Theory & Event

- Although written in fragments, this book is meant to be read as a whole, as the argument cannot be divorced from the experience of its reading.

- Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld

- Like most large books, this one can be read in many different ways: front to back, back to front, in pieces, in a hopscotch pattern, or through correspondences.

- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire.

By and large, academic Marxists of the last decade have been cautious and pessimistic, daring neither to venture nostalgia for the passing of “really existing socialism” nor hope for much relief from a triumphant global capitalism and its liberal apologists. Given the widespread presumption that these are only appropriate responses to the failure of Soviet communism and the worldwide consolidation of U.S. hegemony, few might have anticipated the publication of either of these books. Without apology or apprehension, Dreamworld and Empire look to both past and future, each attempting in their own way to shift the terms of leftist struggle away from its poisoned or outmoded nation-state form. In turn, both eschew the traditional subject of revolutionary consciousness and action in favor of radical forms of democratic materialism that recall anarchist strains of Marxism previously vanquished by orthodox Leninism. If neither can entirely escape the inevitable charges of wishful delusion or even dangerous fantasy, both provide welcome relief from staid or exuberant champions of sustainable growth and the tiresome mantra of “civil society.” Some of the challenges facing such a departure are indicated by the contrasting approaches described in the quotations above. Moreover, it is a sign of the tensions involved in both projects that, as descriptions of their own approach to global forces at once de-centered and all-encompassing, these quotes might just as easily be reversed. Whatever their difficulties, however, these are works that breathe life into left utopias old and new, and they promise to generate new energies for both theoretical debates and textual practices.

The cover image of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “Empire” - a swirling vortex of clouds above the uniform blue of the ocean - aptly prefigures both the scope of their project and the form of power denoted by the title. In a work that has rightly received dramatic, sometimes melodramatic praise, Hardt and Negri produce a theoretical and historical synthesis of immense proportion, combining an extensively documented genealogy of global sovereignty with an urgent - at times giddy - polemic on postmodern liberation. Slavoj Zizek has gone so far as to describe the project as a “rewriting of The Communist Manifesto.” At over 400 pages, however, this is no pamphlet. In the intervening chapters of the book, the authors pursue extensive historical “passages” from the Renaissance to the global “capitalist sovereignty” of the present Empire. To call it a manifesto, then, is to reduce these passages to mere supports for polemical conclusions. It could just as well be argued, to the contrary, that a salutary effect of these genealogies is that they put all polemical simplifications into question. In fact, Empire admits of both tendencies: “the first is critical and deconstructive [...] the second is ethico-political.”(47) Rather than collapsing these approaches, the text can be seen to highlight productive tensions between them. In doing so, it raises the question of whether polemical syntheses are the proper response to forces that are themselves increasingly interpenetrated on a global level, or if such an approach detracts from engagements with local forms of contest and struggle that articulate these forces in particular instances. These are questions easier to raise than to answer, and it is the virtue of Empire that it poses them in both practical and forceful terms.

Negri and Hardt’s text is part of an on-going collaboration that documents a struggle between the constitutive powers of the Multitude and the constituted mediations of Sovereignty.[1] This narrative provides the “ethico-political” dimension of the text, or...