Optimism of the Intellect...

Abstract

One of the difficulties of understanding Empire is that it represents the culmination of work that Hardt and Negri have been pursuing, separately and together, over the last few decades: for better and for worse—for greater economy of expression yet greater difficulty of reading—much of what is said in Empire depends on positions taken and concepts explained in earlier works. My aim here is to reread the later work in relation to some of the earlier work, particularly as it bears on the unusually optimistic tone characteristic of Empire. As unusual as it is, I think that tone can be satisfactorily explained in light of the authors' earlier work; indeed, explanations for it abound there, and I will review several of them. And yet I will suggest that they are not all consistent with one another. I want, in fact, to distinguish within Empire between a methodological optimism (with which I largely agree) and a substantive optimism (about which I have some qualms). It would be wrongheaded and unfair to attribute one of these forms of optimism exclusively to Hardt and the other exclusively to Negri, and yet one is more consistent with Deleuze (with whom Hardt did an “apprenticeship in philosophy”) and the other less so. It is from a Deleuzian perspective, in any case, that I will distinguish a methodological from a substantive optimism in Hardt and Negri's latest work.