[Generation_online] reviews

[Arianna Bove]

thanks to Matteo and Erik for their reviews. It's true that Bull (and 
others) needs to somehow misread, rephrase and twist Empire to turn it into 
a neoliberal intervention. this also reveals the real difficulty to 
'translate' its language into something that the anglo-american academia 
can chew over.  In a sense, the paragraph below, where Bull exalts the 
'globalisation of politics of recognition', something like anticapitalism = 
philanthropy, is closer to the Klein Erik describes in his review than to 
anything vaguely empowering . there's something really worrying about a 
sentence such as 'autonomy leads to extinction'. it is fear of power masked 
behind a patronising form of liberal tolerance and 'compassion'.
maybe then in the light of such stances Negri's 'post-humanism' makes more 
political sense.
Arianna




Globalisation may
have replaced multiculturalism as the focus of contemporary political
debate, but there is an underlying continuity: the concern of
anti-globalisation protesters with remote regions of the world, with the
lives of people unlike themselves, and with species of animals and plants
that most have seen only on TV is predicated on an unparalleled imaginative
identification with the Other. This totalisation of the politics of
recognition from the local to the global is what has given momentum to
campaigns such as the one for African Aids victims; here, it is a question
of sympathy rather than sovereignty, of justice rather than power. In many
cases, unless the powerful recognised some kinship with them, the powerless
would just die. Capitalism has no need for the 'immaterial labour' of
millions now living. For powerless human beings, as for other species,
autonomy leads to extinction.