RETHINKING MARXISM

Volume 13, Number 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2001)

Empire, A Picture of the World

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott
Translated by Isis Sadek
But the impossibility of penetrating the divine schema of the universe cannot dissuade us from outlining human schemas, even though we are aware that they are provisional. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions

In a surprising story entitled On Exactitude in Science, Borges narrates the construction of an extremely detailed map of an Empire: In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild Struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it (1998, 325). This story, which Borges attributes to Surez Miranda (1658), confirms the present texts epigraph: however ridiculous or illogical our schemas may be, they do not cease to be necessary. Or, in the opposite direction, however certain and adequate these schemas may be for our own representations, that doesnt make those representations any less arbitrary. We could also read these utterances in relation to a paradox of contemporary critical thought, which can be expressed as follows: we can either assume the responsibility of restituting the (modern) representational system of the world as totality, or we can try to reconstruct a system of coordinates that would allow us to put forward a new representation of the world. This paradox refers to one of the most problematic points in contemporary academic discussion and politics. The discussion of the acosmical or fissured status of totality in Slavoj ieks Hegelian-Lacanian reading (1999), the theory of hegemonic articulations and reconfigurations of universalist thought in Ernesto Laclau (1985, 1996, 2000), without forgetting Jamesons originary cartog-

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raphy (1991), all stand as contemporary, solid, and pertinent attempts at reorienting a mode of thinking which has lost its modern link with politics, having been left behind by history, its accelerated dynamics, and its unrepresentable actuality. Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris recent book (2000) which is the subject of the following reflections, can be considered one such attempt.

Arguments in the Paradox

The fact that the so-called paradox is structured upon the opposition of two alternatives must not be overlooked. One can either attempt to restitute a representation of the totality of the world, or else, assume the impossible totalization of the facticity of the actual world. Accordingly, the following arguments can be invoked. (1) It could easily be said that what were dealing with here is not a paradox but a false dichotomy, in the sense that its not necessary to restitute a modern cartographythat is, one that bears the systematic vices exhibited by the tradition of critical thought, not so long ago. To elaborate a picture of the world in which the multiplicity of the spatiotemporal experience does not become fixed as a categorial marker. A virtual, and thus, real and possible, picture.1 According to this perspective, the very notion of totality is then weakened with respect to its previous, all-encompassing (allembracing) resonance. The requests of critical thought will then no longer be oriented toward the configuration of a categorial network capable of exhausting the diversity of sensorial experience. On the contrary, they content themselves with signaling some indicative markers (Jamesons Postulans) in which critical inquiry, as well as political practice, could be oriented. (2) One can also argue that putting forward a new cartography, however weak and open it may be, is an imperative that cant be postponed since our representation of the world depends on it, and that such representations contain our position for critical and political ends. Unlike the first alternative, of a more epistemological and substantive nature, this one suffers from a modern ethical imperative, which is problematic in the long run. The paradox is not overcome but it is displaced by urgencythe urgency of situating ourselves in an unrepresentable world, and maybe also the urgency of situating ourselves on its left. Giving precedence to this imperative necessarily implies a specific representation of the world as well as a presupposition as regards the world and what is to be done in it. (3) A third argumentative horizon establishes that the impossibility of constructing a total representation of the world is a lack that is lived at the level of what we
1. This is a major problematic point. Not only because Hardt (1993) had already read the relation between virtuality and politics from the perspective of Deleuzes notion of virtuality, as developed in his study of Bergson, but also because Hardts text on Deleuze goes as far as Deleuzes analyses of Nietzsche, thus limiting itself to a central yet not definitive moment of Deleuzes thought. This doesnt affect Hardts thinking, but it doesnt necessarily allow us to find in Deleuzes thought a major questioning of the problem of the image and the relation between thought and image. I will return to this point toward the end of this essay.

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could denominate intellectual consciousness. Otherwise, what operates is the multitude of subjects that people what Hegel has called natural consciousness (1992), according to which the construction of an image of the world is inherent to its habitability. This is the place in which the image of the world appears as multiplied. And our next problem consists in the inarticulability of these rhizomatic representations, and also in the possibility of conceiving such a multiplicity beyond the narrative possibility of the tele-techno-mediaticthis, once again, entails cartography. In such a perspective, and inverting the cycle of crisis of the Hegelian natural consciousness, the actual lack of a system of coordinates affects the leftist tradition and leads it to forget that the lack of a representation is a clue not only to such a crisis in a negative sense but also to a potentiality in an ontological sense. That is to say, the lack of a homogenizing representation is a fundamental condition of the multiplication of representations. There are, however, two underlying assumptions here that must be made explicit. (3.1) The multiplicity of representations of the world is inherent to the multiplicity of processes of subjectivation and of subject positions that configure present society. We havent yet determined the total physiognomy of this society. We have, however, advanced in signaling its configuration as a complex and heterogeneous one (multiple, hybrid, random, and postclassist are other possible labels coined by contemporary thought). Keeping in line with this reasoning, the truly worrisome question is determining whether this multiplicity is foreign to, in tension with, or in total subordination to the mechanisms of the society of control (Empire), to ideology, to telematics, to integrated world capitalism, or to any other macrocategory that could be used for this questioning. (3.2) The second necessary elucidation is strictly related to the previous one. How can we determine the movement of these representations from such a heterogeneity or multiplicity to a more integrative or articulative plane in which they can function differentially while being simultaneously articulated in a process of subjective (the multitude as a political subject), counterhegemonic (as understood by Laclau and Mouffe), or redeeming constitution? All this supposes transcending particular resistances. If these arguments sufficiently complicate the false paradox, they cannot, however, sufficiently problematize the very issue of the picture of the world. The construction of such a picture supposes a too modern relation with the experience of temporality and spatiality, an objectifying relation in which reality appears as already given and, as such, as determinable and susceptible to being determined. But, before taking a Heideggerian turn, let us leave this last point in suspension and concentrate on another, previously mentioned one. The impossibility of a total representation of the world further reveals the impossibility of a sole representation of this kind in times of multitude and Empire. The so-called crisis of totality, a crisis that is lived at the level of intellectual consciousness, tries, in its many responses, to translate and adapt modern categorial schemes to the vertiginous pace of transformations that have succeeded each other in recent years. However, this lack of a unique image does not entail the absence of a proliferation of stories/his-

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toriesthat is, of images, inexhaustible in their very multiplicity but, at the same time, definitely inarticulatable.2 Let me repeat the argument. If the absence of a total image of the contemporary world can be read as a consequence of the crisis of the tradition of critical thought developed in modernity, a kind of crisis for which categorial replacements and renewals havent yet been constituted, then the present moment becomes indecipherable in its totality. This may be due to the fact (pointed out early on by Deleuze and Guattari [1983]) that such a totality doesnt exist in plenitude, but rather is configured and deconfigured progressively through an unpredictable, hence unrepresentable axiomatics. Let me then ask, paraphrasing the epigraph: can this possibility of putting forward tentative schemas of the world persuade us? No. This negative cannot, however, be understood as a relapse in the voluntaristic operation of modern representation. It is because of the fact that such multiplicity offers the possibility of not determining a unique, homogenizing, and hegemonizing image of the world that the necessity of putting forward tentative, multiple, and rhizomatic schemas of the world doesnt persuade us. In this case, Empire isnt just the proposition of a determined image of the world. Rather, it goes beyond the simple attempt of tuning older categories to new realities. The categorial proposition of the book produces a revision of contemporary critical thought which is efficient enough to be warned of such vice. Its not that simple, though. An image whose categorial center is nourished by the notions of multiplicitymultitude, virtuality, infinity and decentering, ubiquity and absence of frontiers, still doesnt cease automatically to be a homogenizing representation of the world, even if we are no longer dealing with a substantive homogenizationuniversalistdialectical model in times of Fordist leveling, we should still reflect upon a formal homogenizationan articulation-translation, a representation of the differences as hegemony, multiculturalism, or multitude. An image of the world in which the unrepresentable would be represented. A sort of Borgesian Aleph, misty and blurred, buried but nevertheless existing.

Empire
Let us thus see how Empire is structured. First warning. The expository clarity, narrative sequencing, and illustrative character of the book allow us to recognize the present Empire. Empire deals with contemporary capitalism, with the configuration of global society, and with the processes of production, circulation, and subjectivation inherent to that stage. It deals with them
2. Let us note in passing that such proliferation does not take place in a space untouched by relations of power. Rather, this space is constituted by these relations of power and takes on many forms of differentiation, among which we should mention differences in degree and density, so as to distinguish such proliferation from Rortys (1989) pragmatist tribute in which such stories/histories are de-densified and thus oriented toward absolute circulation, converted in the exchange-value of the pragmatic decision.

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in such a way that, rather than an abstract theory, it stands as a representation of the degree of abstraction of the present time. From the outset, this imposes a risk that the authors are, in any case, willing to run: the risk of failing in description constitutes the limit that prevents the book from turning into a compendium of political prescriptions despite the fact that, through its argumentative clarity and its geometrical expository organization, it is intended to exert its influence beyond philosophers, political scientists, and socialists. Second warning. Although the clarity of Empire does not befit the opacity of Empire itself, that is not the result of a simplification. Rather, it is the result of a political operation. In such a case, if we were to require greater specifications as regards the books theses, we would argue that these should not be decontextualized from the authors previous developments. Nevertheless, what we find here is an emulation of the manifesto, particularly the Communist Manifesto, in which the paradox of calling to action by way of the book finds itself extenuated in a treatise of more than four hundred pages and 490 footnotes. If, despite this, the book could seem somewhat vague or superficial in some assertions, this is generally due to its attempt to account for the totality of problems with which a description of the present is faced. The book. The books central thesis is that, before our very eyes, a new world order is being configured. This order differs from the veteran European imperialist project in that it conjugates the tradition of American juridico-political thought with the diverse developments of the computerization of economics and the postmodernization of society. Empire, whose genealogy is traced to the Greco-Roman tradition, appears as a ubiquitous, decentered, and internally contradictory world order. What we are dealing with is the process of capitalist deterritorialization taken to the extreme in which the processes of capitalist subsumption presently operate by absorbing the whole of society in the dynamics of capital.3 Hardt and Negri point out the following transformations: (1) Transformations in terms of the law, which dont make way for an International law4 as the utopia of the Imperialist model would have it, but rather, for the configuration of a worldwide law which regulates the processes of social conflicts and production at the same level. The mode of juridical organization stems from the medieval tradition of the just war. This is heuristically significant when it comes to explaining postcold war military conflicts as well as possible legitimations in policies of military intervention (drug trafficking, terrorism, attacks to the democratic Occidental tradition, etc.). (2) Transformations of the social structure, in which the industrial laborer appears as one more step in the process of proletarization, defined by the relation of exploita3. For further reading about the consequences of the shift from real to formal subsumption, in dialogue with the famous (unpublished) chapter 4 of Capital , Results of the immediate process of production, see Negri (1992). His is a reading motivated by a revision of Marxian value-theory in light of the transformations of computerization and the constitution of the social worker as an already deterritorialized subject of the factory. 4. The analysis of the infrastructural role of modern law for the project of expansion and intensification of capitalist exploitation, from its Renaissance sources to contemporary juridical formalism, inventionism, and continuism, appears in Negri (1999).

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tion within and without the factory. The complete universalization of the capitalist mode of production doesnt need to operate as a universalization of industrial production and it is this (regardless whether it questions the linear, industrial-developmentalistmodernizing perspective) that makes it possible to think of the differentiated integration of the various planetary zones in which extensive modes of production coexist with increasingly stronger regulations and intensive exploitation. This shows the nostalgic character of nation-states claims, and is materialized in the shift from the industrial to the social laborer, which is defined by flexible, precarious, and nomadic contractual relations. This is why, unlike the sedentary mode of life and worker organization in Fordist or Taylorist times, what now appears to be a central characteristic of this multitude is its deterritorialization of the space of work and life, its exodus, and its migration (see Hardt and Virno 1996, and especially Virno 1996). (3) Transformations in terms of the relation between technology and production. If this relationship is constitutive of capitalism (as Weber argued), we are dealing not only with a process of technologization of production but also with a machine transformation of the capital-labor relationship. The computerization of the economical sphere refers not only to the strong incorporation of technology in production, but also to the displacement of the centrality of economic activity from the sector of production to that of services, in a process in which the service sector takes on productive characteristics. Communication and information appear profoundly linked, which is precisely what would make possible the shift from the qualification of labor to its self-valorization. (4) Transformations in terms of power. Just as these transformations come to constitute an imperial order, one of the conditions of this very order is a process of qualification of labor, which blurs the distinction between intellectual and manual labor, resulting in the constitution of a General Intellectalso decentered, nomad, and ubiquitous, but that affords the possibility of going from simple qualification to a collective process of self-valorization. This shift would also imply the multitudes transition from being a vague and internal subject of Empire to being a political subject, fully aware of its centrality in the production of live work. A subjective process of gaining awareness is not what determines this transition. Rather, it is anchored in the profound structure of the conditions of production of contemporary capitalism. This is a subjective process in that it functions as a condition and not just as a consequence of Empire. It also simultaneously constitutes its greatest threat, the cause of its decadence. (4.1) Shift from the disciplinary societies to societies of control. Maybe more effectively than ever, the dispositifs of Imperial domination are seen to be corrupting the multitudes potentiality: Imperial control operates through three global and absolute means: the bomb, money, and ether (Hardt and Negri 2000, 345). These means of control are characterized in the process of production, proliferation, and administration of fear. The simulacrum of the bomb and the resulting total destruction function as the legitimating instance of the performance of a power that operates as the defender of a supposedly shared horizon of values. The administration and monopoly of money by big cities represent the monopoly of a supposedly rare

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symbolic good, and simultaneously determine the conditions of contract and exchange. Ether acts as a smoke screen, thus undifferentiating communication itself within processes of communicationturning it into mere information, undermining any possibilities of self-organization, self-valorization of the labor and cooperation that would go beyond capital. Its argumentative rigor, conceptual precision, informative wealth, and combination of theoretico-categorical development with a reading of ample empirical information, turn this book into a genuine architectonics that rather clearly outlines a specific state of the global situation. However, and with full awareness on the authors part, the shift from this cartography to a more propositional, less suggestive, and more substantive plane becomes increasingly difficult. This difficulty is due precisely to the fact that, at the moment when the manifesto must access the plane of the determination of the contradiction (by then, multiplied) in order to specify what Marxist tradition has denominated the strategic centrality of the struggle, what we find is this honest passage, which warns us of the books limitations: How can the actions of the multitude become political? How can the multitude organize and concentrate its energies against the repression and incessant territorial segmentations of Empire? The only response we can give to these questions is that the actions of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire (399). After having specified this possibility, the book avoids any further thought on the matter, and dedicates its last efforts to producing an outline of a sort of general and basic program of the minimal demands that the multitude, as a revolutionary subject created upon the same deterritorializing logic as that of Empire, should take on as protoprogram. A global, effective, and nonabstract citizenship; a collective social salary for all; the right to reappropriation. These claims are not inscribed in some sort of demand addressed to power; rather, they name the very process of selfvalorization that allows the multitude to go from being a passive subject of and an effect of imperial transformations to being a political subject, a Constituent Power which brings imperial limitation to its crisis, expressing in its action the vital, creative, and collective potentialities of qualified and self-assessed labour.5

The Picture of the World

Having made the claim for the pertinence and importance of this book, let us be daring enough to put forward some minimal objections, which, at best, will favor the possibilities of debate. If the book becomes relevant in its attempt to diagnose the transformations of the present, to determine its problematic points and its contradictions, and to outline a sort of minimal agenda regarding the points of interest from which to rethink the
5. See Negri (1991) for an analysis of the notion of potency in Spinoza, in which it is thought of as the support for a positive concept of crisis and as a basis for a radical political ontology.

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constitution of a political thought, strictly linked to the multitudes effective and everyday practice, we still havent taken up the objection we put forward earlier about Empires implication of a representational condition. The possibility of recognizing the Empire on the basis of this theoretical-interpretative model is not just a phenomenological question. The phenomenology of contemporary society would end up being, in its very decentralization and ubiquity, infinite, and the main consequence of this infinitude would be that theory would be permanently indebted to a vertiginous and pluritemporal axiomatic logic (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). This imposes a task for critical thought, which is strictly related to the possibility of building a system of coordinates. I will present these observations in the following points. (1) The impossible constitution of the society put forward by, among others, Laclau and Mouffe (1985), refers to an epistemological change in relation to the substantive classical approaches of sociology. If society is always the product of a determinable set of descriptions and interpretations, and not an object given in advance which is waiting to be analyzed and understood by the sociological gaze, then the variety of possible societies is directly related to the diversity of these approaches. However, not all societies are immediately possible. This is precisely why this is a problem not just of an epistemological nature, but also of a political one: the constitution of the socialand not just that of societyis produced in a discursive plane in which discourses reality is the effect of positioning, crossings, and tensions, which end up, although momentarily, configuring themselves hegemonically in view of the very counterhegemonic tensions presupposed by such an analysis. If it is actually possible to think that way, an undeniably interesting consequence for the political question of Empire ensues. That is, the multitude turns into a political subject because, according to the authors, the actions of the multitude become political primarily when it begins to confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000, 399). This process of becoming political, mediated by the experience of struggle, could very well keep on being but a political becoming limited by the characteristics of fragmentation and isolation with which the Empire manages its contradictions. What makes it possible to go from being isolated anti-imperialist becomings to being purposeful political becomings, aspiring to a politics that goes beyond the margins of Empire? Especially taking into account the fact that, for the authors, Empire has no outside, the effect of this is the end of the modern gaze upon a supposed outside that would revitalize the utopian horizon of modern society. We are not dealing with just any kind of confrontation here, but with one that has an adequate consciousness of the central repressive operations of Empire. The solution is to be found in the process of self-valorizationthat is, in the transformation of the theory of value, which would thus put emphasis on the indistinction between intellectual and manual labor. We would thus be acceding to the end of the division of labor (diagnosed by Marx in The German Ideology as the central axis of the history of production), and this ending would be expressed in the constitution of

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a General Intellect in which manual labor itself would become, through qualification, highly intellectual labor. However, in this argument it would be necessary to specify the shift from the qualification of labor to its self-valorization since the processes of qualification (Renault, Toyota, and the types of experts supposed by its models of assembly, organization, and production) dont necessarily entail selfvalorization. If this process is not equivalent to a new awareness, then the shift from qualification to self-valorization supposes the experience of struggle. But this brings us back to the beginning of the argument since the political becoming of the multitude (that is, its self-valorization) presupposes strugglewith an adequate consciousness of the central repressive operations of Empirein the same way that struggle presupposes self-valorization. Could it be that insistent dialectics? (2) Empire is a dynamic and open text. Even so, its also a picture of the world. This is not a minor problem, since the arguments against the initial paradox of the present article tell us that this image is not necessarily translatable to modern categories. Thus, Empire is a postmodern image in that it escapes the toponymic and schematic setting of the picture of the world as the product of objectifying knowledge.6 However, in order to escape the objectifying operation presupposed by the constitution of a picture of the world, it is still necessary to take to its extreme the critique of the objectifying relation, which is also, of course, a subjectifying relation. Two calligraphies constitute Empire. One, standard and formal, of a descriptive nature, makes up the main body of the volume, discussing objective transformations, their genealogies and sources. The other, cursive and allusive, takes on the naming of the multitudes apparitions, the poor, the people, the Christians, and any other sort of subjectivity that would act as a surplus to power. At the end, the book becomes political without confounding both calligraphies, but rather, crossing the allusive tone with the standard calligraphy. What we are dealing with here is not populism; its optimism. An optimism that must be sustained self-critically in the very architectonics of the book: Empire is a mediatic monument, not just because of presentation in hardcover or its cosmographic title page, or because of its laudatory receptions in the half-title page. It stands as a mediatic monument precisely because its intended to circulatemediatically, of coursein a circulation in which what the book would aspire to show is the reverse of this very circulation: that is, the potentialities of communication beyond technical abstraction. However, whats once again missing here is a specific consideration of virtuality, of the image, and its conjugation with experience. Without this consideration, the book fails to think its very condition and, in times of late capitalism, becomes a mediatic monument without an event.7 What takes
6. Briefly, the counterargument here is derived from Heideggers The Age of the World Picture (1977), in which the strictly modern character of the image of the world is determined. That is to say, a periods necessity of producing itself as an image befits no other period so well as the modern one. It is in relation to this that we could insist on the essentially modern character of the picture presented to us by Empire. 7. Specifically, I am referring to the relation between experience and technique, between thought and image. In a discussion about this relation, Willy Thayer has observed the pertinence of escaping the pessimism of technique by formulating the question for the possibility of the technical production of a

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place is an operation opposite to the constitution of a General Intellect, in which the indistinction of manual and intellectual labor would not operate as a means of selfvalorization but, rather, as an exhaustion of critical thought and its attempts at trying to escape from the division of labor. Critical labor would thus be inscribed in the international division of labor and would then circulate as a kind of goods available in the global market and the global librarys menu. (3) Empire aspires to the production of a plane of immanence in which the explanatory effect of theory could in itself become capable of producing specific arrangements. This is paradoxical, but its also the whole aspiration of the book.
Deleuze and Guattari, however, seem to be able to conceive positively only the tendencies toward continuous movement and absolute flows, and thus in their thought, too, the creative elements and the radical ontology of the production of the social remain insubstantial and impotent. Deleuze and Guattari discover the productivity of social production (creative production, production of values, social relations, affects, becomings), but manage to articulate it only superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate horizon marked by the ungraspable event. (28)

However, articulating, mediating, bringing together, representing, translating, all name problems that plague modern thinking, rather than solutions. Its precisely because what is at stake in the first place in this aspiration is related to the restoration of a relation between knowledge and politics, for which it would be necessary not only to displace Deleuze and Guattaris thinking toward mere indetermination but also to take this up with the same radicality with which the book describes the process of constitution of the General Intellect. If the General Intellect doesnt function as a simple reinstatement of the modern relation between knowledge and politics, but rather transforms it radically from a practical and creative perspective (in which the practical is ontological and not referential), then why would it be necessary to determine the potential of the multitudes struggle in a book that circulates mediatically? This question is not ill meant; it refers to a problematic point that was previously sketched out. One of the conditions of possibility of Empires functioning is the lonontechnical experience. Bearing in mind this possibility, meanwhile, if the qualification doesnt automatically result in self-valorization, what we need then (and this is intended not only to correct but to enter into dialogue with Empire) is a reflection on the implications of technique in the construction of subjectivity. Empire sets the basis for such a process, starting from a new anthropology that deterritorializes the body from its capitalist function and inscription. That is precisely where the book must account for its condition as mediatic monument and specify its relationship with the production of the image of the world, provided that, in Deleuze, among others, and as central reference of the book, the theme of the image has been unimaginably complicated, be it in terms of reformulating the relation between temporality (Bergson, Nietzsche) and movement, in the cinematographic image (Deleuze 1996), for example, or in relation to the modern image of thinking (Deleuze 1994). Its a kind of image that disarticulates in an unfashionable form (Nietzsche) the diagram of natural inscription of experience, beyond the capacities of inscription that proliferate in current capitalism, in which each event would thus be assigned to a referential and picturesque locality. Accordingly, since the book is presented mediatically (although this is justified, given its importance), we would still have to think the relation between the event and its specific inscription as a book.

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calization of such struggles, of their isolation and fragmentation. In this operation, Empire displays an extraordinary quality to disrupt temporal and spatial relations, which would require an equally extraordinary conception of the temporal and the spatial. A political analytics which would be capable of destroying, deconstructing, or exhausting (these categories are not gratuitous, but introduce us to other problems) the picture with which modern knowledge has represented the temporal-spatial relationship. This is not just about taking to its extreme the critique of the objectifying operation of knowledge, which is also subjectifying. Its rather about rethinking this dichotomous logic with which we critically orient ourselves: a struggle, however isolated or fragmented it may be, is not expropriated of its potentialities, and its because of this, which Empire would be willing to assume, that we cant put precompressions such as the local or the universal, the necessary or the contingent, before the occurrence of these social practices. If modern political thought (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) has taken to the extreme the critique of the logics of necessity and has rethought the question of the contingent (either Rorty [1989] or Laclau [1996]), we could only argue that to classify a struggle as local is always to presuppose a certain degree of universality which, unreflectively, seeps through. The same would take place if we were to brand that struggle merely contingent. Behind such attribution, the philosophy of history and its logic of necessity still breathe. Deleuze and Guattari saw this paradox (1987) as we do today. It might be time to rethink all this once again, and maybe it wouldnt be such a bad thing to assume that our theoretical uncertainties enjoy a certain degree of independence with respect to practical vitality. However, this vitality is, once again, another presupposition. It is in this place that the most suggestive expression of modern thinking dwellsthat of having experienced determination, its failure, and its opening up to de-determination. This is the end, not the conclusion but the finality, but the finality of a thinking that has realized its potentialities. To once again establish a relation between knowledge and politics, thus rushing the production of a picture of the conditions of the present, is to return to determination; it is to renounce, one way or another, the possibility of a political becoming of thought. The end of the cartography entails not only this becoming, but also entails a radicality for which we would not yet be prepared. To dwell in de-determination. The incompleteness of knowledge.8

8. On Exactitude in Science, Borgess short story quoted in the opening epigraph, ends as follows: The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the disciplines of Geography. (1998, 325) This wont be the ending of Empire , for the moment, because it leaves us with such questions. Thanks to books like these, we still have matter for discussion for a long time to come.

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I would like to express my gratitude to the translator who has shown me, in practice, how translationto transform a doubt into a decisionis always a political endeavor. References
Borges, J. L. 1964. Other inquisitions. Austin: University of Texas Press. . 1998. On exactitude in science. In Collected fictions. New York: Viking Penguin. Butler, J., E. Laclau, and S. iek. 2000. Contingency, hegemony, and universality: Contemporary dialogues on the Left. New York: Verso. Deleuze, G. 1994. The image of thought. In Difference and repetition, 129167. New York: Columbia University Press. . 1996. La imagen-tiempo. In Estudios sobre cine 2. Barcelona: Pidos Comunicacin. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1983. Savages, barbarians, civilized men. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, 139271. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. . 1987. 1933: Micropolitics and segmentarity. In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia , 20831. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, M. 1993. Gilles Deleuze: An apprenticeship in philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 1994. Labor of Dionysus: A critique of the state-form. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. . 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M., and P. Virno, eds. 1996. Radical thought in Italy: A potential politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1992. La fenomenologa del espritu . Buenas Aires: Fondo de Cultura Econmica. Heidegger, M. 1977. The age of the world picture. In The question concerning technology and other essays, 11554. New York: Harper and Row. Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Laclau, E. 1996. Emancipation (s). New York: Verso. Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. Negri, A. 1991. The savage anomaly: The power of Spinozas metaphysics and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. . 1992. Fin de siglo. Barcelona: Ediciones Pidos. . 1999. Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. iek, S. 1999. The ticklish subject: An essay in political ontology. New York: Verso.