| What Is a People? Contributor(s): Badiou, Alain (Author), Gladding, Jody (Translator), Butler, Judith (Author) |
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ISBN: 0231168764 ISBN-13: 9780231168762 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $24.75 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: May 2016 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Philosophy | Movements - Critical Theory - Philosophy | Political - Political Science | Essays |
| Dewey: 320.566 |
| LCCN: 2015042650 |
| Series: New Directions in Critical Theory |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 5.8" W x 8.5" (0.70 lbs) 176 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques 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. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Žižek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time. |
Contributor Bio(s): Badiou, Alain: - Alain Badiou (PhD, Philosophy, Ecole Normale Superieure) holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School; he also teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the College International de Philosophie in Paris. He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works, including his masterwork, Being and Event (Continuum, 2007), and several Columbia titles, includng Plato's Republic (2013) and Jacques Lacan Past and Present (2016).Butler, Judith: - Judith Butler (PhD, Philosophy, Yale) is the Maxine Eliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory (of which she was the Founding Director) at the University of California at Berkeley. Among her many works are Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia, 2012), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia, 2012), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia, 2002), and (with Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West) The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia, 2011). |