Antonio Negri’s Ontology of Empire and Multitude

Prior to publishing (with Michael Hardt) his political treatise entitled Empire (2000), followed by its sequels, which are actually more like ‘complements’, Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth
(2009), Antonio Negri had elaborated what we might call an ontology, a theory of what there is, or in his case, of ‘the real’, in works on Spinoza, Marx, the concept of ‘constituent power’ (pouvoir constituant) and most recently, kairos. And as it turns out, not only does the ontology we encounter in these works underpin the empirical reflections on Empire, but less traditionally (that is, in a sense distinct from the usual relation between theory and practice), the idea of ontology itself becomes political. This paper tries to bring to light this dimension of Negri’s thought – the hidden connections between the metaphysics of a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher and the potentially emancipatory mechanisms of globalisation.