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REMARK 2: VULGAR METAPHYSICS AND POETIC METAPHYSICS In the history of philosophy, it is possible to distinguish between a metaphysics of transcendence and a metaphysics of immanence. The former can also be called vulgar metaphysics. Its main tenet is the principle of “the ontotheological One” (Alliez 1996: 200). The latter is a poetic (or poietic ) metaphysics whose presupposition and result are ethical, practical, and whose inner motor is political to the core. Marx’s metaphysics of time is of the latter type, and it is, as Negri says, a “cursed” metaphysics (Negri 1992: 151). It is a cursed metaphysics because it is a materialist one, and because it carries within its womb the tools for a radical transformation of the world. Critical metaphysics, which starts with Kant, still falls within a vulgar type of metaphysics, even though, by denying access to the thing-in-itself, it keeps reason from deluding itself. But to criticize vulgar—in Kant’s case, dogmatic—metaphysics without building a metaphysics of immanence is equal to remaining caught within it. This is also the case with Heidegger, the school of deconstruction, and analytic philosophy in general. It is not the case with Nietzsche and Marx. It is true that today one cannot overlook Heidegger’s fundamental contribution to the question of time. Yet, as Negri says, one does not need to compare Marx to Heidegger in order to understand Marx’s concept of time. In fact, “Marx has a metaphysics of time as, indeed, more radical than Heidegger’s” (Negri 1992: 41). With Marx, “... temporality can be rooted in man’s productive capacity, in the ontology of his becoming—an open temporality, absolutely constitutive, which does not reveal Being but produces beings” (ibid.). The difference between “revealing” and “producing ” is fundamental. The Heideggerian modality of revealing (and this is also true of the later Heidegger on language and technology) still retains something of the beyond typical of vulgar metaphysics.22 For Marx, by contrast , the metaphysics of time does not reveal anything. If there is a hidden subject, it affirms itself in and through production (as the identity of doing and making). If there is a subterranean fire, it breaks itself open through its incessant labor. Negri continues: “... Marx liberates what Heidegger ties up; Marx lights up with praxis what Heidegger brings back to the mystical. Heideggerian time is the form of Being, it is the indistinctness of an absolute ground; Marxian temporality is the key through which a subject which is formally predisposed to the adequacy with an absolute procedure becomes materially able to enter such a process, to define itself as constituent power” (p. 42).23 The substance of this constituent power is time. Marx’s metaphysics of time is the open dialectic of living labor set free by the inability of capital to reconstitute its own identity. 78 CHAPTER TWO Identical is only that concept which, without being a one, is contracted into an infinite series of possible differences. In the history of Western metaphysics, this concept was established by Duns Scotus in an objective fashion. This means that the concept is not an empty abstraction but a real, objective being. The self-identity of this concept, namely, its neutral immediacy, which is also absolute difference, allows for its univocal expansion and inclusion into everything that is.24 This concept can be given different names: being, time, power (as potential, i.e., not as constituted , but as constituent power).25 It is the principle of that which is and is not, which can be and not be. In Marxian terms, moving from pure ontology to political ontology, this concept is nothing but living labor itself. It is then the principle that demystifies the view of bourgeois philosophy and political economy according to which the laws governing the capitalist mode of production are immutable and eternal. In fact, the capitalist mode of production is this essential difference that, as long as it is, totalizes itself and works toward the subsumption of everything else under itself. But precisely by so doing, precisely by this act of subsuming and totalizing, of turning itself into a positive whole, of leaving nothing outside itself, it reaches its concept and vanishes and withers away. The concept of the end so much talked about in these recent years, is nothing but the coming to completion of an essential difference. It is true that this essential difference (the capitalist mode of production) is such that it has subsumed everything under itself...

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