Introduction

While Theory & Event 9:2 is not thematic, there are nevertheless two directions of thinking shared in the issue’s three essays. First, there is an overriding sense of standing on the threshold of political transformations whose significance we can as yet scarcely imagine, much less comprehend, yet which urgently summon us to acts of radical conceptual and strategic reappraisal. Secondly, but more elusively, there are responses to this challenge: whether these entail an active imperative to construct a theory of globalization’ that would ‘lay claim to the state, in full knowledge that it is not what it used to be’ in a context of war and terror, or what might seem from this perspective to be fatal strategies of embracing silence and ‘interpassivity’.

In ‘On Silence and the Constitution of the Political Community’, Paolo Palladino and Tiago Moreira consider the significance of silence for exploring the nature of political community. Their ruminations are provoked by an essay in which the refusal of Gino (a victim of muscular dystrophy) to speak about his experience had sparked a consideration of the role of language in founding political community. Taking issue with the authors’ conclusions, Palladino and Moreira take us on a critical excursus that includes structural anthropology, Foucauldian archaeology, and Leibnizian monadology, in order to reconsider the basis of community (and of its boundaries) in exchange relations. Drawing in particular on Ranciere’s idea of the ‘part that has no place in the “division of the sensible”’ and on Serres’ notion of the parasite that is neither interior nor exterior to the system, they conclude that ‘it may be more productive to recognize how the very calculative reason on which distributive notions of justice rest depends... on the silence of figures such as Gino.’

Gijs Van Oenen’s ‘A Machine That Would Go of itself: Interpassivity and its Impact on Political Life’ might perhaps have been subtitled ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. The article takes as its main theme the concept of interpassivity, a term coined by Pfeller and Zizek as the counterpart to the more ‘upbeat’ idea of interactivity. Finding the term suggestive of both a transgressive mode of analysis and a diagnostic tool of the present, Van Oenen extends its implications beyond its originally aesthetic context into the order of politics and citizenship. The claim here is that interpassivity helps explain the loss of interest in the democratic politics that continuously incites our participation. A pathological and melancholic condition of ‘interpassivation’ that is beyond the pleasure principle emerges now as akin to alienation in the productive realm, as a process devoid of pleasure. This obsessive and resentful hyperactivity, coupled with utter indifference towards its outcome, is where a politics without agents literally becomes ‘a machine that runs on its own’.

Perhaps globalization might also be conceived as such a machine. But in his comparison of two recent attempts to get to grips with it — Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles; Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude — David Hughes shows us why we must care about the direction the machine takes and endeavour to intervene accordingly. He thus reminds us that despite the end of the cold war, which all three authors take as the decisive event that changed everything, it does matter whether one takes a conservative, realist approach or a more leftist, utopian one. Hughes’ emphasis, however, is on the ‘astonishing similarities and areas of consensus’ between these ideologically-opposed authors in their respective analyses of the dangers and opportunities globalization presents. Chief among them are a shared sense that democracy and international law are losing their former significance; that the nation-state is both atrophying yet in need of radical reinvention in light of its enduring efficacy; a sense of domestic and international crisis that embraces sovereignty and legitimacy to extend to the relationship between war and law itself, and a project of historical periodization that results in invocations common to all three writers, of classical ideas, medieval models and Renaissance parallels.

Criticizing both Bobbitt’s scarcely veiled appeal to US hegemony and Hardt and Negri’s hardly more satisfactory invocation of the multitude as the agent of...