Jodi Dean, Paul Passavant Empire's New Clothes, Reading Hardt and Negri (2003)

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.But this has not prevented theiroptimism of the intellect from evoking deadly serious fears in some quarters.One of the intriguing aspects of critical reviews of Empire following theattacks on the World Trade Center is their conflation of political threatsto community, nationality, and security with academic threats to discursiveformalism and autonomy.As one author asserts: Hardt and Negri make adangerously opportunistic move: they simply reinterpret the tradition out ofwhich they write to accommodate the new radicalism, as if Marxism can bemoved this way or that way depending upon who happens to be protesting whaton any particular day. 65 The danger of such opportunism, clearly, is that the keyterms of Marxism, like any other discourse, can indeed be moved this way orthat, and their power harnessed to diverse practical ends.As another criticlaments: Unfortunately, preposterousness has never been a barrier toeffectiveness.There are plenty of ideas that are fatuous, wrongheaded, or simplyridiculous that nevertheless have a great and baneful influence on the world.Books like Empire are a veritable repository of such ideas. 66While they rightly assign political import to discursive practice, these criticsgive Empire both too little and too much credit.Hardt s and Negri sreinterpretation of the Marxist tradition, while creative, is hardly arbitrary.Moreover, their conflation of multiple rhetorics is hardly unique.The left holdsno patent on contradictory rhetoric and effective absurdities, as Rumsfeld hasdemonstrated.67 As Sorel reminds us, institutional authorities are themselvesnourished by mythological abstractions.Might we detect in these hyperbolicattacks on Hardt s and Negri s opportunism a general anxiety surrounding thediscursive and political dislocations the Hardt s and Negri attribute to Empire,that is, an anxiety concerning the collapse of discursive, economic, and political312 EMPIRE S NEW CLOTHESforces as well as that of plural discursive categories? What terms could not beconflated and co-opted today? As we see in the election and subsequent acts ofthe current U.S.regime, the rhetoric of democratic rule is flexible indeed.Given the dynamic contingencies in which human action and imagination areinvolved, might it not make more sense to adopt a tragic rather thanmythological view of political action? In opposing tragedy to myth, I followJ.P.Vernant s distinction, according to which tragedy is an imitation of myththat invites a critical perspective.For a reading of Gramsci s slogan along tragiclines, we might turn to Walter Benjamin.Benjamin, like Sorel, explicitlydistinguished a pessimistic approach to creative imagination from the optimistic Utopias of bourgeois politicians: To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution in other words,poetic politics? We have tried that beverage.Anything, rather than that!Well, it will interest you all the more how much an excursion into poetryclarifies things.For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A badpoem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors&.These are mereimages.And the stock of imagery of these poets of the social democraticassociations?& Optimism.68Hardt and Negri include Benjamin among those theorists whose ontology of thepossible, along with their own, pales before the material transformations theyanticipate.Like them, he was committed to posthumanist notions of collectiveliberation and endorsed disruptive techniques rather than a direct seizure ofsovereign power.The General Strike was an exemplary form of politics for himas well.69 However, he also sought to democratize the experimental, activepessimism that thinkers such as Sorel and Hardt and Negri reserve for the critic.Following the methods of the surrealists, he combined reflexive criticism,technical innovation, and conceptual complexity: For to organize pessimismmeans nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discoverin political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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