Abstract

The article aims to study the usages of the “people” as a critical idea in the texts of two contemporary radical political philosophers: Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. The author’s intention is not so much to point out the divergence between them, rather it is to grasp a common trend imposing the figure of the “people” as a main subject of the political and as a source of a desired, but hardly conceivable social change. The strong appeal to an epochal rupture, yet unsupported by any utopia, could be considered as a double crisis—of the institutions of liberal democracy as well as of the critical imagination itself.