THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI

Abstract

The works titled Empire and Multitude that were co-authored by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have created a considerable impact on human and social sciences. In these studies, the writers examine the main characteristics of the passage from modernity to postmodernity, industrial production to postindustrial immaterial production, modern notion of sovereignty to the global regime that they call Empire. Moreover, they maintain that the political agents that were active in modernity should be reconsidered within the context of a new postmodern political subjectivity which they call “the multitude.” This article argues that Hardt and Negri’s political theory cannot be grasped only with an empirical approach, it must also be read from the perspective of political ontology. Underlying this claim is the fact that Hardt and Negri depart from the dominant political theories and critical methods of modernity, and that they take Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Spinozian ontology to the center of their analysis. Accordingly, this article discusses the sources—primarily the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari—that feed into concepts such as Empire, the multitude, desire, and immaterial labor introduced by Hardt and Negri, and it investigates the political ontology that constitutes the framework of their work.