1 Libidinal economy of the multitude. A Stieglerian critique of Hardt and Negri’s view on cognitive capitalism and the technological conditions of the common Pieter Lemmens, PhD Radboud University Nijmegen Department of Philosophy and Science Studies Abstract This article attempts to provide a Stieglerian organological and pharmacological critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s thesis, mainly developed in their Empire trilogy, that today’s cognitive capitalism forms a prefiguration of communism, i.e., that the current ‘knowledge economy’ based on immaterial production intrinsically generates the conditions or prerequisites for a transition towards communism. Cognitive capitalism, according to Hardt and Negri, in fact represents a perverse ‘communism of capital’ that will eventually evolve, due to its inherent contradictions, into a genuine ‘communism of the multitude’. Basing myself on the work of Bernard Stiegler but also on Franco – bifo - Berardi’s recent analyses of semiocapitalism and the cognitariat, I criticize the three basic (and deeply interrelated) arguments that Hardt and Negri provide to back up this thesis: the growing autonomy of the multitude, the withering away of the process of proletarianization in immaterial labor and the becoming (bio)political of immaterial labor. Here I will focus mainly on the first two arguments and show that they are unconvincing in the light of recent developments in cognitive capitalism. I argue that to present contemporary cognitive capitalism as a proto-communist configuration seems inadequate. Principally, Hardt and Negri’s diagnosis fails to adequately address the technological and libidinal conditions for the creation of a communist society. Foremost, it fails to acknowledge, and even explicitly denies, the deeply proletarianizing nature of cognitive capitalism, as it remains blind to the organological and pharmacological impact – in Stiegler’s terminology - of the digital networks on immaterial labor. In conclusion, I will argue that a communism of the multitude first of all presupposes a struggle against the processes of cognitive and affective proletarianization that are the prime characteristic of cognitive capitalism’s subsumption of the mind under capital. For that purpose, Stiegler’s work can be very helpful, provided that it be adapted to the multitudinous and ‘communist’ perspective advanced by Hardt and Negri. Keywords: capitalism, communism, multitude, Negri, Hardt, Stiegler, new media 1. Introduction. The Comeback of Communism After three decades of neoliberal triumphalism and the collapse of the communist alternative, today communism – sometimes renamed ‘commonism’ – is back on the agenda again of leftist political thought. Since the sold-out Birbeck conference on communism organized early 2009 in London by Slavoj Žižek and Costas Douzinas, it seems that the idea of communism is in the air again and is slowly gaining more serious attention within radical academia, and also outside of it among a growing population of workers who have begun to realize that the neoliberal capitalist system has not much to offer them anymore and has become devoid of any future prospects other than austerity, towering debt and further devastation of societies and ecosystems 1 . Especially since the financial crisis of 2008 and the series of protests it has provoked all over the globe – from the revolutions in the Arab world and the revolts in Europe to the Occupy movement in the United States – the call for more radical alternatives to capitalism is gaining ground again. In the introduction to the volume with the collected contributions to the Birbeck conference, Couzinas and Žižek applaud this renewed interest in radical ideas and politics these days and argue that it should be answered philosophically as well as politically by a reanimation of the communist idea,