OS TEMPOS QUE CORREM. Miguel Vale de Almeida


13.11.04  

Tirar as palavras da boca de alguém.

No universo diversificado e frequentemente contraditório dos movimentos alterglobalização e da esquerda pós-comunista, os livros Império e Multitude de Hardt e Negri têm feito grande sucesso. Confesso que apenas os tresli. A principal razão para a "tresleitura" foi o enfado com a linguagem, e a sensação de estar perante mais uma tentativa de criação dogmática, passível de seduzir política e emotivamente muita gente. No meio do ensaio citado no post anterior, Tony Judt faz uma crítica que subscrevo:

«If the right has proved inadequate to the task of imagining and executing a responsible foreign policy for the twenty-first century, its critics have done little better. While neoconservatives culpably overestimated America's capacity to dominate the actual world, the left continued to dream up worlds of its own imagining. In an age when the right to bear (nuclear) arms may soon be available to any criminally disposed person on the planet, and when the problem of maintaining security in an open society is the most difficult challenge facing any democratic government (albeit cynically exploited by the present American one), what is the most popular source of political enlightenment on American campuses today? Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - now accompanied by the same authors' Multitude.

Both books are dreadful. Anyone old enough to remember the revolutionary rhetoric of the Seventies will recognize the style, notwithstanding the postmodern updating. Negri, who spent many years in prison for his part in the homicidal radicalism of Italy's Lead Years, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing (Hardt is presumably too young to have known anything in the first place). There are no subjects in these books: just structures, processes, and "de-centered" forces and "encounters." The proposition - to flatter more than nine hundred pages of flaccid, inept prose - is that the "multitude" will be brought together by the workings of "empire" and (with the familiar help of some cleansing violence) will rise up and break its shackles: "Empire...by colonizing and interconnecting more areas of human life ever more deeply, has actually created the possibility for democracy of a sort never before seen. Brought together in a multinoded commons [sic] of resistance, different groups combine and recombine in fluid new matrices of resistance".

This is globalization for the politically challenged. In place of the boring old class struggle we have the voracious imperial nexus now facing a challenger of its own creation, the de-centered multitudinous commonality: Alien versus Predator. Through his American dummy, Negri is ventriloquizing a twenty-first-century paraphrase of Marxist theories of imperialism popularized by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin at the end of the nineteenth. The originals were much better written and distinctly more poli-tically threatening, since they had some purchase upon reality. With the American left reading Multitude, Dick Cheney can sleep easy.» (Continue a ler Dreams of Empire)

mva | 18:03|