Negri om biopolitiskt exodus

(Från Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo, s. 240-241 i Time for revolution.)

12.1 Therefore, in the biopolitical postmodern, 'doing politics' means first of all to resist and rebel. But it is at the same time to express a biopolitical subject extended between poverty and love, and which decides upon the common telos. For that reason, 'doing politics' means to take leave of domination, to take leave of the Power of the State and every transcendental illusion in order to produce new common co-operative temporalities and spaces on the edge of being, and to realize the amorous innovation that bestows meaning on common being.

12.2 That which cannot take leave is the modern political party: that configuration which constructed itself on the basis of representation (or presented itself as the vanguard of the masses) and realized its institutional form. The political party is always constrained within that space of Power that excludes the biopolitical determination, while on the contrary, we are speaking of a subject that is at once the product of the biopolitical and that generates in the biopolitical. It is not political representation that can construct the common telos within the multitude, on the contrary, it can only be constructed by taking leave of representation and all the representative institutions in order to install itself in the new common temporalities. This common occupation (Beruf) considers the 'professional politician' as a contemptible infamous figure.

12.3 So how can one take leave then?

12.4 It is not enough to say simply that only resistance and rebellion can take leave. If resistance and rebellion were not movements of ontological constitution, they would not even be possible as common names. To take leave implies in fact a transvaluation of being. In postmodernity, when the multitude does politics and decides in relation to the common, it means that it has chosen to take leave while constituting.

12.5 If to take leave means to create new temporality in order to determine new power, it is not only a case of taking leave of Power. For if Power is the measure of exclusion, to take leave while constituting (constituting new power) is to take leave with the excluded, with the poor. The multitude that takes leave is poor.

12.6 To take leave while constituting means, in second place, to act under conditions of the most extreme deterritorialization: in postmodernity, this deterritorialization is that experienced by the bodies of the multitude. It is a case then of hybridizing in a cosmopolitan fashion the world of life, that is, appropriating global mobility through the generation of new bodies. 'Proletarians of all countries, unite' is an injunction that today means: mix up races and cultures, constitute the multicoloured Orpheus who generates the common from the human. Break down all the transcendental barriers that prevent the singular from becoming common and that block the innovation of the eternal: that is what it means to take leave while constituting.

12.7 Finally, to take leave while constituting means to construct, through the extreme reterritorialization that the bodies of the multitude experience in postmodernity, common machines through which men and women stretch out beyond the edge of time. Or rather, construct machinically and in the immeasurable, turning the technological monster into the angel of the to-come.

13.1 When, through a biopolitics of exodus, the singularities decide to turn the multitude into a revolutionary subject, teleological production, without prefiguring the common, exposes it to the to-come. The vita activa of the multitude is thus an open and total dystopia, and the decision to revolutionize the eternal irreversible.

13.2 With the events of 1968, the City of Man, in an irreversible decision, loosed the arrow of the revolutionary temporality of the common. In the face of this kairòs of poverty and of love, the City of God is now only a bad stench.

13.3 Alma Venus: the daily paean to the revolution of the eternal.