Фигури на народа при Фуко: народът като властови обект
Figures of the people in Foucault: the people as an object of power

Summary/Abstract: The concept of “the people” is accompanied by a constant polemics vis-à-vis the genesis, the structure and the real dimensions of its supposed referent. The standard deconstruction-oriented critique of “the people” focuses mostly on the constructed character of this fi gure, and at the same time omits its status of “reality”. A symptomatic reading of some texts by Michel Foucault, which has as a starting point his analytical uses of “the people” (and the related “plebs”, “popular classes”, “population”), demonstrates a different way of seeing, which focuses on the multiplicity, the heterogeneity and the constant mobility of the reality called “the people”, as well as on the inevitable interrelation and confrontation of power relations and resistances which both generate “the people” and keep it in a permanent movement and displacement towards itself. The implicit ambition of such a reading is to show that this type of analyses could inform us better about the concrete functioning of “the people” than a critique that sees in it nothing more than a fi ction of a defi nite political imaginary.

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