Suchergebnisse

Introduces a collection of critical responses to Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's Empire (2000), a text about globalization & multitude that contributes to academic interest in the global revolution against capital & on behalf of labor. Hardt & Negri's approach to politics, centered on economic production, is compared to Hannah Arendt's thought, which separates politics from economics. Hardt & Negri's postmodern republicanism, which sees the demise of boundaries, is then contrasted with Arendt's position, wherein the preservation of politics & freedom relies on such distinctions. The emancipatory potential of this breakdown in boundaries is evident in Hardt & Negri's thought on geographic changes, organizational changes in economic production, & changes in labor. While Hardt & Negri share with Arendt an idea of Foucauldian biopolitics, the former's normative conclusions for political life derived from this diverge sharply from the latter's. Three reasons are provided for why Hardt & Negri assess labor differently from Arendt: (1) Labor's value is beyond measure. (2) Labor provides the ontological basis for global democracy, for the emergence of multitude. (3) That labor is productive of life indicates its excessive value. Hardt & Negri's celebration of deterritorialization as the condition of possibility for absolute democracy, ie, the formation of the multitude, is illustrated via French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's 14 Feb 2003 UN speech against the impending US invasion of Iraq. Analysis of the notion of the place (ie, the UN) from whence the political action (the speech) emanates suggests that Arendt's republicanism, which relies on the preservation of constituted forms of power, may mask authoritarianism. It is argued that Hardt & Negri wish to challenge all forms of constituted power. Some attention is then given to relating the thought of Niccolo Machiavelli & Antonio Gramsci to Hardt & Negri's work. J. Zendejas