Introduction

Anarchy seems to be in the air. This issue of Theory&Event, features a conversation between Tom Dumm and Michael Hardt. Their conversation covers a range topics — the fate of communism, the relationship of poststructuralism to radical democracy, the question of nationalism in the new empire — all of which are addressed in the new book, Empire, authored by Hardt and his collaborator Antonio Negri. At the heart of their book is a desire to theorize the multitude as the acting subject of politics. This desire is expressed in different ways throughout Empire, and in conversation, as the hopeful fate of radical democracy.

Our essays this issue cover a range of topics not quite as far-flung as the emporium theorized by Hardt and Negri, but quite possibly every bit as relevant to thinking through the present as they understand it in Empire. In “Maxima Immoralia,” Jeffrey T. Nealon presents a spirited methodological interpretation of one of the most disillusioned works of twentieth century thought, Adorno’s Minima Moralia, arguing that Adorno offers us a political theory in which speed is to play a constitutive role in the return of hope. Saul Newman finds Nietzsche to provide a surprisingly useful critique of the role of ressentiment in anarchism, and in “Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment” outlines the possibility of an anarchism that can embrace a will to power and remain anarchistic. Shades of the multitude. Alexander Reid’s contribution, “Free Action or Resistance” takes a close look at how competing theories of cultural critique play themselves out in college classrooms in the United States, suggesting, among other things, that attempts to deinstitutionalize learning experiences might be able to employ Deleuzian tactics to move beyond resistance and toward the creation of nomadic spaces. Finally, Mary Caputi, relying on both Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, analyzes “American Overabundance and Cultural Malaise.” Caputi’s essay, in its appropriately saturnine manner, brings us back to Hardt and Negri. The fate of capital, the fate of democracy, and the fate of our souls, all seem to be connected through the traumatic identities shaped around the longing for an ideal that cannot be filled, but that continues to shape our melancholic identities.

Bill Chaloupka and Thomas Dumm, coeditors