What Is a People?

1. E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 153. For an overview 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 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, however, that the many individuals do not exist any more than the oneness 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 (Minneapolis: 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 politics 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.

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 multiple 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 Society (London: Verso, 2014), 94. Laclau famously generalizes the logic of hegemony as a way of overcoming the class essentialism of orthodox 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 philosopher’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.

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 common sense (Historie). At stake is not this or that historical occurrence but the event of being as the ontological possibility of historicity or historiality as such.

24. Ibid., 13 and 112 (translation modified).

25. Ibid., 4–5. See also J.-L. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (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 sensible” the absence or powerlessness of the people is openly indebted to this post-Heideggerian line of thinking.

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 elevated 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, 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 language (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 circles 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 interventions 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 popular language” (Bauche, Langage populaire, 9). And later, “The boundaries between slang—the various slangs—and popular language are sometimes difficult to determine. Quite vague as well are the lines between popular 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 education, those whom the ‘bourgeois’ characterize as ‘common’” (26).

10. Even though, for complex reasons that need to be examined, the dominant vision does not give it a central place, the opposition between masculine 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” ambiguous: 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 comprehend 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 opposition 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 unconscious exclusion of the very possibility of a difference (of tact, invention, competence, and so on) and a pursuit of the difference. The undifferentiated 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 considering it representative of ordinary speech.

14. The young “toughs” coming from immigrant families clearly represent the outer limit of the revolt of adolescents coming from economically and culturally deprived families, which is often based in difficulties, 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 professions (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 categories 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 bourgeoisie 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 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 conditions 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, submissive, 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 imposing on men a strict, rigid—in a word, essentialist—vision of their identity 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 closing the distance between social ranks, maintains and increases it; under the guise of irreverence and freedom, it abounds in the sense of degradation, it is the self-confirmation of inferiority.” (This concerns the servants’ gossip regarding Mademoiselle de Breil—see J.-J. Rousseau, Confessions III in Oeuvres complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], 94–96, as analyzed by Starobinski in La Relation critique [Paris: Gallimard, 1970], 98–154.)

1. H. Arendt, The Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

2. United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948), articles 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, Standards, 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. Canovan, The People (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); E. Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. J. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and J. Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University 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.

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 Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).

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 Promise 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: Filmmakers 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 modified). [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 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. Schlegel (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.

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 History 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 Universitaires 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 XIX^e 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 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).]

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 Gandillac revised by P. Rusch, in Oeuvres III, 430. [Trans.:—See Benjamin, Illuminations.]

18. Ibid., 440–41.

21. W. Benjamin, “Paralipomènes et variantes des ‘Thèses sur le concept d’histoire’” (1940), trans. J.-M. Monnoyer, in Écrits français (Paris: Gallimard, 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 California 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).

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: Klincksieck, 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 XVIII^e siècle: délinquance et criminalité (Paris: Plon, 1974).

32. A. Farge, Dire et mal dire: l’opinion publique au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Le Seuil, 1992); Le Bracelet et le parchemin: l’écrit sur soi au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Bayard, 2003); “Walter Benjamin et le dérangement des habitudes historiennes,” 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 VXIII^e siècle (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1979; Paris: Gallimard, 1992); (with M. Foucault), Le Désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des archives de la Bastille au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Gallimard-Julliard, 1982); La Vie fragile: Violence, pouvoirs et solidartés à Paris au XVIII^e siècles (Paris: Hachette, 1986; Paris: Le Seuil, 1992). [Trans.:—See A. Farge and C. Shelton, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).]

34. A. Farge, Effusion et tourment, le récit des corps: Histoire du peuple au XVIII^e siècle (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 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 ordinaires: 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 prolétaires: Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris: Fayard, 1981; Paris: Hachette Litteeratures, 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. Fernbach (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 Voyages to the Land of the People, trans. J. Swenson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).]

38. Benjamin, Paris, capital du XIX^e 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, XIX^e–XX^e siècles (1986; repr., Paris: Le Seuil, 2001).

40. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique (1955; repr., Paris: Gallimard, 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. 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: Galllimard, 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: Flammarion, 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 hommes: 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, Austerlitz (2001), trans. P. Charbonneau (Arles: Actes Sud, 2002); and J.-C. Bailly, Le Dépaysement: Voyages en France (Paris: Le Seuil, 2011). See the studies of M. Pic, “Du montage de témoignages dans le littérature: Holocauste de Charles Reznikoff,” Critique, no. 736 (2008): 878–88; “Élégies documentaires,” Europe no. 1033 (2012): ch04**. [Trans.:—See Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915) Recitative (New York: New Directions, 1965); Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. A. Bell (New York: Random 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, informations, visions, théories (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 2002), 45–66.

52. A. Breton, Nadja (1928), Oeuvres complètes 1, ed. M. Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 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 (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.

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 altermondialiste,” 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).

1. A. Badiou, “Twenty-Four Notes on the Uses of the Word ‘People,’” in this volume, 28.

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 dissertations 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.

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.: Harvard 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 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.

18. Didi-Huberman, Peuples exposés, 96–105.

19. Ibid., 33, 108–9.

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 Intellectual 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: Cambridge 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: Cambridge 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 Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 306; J. Frank, Constituent 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.