Editorial: Empire
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Globalization and Democracy (in Danish)
The dominant modern notion of democracy has been intimately tied to the nation-state. With a new focus on the practice of sovereignty of the nation-state the authors suggest that Empire refers to a new form of sovereignty that knows no boundaries, or rather, that knows only mobile boundaries. As such, the concept of the people as representation and as unity is replaced by the concept of the multitude that only refers to a singular multiplicity, a concrete universal. The people constituted a social body but the multitude does not - the multitude is the flesh of life. The authors advocate a spinozistic absolute democracy - absolute in the sense of being unbounded and immeasurable. Finally the authors suggest a counterpower that ties resistance to insurrection and constituent power. The democratic potential is tied to the multitude as a multiplicity of bodies criss-crossed by intellectual and material powers of reason and affect. True democracy is connected to a positive micropolitical collective act of resistance.
Alexander Carnera and Bent Meier Sørensen: Smiling on the Operating Table - the Biopolitical Entrepreneur (in Danish)
In their affirmative reading of Empire the authors expose and intensify the potential of the biopolitical worker and body. At first, the article relates social science to the concept of crisis and difference. Also, any critique of society must return to production, not only a production of things but a production of the social and of subjectivity and expose the social in a multiple, micro-social field, and become a nomadic social science. This points to 'the hidden abode of production', highlighting the importance of bringing power back to its materiality, to subjectivity as potentia. It is argued that a future social science will benefit grossly from such a radical ontology. It is also emphasized that biopolitics embodies the production of value (economy) in the sense of producing social values and life (affects), value and affects that dominate and infuse all production. Furthermore, it is argued that the analysis must return to the production of subjectivity as the only 'place' that can challenge the domination of exchange-value. This power exposes an un-domesticated creative force, vital to the creation of the social in workplaces, in art, in politics. Finally, it is claimed that the biopolitical production evokes an ethical passage - although absent in Empire - because resistance is prior to power. This calls for a 'Foucauldian practice' of folding the self as the production of freedom. But the struggle for revolution cannot bring back the militant - instead, the biopolitical entrepreneur is suggested as affirming the potentiality of the event. This biopolitical entrepreneur is everywhere connecting the common with love.
Mikkel Bolt and Morten Visby: Network or Delusion - Empire as Communist Theory or Cybernetic Ideology (in Danish)
The article analyses whether Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire is to be read as a real communist critique of present capitalism or whether Empire is an example of the contamination of Marxist theory by the cybernetic ideology. In its emphasis on the holistic functioning of the multitude and the completeness of society, Empire remains dependent upon the cybernetic ideology that privileges totality, integration an steering.
Ian Buchanan: Globalising Deleuze and Guattari (in Danish)
The article departs from a meticulous reading of Robert Brenner's 'The Economics of Global Turbulence' in the series New Left Review, 1998. The question is raised why the revolution has not already taken place, given that it is widely agreed that things cannot continue as they are. Brenner, on his side, depicts the inability of the neo-liberal economists to account for economic world crisis departing from their assumption that the problems stem from labours' blind demand for higher wages. In reality, it is inter-capitalistic competition, resulting in overcapacity and overproduction, combined with the system's inability to self-govern that produces the perpetual crisis. Whereas Brenner's analysis leaves somewhat open the inherent social implications of this, the article traces the virtual philosophical point: that the very theory of economics is jeopardised by the fact that the capitalist system operates in an essentially unplanned, uncoordinated and ruthlessly competitive manner. The 'dark force' or 'malign hand' of the market needs another conceptualisation altogether, provided by Deleuze and Guattari's theory of desire, rather than by Freud and the death principle. The crux of the matter is that lack is produced actively by the institutions of antiproduction, State, Police, alongside the production of stupidity needed in order to keep the customers in the market. Empire is a salvo in this debate, but its authors' 'faith' in the Multitude makes them stumble over a revolution that has not taken place. Finally, it is argued that we need to conceptualise the revolution without a programme at all.
Hans Hauge: Empire as a Gnostic Manifesto (in Danish)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire is categorised as Gnostic since a redemption from the present is expected. First it is compared with other books about globalisation such as Jonathan Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree and Pascal Bruckner's La misère de la prospérité in order to be able to find out what sort of book Empire is. Hardt and Negri's diagnoses are compared in detail with the German sociologist Ulrich Beck's. Similarities and differences are pointed out. First and foremost Empire is based upon Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and in particular on his understanding of the phenomenon of immanence. In conclusion the book's Gnostic vision is discussed in the light of Eric Voegelin's theory of modernity.
Jesper Lohmann: Production of Subjectivity - an Analysis of the Concept of biopolitics in Empire (in Danish)
This article focuses on the concept of 'biopolitics' in Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Involving one of Hardt and Negri's sources of inspiration, Michel Foucault, the concept is analysed and further articulated through a comparison with Giorgio Agamben's analyses of the same concept in Homo Sacer. Hereby it is stressed that 'biopolitics' in Empire concerns immanent production of subjectivity. The question presented and discussed is whether their reflections contain a potential in regard to fighting the current biopolitical regime whose dominant political subject is the 'Empire'. In spite of a potential, the article concludes, the multitude, the productive subject Hardt and Negri imagine fighting the Empire, is not presented forcefully in any concrete form. Having read Empire it still remains to be seen if the potential of the multitude can and will be unfolded in concrete forms.
Jens Teilberg Søndergaard: From Perpetual Peace to Empire - an Essay on Law, Peace and Freedom in the Light of Globalisation (in Danish)
In 1795 Immanuel Kant introduced the term 'cosmopolitan law'. Today - 200 years later - several political theorists see the Kantian cosmopolitanism as a solution to the problems caused by the processes of globalisation. This article claims that although Kantian cosmopolitanism may bring around peace and security, it may at the same time limit access to the exercise of freedom. An alternative response to the threat of globalisation is formulated drawing on inspiration from Gilles Deleuze's description of freedom as becoming, Niccolò Machiavelli's political 'pragmatism' and the book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Mitchell Dean: Empire and Governmentality (in English)
Empire, like Michel Foucault's thought on power, takes its aim at the heart of the present. Also like his thought, it is an event as much as a theory. It not only offers analysis and diagnosis but also hopes to have effects in the present and to establish linkages with social and political struggles. The article compares the analysis in Empire with Foucault's thought, particularly on the points where Empire draws on, or perhaps rather, claims to draw on his work. Whereas Hardt and Negri approach their task by means of a realist account of the mutation of power relations and a teleological philosophy of history with strong dialectical elements, Foucault's 'nominalist critique' seems to aim in the opposite direction, the author argues, in that it confronts regimes of truth with their historical conditions and effects. Despite its efforts to incorporate Foucault's insights, Hardt and Negri disregard both the importance of singularities and the genealogical trajectories of the modern technologies of government.
Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen: From 7-eleven to 9.11 - Terrorism in the Network Society (in Danish)
Taking a "sociologising" stance against the political and cultural adiaphorisation of Sept 11, the overall aim of the article is to relate 9.11 to globalisation (7-eleven). We open with distinguishing classic and new terrorism, relating this distinction to the politics of security. Then we discuss how globalisation and terrorism share in common the logic of networking and an emphasis on mobility. Following this we show that the theorisation of the emergent gap between the mobile elite and the immobile masses must be supported by an understanding of the processes of internal stratification within the mobile, especially that between the mobile elite and the terrorists. The issue of terrorism, in other words, gives a significant twist to what Bauman calls the 'revenge of nomads' illuminating that mobility changes its meaning drastically depending on the context. This helps us consolidate the link between the two de-territorialised networks: global capitalism and global terrorism. We support the analysis of this mimetic relation with another analysis which is between the politics of security as a form of contemporary (political) fundamentalism and the religious fundamentalism that it seeks to fight.
Slavoj Zizek: The (Mis)uses of Catastrophes (in English)
A certain understanding of catastrophes emerges in 20th century thought. Whereas Heidegger sees the catastrophe in man himself and his forgetting of Being, Adorno and Horkheimer interpret Enlightenment as catastrophic in the sense of being a verwaltete Welt. The article demonstrates that one of the difficult aspects of catastrophes is that it can only be determined retrospectively if a catastrophe has occured. Bergson writes on the outbreak of World War I that it was at the same time probable and impossible. Only afterwards is the past ascribed the possibility that was realized in the catastrophic event. This means that the radically New retrospectively changes the past's understanding of what was possible and allows us to fall back into the past that the catastrophe inscribes as the linear cause of the present.