MAJEURE : Du côté du Japon : marges et miroir d’Empire
CIRCUIT MONÉTAIRE IMPÉRIAL OU CAPTURE FINANCIÈRE DES VALEURS
By YOSHIHIKO ICHIDA.
In the epoch of Empire, the American economy is sustained by a global monetary circuit totally different front that of the imperialist period. Whilst the imperialist countries were constituted as « centres » of production, the contemporary US is no longer just a centre of absorption and evacuation of money which necessitates the existence of a financial pump to the outside. In becoming that pump, the Japanese economy became integral to the global market. The imperial monetary circuit also functions as a mode of capture, particularly of value, that one can qualify as « financial » with regard to the classic « exploitation » of workers. This paper tries to demonstrate that ultimately the two modes of capture are nonetheless achieved by a single function of money.
NATIONALISME JAPONAIS DE L’APRÈS-GUERRE : COMPLICITÉ ENTRE ÉTAT PÉRIPHÉRIQUE ET SUPER-ÉTAT
By NAOKI SAKAI.
Japanese nationalism after World War II emerged out of the U. S. occupation of Japan. Rather than oppressing nationalist sentiment, the U. S. occupation administration nurtured the sense of national uniqueness and continuity in Japan and helped absolve Japanese colonial guilt and war responsibility. This U S. strategy toward Japan is best symbolized by the way the emperor system was reconstructed as part of the American reign in East Asia. Although it sometimes reveals its anti-American emotion, Japanese nationalism is in complicity with the US. hegemony in East Asia, in such a way that Japan’s subjugation to US. policies is further intensified as its nationalism manifests more jingoistic tendencies. Perhaps we should find an intimation of today’s global complicity of the peripheral state with the super-state in this entanglement.
CONTES DE DEUX RUINES ET AU DELÀ: HIROSHIMA, WORLD TRADE CENTER, INNOMMABLES CAMPS-BORDELS JAPONAIS
By LISA YONEYAMA
Despite many obvious differences, the ruins of the atomic attack on Hiroshima and at the post-9.11 World Trade Center generate a number of shared characteristics concerning struggles over the reconstruction, commodification of memory, and the contestations over historical knowledge with which to explain what led to such violence. The paper discusses the politics of memory in these two sites of victimization, but also contrast it with emerging discourse on yet another lesser known instance of violence against women of Asia and Pacific who fell victim to the wartime Japanese military sexual enslavement. In so doing, the paper begins to explore some of the elements that generate boundaries of compassion and amnesia toward violence against the racialized, colonized, gendered bodies.
TOKYO L’ORGEUILLEUSE
By FÉLIX GUATTARI.
« The vertigo of an alternative Japanese path: Tokyo renounces its role as Eastern capital of occidental capitalism and becomes instead, the Northern capital of the emancipation of the Third World. »
WARHOL AU SOLEIL LEVANT ART, SOUS-CULTURE ET PRODUCTION SÉMIOTIQUE
By BRIAN HOLMES.
Legendary for its collective creativity, Andy Warhol’s « Factory » tried to subvert the normative culture of the Fordist period with artistic production from below, the work of « subcultures ». But today, the Warholian approach proves perfectly adapted to the post-Fordist regime of semiotic production, which encourages subjective interpretation so as to individualize the mass product. Using two examples — the artist Takashi Murakami and his team in Japan, and the Palais de Tokyo, « site of contemporary creation » in Paris – the article shows how a form of biopolitical control emerges in the commercial and cultural exchanges between Japan, Europe and North America. Minority expressions are encouraged, monitored, rendered profitable. The question arises: how to subvert this new form of control?
L’EMPIRE ET LE RÉGIME DE LA TRADUCTION UNILATÉRALE
By JON SOLOMON
Accepting the premise advanced by Empire that networks of language constitute a crucial site for the multitudes in the struggle against global Empire, this brief essay explores how the problems of address within the text call forth, or pre figure, a certain mode of address by critical intellectuals from the non-West. In this sense, both Empire and its critics – in this case, the reception of the text by intellectuals in Taiwan -font a fascinating instance of « co-figuration » that demands the attention of those who find in the notion of the multitude a conceptual mobility adequate to the exposure of non-subjective sovereignty and the diagonal lines of flight from capital.
YUKIO MISHIMA : NOTRE HOMOFASCISTE PRÉFÉRÉ
By KEITH VINCENT
The article begins with the observation that novelist Yukio Mishima is best known outside Japan as a « gay » writer, while inside Japan he is known for his right-wing beliefs. This uneasy cohabitation of « homosexuality » and «fascism » in the figure of Mishima is then discussed as symnptomatic of a snore general tendency in postwarlapan to see both homosexuality and fascism as examples of an excessive investment in signs and representation for their own sake. The result is that psychic defenses against fascism often borrow from the energies of homophobia.
COMPOSITION DE CLASSE EN CORÉE DU SUD ET TOURNANT NÉOLIBÉRAL
By JOE JEONG HWAN.
The aim of this article is to describe the change of the Korean society after the neoliberal crisis in 1997. The economic crisis in Korea resulted from the militant struggles of working class between 1987-1997. But it had been used as a moment for deepening the neoliberal reformation and the recomposition of capital. This paradoxical process had been accomplished by a wide and violent lay-off as in any other countries. In this process the first notable factor is the appearance of cooperative attitude in the Korean progressive labor movement. The author described the context of decomposition of militant working class in factories, and groped for the new recomposition of working class and the formation of autonomous multitudes in the whole range of Korean society.
L’EMPIRE AMÉRICAIN ET LES MOUVEMENTS POUR LA PAIX EN ASIE
By ICHIYO MUTO.
Since September 11 2001 efforts have been made to articulate Asian people’s responses to the Bush war across the region, that crystallized as the formation of the Asian Peace Alliance (APA) in August 2002. But peace movement in Asia has different characteristics than its western counterparts. We in Asia have to create peace from bottom up, rather than conceive peace as a return to the statu quo ante. The Bush war has been grafted to the already peaceless structures, snaking there more violent, repressive, and patriarchal. The challenge is to build Asian peace movement as a comprehensive and dynamic process of alliance building to dismantle the « nexus of evil e between the imperial machinery and the oppressive, exploitative, and militarized local structures by peaceful means.
INSERT
COOPÉRATION ET AUTONOMIE DES FEMMES DE BANLIEUE
By MADELEINE HERSENT.
People are shocked to discover the desperate conditions facing young women in the so-called « sensitive » neighborhoods; but this very real state of affairs is only a logical consequence of failing public policies, which display little concern for supporting egalitarian relations between the sexes. Under close analysis, the dynamics of cooperation and autonomy among immigrant women in the suburbs proves to be interethnic, innovative, and oriented toward the conquest of public space. Urban policy ignores these women. So who do they threaten?
ICÔNES
ERWIN WURM, OU LE « GROUND-ZERO » DE LA SCULPTURE
By ÉRIC ALLIEZ.
A cross between a Do It Yourself and a primer of political anatomy, ErwinWurm’s « politically incorrect » drawings present, one by one, the sculptures of a present dreamed up by a post-post-minimalist Buster Keaton. Wurm sculpts bodies that are both outlandish and Austrian; there is nothing to prevent us from thinking of both Austria and the outlandish when we look at these drawings produced for Multitudes, together with the photographs that accompany them.
MINEURE : Machiavel : maitenir le conflit
CONFLIT, GUERRE, VIOLENCE ET CORRUPTION
By THOMAS BERNS.
By way of introduction, Thomas Berns reveals the thrust of a work which seeks to think conflict as something that must be sustained. Sustaining it means not only inscribing the order represented by the law within the disorder of conflict, but also establishing war as the permanent horizon of peace. That is, law is established only as violence, and can only be thought as permanently vulnerable to corruption. In short, this is precisely that with which a politics centred on sovereignty breaks.
S’ACCOUTUMER À LA DIVERSITÉ: FIGURES DE LA MULTITUDE CHEZ MACHIAVEL ET SPINOZA
By FILIPPO DEL LUCCHESE.
Taking as a point of departure the contempt with which both Spinoza and Machiavelli treat the opinions of those who restrict human vices to « the proles », this article examines the theoretical status of the multitude as the foundation of the politics of these two philosophers. Emphasis is placed on the one hand on the standpoint, common to both, which doesn’t just praise the multitude as such, but also examines the negative; that is to say, the propensity of men to fight for their servitude as though it were their own salvation. On the other hand, I look at the constitution of the individual multiple subject as the greatest expression of political rationality. The article concludes with a consideration of the connections between the idea of the superiority of the multiple over the singular, and the Machiavellian theory of order and conflictual cooperation, as well as of the role played by the latter concepts in Spinozist thought.
ALTHUSSER ET MACHIAVEL : LA POLITIQUE APRÈS LA CRITIQUE DE MARX
By MIGUEL VATTER.
After 1977 Althusser’s thought took an important « turn » away front Marxism-Leninism. The posthumously published writings from his late period constitute an extremely rich theoretical resource for post-Marxist thought. In them one can find a decisive refutation of the errors of Marxism-Leninism, which Althusser believes have two roots: the denigration and misunderstanding of the autonomy of the political, on the one hand, and the reliance on a metaphysical construction of historical becoming, on the other. In order to find the proper horizon to understand the political in its autonomous, or constituent, dimension Althusser finds it necessary to return to Machiavelli. In order to escape the grip of modern philosophy of history, and its obsession with a subject of history, Althusser offers a sketch of a theory of history that gives priority to the dimension of the event, of the contingent encounter, which evacuates all substance and all subject from historical becoming. The necessity of politics and the contingency of history: these are the two requirements for recovering Marx « after Marxism ».
L’ORDRE CONFLICTUEL DU POLITIQUE : UNE FORMULE AMBIGUË. SCHMITT ET FOUCAULT, LECTEURS DE MACHIAVEL
By MARIE GAILLE-NIKODIMOV.
The confrontation between Machiavelli and two of his major Twentieth Century readers, Foucault, and Schmitt, demonstrates that the thesis of a conflictual order of politics can be affirmed in radically distinct ways. At a level of extreme generality, all three could accept such a vision. But the divergences appear once you step down from such a general level. Machiavelli’s thought is oriented towards the idea of a liberty born from popular tumults which emerge onto – and are sustained by – an institutional republican order. Neither Schmitt nor Foucault could acknowledge, or at least, blame the reception of such an idea, on the basis of interpretative elements which prevail over their reading of Machiavelli. In order to understand the non-meeting of Schmitt and Foucault with Machiavelli à propos the conflictual order of politics we must identify these elements and elucidate their theoretical effects.
MACHIAVEL OU LES PROSPÉRITÉS DE LA LUTTE.
By TONI NEGRI.
Tord Negri takes a new look at the materialist Machiavelian teleology that has fuelled his thought, as it did Spinoza’s and Gramsci’s. He treats it, in other words, as an expression of the always singular, always iterable construction of dispositives that enable the emergence of that which is held in common.
HORS-CHAMPS
LA RÉPUBLIQUE DE LA MULTITUDE. POUR EN FINIR AVEC LE CONCEPT D’UNE IMMANENCE SANS DEHORS
By FRÉDÉRIC NEYRAT.
Economy, politics and ontology are entered into conjunction; immanency situation discribed by Empire’s authors. Our interrogation will be based on two hypotheses: 1°) immanency is the liberation of an infinity of outsides; 2°) desire of the multitude includes a counter-desire which prefers rest to movement, and reterritorialisation to deterritorialisation. How to deal with such a counter-desire?