Seven Red

On the contrary, the impression is that the domain of law is gaining terrain both domestically and internationally; the process of normativization is investing increasingly wider spaces. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that juridical language per se reveals itself to be incapable of illuminating the profound logic of such change. When one speaks of “human rights,” for example, rather than referring to established juridical subjects, one refers to individuals defined by nothing other than the simple fact of being alive. Something analogous can be said of the dispositif of sovereignty. Anything but destined to weaken as some had rashly forecast (at least with regard to the world’s greatest power) sovereignty seems to have extended and intensified its range of action – beyond a repertoire that for centuries had characterized its relation to both citizens and state structures. – Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy

On the day that we learn Berlusconi will deploy 2,500 troops from the Italian Army to “supplement” the police and carabinieri in an “anti-crime” effort, I finished another of the spate of fascinating philosophical texts coming out of Italy, Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Last week, I finished Paolo Virno’s latest, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, which I pre-ordered like a pathetic teenage fan anticipating the new album of my favorite band. Ah well. We all have our things, I guess. Perhaps the best result of Hardt and Negri’s Empire is the renewed interest and subsequent translation of a whole body of Italian thought – thought, to be somewhat melodramatic, forged in the crucible of the 1970′s, the student and worker struggles, the Legge Reale, the Movement of ’77, the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the crackdown of 1979, and prison, always the shadow of the prison experience.

Much of this emerging work is, of course, responding to H&N; Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude is certainly much darker in its assessments of the “constitutive power of the Multitude,” or at least the version of “love” (or affirmative biopower) that it leaves us with. Not darker in the sense of retreating from such an affirmative power ( a move generally left to the truly gloomy Agamben), but a much more frightening framework for the way the affirmations are turned against themselves, particularly when it comes to labor. In his previous work, particularly the essay “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment” (in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics), Virno usually ends with a decidedly half-hearted notion that the same forms of subjectivity and action he just outlined as particularly brutal can themselves be affirmed otherwise. But it has seemed rather like a theoretical dogma: to suggest otherwise would be nostalgia. But you can see how the real peddlers of nostalgic politics get to slap Multitude around, and establish their resentful purchase. Where nostalgia always has a programmatic response ready to hand (called “yesterday”), the affirmative politics of what’s been called, snarkily enough for Left polemics, “The Italian Ideology” always seems to end on a fuzzy note, especially where Francis of Assisi makes his appearance.

This “love” business always bothered me, not least because the swerve around sovereignty and the state of exception – now returned rapidly in the lawless Bush regime and their torture apparatus, and in the blithe manner in which Berlusconi deploys the military to combat supposed street crime – the swerve, to repeat, always seems rather insufficient. Both Esposito and Virno tackle this problem directly, focusing explicitly on the state of exception, and the relationship between the “norm” and what it seeks to normalize (which is to say, the relationship between what we used to call, in the key of liberalism, politics and nature). I’m waiting for Negri’s The Porcelain Workshop, at which point I think I’ll produce a review essay on the three books. For now, though, I’d say that the Esposito should be required reading, and the Virno I’ll have to think about more (Virno’s prose tends to be so simple that his ideas need to rest a bit before they flower).

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