Empire (14 page)

the construction ofEurocentrism. Although modern sovereignty

emanated from Europe, however, it was born and developed in large

part through Europe’s relationship with its outside, and particularly

through its colonial project and the resistance ofthe colonized.

Modern sovereignty emerged, then, as the concept ofEuropean

reaction and European domination both within and outside its

borders. They are two coextensive and complementary faces of one

development: rule within Europe and European rule over the world.

TheRevolutionary Planeof Immanence

It all began with a revolution. In Europe, between 1200 and 1600,

across distances that only merchants and armies could travel and

only the invention ofthe printing press would later bring together,

something extraordinary happened. Humans declared themselves

masters oftheir own lives, producers ofcities and history, and

inventors ofheavens. They inherited a dualistic consciousness, a

hierarchical vision ofsociety, and a metaphysical idea ofscience;

but they handed down to future generations an experimental idea

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71

ofscience, a constituent conception ofhistory and cities, and they

posed being as an immanent terrain ofknowledge and action.

The thought ofthis initial period, born simultaneously in politics,

science, art, philosophy, and theology, demonstrates the radicality

ofthe forces at work in modernity.

The origins ofEuropean modernity are often characterized

as springing from a secularizing process that denied divine and

transcendent authority over worldly affairs. That process was cer-

tainly important, but in our view it was really only a symptom of

the primary event ofmodernity: the affirmation ofthe powers of

this
world, the discovery ofthe plane ofimmanence. ‘‘Omne ens

habet aliquod esse proprium’’—every entity has a singular essence.2

Duns Scotus’ affirmation subverts the medieval conception of being

as an object ofanalogical, and thus dualistic, predication—a being

with one foot in this world and one in a transcendent realm. We

are at the beginning ofthe fourteenth century, in the midst of

the convulsions ofthe late Middle Ages. Duns Scotus tells his con-

temporaries that the confusion and decadence of the times can be

remedied only by recentering thought on the singularity ofbeing.

This singularity is not ephemeral nor accidental but ontological.

The strength of this affirmation and the effect it had on the thought

ofthe period were demonstrated by Dante Alighieri’s response to

it, thousands ofmiles away from Duns Scotus’ Britannic north.

This singular being is powerful, Dante wrote, in that it is the drive

to actualize ‘‘totam potentiam intellectus possibilis’’—all the power

ofthe possible intellect.3 At the scene ofthe birth ofEuropean

modernity, humanity discovered its power in the world and inte-

grated this dignity into a new consciousness ofreason and potenti-

ality.

In the fifteenth century, numerous authors demonstrated the

coherence and revolutionary originality ofthis new immanent onto-

logical knowledge. Let us simply cite three representative voices.

First, Nicholas ofCusa: ‘‘Speculation is a movement ofthe intellect

from
quia est
to
quid est;
and since
quid est
is infinitely distant from
quia est,
such a movement will never come to an end. And it is a

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very pleasurable movement, since it is the life itself of the intellect;

from this fact such movement finds its satisfaction, since its motion

does not generate fatigue but rather light and heat.’’4 Second, Pico

della Mirandola: ‘‘When you conceive ofGod as a living and

knowing being, make sure before all else that this knowledge and

this life are understood as free from every imperfection. Conceive

ofa knowledge that knows all and everything in a most perfect

manner; and add still that the knower knows all by itself, so there

is no need to search outside itself, which would make it imperfect.’’5

In this way Pico della Mirandola, rather than conceiving a distant,

transcendent God, makes the human mind into a divine machine

ofknowledge. Finally, Bovillus: ‘‘The one who was by nature

merely human [
homo
] becomes, through the rich contribution of

art, doubly human, that is,
homohomo.
’’6 Through its own powerful

arts and practices, humanity enriches and doubles itself, or really

raises itselfto a higher power:
homohomo,
humanity squared.

In those origins of modernity, then, knowledge shifted from

the transcendent plane to the immanent, and consequently, that

human knowledge became a doing, a practice oftransforming na-

ture. Sir Francis Bacon constructed a world in which ‘‘what has

been discovered in the arts and the sciences can now be reorganized

through usage, meditation, observation, argumentation . . . be-

cause it is good to treat the most distant realities and the occult

secrets ofnature through the introduction ofa better use and a

more perfect technique of the mind and the intellect.’’7 In this

process, Galileo Galilei maintains (and this will conclude our circle

de dignitate hominis
), we have the possibility ofequaling divine

knowledge:

Taking the understanding to be
intensive,
insofar as that term

carries with it intensively, that is perfectly, several propositions,

I say that the human intellect understands some things so

perfectly and it has such absolute certainty of them that it equals

nature’s own understanding ofthem; those things include the

pure mathematical sciences, that is, geometry and arithmetic,

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73

about which the divine intellect knows infinitely more propo-

sitions since it knows them all, but ofthose few understood

by the human intellect I believe that its knowledge equals

divine knowledge in its objective certainty.8

What is revolutionary in this whole series ofphilosophical develop-

ments stretching from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries is

that the powers ofcreation that had previously been consigned

exclusively to the heavens are now brought down to earth. This

is the discovery ofthe fullness ofthe plane ofimmanence.

Just as in philosophy and science, in politics, too, humanity

reappropriated in this early period ofmodernity what medieval

transcendence had taken away from it. In the span of three or four

centuries, the process ofthe refoundation ofauthority on the basis

ofa human universal and through the action ofa multitude of

singularities was accomplished with great force, amid dreadful trage-

dies and heroic conquests. William ofOccam, for example, claimed

that the church is the multitude of the faithful—‘‘Ecclesia est multi-

tudo fidelium’’9—meaning that it is not superior to and distinct from

the community ofChristians but immanent to that community.

Marsilius ofPadua posed the same definition for the Republic: the

power ofthe Republic and the power ofits laws derive not from

superior principles but from the assembly of citizens.10 A new under-

standing ofpower and a new conception ofliberation were set in

motion: from Dante and the late medieval apologia of the ‘‘possible

intellect’’ to Thomas More and the celebration ofthe ‘‘immense

and inexplicable power’’ of natural life and labor as foundation for

the political arrangement; from the democracy of the Protestant

sects to Spinoza and his notion ofthe absoluteness ofthe democracy.

By the time we arrive at Spinoza, in fact, the horizon of immanence

and the horizon ofthe democratic political order coincide com-

pletely. The plane ofimmanence is the one on which the powers

ofsingularity are realized and the one on which the truth ofthe

new humanity is determined historically, technically, and politically.

For this very fact, because there cannot be any external mediation,

the singular is presented as the multitude.11

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Modernity’s beginnings were revolutionary, and the old order

was toppled by them. The constitution ofmodernity was not about

theory in isolation but about theoretical acts indissolubly tied to

mutations ofpractice and reality. Bodies and brains were fundamen-

tally transformed. This historical process of subjectivization was

revolutionary in the sense that it determined a paradigmatic and

irreversible change in the mode oflife ofthe multitude.

Modernity as Crisis

Modernity is not a unitary concept but rather appears in at least

two modes. The first mode is the one we have already defined, a

radical revolutionary process. This modernity destroys its relations

with the past and declares the immanence ofthe new paradigm of

the world and life. It develops knowledge and action as scientific

experimentation and defines a tendency toward a democratic poli-

tics, posing humanity and desire at the center ofhistory. From the

artisan to the astronomer, from the merchant to the politician, in

art as in religion, the material of existence is reformed by a new life.

This new emergence, however, created a war. How could

such a radical overturning not incite strong antagonism? How could

this revolution not determine a counterrevolution? There was in-

deed a counterrevolution in the proper sense ofthe term: a cultural,

philosophical, social, and political initiative that, since it could nei-

ther return to the past nor destroy the new forces, sought to domi-

nate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and

dynamics. This is the second mode ofmodernity, constructed to

wage war against the new forces and establish an overarching power

to dominate them. It arose within the Renaissance revolution to

divert its direction, transplant the new image ofhumanity to a

transcendent plane, relativize the capacities ofscience to transform

the world, and above all oppose the reappropriation ofpower on

the part ofthe multitude. The second mode ofmodernity poses a

transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent

power, order against desire. The Renaissance thus ended in war—

religious, social, and civil war.

The European Renaissance, but above all the Italian Renais-

sance, with the splendid and perverse works that characterize it,

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75

was the site ofthe civil war over the realization ofmodernity.

When the Reformation spread throughout Europe, it was like a

second cyclone added to the first, repeating in the religious con-

sciousness ofthe masses the alternatives ofhumanist culture. The

civil war thus invested popular life and mingled with the most

intimate recesses ofhuman history. Class struggle moved across this

terrain, marshaling up in the genesis ofcapitalism the creativity of

the new mode oflaboring and the new order ofexploitation within

a logic that carries together signs ofboth progress and reaction. It

was a clash oftitans, like the one Michelangelo depicted on the

ceiling ofthe Sistine Chapel: the tragic conflict ofthe genesis

ofmodernity.

The revolution ofEuropean modernity ran into its Thermidor.

In the struggle for hegemony over the paradigm of modernity,

victory went to the second mode and the forces of order that sought

to neutralize the power ofthe revolution. Although it was not

possible to go back to the way things were, it was nonetheless

possible to reestablish ideologies ofcommand and authority, and

thus deploy a new transcendent power by playing on the anxiety

and fear ofthe masses, their desire to reduce the uncertainty oflife

and increase security. The revolution had to be stopped. Through-

out the sixteenth century, whenever the fruits of the revolution

appeared in all their splendor, the scene had to be painted in twilight

colors. The demand for peace became paramount—but which

peace? While the Thirty Years’ War in the heart ofEurope exempli-

fied in the most terrible forms the outlines of this irreversible crisis,

the consciousnesses, even the strongest and wisest, yielded to the

necessity ofthe Thermidor and the conditions ofthe miserable and

humiliating peace. Peace was a value that in a short stretch oftime

had lost the humanist, Erasmian connotations that had previously

made it the path oftransformation. Peace had become the miserable

condition ofsurvival, the extreme urgency ofescaping death. Peace

was marked simply by the fatigue of the struggle and the usury of

the passions. The Thermidor had won, the revolution was over.

The Thermidor ofthe revolution, however, did not close but

only perpetuated the crisis. Civil war did not come to an end but

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was absorbed within the concept ofmodernity.
Modernity itself is

defined by crisis,
a crisis that is born ofthe uninterrupted conflict between the immanent, constructive, creative forces and the transcendent power aimed at restoring order.12 This conflict is the key