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<h1 class="title"><img class="supapress-book-cover"
src="cid:part1.78E67BAE.6ED83F5C@ziggo.nl" alt="What Is a
People?" height="336" width="224"></h1>
<p class="pubdate"><strong>Pub Date:</strong> May 2016</p>
<p class="isbn"><strong>ISBN:</strong> 9780231168762</p>
<p class="pages">176 Pages</p>
<p class="format"><strong>Format:</strong> Hardcover</p>
<h1 class="title">What Is a People?</h1>
<p class="author"> Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler,
Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière.
Translated by Jody Gladding. Introduction by Bruno Bosteels.
Conclusion by Kevin Olson. </p>
<p class="publisher">Columbia University Press</p>
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<div class="sp__the-description">
<p><i>What Is a People?</i> seeks to reclaim "people" as an
effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses
over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a
productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a
negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre
Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular"
and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even
soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler
calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an
exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the
problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives.
Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial
hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and
Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating
theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the
idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging
this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and
ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate
"people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital
formulations.</p>
<p>Together with <i>Democracy in What State?</i>, in which
Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj
iek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, <i>What
Is a People?</i> expands an essential exploration of
political action and being in our time.</p>
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<div class="authors">
<h2>About the Author</h2>
<p>Alain Badiou is emeritus professor of philosophy at the École
Normale Supérieure in Paris.</p>
<p>Barbara Cassin is a French linguist and philosopher and
director of research at the National Center for Scientific
Research in Paris.</p>
<p>Kenneth Reinhard is associate professor of English and
comparative literature at the University of California, Los
Angeles.</p>
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