Militancy : the birth of multitudes, the politics of truth

While we cannot help but marvel at Badiou’s and Negri’s erudition, and perhaps bemoan the paucity of post-Marxist intellectual culture on the left, the impasse represented by sovereignty and the concept of the political will not be resolved, or even significantly addressed, through any return to or reinvention of the discourse of modernity – be it republicanism, revolution or the state. Unfortunately, this includes the opposition between ‘constituent’ and ‘constituted’ power, as well as every concept of ‘the people’ and ‘the multitude’. Not that these categories should be dispensed with, just that they remain internal to that which Negri and others would like to use them to surpass – namely the modern concept of sovereignty. On the other hand, while neither Negri nor Badiou addresses this fact, the concept of ‘sovereignty’ is not an exclusively modern one. Indeed, it is a metaphysical as much as it is a modern concept, and reaches back to the origins of Western understandings of the relationship between law and life (Agamben, 1998). Thus a more fertile approach might endeavour to think other forms of sovereign life alongside that of the modern nation-state. Indeed, instead of attempting to resolve a contradiction that we have for some time now believed was handed down to us by the 17th century, we might begin to rethink exactly what was new about that moment, and how it has come to represent a colossal shift in our collective existence (Foucault, 2003). This approach might also make it possible finally to dismantle the opposition between the social and the political, or constituent and constituted power, and come to understand the operation of power instead as an articulation of law and life, the juridical and the medical – in a word, biopower.