There are also the repeated games of hide-the-ball--designed to make it hard for non-insiders to understand what is going on. For example, consider "In an extraordinary text written during his period of seclusion, Louis Althusser..." A more misleading circumlocution I have not seen since the days of Paul de Man's "wartime journalism"...
This comment reads to this non-insider as a pretty inside view. I did read Empire, all of it, but even though I didn't get all of their references (including this Althusser thing), I found it a useful extension of Deleuze and Guattari (and a great expansion of Guattari and Negri's "Communists Like Us" pamphlet). I can't comment on Negri's reading of Spinoza and politics, but that certainly seems to be the key to understanding the recovery of a working class subjectivity. Haven't postmodernisms (like D/G and Foucault and the usual suspects) discredited the kind of ontology that would make a global proletariat possible? I for one am thankful to H/N for pointing back in that direction (of ontology); and far from gelatinous, I found the book laced with approaches to questions that galvanized my thinking. And yes, I think their main thesis is correct: there may be an "empire in the abstract", but it is far from gelatinous. Rather, it's machinic, hyperextensive and it penetrates down to the microscopic levels. To attempt a totalizing analysis of this might indeed be overwhelming, but at this point I'd prefer, for one, to attribute my confusion to my newness to the method rather than to some attempt to mystify American imperialism. I'm reading some popular work on globalization like Wm.Grieder's "One World Ready or Not", and he puts flesh and blood stories on some of "Empire's" abstractions. And it ain't all about America, and in the future it'll be less and less.
But it's great to see that the book is pushing some people's buttons! I enjoy seeing the discussion continue.
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