ABSTRACT
In a recent interview,1 Jacques Rancière opposes his notion of “people” (peuple)2 to the category of “multitude” as presented by the authors of Empire. As is well known, Rancière differentiates between police and politics, the first being the logic of counting and assigning the population to differential places, and the second, the subversion of that differentiating logic through the constitution of an egalitarian discourse which puts into question established identities. The “people” is the specific subject of politics and presupposes a sharp division in the social body that cannot be led back to any kind of immanent unity. Empire, on the contrary, makes immanence its central category and the ultimate ground of the multitude’s unity.
