RETHINKING MARXISM Volume 13, Number 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2001) On Empire Mahmut Mutman The new book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000), sets up a num- ber of difficult tasks for radical thought. Rather than seeing it as a global and com- prehensive theorization of the present conjuncture, I would like to approach it in terms of its ethico-political problematic. I will bypass the points of agreement (which are many, as I think will be clear to my careful readers) and directly discuss what I con- sider to be the problematical and strategic aspects of the book. While Hardt and Negri resist a totalizing style of theorization, they also feel the necessity of going through a number of arguments and analyses within a general framework that will enable their readers to make sense of the current conjuncture. We can only thank them for the wonderful job they did for us. In this double deter- mination (avoiding an overarching and founding totalization while enabling a dis- course that will still make sense of the general), it is the very difference or “new- ness” of the conjuncture that is at stake. What is the postmodern? A beyond of modernity that interrupts its grand narrative or another facet of modernity’s obses- sion with the new—that is, the most recent commodity on the market? The answer given by Hardt and Negri depends on their awareness of the continuity of the mode of production and power which underlies their historical distinction. While the post- modern is still used as one of the terms that narrates the present, a different ethico- political focus is suggested by the term and concept of “Empire.” (In this sense the book is an implicit critique of a certain version of Marxism which can find the pos- sibility of a critique of the present only in a totalizing gesture.) In producing this concept, Hardt and Negri present a remarkable tour de force by articulating diverse theoretical sources from Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze to classical and modern po-