Multitude

Check here for the latest postings of reflections on the book Multitude, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

Chapter 1. WAR

Reflection by Emily Mc Gaughy

<click here to read the full review>

 

Sample: Whereas political and economic systems identify human persons as autonomous actors participating in a circadian rhythm of amoral cause and effect, religion and philosophy have interested themselves in the theory of human essence and/or imago dei. However along the way, imago dei, or the value of the human person, got mixed in with the rhetoric of country and empire, patriarchy and papal infallibility, crusade and capitalism. I’ll say it here like I’ve said it before: religion and politics have never been completely separate; they are co-creating entities that share a framework of self-definition based on other-ing. They often borrow and employ each others discourse(s) for the purposes of unifying and differentiating. What we see today, which Hardt & Negri point to over and over, is a rhetoric of war that appropriates religious language and concepts, yet drives its agenda in the name of political and “national” security.

ROBYN

Click <here> to read Robyn’s reflection on PSR’s Peace Week and how it reveals the Multitude at work.

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Coming soon:

 

Chapter 2. MULTITUDE

 

Chapter 3. DEMOCRACY

 

Heya! Go check out the interview Jon Stewart does on the Daily Show with Lt. Col. John Nagl, who helped write a Counterinsurgency manual – he really says just what H&N say about full spectrum dominance and the Empire’s model of counterinsurgency techniques:

“We can’t just outfight them; we have to out-think them.”

His summary of the manual’s advice to soldiers in Iraq:

“Be polite. Be professional. Be prepared to kill.”

The interview is dated August 23, 2007, and can be found at www.comedycentral.com.