Foreign Theories: On the Completion of the Empire Trilogy

Commonwealth, the last volume of the trilogy authored by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, appeared in October 2009, almost ten years after the publication of the first volume. It is only fitting, then, that we pause to assess what the improbable collaboration between two strikingly asymmetrical thinkers has brought to their equally different publics, located as they are both in the academic fields of political theory and cultural studies and in the more dispersed world of political organizing. In both cases, the reception of the trilogy has been lively and controversial even though it seems that the third volume has not been received with the same level of excitement that greeted the publication of the first two, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004). In the following pages I will try to sketch a brief history both of the conceptual content and the historical reception of the Empire trilogy, as well as comment on where the last volume, Commonwealth, leaves us. I am convinced that this historical approach is consistent with the main intent of the trilogy, which—as Réal Fillion said in his excellent 2005 essay¹—is to provide us with a speculative philosophy of history that would make possible the theoretical recognition of historical agency beyond the constraints of ideology and oppression. To that aim, however, a few words about the peculiar improbabilities of this work's historical emergence will also be necessary in order to mediate between the context of the trilogy and its speculative content.

An Improbable Signature

It is well known that Hardt and Negri met in Paris at the very beginning of the 1990s. Their encounter was on the one hand the unpredictable result of Mitterrand's doctrine on the Italian juridical apparatus during the so-called "years of lead,"² and on the other the consequence of Hardt's comparative or rather internationalist leanings in building his own political and theoretical profile. What makes their authorial collaboration improbable is a combination of several factors. One of the most striking differences between the two, one that might be more difficult to mediate than linguistic and cultural roots, is generational: Negri was born in 1933 and Hardt in 1960. This gap is important in a body of work that is primarily concerned with the intelligibility of historical change because the authors' very apprehension of their own historicity could only be made common through the creation of a common archive of theoretical references and political struggles. This required an unusual determination to overcome the difficulties implicit in delineating a common project across all generational, linguistic, and even logistical obstacles. Such willingness, I will later argue, has to be rooted in a desire to expand one's own temporal and cultural limits, a desire that it is highly optimistic in nature and quite rare to find. In other words, if they wanted to write a book about contemporary history, Hardt and Negri had, first of all, to invent a past, present, and future that could be common to the two of them since they wanted to write together and at the same time.

The expansive, extroverted nature of the Empire project was clearly visible already in its first volume which, however, was preceded by the publication in English of several essays by Italian post-workerist political thinkers (in a volume co-edited by Hardt) and Hardt's translation of Negri's important book on Spinoza.³ This preliminary work was necessary to the cultivation of both a coauthor for the aging Italian philosopher and an audience for the volumes to come, since Negri's theories were firmly rooted in the particularities of the Italian Marxist tradition and were not easily digestible by the international—and particularly the Anglo-Saxon—academic community. Once this complex linguistic and cultural translation was accomplished, Hardt and Negri authored a first book together, entitled The Labour of Dyonisus: A Critique of the State Form (U of Minnesota...