Political Subjectivity,Absolute Immanence And Revolutionary Politics

Negri’s political ontology in his early stages not only confirms the kernel frame and methodological prerequisites in his theory of political critique in his later stages,but also constitutes the key breakthrough point through which his post-socialist political project has been constructed.Through disclosing political meaning in traditional metaphysics,and the articulation among metaphysics,politics and historical conjunctures,Negri manages to organize the ontology in Marxism.For him,ontology takes refusing teleology,transcendentalism and dialectics as fundamental prerequisites.It does’nt trace the transcendental origin and basis of things,but concentrates on the infinitely open historical constitutive process in order to construct free space of liberation which points to difference and future.His aim of reconstruction is not to fix Marxism in the frame of some abstract metaphysics,but to reform frames of traditional ontology for static abstract being or essence.Through exploring the dispositifs of political power,he tries to articulate them with capitalist ideology from theoretical basis to completely eliminate capitalist evil legacy in radical revolutionary thread.Firstly,he founds it on the antagonism between labor and capital all the time and radicalizes intrinsic mechanism of transcendence-hierarchy-representation and mediation-balance-synthesis as capitalist political dispositif,then emphasizes the complete refuse and political rupture that the constitutive ontology or proletarian revolutinary politics exerts on it.Secondly,he also emphasizes its endogenous mechanism of diversity-subjectivity and collectivity-productivity-constitutivity in the unitary space of proletarian liberated time,futhermore,positively constructs the revolutionary project of proletarian freedom and desire in time-to-come ontological field of temporality.In this sense,political ontology in fact is the theoretical weapon and cornerstone of thought for criticizing capitalism and realizing communism.Negri’s political ontology takes contemporary post-Fordist transformation in capitalist society,the May in 1968 and Italian Workism and Autonomia as its realistic background.He treats Capital and its correlated manuscripts,Spinoza and Nietzsche’s contemporary revival in Frence left intelligentsia as its theoretical sources.He manages to pull historical materialism from purely objective structure back to revolutionary subjectivity in political discource.It mainly includes double contexts with logical progressive relationship,the first one is embodied in discovering the new political subject and social ontological power in contemporay capitalist social transformation founded on Workism and Aunonomnia.Based on continuous attention on labor and labor force,he completely inverts the relation of power between labor and capital,returns to radical political reading on Grundrisse,reconstructs kernel structure of historical materialism which takes political and subjective frame of class composition as its core,and reorganizes Lenin’s theory of subject and organization and its field of contemporary transformation.His aim is to remove objectivist phantacy and revolutionary utopia in traditional Marxism,humanist Marxism and structurist Marxism.These aspects constitute the all-pervading methodological cornerstones in his political theory.The second one is the ontological field Negri establishes for new political subject founded on Frence post-structurism.Foucault’s philosophy of transgression and Deleuze’s philosophy of difference establish the logical basis of political ontology.He discloses the antagonistic logic between Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx and Hobbes-Rousseau-Hegel to discern the real critical and revolutionary projects of metaphysics,going deep into the history of western political thought:plane of immanence,constitutive power,singular event and absolute democracy.The first context establishes the political-subjective discourse of proletarian revolution,taking capitalist social transformation as realistic background.The second context bestows this political subject fundamental attributes and appearing methods.In fact,Negri’s research on political questions and contemporary capitalism is concretion and actualization of the field of his political ontology.Similarly,this progradation of thought mainly includes double progressive logical threads.The first thread gives priority to analyzing the macro-level proposition of political philosophy.It takes politics-society,state-constitution and revolution-democracy as theme,and considers constituent power as subjective constitutive power and open revolutionary project as its core.It deeply analyzes the antagonistic logic among constituent power,eternal revolution,and absolute democracy and constituted power,state,constitutional system,and power of sovereignty.In essence,constituent power is another appellation of constitutive ontology and radical political subject.It represents absolute eternal revolution,open constitutive principle of power,and immanent philosophy of event of singularity and contingency.In this sense,it actually establishes the total political declaration,revolutionary creeds and operative norms.The second thread concentrates on the social transformation of global capitalism on realistic level.It considers rudimentary changes of forms of labor and proletarian labor force,capitalist practice of power and productive mode of subjectivity under post-Fordist mode as realistic basis.It also considers absolute immanence and smooth politics as theoretical prerequisites and takes politics of body and nomadic politics as kernel thread.Through them,he positively constructs postmodern theory of political revolution which treats multitude,nomadic revolution and radical democracy as themes to trace the historical continuity between Marx and post-Marxism and coordinate the intrinsic unity between critique-deconstruction and construction-ethical politics.In sum,Negri’s political ontology is a post-modern political theory considering difference,subject and event as frame.It is a philosophy of event based on subjectivity and revolution,immanence and constitutivity,contingency and difference.It is a radical political mode founded on openness,discontinuity,uncertainty and unpredictability.It is a theory of political subject treating living labor-power-desire and consituent power-multitude-absolute democracy as core.It is a radical revolutionary tradition considering materialist critique,absolute immanence and communism as essence.In essence,it is simply a kind of "political Marxism"wavering between materialism and voluntarism.It is a radical democracy founded on adequate ontology.It is a theoretical mixture of late Marxism and post-structurism.However,becauce of excessively emphasizing the subjective aspect,reducing historical process and refusing historical essence,it finally departs from historical materialism.