Latinamericanism after 9/11

2. The Persistence of the Nation (against Empire)

chapter two The Persistence of the Nation (against Empire) empire and multitude If Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are right, and we are in something like a new Roman Empire, in which there is no longer a center or periphery (for the Empire has no outside), then the central question of our times might be: Who are the Christians today? That is, who in the world today, within Empire but not of it, like the early Christians, carries the possibility of a logic that is opposed to Empire and that will bring about its eventual downfall or transformation?1 Even for those who continue to consider themselves Marxists in some sense (and I include myself in that category), it no longer seems enough to call this subject the proletariat or the working class. Hardt and Negri themselves prefer the idea of the “multitude”—which they derive from Spinoza via the Italian political philosopher Paolo Virno. Hardt and Negri have themselves suggested on various occasions postcolonial studies and subaltern studies in particular as one of their inspirations.2 This gesture has the positive effect of opening up the category of the subaltern to the future, instead of seeing it, as Gramsci did, as an identity shaped by the resistance of rural tradition to modernity. Are the categories of the subaltern and the multitude commensurate, such that one could imagine a sort of strategic convergence between the projects of Hardt and Negri in Empire and subaltern studies, particularly around the critique of the nation-state?3 Yes and no. There is a perhaps crucial difference between the multitude and the subaltern: the multitude, as Hardt and Negri use the term, is meant to designate a faceless or rather many-faced, hydra-headed, hybrid the persistence of the nation 27 collective subject conjured up by globalization and cultural deterritorialization , whereas the subaltern is in the first place a specific identity as such, “whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way,” to recall Ranajit Guha’s classic definition.4 It follows that the politics of the subaltern must be, at least in some measure, “identity” politics. The problem here is that Hardt and Negri themselves go to some pains in Empire to argue that multicultural identity politics as they understand it (that is, as what usually is called “liberal multiculturalism”) is itself deeply complicit with Empire. For if supra- or subnational permeability is the central economic characteristic of the new global capitalism, then multicultural heterogeneity is syntonic with this permeability in some ways, exploding or reordering at the level of the ideological superstructure previously hegemonic narratives of the unified nation-state and the “people” (one language, history, territoriality, etc.). For Machiavelli, who could be said to have been the first modern thinker of national liberation struggle, “the people” (il popolo) is the condition for the nation and, in turn, realizes itself as a collective subject in the nation. What Hardt’s and Negri’s concept of the multitude implies is that in effect you can have “the people” without the nation. Machiavelli believed that “the people” without the nation is irremediably heterogeneous and servile—like the Jews in Egyptian captivity. It is the Prince—Moses— who confers on “the people” a unity of will and identity by making it into a nation. But the appeal to the idea of the nation also stabilizes that will and identity—as, now, a people—around a hegemonic vision, codified in the law and the state apparatus, of a common language, set of values, culture , interests, community, tasks, sacrifices, historical destiny—a vision that rhetorically sutures over the gaps and discontinuities internal to “the people.” But it is in those gaps and discontinuities that the force of the subaltern or the subaltern-as-multitude appears. Is the transcendence of the nation-state by globalization fortuitous for the project of human emancipation and diversity, then? Hardt and Negri, following a tradition of Marxist antinationalism that goes back to Rosa Luxemburg (and in some ways Marx himself), seem to think that it is. Their argument against multiculturalism in Empire is connected to their argument against hegemony in Gramsci’s sense of “moral and intellectual leadership of the nation.” They want to imagine a form of politics that would go beyond the limits of both the nation and the forms of political 28 chapter two and cultural representation traditionally...