Empire versus Multitude

Abstract

The author presents open questions posed by the recent notorious work by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire. Their modeling upon Marx and Deleuze is, he claims, a symptom which affects and colours the whole work, all of its premises and starting points. The basic conceptual pair Empire-multitude framed by a thesis on bio-power meets the same fate. Further shortcomings and impasses of the work are shown concerning Deleuze's thesis on the passage from the disciplinary society to a society of control and Deleuze's notion of multiplicity and the political.