Empire (10 page)

opposed to the globalization ofrelationships as such—in fact, as

we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effec-

tively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of

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global relations that we call Empire. More important, this strategy

ofdefending the local is damaging because it obscures and even

negates the real alternatives and the potentials for liberation that

exist
within
Empire. We should be done once and for all with the

search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our

politics. It is better both theoretically and practically to enter the

terrain ofEmpire and confront its homogenizing and heterogenizing

flows in all their complexity, grounding our analysis in the power

ofthe global multitude.

TheOntological Drama of theRes Gestae

The legacy ofmodernity is a legacy offratricidal wars, devastating

‘‘development,’’ cruel ‘‘civilization,’’ and previously unimagined vi-

olence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre

that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps

this is true precisely because ofthe tragedy Western modernity has

imposed on the world.5 Concentration camps, nuclear weapons,

genocidal wars, slavery, apartheid: it is not difficult to enumerate

the various scenes ofthe tragedy. By insisting on the tragic character

ofmodernity, however, we certainly do not mean to follow the

‘‘tragic’’ philosophers ofEurope, from Schopenhauer to Heidegger,

who turn these real destructions into metaphysical narratives about

the negativity ofbeing, as ifthese actual tragedies were merely an

illusion, or rather as ifthey were our ultimate destiny! Modern

negativity is located not in any transcendent realm but in the hard

reality before us: the fields of patriotic battles in the First and Second

World Wars, from the killing fields at Verdun to the Nazi furnaces

and the swift annihilation of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

the carpet bombing ofVietnam and Cambodia, the massacres from

Se´tifand Soweto to Sabra and Shatila, and the list goes on and on.

There is no Job who can sustain such suffering! (And anyone who

starts compiling such a list quickly realizes how inadequate it is to

the quantity and quality ofthe tragedies.) Well, if
that
modernity

has come to an end, and ifthe modern nation-state that served as

the ineluctable condition for imperialist domination and innumera-

ble wars is disappearing from the world scene, then good riddance!

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47

We must cleanse ourselves ofany misplaced nostalgia for the belle

e´poque ofthat modernity.

We cannot be satisfied, however, with that political condem-

nation ofmodern power that relies on the
historia rerum gestarum,

the objective history we have inherited. We need to consider also

the power ofthe
res gestae,
the power ofthe multitude to make

history that continues and is reconfigured today
within
Empire. It is a question oftransforming a necessity imposed on the multitude—a

necessity that was to a certain extent solicited by the multitude

itselfthroughout modernity as a line offlight from localized misery

and exploitation—into a condition ofpossibility ofliberation, a

new possibility on this new terrain ofhumanity.

This is when the ontological drama begins, when the curtain

goes up on a scene in which the development ofEmpire becomes

its own critique and its process ofconstruction becomes the process

ofits overturning. This drama is ontological in the sense that here,

in these processes, being is produced and reproduced. This drama

will have to be clarified and articulated much further as our study

proceeds, but we should insist right from the outset that this is not

simply another variant ofdialectical enlightenment. We are not

proposing the umpteenth version ofthe inevitable passage through

purgatory (here in the guise ofthe new imperial machine) in order

to offer a glimmer of hope for radiant futures. We are not repeating

the schema ofan ideal teleology that justifies any passage in the

name ofa promised end. On the contrary, our reasoning here is

based on two methodological approaches that are intended to be

nondialectical and absolutely immanent: the first is
critical and deconstructive,
aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social

structures and thereby reveal an alternative ontological basis that

resides in the creative and productive practices ofthe multitude;

the second is
constructive and ethico-political,
seeking to lead the processes ofthe production ofsubjectivity toward the constitution of

an effective social, political alternative, a new constituent power.6

Our critical approach addresses the need for a real ideological

and material deconstruction ofthe imperial order. In the postmod-

ern world, the ruling spectacle ofEmpire is constructed through a

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variety ofself-legitimating discourses and structures. Long ago au-

thors as diverse as Lenin, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Debord

recognized this spectacle as the destiny oftriumphant capitalism.

Despite their important differences, such authors offer us real antici-

pations ofthe path ofcapitalist development.7 Our deconstruction

ofthis spectacle cannot be textual alone, but must seek continually

to focus its powers on the nature of events and the real determina-

tions ofthe imperial processes in motion today. The critical approach

is thus intended to bring to light the contradictions, cycles, and

crises ofthe process because in each ofthese moments the imagined

necessity ofthe historical development can open toward alternative

possibilities. In other words, the deconstruction ofthe
historia rerum

gestarum,
ofthe spectral reign ofglobalized capitalism, reveals the possibility ofalternative social organizations. This is perhaps as far

as we can go with the methodological scaffolding of a critical

and materialist deconstructionism—but this is already an enormous

contribution!8

This is where the first methodological approach has to pass the

baton to the second, the constructive and ethico-political approach.

Here we must delve into the ontological substrate ofthe concrete

alternatives continually pushed forward by the
res gestae,
the subjective forces acting in the historical context. What appears here is

not a new rationality but a new scenario of different rational acts—a

horizon ofactivities, resistances, wills, and desires that refuse the

hegemonic order, propose lines offlight, and forge alternative con-

stitutive itineraries. This real substrate, open to critique, revised by

the ethico-political approach, represents the real ontological referent

ofphilosophy, or really the field proper to a philosophy ofliberation.

This approach breaks methodologically with every philosophy of

history insofar as it refuses any deterministic conception of historical

development and any ‘‘rational’’ celebration ofthe result. It demon-

strates, on the contrary, how the historical event resides in potential-

ity. ‘‘It is not the two that recompose in one, but the one that

opens into two,’’ according to the beautiful anti-Confucian (and

anti-Platonic) formula of the Chinese revolutionaries.9 Philosophy

A L T E R N A T I V E S W I T H I N E M P I R E

49

is not the owl ofMinerva that takes flight after history has been

realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy

is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to

the event.

Refrains of the ‘‘Internationale’’

There was a time, not so long ago, when internationalism was a

key component ofproletarian struggles and progressive politics in

general. ‘‘The proletariat has no country,’’ or better, ‘‘the country

ofthe proletariat is the entire world.’’ The ‘‘Internationale’’ was the

hymn ofrevolutionaries, the song ofutopian futures. We should

note that the utopia expressed in these slogans is in fact not really

internationalist, ifby internationalist we understand a kind ofcon-

sensus among the various national identities that preserves their

differences but negotiates some limited agreement. Rather, proletar-

ian internationalism was antinationalist, and hence supranational

and global. Workers ofthe world unite!—not on the basis of

national identities but directly through common needs and desires,

without regard to borders and boundaries.

Internationalism was the will ofan active mass subject that

recognized that the nation-states were key agents ofcapitalist exploi-

tation and that the multitude was continually drafted to fight their

senseless wars—in short, that the nation-state was a political form

whose contradictions could not be subsumed and sublimated but

only destroyed. International solidarity was really a project for the

destruction ofthe nation-state and the construction ofa new global

community. This proletarian program stood behind the often am-

biguous tactical definitions that socialist and communist parties pro-

duced during the century oftheir hegemony over the proletariat.10

Ifthe nation-state was a central link in the chain ofdomination

and thus had to be destroyed, then the
national
proletariat had as a primary task destroying itselfinsofar as it was defined by the nation

and thus bringing international solidarity out ofthe prison in which

it had been trapped. International solidarity had to be recognized

not as an act ofcharity or altruism for the good ofothers, a noble

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sacrifice for another national working class, but rather as proper to

and inseparable from each national proletariat’s own desire and

struggle for liberation. Proletarian internationalism constructed a

paradoxical and powerful political machine that pushed continually

beyond the boundaries and hierarchies ofthe nation-states and

posed utopian futures only on the global terrain.

Today we should all clearly recognize that the time ofsuch

proletarian internationalism is over. That does not negate the fact,

however, that the concept ofinternationalism really lived among

the masses and deposited a kind ofgeological stratum ofsuffering

and desire, a memory ofvictories and defeats, a residue ofideological

tensions and needs. Furthermore, the proletariat does in fact find

itselftoday not just international but (at least tendentially) global.

One might be tempted to say that proletarian internationalism actu-

ally ‘‘won’’ in light ofthe fact that the powers ofnation-states have

declined in the recent passage toward globalization and Empire,

but that would be a strange and ironic notion ofvictory. It is more

accurate to say, following the William Morris quotation that serves

as one of the epigraphs for this book, that what they fought for

came about despite their defeat.

The practice ofproletarian internationalism was expressed most

clearly in the international cycles ofstruggles. In this framework

the (national) general strike and insurrection against the (nation-)

state were only really conceivable as elements ofcommunication

among struggles and processes ofliberation on the internationalist

terrain. From Berlin to Moscow, from Paris to New Delhi, from

Algiers to Hanoi, from Shanghai to Jakarta, from Havana to New

York, struggles resonated with one another throughout the nine-

teenth and twentieth centuries. A cycle was constructed as news

ofa revolt was communicated and applied in each new context,

just as in an earlier era merchant ships carried the news ofslave revolt

from island to island around the Caribbean, igniting a stubborn string

offires that could not be quenched. For a cycle to f

orm, the

recipients ofthe news must be able to ‘‘translate’’ the events into

their own language, recognize the struggles as their own, and thus

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51

add a link to the chain. In some cases this ‘‘translation’’ is rather

elaborate: how Chinese intellectuals at the turn ofthe twentieth

century, for example, could hear of the anticolonial struggles in the

Philippines and Cuba and translate them into the terms oftheir

own revolutionary projects. In other cases it is much more direct:

how the factory council movement in Turin, Italy, was immediately

inspired by the news ofthe Bolshevik victory in Russia. Rather

than thinking ofthe struggles as relating to one another like links

in a chain, it might be better to conceive ofthem as communicating

like a virus that modulates its form to find in each context an

adequate host.

It would not be hard to map the periods ofextreme intensity

ofthese cycles. A first wave might be seen as beginning after 1848