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Antonio Negri has presented one of the most convincing articulations of affirmation as necessary to the constitution of a radical communist politics. In this chapter his work on political ontology and his vitalist politics of the powers of ‘Life’ as excess is critiqued through attention to the traces of the negative that remain. Focusing particularly on Negri’s work on art an engagement with the necessity of negation to the process of creation and production can be recovered from his work. Also, this chapter sharpens the critique of Negri’s recourse to an affirmative concept of the ‘multitude’ as political agent. While claiming a radical political agenda Negri’s theorisation remains problematically dependent on the capitalist categories – creation, production, the immeasurable – it aims to exceed.

The introduction elaborates the key concepts of the book: homosexuality, value, and labor. It contextualizes the importance of these concepts for modern Irish history and culture. Furthermore, it argues that the study brings together currently alienated critical discussions that both trace themselves to Foucault’s History of Sexuality: queer theory that has developed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of Foucault and studies of empire engaged with the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The chapter makes connections among queer theory, Irish studies, modernist studies, and theories of empire.

The chapter shows how Oscar Wilde sets in motion the discourses of sexuality, debates about aesthetic and economic value, and theorization of history that the study engages. In particular it reads “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” and “The Soul of Man under Socialism” in conjunction with Karl Marx’s theory of value and Antonio Negri’s work on affective labor. The chapter argues that Wilde allows us to think about the political and social dimensions of aesthetic value in ways that prefigure Negri’s work on the contemporary production of affective value. The reading of Wilde and Negri is a prime example of the study’s original coordination of Irish and modernist studies, queer theory, and post-Marxist theories of value and the aesthetic.

This chapter pursues the problem of what life is and what life may become outside of its capture within the forms of logistical order promoted in the name of a War on Terror, through recourse to the work of two of the most currently influential of all Foucauldian thinkers, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. What defines the work of Hardt and Negri, and certainly what has helped make their work so popular in recent years, is their attempt to reconstitute the historical tradition of refusal of and resistance to the logistical ordering of liberal societies. The chapter is organized as follows. One section provides an account of the development of the theory of the war of the multitude as it occurs in Negri's political thought. The text then examines how this contributes to the more recent account of Hardt and Negri's conceptualisation of the ‘two wars of liberal modernity’ through which, as they argue, the antagonistic relationship between the multitude and liberal regimes has developed. The final section addresses the problem of how this antagonism has been complicated by the emergence of Terror as a resistance to liberal regimes, and the question of whether Hardt and Negri are able to usefully distinguish their account of the contemporary character of the war of the multitude from it.

Agamben describes his posture as a reader as one of seeking a text’s Entwicklungsfähigkeit, or capacity for elaboration.1 In examining Agamben’s practices of reading, we can attend to the opposite phenomenon: the counter-elaboration that a text, in having being read by the philosopher, performs upon Agamben’s own thought. This reciprocal elaboration might constitute a paradigm for Agamben’s use of reading, according to his own idiosyncratic definition of use as an event in the middle voice, in which (according to a definition of Benveniste) the subject ‘effects an action only in affecting itself (il effectue en s’affectant)’ (UB 28). With this definition in mind, we could say that Agamben effects a text (he writes) only to the extent that he is also affected by another text (he reads). This is why Agamben’s position as a reader proves particularly important to any assessment of his work, quite aside from the problem of influence or intellectual genealogy. For this same reason, however, assessing Agamben’s relation to Antonio Negri – a figure with whom, by most measures, he is at odds – poses an unexpected challenge: how can Agamben’s thought be a use of Negri? Answering this question means not only assessing the critical distance between the two thinkers, but also taking this distance as a measure, in the Spinozan sense, of mutual affection.

This concluding chapter examines the concept of multitude within the context of posthegemony by focusing on Peronism in Argentina, Sendero Luminoso in Peru, national liberation struggles in Central America, and new social movements in Chile. Drawing on Antonio Negri’s notion of multitude, it considers the physiognomy of the Latin American multitude and how a theory of posthegemony reframes analysis of the region. It also discusses the relationship of constituent to constituted power, and therefore the double inscription of power in posthegemony, as well as the points at which that constitution starts to dissolve. It suggests that multitude goes against the dominant tradition of modern political philosophy that, according to Negri, is represented by Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Finally, the chapter looks at Negri’s “theory of the political composition of subjectivity” based on Benedict de Spinoza’s “constitutive ontology”.

This chapter offers a complementary analysis that seeks to identify the limits of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Gilles Deleuze-inspired political theses. It criticises Hardt and Negri's concept of the multitude and introduces the problem of political composition in the context of communist politics, addressing the minor politics operating through the vacuoles of non-communication. The chapter investigates how politics can be rescued from the musty corners of self-referentiality and begins to engage the social once more.

This chapter examines William S. Burroughs’ late trilogy of novels—Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987)—as a critical response to American neoliberalism. It analyzes what Burroughs terms the trilogy’s retroactive utopianism, or the way in which it reactivates the potential of historical revolutions (including the American Revolution and the global revolts of the 1960s) as a way of reimagining the future of global politics. Focusing on The Place of Dead Roads, the chapter shows how Burroughs combines science fiction and the Western to envision the Frontier in utopian terms. It argues that Burroughs’s fiction builds on the politics of the multitude, or the antisystemic politics of the late 1990s to the present, articulating a vision of the nation in terms of communal property, egalitarian relations, and democratic self-rule.

This chapter addresses the question of modernity in Haiti—first as political project and then as artistic production—by examining the quintessential theorists of a seemingly belated modernity in this presumably postmodernist moment: Jürgen Habermas, Arjun Appadurai, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. It studies the Habermasian and Appaduraian parameters of modernity—as an “unfinished project” and as postcolonial globalization, respectively—before considering Hardt and Negri's important delineations of altermodernity as a model for thinking about Haitian and Port-au-Princian politics. The Habermasian position on reason, rationality, truth, and values is that these categories remain the guiding principles of modernity, but they must be rethought and reconceptualized anew through an altered understanding of subjects and subjectivity. Meanwhile, Appadurai states that “modernity belongs to that small family of theories that both declares and desires universal applicability for itself,” which “aspired to create persons who would, after the fact, have wished to have become modern.”

This thesis shows that the dialectic of constituent and constituted power only ever leads to forms of sovereignty. Every negation of constituted power only ever leads to the re-emergence of sovereignty—or, what I call “the ruse of sovereignty.” Instead, it is more constructive to note the contrast between democracy and sovereignty implicit in a particular understanding of constituent power.

This introductory chapter begins by discussing an interpretation of Baruch Spinoza in the book, The Savage Anomaly. According to that book, it is Spinoza who understood the energy that constructs modal singularities in absolute being; and who perceived the ontological unfolding of life forms and institutions. The reason for The Savage Anomaly's ability to impose a new perspective on the interpretation of Spinoza is that it was part of a wider process of renewal of the traditions of thought about transformation. It was included in the epistémè of innovation and revolution from 1968 that rebuilt the foundations of the science of mind. The chapter explains how Spinoza challenges all the paradigms of modern thought—he presents an alternative to the modern, not out of the potency of the individual, but out of the potency of the common and of love.

The chapter opens with a distinction between political activism and artmaking by suggesting that activism tends to push the political as subject matter, while art has moved away this century from representing ‘the political’, returning to a concern for materials and their affects. However, such a crude distinction fails to account for nuances within practices, and thus the example of the Cuban artist, Tania Brugera, who uses political tools as material for her work, complicates the claim. Is it possible to define something as nebulous as an art community today? As with the contested space of aesthetics, Rancière argues that communities offer similar breaches that open and close, in this case between identities. There will be agreement in certain places and times on what constitutes an art community, but this is contingent upon an ongoing process of dissensus and transformation, subjectivation and disidentification. The chapter closes with an introduction to what became a global economic imperative from the 1970s, neo-liberalism, and it suggests that what is at stake for artists is a battle to define one’s practice against the contemporary figure of a complicit artist-entrepreneur. [185]

The conjunction of Christ’s fleshly presence and its capacity to refer beyond itself corresponds very closely to the doubled aspect of poetic utterance, which generally maintains some tension between language’s designative function and all the material and formal features that disrupt designation. The chapters below aim to think through, but also to think with, the profundity of these fleshly disruptions or intrusions. By attending to a highly selective— and in no way comprehensive— number of interventions from the fifteenth century to the present day, the readings offered here attempt to outline divergent approaches to the word- as- flesh, approaches that interrogate the tendency to overlook linguistic difference. Philologies of the flesh stall the reduction of verbal expression to semantic or designative functions alone, and thus refuse to rest content with instrumentalizing discourse. The noun logos is derived from the verb legein, which in the Homeric epics means to gather, to enumerate, to select, and consequently, in Attic Greek, to speak . The verb’s root is related to the Latin legere, which also primarily denotes to gather, to collect, and thus, to read out a select passage or simply to read , as in the modern Romance verbs for reading.

This chapter argues that scholarly debates about constituent power presuppose a distinction between constituent power and constitutional form that is neither theoretically compelling nor practically illuminating. In contrast to constitutionalists, it argues that constituent power is inexhaustible, the revolution not being reducible to an event and thus constitution-making fails to terminate constituent power. In contrast to populists, it argues that constituent power does not operate in a constitutional vacuum because the judiciary imposes constitutional continuity through unwritten constitutional principles. The judiciary also polices will formation during revolutionary upheaval, as reflected in Egyptian and Tunisian judicial rulings and legal debates relating to the formation and functioning of constituent assemblies. Finally, the overlap between constitutive and legislative functions in the practice of constituent assemblies, and the deflation of the constituent power’s political agency are inconsistent with theories that present constituent power as an unbounded political agency that establishes a new political order.

This chapter raises questions concerning the changing nature of memory contests in postcinematic visual cultures in the Middle East. How will cultural memory be affected by the emergence of a form of social subjectivity that may be termed “the multitude,” which coincides with the diversification of visual media away from cinematic techniques to other forms, such as cellphone videos. In particular, this conclusion identifies practices emerging in the aftermath of revolutionary social movements in the region (such as the Arab spring or the Iranian Green Movement), as well as other “multitudinous” shifts that reposition the role of cinema in setting limits and boundaries for cultural memory, and invites us to view ourselves as entering a new period of what has been called “postcinematic” memory.