaking and the language of the common folk, those
who, without being precisely of the people, lack instruction or educa-
tion, those whom the ‘bourgeois’ characterize as ‘common’ ” (26).
10. Even though, for complex reasons that need to be examined, the domi-
nant vision does not give it a central place, the opposition between mas-
culine and feminine is one of the principles beginning from which are
engendered the oppositions most typical of the “people” as a “female”
populace, changeable and hungry for sensual pleasure (according to the
antithesis of head/womb).
11. This is what makes praising the speech of the “real real men” ambigu-
ous: the vision of the world that is expressed by it and the virile virtues
of the durs de durs find their natural extension in what has been called
the “popular right” (see Z. Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914:
Les origines du fascisme [Paris: Le Seuil, 1978]), a fascist-like combination of
racism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. And we can better compre-
hend the obvious bizarrerie represented by the case of Céline.
12. Everything seems to indicate that with the prolonging of schooling, the
“tough” character is now formed as early as school age, and in opposi-
tion to all forms of submission that school requires.
13. It is one of the effects of class racism, according to which all the “poor,”
like Asians or blacks, resemble one another, that it leads to the uncon-
scious exclusion of the very possibility of a difference (of tact, invention,
competence, and so on) and a pursuit of the difference. The undiffer-
entiated praise of the “popular” that characterizes populism can thus
lead to exulting confidently over demonstrations that “natives” consider
inept, idiotic, or crude, or, what amounts to the same thing, it can lead
to retaining of the “common” only what is out of the ordinary, and con-
sidering it representative of ordinary speech.
14. The young “toughs” coming from immigrant families clearly repre-
sent the outer limit of the revolt of adolescents coming from economi-
cally and culturally deprived families, which is often based in difficulties,

138 2. you said “popular”?

 disappointments, or failures in school, as far as it can be pushed toward
the total rejection of “French” society, symbolized by school and also by
routine racism.
15. P. E. Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), see
esp. 48–50.
16. As an exemplary demonstration of this principle of classification and
of the vastness of its field of application, it suffices to cite the builder
(a former miner) who, when asked to categorize the names of profes-
sions (in a test conceived on the model of the techniques used for the
componential analysis of terms of kinship) and to give a name to the cat-
egories thus produced, dismissed with a hand gesture a cluster of higher
professions, the paradigm of which was for him the television show host,
saying, “all the pédés—queers” (Yvette Delsaut Study, Denain, 1978).
17. In a more general fashion, because the more or less blunt evocation of
sexual matters and the flattening projection of the sentimental onto the
physiological level often have the value of euphemisms through hyperbole or
antiphrasis, which, opposite of understatement, say more in order to say
less, this lexicon changes meaning completely when it changes markets,
with novelistic transcription or lexicological recollection.
18. The equivalent of this situation might only be encountered in the form
of military service, which was no doubt one of the principal places for
the production and inculcation of forms of slang speech.
19. The small business owner, and especially the bar owner, particularly
when he possesses the virtues of sociability that are part of professional
requirements, is never the object of statutory hostility on the part of
workers (contrary to what intellectuals and members of the petite bour-
geoisie with cultural capital tend to assume, who are separated from
them by a true cultural barrier). He very often enjoys a certain symbolic
authority—which can be exercised even on the political plane, even if
the subject is tacitly taboo in café conversation—because of the ease and
assurance that he owes among other things to his economic ease.
20. It should be ascertained whether, in addition to bar owners, merchants,
and in particular professionals in sales talk and patter like street vendors

2. you said “popular”? 139

 and the hawkers at markets or fairs, as well butchers and in a different
style, corresponding to different structures of interaction, hairdressers
and barbers don’t contribute more to the production of coinages than
the workers who are simple occasional producers.
21. This representation assigns to the masculine a social nature—that of
the “tough” man and “tireless worker,” “of few words,” rejecting feelings
and sentimentality, solid and “all of a piece,” honest and dependable, “a
man you can count on,” and so on—that the harshness of living condi-
tions would impose on him in any case but that he feels it is his duty to
choose because it defines itself in opposition to the “feminine” nature
(and to the effeminate “counternature”): weak, gentle, docile, submis-
sive, fragile, changeable, sensitive, sensual. This principle of division acts
not only in its specific field of application, that is to say, in the domain of
the relationships between the sexes, but in a very broad way by impos-
ing on men a strict, rigid—in a word, essentialist—vision of their iden-
tity and more generally of other social identities, and thus of the whole
social order.
22. It goes without saying that these behaviors tend to vary according to the
woman’s level of education and especially according to the difference in
educational levels between spouses.
23. It is clear that according to this logic, women are always at fault; that is
to say, it is in their (faulty) nature. The examples could be multiplied to
infinity: in the case where the woman is appointed to take the necessary
steps, if she succeeds, it is because it was easy; if she fails, it is because she
didn’t know how to do it.
24. The intention of inflicting a symbolic stain (through insult, gossip, or
erotic provocation, for example) on what is perceived as inaccessible
contains the most terrible admission of recognizing superiority. So it
is that, as Jean Starobinski has clearly shown, “crude talk, far from clos-
ing the distance between social ranks, maintains and increases it; under
the guise of irreverence and freedom, it abounds in the sense of deg-
radation, it is the self-confirmation of inferiority.” (This concerns the
servants’ gossip regarding Mademoiselle de Breil—see J.-J. Rousseau,

140 2. you said “popular”?

 Confessions III in Oeuvres complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], 94–96, as
analyzed by Starobinski in La Relation critique [Paris: Gallimard, 1970],
98–154.)

3. “We, the People”: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly

Parts of this discussion are drawn from Judith Butler, Notes Toward a
Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2015).
1. H. Arendt, The Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958).
2. United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948), arti-
cles 20, 23.
3. The International Labour Organization makes clear that the right to
freedom of peaceable assembly is central to collective bargaining and
participation and membership in international labor organizations.
See D. Tajgman and K. Curtis, Freedom of Association: A User’s Guide, Stan-
dards, Principles, and Procedures of the International Labour Organization (Geneva:
International Labour Information, 2000), 6.
4. See my “Performativity’s Social Magic,” in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed.
R. Shusterman (London: Basil Blackwell, 1999).
5. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisa
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), lecture 9.
6. See J. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. T. Keenan and T.
Pepper, New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986): 3–19. See also M. Cano-
van, The People (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); E. Balibar, We, the People of
Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. J. Swenson (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and J. Frank, Constituent Moments:
Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2010).
7. S. Felman, Le scandale du corps parlant (Paris: Seuil, 1980), republished as
The Scandal of the Speaking Body (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2002). Some of my remarks offered in the introduction to that text are
reworked in this text.

3. “we, the people” 141

8. See E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005) for a different
account of demands and their propositional forms.
9. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), 199.
10. See my “Introduction: Precarious Life, Grievable Life,” in Frames of War:
When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).
11. See Donna Haraway’s views on complex relationalities in Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991) and The Companion Species Mani-
festo (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).

4. To Render Sensible
1. H. Arendt, Qu’est-ce que la politique? (1950–1959), trans. S. Courtine-
Denamy (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995), 39–43. [Trans.:—See Arendt, The Prom-
ise of Politics, ed. J. Kohn, trans. J. Woods (New York: Random House,
2005).]
2. First Contact, directed by B. Connolly and R. Anderson (New York: Film-
makers Library, 1982). See F. Niney, L’Épreuve du réel à l’écran: Essai sur le
principe de réalité documentaire (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 2000), 283.
3. I have already tried to justify this plural in Peuples exposés, peuples figurants,
L’oeil de l’histoire 4 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2012).
4. See “Populisms,” special issue, Critique 68, no. 776–77 (2012).
5. P. Rosanvallon, Le Peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique
en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 11, 13, with a reference to the article
by O. Beaud, “Repräsentation et Stellvertretung: Sur une distinction de Carl
Schmitt,” Droits: Revue française de théorie juridique, no. 6 (1987): 11–20.
6. C. Schmitt, Theorie de la Constitution (1928), trans. L. Deroche (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 347 (translation slightly mod-
ified). [Trans.:—See Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, J. Seitzer (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).]
7. Ibid., 218, 381, 419–20, and so on. See also C. Schmitt, État, mouvement,
peuple: L’organisation triadique de l’unité politique (1933), trans. A. Pilleul (Paris:
Éditions Kimé, 1997), 48–63. [Trans.:—See Schmitt, State, Movement,
People, trans. S. Draghici (Corvallis, Ore.: Plutarch Press, 2001).] I have

142 3. “we, the people”

 discussed the use of these Carl Schmitt texts by Giorgio Agamben (in
Le Règne et la gloire: Pour une généologie théologique de l’économie et du gouvernement
[Homo sacer II, 2] [2007], trans. J. Gayraud and M. Rueff [Paris: Le Seuil,
2008]) in Survivance des lucioles (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009),
77–97.
8. See C. Schmitt, Parlementarism et démocratie (1924–1931), trans. J.-L. Schle-
gel (Paris: Le Seuil, 1988). [Trans.:—See Schmitt, The Crisis of Parlimentary
Democracy, trans. E. Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).]
9. Rosanvallon, Le Peuple introuvable, 440–41, 445–46, 447–48.
10. Ibid., 447.
11. For “syncopes,” see L. Marin, “Ruptures, interruptions, syncopes dans la
représentation de peinture” (1992), in De la représentation, ed. D. Arasse,
A. Cantillon, G. Careri, D. Cohn, P.-A. Fabre, and F. Marin (Paris: Le
Seuil-Gallimard, 1994), 364–76. For “rips,” see G. Didi-Huberman,
Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Les Éditions
de Minuit, 1990), 169–269 (“L’image comme déchirure”). [Trans.:—
See Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain His-
tory of Art, trans. J. Goodman (University Park: Penn State University
Press, 2005).]
12. See G. Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme
des images (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000). Also see the recent
issue of the online journal Trivium no. 10 (2012), edited by M. Pic and
E. Alloa.
13. See G. Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes
selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002), 115–270.
14. S. Freud, L’Interprétation du rêve (1900), trans. J. Altounian, P. Cotet, R.
Lainé, A. Rauzy, and F. Robert (2003; repr., Paris: Presses Universita-
ires de France, 2010), 509–11. [Trans.:—See Freud, The Interpretation of
Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955).]
15. W. Benjamin, Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle: Le Livre des passages (1927–1940),
trans. J. Lacoste (Paris: Éditions de Cerf, 1989), 481n4.1. [Trans.:—See
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).]

4. to render sensible 143

16. W. Benjamin, “L’oeuvre d’art à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique”
(first version, 1935), trans. R. Rochlitz, Oeuvres III (Paris: Gallimard,
2000), 93–94. [Trans.:—See Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn
(New York: Random House, 1968).]
17. W. Benjamin, “Sur le concept d’histoire” (1940), trans. M. de Gan-
dillac revised by P. Rusch, in Oeuvres III, 430. [Trans.:—See Benjamin,
Illuminations.]
18. Ibid., 440–41.
19. Ibid., 431.
20. Ibid., 433.
21. W. Benjamin, “Paralipomènes et variantes des ‘Thèses sur le concept
d’histoire’ ” (1940), trans. J.-M. Monnoyer, in Écrits français (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1991), 346.
22. Benjamin, “Sur le concept d’histoire,” 441.
23. See S. Freud, Métapsychologie (1915), trans. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis
(Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 45–63. [Trans.:—See Freud, On Metapsychology,
trans. J. Strachey (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).]
24. See H. Arendt, La Tradition cachée: Le Juif comme paria (1944–1948), trans.
S. Courtine-Demany (1987; repr., Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1997).
[Trans.:—See Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. R. Feldman (New York:
Grove Press, 1978).]
25. M. de Certeau, La Solitude, une vérité oubliée de la communication (with F.
Roustang et al.) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1967); L’Absent de l’histoire
(Tours: Mame, 1973); L’Invention du quotidien (Paris: Union générale
d’Éditions, 1980; Paris: Gallimard, 1990–1994). [Trans.:—See Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1984).]
26. M. Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’àge classique (Paris: Plon,
1961; Paris: Gallimard, 1972); Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard
médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Raymond Roussel
(Paris: Gallimard, 1963); Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris:
Gallimard, 1975); Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–1994).

144 4. to render sensible

27. M. Foucault, “Espace, savoir et pouvoir” (1982), in Dits et écrits 1954–1988,
IV: 1980–1988, ed. D. Defert, F. Ewald, and J. Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard,
1994), 273–77.
28. Foucault, “Des espaces autres” (1984), in Dits et écrits, 756, 758–59, 762.
29. A. Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989). [Trans.:—See Farge,
The Allure of the Archives, trans. T. Scott-Railton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 2013).]
30. A. Warburg, “L’art du portrait et la bourgeoissie florentine: Domenico
Ghirlandaio à Santa Trinita: Les portraits de Laurent de Médicis et de
son entourage” (1902), trans. S. Muller, in Essais florentins (Paris: Klincks-
ieck, 1990), 106. [Trans.:—See Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture and
the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. D.
Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and
the Humanities, 1999).]
31. A. Farge, Le Vol d’aliments à Paris au XVIIIe siècle: délinquance et criminalité
(Paris: Plon, 1974).
32. A. Farge, Dire et mal dire: l’opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Le Seuil,
1992); Le Bracelet et le parchemin: l’écrit sur soi au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Bayard,
2003); “Walter Benjamin et le dérangement des habitudes histori-
ennes,” in “Walter Benjamin: la tradition des vaincus,” special issue,
Cahiers d’anthropologie sociale, no. 4 (2008) 27–32.
33. A. Farge, Vivre dans la rue à Paris au VXIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard,
1979; Paris: Gallimard, 1992); (with M. Foucault), Le Désordre des familles:
Lettres de cachet des archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard-
Julliard, 1982); La Vie fragile: Violence, pouvoirs et solidartés à Paris au XVIIIe siè-
cles (Paris: Hachette, 1986; Paris: Le Seuil, 1992). [Trans.:—See A. Farge
and C. Shelton, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).]
34. A. Farge, Effusion et tourment, le récit des corps: Histoire du peuple au XVIIIe siè-
cle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 9–10. See more recently, Essai pour une
histoire des voix au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Bayard, 2009). A continuation
of these problematics is found in the work collected by the Maurice

4. to render sensible 145

 Florence Collective, Archives de l’infamie (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaire,
2009).
35. Arlette Farge refers here to the book by D. Le Breton, Les Passions ordi-
naires: Anthropologie des émotions (Paris: Armand Colin-Massion, 1998;
Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2004).
36. A. Faure and J. Rancière, La Parole ouvrière (Paris: Union générale
d’Éditions, 1976; Paris: La Fabrique, 2007); J. Rancière, La Nuit des prolé-
taires: Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris: Fayard, 1981; Paris: Hachette Litteera-
tures, 2009). See also Les Scènes du peuple (Les Révoltes logiques, 1975–1985)
(Lyons: Horlieu Éditions, 2003). [Trans.:—See Rancière, Proletariat
Nights: The Workers’ Dream in the Nineteenth Century, trans. J. Drury (London:
Verso, 2012); Staging the People: The Proletariat and His Double, trans. D. Fern-
bach (London: Verso, 2011).]
37. See É. Zola, Carnets d’enquêtes: Une ethnographie inédité de la France (1871–1890),
ed. H. Mitterand (Paris: Plon, 1986); J. Rancière, Courts Voyages au pays du
peuple (Paris: Le Seuil, 1990), 89–135. [Trans.:—See Rancière, Short Voy-
ages to the Land of the People, trans. J. Swenson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2003).]
38. Benjamin, Paris, capital du XIXe siècle, 481.
39. See C. Lefort, “La politique et la pensée de la politique” (1963), in Sur
une colonne absent: Écrits autour de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978),
45–104; Les Formes de l’histoire: Essais d’anthropologie politique (1978; repr.,
Paris: Gallimard, 2000); and Essais sur le politique, XIXe–XXe siècles (1986;
repr., Paris: Le Seuil, 2001).
40. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique (1955; repr., Paris: Gal-
limard, 2000), 17–45 (“La crise de l’entendement”); “Partout et nulle
part” (1956), in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 194–200 (“Existence et
dialectique”); Le Visible et l’invisible (1959–1961), ed. C. Lefort (1964; repr.,
Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 75–141 (“Interrogation et dialectique”). For a
recent philosophic rehabilitation of the sensible, see the fine book by
E. Coccia, La Vie sensible, trans. M. Reuff (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2010).
[Trans.:—See Merleau-Ponty, Adventures in the Dialectic, trans. J. Bien
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Signs, trans. R.

146 4. to render sensible

 McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964); and
The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1968).]
41. J. Rancière, Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique,
2000). [Trans.:—See Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S.
Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010).]
42. J. Rancière, Aux bords du politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 1998; Paris: Gallli-
mard, 2004), 242, 244. [Trans.:—See Rancière, On the Shores of Politics,
trans. L. Heron (London: Verso, 2007).]
43. A. Badiou, “La politique: Une dialectique non expressive” (2005), in La
Relation enigmatique entre philosophie et politique (Meaux: Éditions Germina,
2011), 70–71.
44. J. Rancière, Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Fayard, 1983; Paris: Flammar-
ion, 2007), vi (2006 preface). [Trans.:—See Rancière, The Philosopher and
His Poor, trans. A. Parker, J. Drury, and C. Oster (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2004).]
45. M. Merleau-Ponty, “Le roman de la métaphysique” (1945), in Sens et
non-sens (Paris: Éditions Nagel, 1948; Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 35–37.
[Trans.:—See Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. and P. A.
Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964).]
46. J. Rancière, Aisthesis: Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 2011). [Trans.:—See Rancière, Aiethesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic
Regime of Art, trans. Z. Paul (London: Verso, 2013).]
47. Ibid., 287–307. See J. Agee and W. Evans, Louons maintenant les grands hom-
mes: Alabama, trois familles de métayers en 1936 (1941), trans. J. Queval (1977;
repr., Paris: Plon, 2002). [Trans.:—See Agee and Evans, Now Let Us Praise
Famous Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1941).]
48. See V. Maïakovski, L’Universel Reportage (1913–1929), trans. H. Deluy
(Tours: Farrago, 2001).
49. See esp. C. Reznikoff, Témoignage: Les États-Unis (1885–1915), recitatif
(1965), trans. M. Cholodenko (Paris: P.O.L., 2012); W. G. Sebald, Aus-
terlitz (2001), trans. P. Charbonneau (Arles: Actes Sud, 2002); and
J.-C. Bailly, Le Dépaysement: Voyages en France (Paris: Le Seuil, 2011). See

4. to render sensible 147

 the studies of M. Pic, “Du montage de témoignages dans le littéra-
ture: Holocauste de Charles Reznikoff,” Critique, no. 736 (2008): 878–
88; “Élégies documentaires,” Europe no. 1033 (2012): *****. [Trans.:—See
Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915) Recitative (New York:
New Directions, 1965); Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. A. Bell (New York: Ran-
dom House, 2001).]
50. See G. Didi-Huberman, Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet, L’oeil de l’histoire 3
(Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2011).
51. B. Cendrars, Kodak (documentaire) (Paris: Stock, 1924); Poésies complètes (Paris:
Denoël, 1944), 151–89 (“Documentaires”). [Trans.:—See Blaise Cendrars:
Complete Poems, trans. R. Padgett (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992).] See D. Grojnowski, Photographie et langage: Fictions, illustrations, informa-
tions, visions, théories (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 2002), 45–66.
52. A. Breton, Nadja (1928), Oeuvres complètes 1, ed. M. Bonnet (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1988), 643–753. [Trans.:—See Breton, Nadja, trans. R. Howard
(New York: Grove Press, 1960).]
53. See G. Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance inform, or le gai savoir visuel selon
Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995).
54. See U. Marx, G. Schwarz, M. Schwarz, and E. Wizisla, Walter Benjamin:
Archives; images, textes et signes (2006), ed. F. Perrier, trans. P. Ivernel (Paris:
Klincksieck, 2011), 272–93.
55. I. Ehrenbourg, [Mon Paris] (Moscow: Izogiz, 1933; Paris: Éditions 7L,
2005).
56. See O. Lugon, Le Style documentaire: d’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945
(2001; repr., Paris: Macula, 2011). G. Didi-Huberman, Quand les images
prennent position, L’oeil de l’histoire 1 (Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009).
57. Agee and Evans, Now Let Us Praise, unpaginated photos.
58. M. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1983), 54. [Trans.:—See Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. P.
Jorris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Books, 2006).]
59. I have altered Maurice Blanchot’s expression in the French here because
of the distinction, which seems to me necessary (one will find it, notably,
in the commentaries on Nietzsche by Gilles Deleuze), between puissance

148 4. to render sensible

 (power, strength) and pouvoir (power, ability). Thus one could say that
a “declaration of powerlessness” (inability) is not exactly deprived of its
power (strength) of declaration.

5. The People and the Third People

1. It seems to me that it can be claimed that in American democracy the
citizenship is especially individualized whereas in the French republic it
is more collective, identified with popular sovereignty.
2. I have attempted to back up this hypothesis in La Contre-révolution coloniale
en France: De de Gaulle à Sarkozy (Paris: La Fabrique, 2009).
3. See notably J.-L. Mélanchon, “Une défense souveraine et altermondial-
iste,” Revue Défense nationale, no. 749 (April 2012).
4. F.-B. Éwanjé-Épée and S. Magliani-Belkacem, “Les luttes d’immigration
postcoloniale dans la ‘révolution citoyenne,’ ” Contretemps, September 6,
2012, http://www.contretemps.eu/interventions/luttes-immigration-
postcoloniale-dans-«révolution-citoyenne». The declarations of Jean-
Luc Mélanchon also prompted excellent reaction from a few militants
of the Left Front, members of one of the movements stemming from
the anticapitalist New Party: C. Durand, R. Keucheyan, J. Rivoire,
and F. Verri, “Jean-Luc Mélanchon, vous avez tort sur les émueutes
d’Amiens-Nord,” Rue89, August 31, 2012, http://rue89.nouvelobs.com
/rue89-politique/2012/08/31/jean-luc-melenchon-vous-avez-tort-sur
-les-emeutes-damiens-nord-234968.
5. Malcolm X, Le Pouvoir noir, ed. G. Breitman, trans. G. Carle (Paris: La
Découverte, 2008), 208. [Trans.:—See By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X
Speeches and Writings (New York: Pathfinder, 1970).]
6. These questions are approached in my latest essay, Malcolm X: Stratège de la
dignité noire (Paris: Amsterdam, 2013).
7. See S. Khiari, “Nous avons besoin d’une stratégie décoloniale,” in Races et
capitalisme, ed. F. Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and S. Magliani-Belkacem (Paris:
Syllepse, 2012).
8. I began to consider this question in Pour une politique de la racialle (Paris:
Textuel, 2006).

5. the people and the third people 149

 6. The Populism That Is Not to Be Found
This chapter originally appeared in Liberation (January 3, 2011) and has
been revised for the present volume.

Conclusion: Fragile Collectivities, Imagined Sovereignties

1. A. Badiou, “Twenty-Four Notes on the Uses of the Word ‘People,’ ” in
this volume, 28.
2. Ibid., 22–24.
3. Ibid., 30–31.
4. P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
R.Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 99–168.
5. G.-F. Coyer, Dissertation sur la nature du peuple, in Bagatelles morales et disserta-
tions par Mr. L’Abbé Coyer; avec le testament litteraire de Mr. L’Abbé Desfontaines
([Frankfurt?]: Knoch & Eslinger, 1757), British Library, 225–26.
6. Voltaire to Damilaville, April 1, 1766 (D13232), in The Complete Works of
Voltaire, vol. 114: Correspondence, ed. T. Besterman (Banbury, UK: Voltaire
Foundation, 1973), 155–56.
7. Coyer, Dissertation, 232–34.
8. Bourdieu, Distinction, 397–465; “You Said ‘Popular,’ ” in this volume,
46–47.
9. J. Butler, “ ‘We, the People’: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” in this
volume, 50.
10. Ibid., 51.
11. E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); J. Habermas, Between
Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans.
W. Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 329–87.
12. J. Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge,
1997), 12, 15–16, 77–79; W. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected
Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, trans. E. Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1996); J. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume
1, trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009);
M. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–
1976, trans. D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 36–40, 43–44; Carl

150 conclusion
 Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G.
Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
13. Butler, Excitable Speech, 77–78.
14. Butler, “We, the People,”53.
15. G. Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés, Peuples figurants(Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 2012), 17; “To Render Sensible,” in this volume, 84.
16. Didi-Huberman, “To Render Sensible,”74–78.
17. Ibid., 85.
18. Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés, 96–105.
19. Ibid., 33, 108–9.
20. Ibid., 105.
21. Ibid., 30–31.
22. J. Rancière, “The Populism That Is Not to Be Found,” in this volume,
105.
23. Collected and translated as J. Rancière, Staging the People: The Proletarian
and His Double, trans. D. Fernbach (London: Verso, 2011) and The Intellec-
tual and His People: Staging the People, Volume 2, trans. D. Fernbach (London:
Verso, 2012).
24. I have developed this narrative in greater detail in Imagined Sovereignties:
The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2016).
25. H. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 248–50.
26. Olson, Imagined Sovereignties, chap. 4.
27. S. Khiari, “The People and the Third People,” in this volume, 87–88, 89.
28. Olson, Imagined Sovereignties, chap. 5.
29. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 178–85; R. Smith, Stories of
Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2003), 64–69, 103–16.
30. E. Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” (1789), in Political Writings, ed. and
trans. M. Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 136.
31. J. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. T. Keenan and
T. Pepper, New Political Science 7, no. 1 (1986): 10; Derrida, The Politics of

conclusion 151
 Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 306; J. Frank, Constit-
uent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2010), 5–6.
32. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” 10; Frank, Constituent Moments,
8; B. Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the
Problem of Founding a Republic,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1
(1991): 97–113.

152 conclusion
 INDEX

ABC of the War (Brecht), 84 anarchist energy, 51, 113, 114, 115
accent pointu (northern accent), 36 anthropological effectiveness of
acclamation, 68, 69 relics, 72
adjective + people, 24. See also anthropology, 2, 78, 81, 120
national adjective + people anti-austerity demonstrations
adjective pairs, system of, 36 (Europe), 124
Adorno, Theodor, 69, 83 antiphrasis, 139n17
aesthetic, 65, 79, 80–81 Arab Spring, 26, 124
Agamben, Giorgio, 71 Aragon, Louis, 83
Agee, James, 82, 84, 85, 86 Arendt, Hannah, 50, 60, 65, 74, 124
Aisthesis (Rancière), 82 aristocratism, 29, 38, 40
Alexanderplatz (Döblin), 83 Aristotle, 29
Althusser, Louis, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, Assad, Bachar, 80
13, 20 assembly, 24, 25, 49–64, 113, 114,
Althusser’s Lesson (Rancière), 11 116, 122, 123, 130

153
Auschwitz, 19 body politic, 6, 9, 57, 64
Austin, J. L., 54 Boiffard, Jacques-André, 83
Bourdieu, Pierre, 4, 32–48, 108,
Badiou, Alain, 11, 14, 21–31, 80, 109–12, 113, 118, 119
108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 118, 119, Brecht, Bertolt, 84
123 Breton, André, 83
Bailly, Jean-Christophe, 83 Burckhardt, Jacob, 74, 77
Balibar, Étienne, 134n13 Butler, Judith, 3, 14, 49–64, 108,
Bataille, Georges, 72, 78, 82, 83, 118 112–17, 119, 121–22, 123, 130
Battleship Potemkin (film), 80
Bauche, Henri, 37, 137–138n9 Carné, Marcel, 34
Being and Time (Heidegger), 16, 17 Carnets d’enquêtes (Zola), 78
Benjamin, Walter, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, Castoriadis, Cornelius, 118
76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 115, 117 Cendrars, Blaise, 83
Berlin Wall, 131 censorship, 43, 44
Berlusconi, Silvio, 102 Certeau, Michel de, 74, 117
Binswanger, Ludwig, 81 Chávez, Hugo, 15, 101
Black Notebooks (Heidegger), 18 citizenship, 64, 89, 92, 95, 104
Blanchot, Maurice, 16, 85, 117, 118 classes: dominant classes, 72,
Bloch, Ernst, 69, 82 89; middle class, 29, 30,
Bloch, Marc, 77 109; popular classes, 33–35;
bodily acts, linguistic speech as subordinate classes, 89, 95,
linked to, 57 97; working classes, 33–35, 44,
bodily life, 60, 61, 63 95, 100
body/bodies: as activated by history classification, 111, 118, 119,
and as acting upon it, 77; as 139n16
affectively in the world, 77–78; class racism, 138n13
mobility as right of, 63; as more class struggle, 10, 11, 73, 89
than active agents of resistance, coinages, 35
62–63; plurality of, 59–60, 61; collective cultural rights, 99
reasons for assembly of, 63; as collective identity, 120, 121, 126,
set of relations, 61; techniques 127, 129
of, 81; as vulnerable, 64 collective political action, 112, 113

154 index
collectivity: action as helping to Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)
constitute intersubjective, (Heidegger), 17, 18
normative basis of reality in, 130; Coyer, Gabriel-François, 110, 111,
creation of as having normative 118, 125
character, 127; forms of, 107; crowds, 107, 123, 124
fragile, fleeting nature of the cultural law, 42
people as, 122; notions of, 118; as cultural legitimacy, principles of, 43
passive or active, 112; as political
agent, 111–12; subnational Da-sein, 16–17, 19
collectivities, 124; symbolic declaration of powerlessness,
elements in formation of, 119; 85, 86
unsettlement and controversy “Declaration of the Rights of Man
over composition of, 126 and of the Citizen” (Marx), 9
colonialism: history of, 126; delinquent culture, 42
unworking of, 124 democratic rule, 51
colonized within, 97 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 55, 115, 130
commonly used, 33 detachment, 27–28, 123
communist politics, 31, 109 deviances, history of, 74
condition of life, 60 dialectical/dialectic, 69–74, 79, 80,
Confessions (Rousseau), 11 82, 83; emotions, 86; idea, 84;
confused representations, network images, 69, 70, 71, 84, 86, 117;
of as engendered by social of the symptom, 85
subjects, 35 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 15, 16,
conscious intervention, 36 65–86, 108, 117–19, 120, 121,
constituent power, 123 122, 123, 131
constructive principle (konstructiv Disagreement: Philosophy and Politics
Prinzip), 73, 74 (Rancière), 11–12
contingent hegemonic articulation, Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau), 10
14 discrimination, 40, 90–91, 98, 103
contract, Rousseau’s notion of, 8 dispositions, hierarchy of, 41
contract model, 6 Dissertation sur la nature du peuple
contractual exchange, Rousseau’s (Coyer), 110
formula of, 6, 7, 8 Döblin, Alfred, 83

index 155
Documentaires (Cendrars), 83 false people, 29, 109
documentary montage, 83 Farge, Arlette, 76, 117
Documents (Bataille), 83 fascism, 69, 124
dominant classes, 72, 89 faubourien (Paris working-class
dominant culture, 96 accent), 36
dominant markets, 39, 41, 43, 44, Faure, Alain, 78
46, 47, 48 Felman, Shoshana, 57
dominant oppositions, 37 Filmer, Robert, 116
the dominated, 37, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, First Contact (documentary), 66
47, 48 FN (Front national), 94
dream image, 70, 72 For Marx (Althusser), 10, 11, 13
dualistic mode of thought, 39 Foucault, Michel, 74, 75, 76, 115, 117
dualist taxonomies, 37 France, masking of racial
hierarchies in, 92
Effusion et tourment (Farge), 76–77 Frank, Jason, 130
Egyptian people, 26 freedom of assembly, 49–64, 113
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 83 freedom of association, 50
Einstein, Carl, 69, 81 free markets, 39, 43, 44, 46, 48
Eisenstein, Sergei, 72, 80 Frei, Hans Wilhelm, 37
elected regime, 50, 51 French, how to be French without
Émile (Rousseau), 7 being French, 97–100
emotion-people, 68, 69 French culture, 99
enunciation, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 115 French history, 99
equality, embodiment of in French nation, 93
practices of assembly, 59 French nationalism, 94
Evans, Walker, 84, 85, 86 French people, 22, 23, 24, 26, 87, 92,
event-people, 68 93, 94, 97, 109, 126
Éwanjé-Épée, Félix Boggio, 96 French state, 93, 98
exclusion, 2, 3, 4, 68, 96, 111, 119, French stock, 91, 93, 97, 126
126, 128 frequencies, 35, 43
expression, scholastic norms Freud, Sigmund, 70, 72, 73
of, 42 Front national (FN), 94
extra-parliamentary power, 51 Führertum, 67

156 index
gathering, 54, 56, 123 implicit definitions, 34
Gemeinschaft, 16 insurgencies, 124, 126
gender, effect of, 41, 46–48 International Labor Organization,
generation, effect of, 41 50
Gleichschaltung, 53 invisible peoples, 118
group distinction, mechanisms of,
110 Jew as Pariah, The (Arendt), 74
group psychology, 2
Kant, Immanuel, 8–9
Habermas, Jürgen, 114 Kehre, 17
Haraway, Donna, 61 Khiari, Sadri, 14, 15, 87–100, 126,
Hardt, Michael, 15 127
Hegel, G. W. F., 8–9, 68, 69, 74 Kodak (documentaire) (Cendrars), 83
Heidegger, Art, and Politics (Lacoue- Kracauer, Siegfried, 69
Labarthe), 18 Krull, Germaine, 83
Heidegger, Martin, 16–19
heterotopias, 74–80 Laclau, Ernesto, 4, 14, 114
history of deviances, 74 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 16, 18,
history of solitudes, 74 19
Hobbes, Thomas, 14, 116 La Nouvelle Héloise (Rousseau), 11
Hollande, François, 25 La Nuit des prolétaires (Rancière), 78
Hong Kong pro-democracy La Parole ouvrière (Faure and
protests, 124 Rancière), 78
Honig, Bonnie, 130 Le Bon, Gustave, 103
Lefort, Claude, 79
illocutionary act, 56 Left Front, 94, 96
images: dialectical, 69, 70, 71, left-wing populism, 15
84, 86, 117; dream, 70, 72; legibility: crystals of (Lesbarkeit), 69;
implacable, 84 of history, 84, 86; power of, 84
imaginary peoples, 65, 68, 69 legitimate language, 33, 35, 36, 41,
imagined sovereignty, 108, 122–31 42, 110
immigrants, 28, 34, 42, 95, 96, 98, Le Paysan de Paris (Aragon), 83
105 Le Pen, Marine, 21, 104, 105

index 157
Le Peuple introuvable (Rosanvallon), material dispossession, 112
66 Mauss, Marcel, 81, 82
Le scandale du corps parlant, 57 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 83
Les Révoltes Logiques (journal), 12, 121 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 21, 94–95,
Les Scènes du peuple (Rancière), 13–14 96, 97
le tiers peuple, 14 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 78, 79, 82
liberation: national liberation, 23, methodical observation, program
24, 25–26, 27, 31, 89, 109; and of, 44
use of term “people,” 22–23 Michelet, Jules, 74, 78
liberation movements, 89 middle class, 29, 30, 109
life, condition of, 60 minority detachment, 27–28, 123
linguistic counter-legitimacy, 42 minority peoples, 89
linguistic habitus, 39 Moholy-Nagy, László, 83
linguistic law, 42 Mon Paris (Ehrenburg), 83
linguistic speech, 57 Morales, Evo, 15
Lissitzky, El, 83
Lotar, Eli, 83 Nadja (Breton), 83
lowlife, 34, 41, 43 nameless of history, 73
lumpenproletariat, 34 naming, 25, 52, 110, 119
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 16, 19, 118
Magliani-Belkacem, Stella, 96 nation, concept of, 89
Malcolm X, 97–98 national adjective + people, 23, 26,
mandate, 66, 67, 70, 71 109
Man Ray, 83 National Front, 104
Mao Zedong, 28 national identity, 30, 93, 99, 104
marginalized peoples, 112, 118 nationalism, 94, 95, 124
marseillais (Marseilles accent), 36 national liberation, 23, 24, 25–26,
Marx, Karl, 5, 9, 11, 14, 23, 27, 76, 27, 31, 89, 109
78, 79, 111 National Socialism, 124
Marxism, 11, 12, 15 national sovereignty, 89, 94, 95
masses, 2, 28, 29, 68, 69, 103, 105, national union, 89
107, 121, 123, 124 national wars, 89
mass psychology, 2 nation-people, 68

158 index
Nazi Germany/Nazism, 16, 19, 21, particularity, 126
92, 104 Parti socialiste (PS), 93
Negri, Antonio, 15 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 72
neo-liberalism, 95, 111 Passagenwerk (Benjamin), 70, 78
neo-populists, 16 pathos, formulas of, 70, 80, 81, 86
new people, 27, 30, 31 patois, 36
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 68, 77 people: abstract humanist notion
nonconventional French of, 90; acting like a people,
dictionaries, 33, 35 130; against whom are they
nonconventional language, 33 constituted, 88–90; as
nonexistent mass, 28 category constituted on basis of
nonexistent state, 30, 109 exclusion, 2; as category of the
normativity, 128, 129, 130 right of state, 24; claiming to be
normatization, 127, 128, 129 part of, 87; complex, discursive-
material character of, 113;
Occupy movement, 52, 59 composition and fragility of,
official people, 28, 29, 30, 31, 109 108; as designating something
Of Grammatology (Derrida), 10 singular, 26; as designating
Of Ideology (Badiou), 11 subject of a political process,
Olson, Kevin, 107–31 27; imaginary character of,
On Populist Reason (Laclau), 4 118; as imaginary entity, 121;
“On the Jewish Question” (Marx), 9 as imagined collectivity that
opinion-people, 68 bears an imagined sovereignty,
opposition: dominant oppositions, 131; material elements of, 88;
37; between masculine and meaning and significance of,
feminine, 138n10, 140n21 107; as more general normative
oppressed. See tradition of the category, 123; as name for
oppressed (Tradition der political process that produces
Unterdrückten) its own subject, 20; negative
others, 103 senses of term, 30; as neutral
term, 21; no people as such,
parliamentary forms of power, 51 120, 121; normative character
Partage du sensible (Rancière), 80 of, 108; as not a progressive

index 159
people (continued ) performative enactments, 53, 54–55,
noun, 21; as not existing, 66, 58, 113, 114
102; as not to be found, 70; performativity, 108, 112–17, 122,
the people’s people, 28; as 129, 130
political category, 1, 3, 4, 13, permanent revolution, 115
20, 31; as political collectivity Plato, 19, 29, 69, 80, 84
with special normative status, plural action, 52, 55
120; as political notion, plural body/plural bodies, 60, 63
89; positive senses of term, plurality: of bodies, 59, 61;
30–31; as privileged term for condition of, 58
articulating sphere of modern political action: background
politics, 2–3; racial dimension assumptions about, 123;
of notion of, 90; as rendered collective political action, 112,
sensible, 80–86, 117, 118, 113; crux of, 14
119, 120, 122, 131; as result of political becoming, process of, 5
process of political becoming, political depoliticization and
5; revalorization of category exclusion, 111
of, 15; social ontology of, 121; political effectiveness of relics, 72
and socioeconomic order, 90; political imaginaries, 108, 120, 122,
as standing for new forms of 130
decentralized, democratized political plurality, 63
epistemology, 125; strategic political sociality, 56
dimension of, 89; as taking political sovereignty, 116
on normative value, 129; Political Theology (Schmitt), 67
talking about in the plural, political theory, role/text of, 3, 4
2; as term of art in ancien politics: communist politics, 31,
régime, 125; use of term when 109; final aim of, 62; of power,
accompanied by an adjective, 95; progressive politics, 30;
22, 23–24; virtualization of in of the street, 59, 113; survival
contemporary politics, 114. See as precondition of, 60; of the
also specific groups of people truth, 80
people-nation, 89, 90 popular, 4, 22, 25, 32–48, 109–10;
peoples, as having powers, 131 art, 33, 35; classes, 33–35;

160 index
 language, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, racial minorities, 98
39, 44, 47; medicine, 35; realism, racism, 102, 103. See also class racism
40; religion, 33, 35; will, 50, 61 radical left, national inflexion of,
popular sovereignty, 49, 50–52, 53, 93–97
54, 55, 89, 94, 95, 98, 99, 123 Rancière, Jacques, 11, 13, 14, 15, 78,
populism, 15, 21, 66, 101–5 79, 80, 81, 82, 101–5, 118, 121
populist celebration, 68 Reading Capital (Althusser), 10, 11
post-Marxist, 16, 111 real real men, 138n11
power: extra-parliamentary refoulement, 73
power, 51; of legibility, 84; remontage, 83
parliamentary forms of, 51; of Repräsentation, 67
the people, 12, 53, 66, 115, 123, representation: according to
124, 125, 127, 129, 130; politics Schmitt, 67; forms of, 51, 119;
of, 95; tradition of, 73 of the people/the peoples,
powerlessness, declaration of, 85, 86 65–69, 71, 78, 117; of powers,
power relationships, 88, 90, 92, 93 71; question of, 66; and
practical knowledge, 36 Rosanvallon’s emotion-people,
private exchanges, 43 68; work of, 38
privilege, 90, 91 répression, 73
problematization, 117, 118, 122 resistance: bodies as capable of,
program of methodical observation, 63; networks of, 62; to official
44 norms, 40; reasons for, 62
progressive politics, 30 Reznikoff, Charles, 83
Proletarian Nights (Rancière), 12 right of assembly (or association),
proletariat, 14, 15, 16, 20, 23, 34 50
protests/uprisings, 3, 124 rights of collective bargaining, 50
PS. See Parti socialiste rips, 69
public exchanges, 43, 44–46 Rocha, Glauber, 72
Puerta del Sol (Spain), 3, 59 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 66–67, 68,
69, 71
race: concept of, 90–93; as principal Rouch, Jean, 72
way of not having a part in Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4–5, 6, 7, 8,
contemporary societies, 127 9, 10, 14, 20, 24

index 161
Roussel, Raymond, 74 slang, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44
royal sovereignty, 125, 126 social classification, 111
Russian people, 109 social distinction, 111
social identity, 110, 119
Saint-Denis, 87 Socialist Party, 95
Sander, August, 84 social plurality, 52
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 99, 102 social races, 90, 92
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 78 Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 4, 5,
Schmitt, Carl, 67, 68, 69, 71, 6, 7, 9, 10
73, 115 sociolinguistics, 36, 137n8
scholastic norms of expression, sociology, 2, 4
42 solitudes, history of, 74
secularism, 96, 99, 104 sovereign people, 14, 28
self-authorization, 130 sovereign performatives/sovereign
self-constitution, 3, 51, 52, 54, 55, 63, performativity, 115, 116
113, 114, 119, 122 sovereignty, 24, 96, 115, 116, 117,
self-designation, 52, 54, 113 123, 125. See also citizenship;
self-determination, 99 imagined sovereignty;
self-direction, 115 national sovereignty; popular
self-exclusion, 111 sovereignty; royal sovereignty
self-formation, 58 Soviets, formation of, 124
self-making, 51, 52, 54 space of appearance, 60
self-silencing, 111 speaking in unison, 52, 56
sensible: dialectic as encountering, speech act, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57,
83; dialectic of the, 82; events of 58, 113, 115
the, 81; points of contact with spontaneous sociolinguistics, 36,
dialectical, 79, 80; rendering 137n8
of, 80–86, 117, 118, 119, 120, Staging the People (Rancière), 12, 15
122, 131; truth of, 80; world of standard language, 35, 39
the, 65 Starobinski, Jean, 140–41n24
sensible events, 81, 84 Stellvertretung, 67
Sieyès, Emmanuel, 128 Straus, Erwin, 78

162 index
stylistic affectation, 43 truth of the sensible, 80
subjectivity: notion of, 115; and “Twenty-Four Notes on the Uses of
sovereignty, 116; will to, 20 the Word ‘People’ ” (Badiou),
subnational collectivities, 124 108
subordinate classes, 89, 95, 97
suburban youth, 103 UMP (Union pour un mouvement
surging multitudes, 61–62 populaire), 94
survival, as precondition of universalism, 90, 109, 126
politics, 60 Unterdrückung, 73, 74
symbolic domination, 37 upwelling of heterogeneity
symbolic figuration, 67 (surgissement de l’hétérogène), 118
symbolic imposition, 41 usage marks, 33
syncopes, 68 U.S. Constitution, 53
system of adjective pairs, 36 U.S. Declaration of Independence,
55
Tahrir Square (Egypt), 3, 26, 49, 59, utopias, 75
124, 131
Taine, Hippolyte, 103 Vargas, Getúlio, 101
theoretical framework (theoretische Verdrängung, 73
Armatur), 73 Verfassungslehre (Schmitt), 67
third people, 14, 87–100 Vietnamese people, 22, 25
Thomas, Saint, 25 Volk, 16, 19, 21
thymic moments, 81 Volksgemeinschaft, 16
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 71 Voltaire, 110, 125
totalitarian guidances, 67, 68 vulgar language, 38–39
toughs, 34, 35, 38, 41, 138–39n14, vulnerability, 61, 63, 64
138n12, 140n21
tradition of power, 73 Warburg, Aby, 68, 69, 70, 72, 76,
tradition of the oppressed 77, 81
(Tradition der Unterdrückten), 73, “we, the people,” 3, 49, 51–59, 64,
74, 76 113
Traumdeutung (Freud), 70 Webald, W. G., 83

index 163
Westphalian strategy, 129 “Work of Art in the Age of
Willis, Paul E., 40 Mechanical Reproduction,
will to subjectivity, 20 The” (Benjamin), 70
workers’ movement, 103 work of representation, 38
working classes, 33–35, 44,
95, 100 xenophobia, 102, 104
working people, 26
Work Journals (Brecht), 84 Zuccotti Park, 131

164 index
 New Directions in Critical Theory

Amy Allen, General Editor

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory,
Amy Allen
Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee
The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero
Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser
Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth
States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens
The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity,
Donna V. Jones
Democracy in What State?, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd,
Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek
Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues,
edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller
Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Jacques Rancière
The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst
The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova
The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr
Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel
Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa
The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara
Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram
Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth
Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici
Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi
The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst,
edited by Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill
The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco
A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, Anita Chari
The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen
Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, Axel
Honneth and Jacques Rancière, edited by Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty