The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s <i>Empire</i>

Abstract

The Future of an Ethics of Difference After Hardt and Negri’s Empire Zahi Zalloua (bio) In their landmark Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a reconfiguration of the field of political theory, arguing that critics must go beyond a “politics of difference” that has been “outflanked by [new] strategies of power” (138). Singled out in their analysis are postcolonial and postmodern thinkers who engage in a demoded—and dangerously ineffective—form of critique by continuing to privilege fluidity and hybridity in their struggle against “the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty” (138).1 While Hardt and Negri themselves have downplayed the radicality of their approach,2 their manifesto arguably makes the case for the urgency of theorizing globalization differently, as “Empire”; this renewed understanding, they contend, is the only means to come to terms with the complex and changing reality of the present and, subsequently, to find a more efficient mode of resisting the repressive, homogenizing elements of that reality: “In the face of the new forms of sovereignty, new strategies of contestation and new alternatives need to be invented” (Brown and Szeman 2002, 182). In this essay, I propose to scrutinize and supplement Hardt and Negri’s understanding of difference through a reflection on the place of ethical theory in the conceptualization of new strategies of political resistance in a global era. Drawing on the works of Edouard Glissant and Jacques Derrida, I would [End Page 127] like to theorize and rethink the problematic of difference within Empire, this “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii). If the authors of Empire rightly underscore the limits of a politics of difference, calling attention to the ways “difference” can always be coopted by dominant discourses, they do not adequately develop the ethical dimension of difference, bracketing from analysis any discussion of its postcolonial/postmodernist inflections and devoting to “the politics of difference” less than ten pages in a five-hundred-page volume.3 This is all the more puzzling, as we shall see, given Hardt and Negri’s own commitment to more general questions of ethics and difference—albeit in their more Spinozian and Deleuzian inflections—and, more particularly, to the deployment of the ethico-political figure of the multitude as the true subversive subject of globalization.4 Fighting a New Enemy The merits of Empire lie in its desire to reconfigure the center/periphery model of analysis, and, more importantly, to complicate the identification by postcolonial theorists of globalization with neo-imperialism (or the U.S.) by examining more closely how repressive power currently functions. At the heart of Hardt and Negri’s critique is their contention that the nation-state is an outdated notion, belonging to a prior era of “modern,” imperialist sovereignty that has been superseded by the new, imperial sovereignty of an “Empire” structured by the flow of capital. Any critique of globalization based on the assumption that nation-states are the primary locus of power is misguided: “We insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital” (43). No one is immune from the logic of global capital. Inside/outside and local/global dichotomies are, strictly speaking, illusory, since we all “feed into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine” (45). It is therefore not [End Page 128] only false, but counterproductive and damaging, “to claim that we can (re)establish local identities that are in some sense outside and protected against the global flows of capital and Empire,” that is, to think difference in terms of a particular locale resisting a general global trend (45). As a corrective to this misguided vision of the nation or the local’s capacity for resistance, Hardt and Negri argue for a reconceptualization of globalization as a “regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization” (45). This understanding of globalization relies more specifically...