Which is the political form which characterizes the globalisation? Is the universalization of the markets and the capitalistic production supported by a sovereignty and a capacity which determine the complex methods of assertion of them? In addition: can one consider, in this globalisation and this (possible) planetary sovereignty, of the strategies of resistance and release, of the alternatives able to show us the emergence and the constitution of new processes of subjectivation? Such are the questions which arise and to which try to provide an answer Mr. Hardt and A. Negri in their last dedicated work with the “Empire” (Empire, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000). It is a question for the authors of clarifying a double stake, which does not concern dialectical but rather a double report/ratio of implication: the modes of production can exist only while being based on a political order, by thus creating social practices of control. But, at the same time, in new manners of living and of producing can only give place to modes of production and a political order tending to subsume them by practices of control. This double report/ratio of implication updates the specificity of the problems of the Empire - which escapes a purely dialectical logic consequently opposing a “object on a “subject”.

“The problems of the Empire are initially given by a simple fact: there exists a world order. This order is expressed in a legal formation” (p.3). The experiment of the Empire calls upon a phenomenology whose deployment follows all the courses of reality: the factual existence of a new world order falls under a major transformation of the right and a new design of the political authority. The legal field represents by no means here the abstract framework of the resolution of the social conflicts and political, national and/or international, - it defines rather, in a concrete way, the field of the changes and modifications “of the material constitution of the capacity and order world” (p.9). The material constitution indicates the socio-productive processes which induce the ceaseless transformations of forms of life to the planetary scales. The right can only apprehend these processes, by integrating them into its step founder. By there, it provides the bases for the political authority - for the exercise of sovereignty. This is why, from this point of view, to wonder about the sovereignty which characterizes the globalisation amounts raising the question of the Empire. In other words, it is possible to identify international legal practices whose modus operandi returns to the constitution of a world order (imperial) exerted by institutions: the United Nations, since the War of Gulf until Kosovo, support and implement a right of intervention, as a mode of resolution of the regional and national crises, which connect them more and more with a mondialized police force; ONG, through the defense of the human rights, provide the “moral” framework necessary to any regulating intervention of the United Nations. “Ethics” and the “right” concern here the transformations which affect the material constitution of the world order: their report/ratio does not evoke a simple juxtaposition of the criteria of the action, it underlines the narrow interdependence which, in the Empire, regulates the exercise of sovereignty.

It is the legitimation of the force which is obviously concerned in these practices. The problem is undoubtedly not new: since Hobbes, it is in the middle of the modern political thought. How the sovereign can exert all the force of which it without lays out to destroy the source of its capacity, in other words the life of its subjects? Such was the hobbesienne question. The imperial answer is radical and lies in the deterritorialisation of sovereignty. The Empire does not have a center, it is universal and local, it acts according to a dynamics which is at the same time of identification and differentiation: the “difference” (ethnic, economic, political or social) is the mediation necessary which supports its action of deterritorialisation, i.e. identity inclusion, by the right, from what escapes its control. Thus, the Empire does not know borders - or better: there exists only by unceasingly moving its limits, while adjusting and correcting, by the juridico-police intervention, contradictions which tend to weaken its sovereignty.
The legitimation of the force, in the Empire, thus returns at a biopolitic origin of sovereignty. The authors refer here explicitly to the thought of Mr. Foucault [1]. The passage of the disciplinary company at the holding company defines at Foucault the changes affecting the exercise of the capacities in the post-modern States: this exercise is carried out by the vital regulation of the subjects, by the taking into account of their knowledge and their affectivity. The capacities act as of the machines of capture of the multiplicities: the subjects change by there into singularities which are not opposed any more a face to disciplinary hardness of the modern State and of its techniques but which position on a producing plan of immanence of activity and events. The life of the subjects reproduces and is created while escaping the machines from control from the State. To biopouvoir can only return to the biopuissance of the subjects and their technologies (emotional, cognitive, productive) of emancipation. The heritage foucaldien makes it possible in this direction to clarify the methods of constitution of imperial sovereignty. The Empire legitimates its sovereign force by the ceaseless development of the procedures aiming at controlling the production of power of the subjects: the communication, the financial markets, the multinationals appear as being the standards able to justify the authority exerted on the subjects. It is on this level that the Empire affirms all its rationality: in the legal transformation of the social processes, economic and political expressed by the biopuissance of the subjects.
In this direction, the Empire conceals positive aspects or constitutive: its biopolitic sovereignty being completely immanente with the production and the reproduction of the subjects, it makes it possible to build and determine a “potential of release” (p.43). The force of the Empire also lies in its capacity to always produce new forms of subjectivity, novel modes of production, new knowledge and new social reports/ratios. To exist and exert its sovereignty, the Empire needs the growth and the development for its subjects: thus it can legitimate its force. The Empire is presented in the form of an eagle to two heads: on the one hand, we have the legal structure and the capacity made up, based on the machine of the command biopolitic and supposed to regulate, through peace and the order, the ruptures and contradictions; D different leaves, we have the plural multitude of subjectivitys productive, true constellation of singularities, able, from their biopuissance, to impose on the Empire perpetual reconfigurations of its sovereignty (p.60). Mr. Hardt and A. Negri insist on the fact that no dialectical is concerned here: the relationship between the Empire and the multitude of the subjects is not solved in a relationship between a “system” and “movements asystemic”, according to a luhmanienne explanation. It rather configures a “sequence of events” produced on a smooth space and in a time of jolts by a wandering multitude, by the new shapes of subjectivitys, hybrids and metamorphosing, technologized and métissées (p. 61). New constituent forces are with work in the Empire: “the deterritorialized power of the multitude is the productive force which support the Empire and at the same time the force which calls and makes necessary its destruction” (ibidem). The analysis of Hardt and Negri is dependent on the spinozism here. Spinoza, in the middle of the XVIIème century, reverses the model hobbesien political science: the multitude is not negative capacity, the abyss at the bottom of which can constantly sink the rationality of the sovereign - it is on the contrary the full positivity of the natural power, the enlightened and merry face of ontology, the common constitution of the emancipation and the release of the constraint [2]. The desire which traverses the multitude spinozienne can also indicate the field of assertion of the post-modern multitude, its immanente activity and its power resolutely materialist, beyond any utopian determinism and of any finalism historicist. Thus, the “end of the history” announced by the prophets of the new world order represents only space expérientiel able to open prospects émancipatrices again and to create the conditions for the free assertion of the multitude and its singularities (Spinoza joined here Machiavel read again through the eyes of Althusser) [3] (p.63-66).
However, if the report/ratio of implication which structure to biopouvoir it Empire and produces the biopuissance multitude provides to the two authors the conceptual framework necessary to the general apprehension of the problems, it remains to be seen how and why the Empire could be built. How does one pass of an official and national sovereignty to an imperial sovereignty? In addition, which is the difference between the imperialism which characterizes the formation of the modern State and the Empire which marks the emergence of the post-modern State? Can one identify in this respect an official structure able to summarize, from his history and his action, the direction of the imperial practices? The whole of these question crosses the second part of the book, nourished and supported by enthralling analyses. The genealogy of the Empire doubles of a new reading of Western political philosophy, starting from the Rebirth: the passage of national sovereignty to imperial sovereignty testifies to the combat that philosophies of the “transcendence” and the history carried out without slackening against philosophies of the “immanence” to legitimate the authoritative violence of the modern State. Titanic combat, in the middle same of the modernity, whose finality lies in the purification of the thought of any component materialist and revolutionist. Modernity cannot like indicating the perpetual crisis between the creative and constructive forces of the immanence and the transcendent capacity which unceasingly aims the restoration of the order and balance. Duns Scoto, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza and Marx are opposed here to Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. The prospect traced by Mr. Hard and A. Negri makes it possible to raise, from another point of view, the question of “humanism” formerly in the center of the Words and the things of Foucault: in themodern one, it would not be a question so much of proposing a “anti-humanism” in order to answer the “crises” of modernity, but, much more radically, to think of new expenses the “human nature”, to invent “an other” human project, brought back to the infinite potentialities and ceaseless virtualities of a world of mutants - a natural cyborg, modular form between the biopolitic productions of the Empire and the biopuissance wishing multitude (p. 91-92).
The “crisis” which determines and founds the deployment of the modern thought provides in this context the ideological and procedural base to the “modernity of the policy”. Here, it concept-key is that of “nation”. It is the nation which includes the space of the sovereignty and which makes it possible to transform the multitude into people. Passage essential with the European modernity, whose consequences appear decisive for the history of planet. Such a passage becomes possible when the monarchical absolutism transforms, through the imposition of the capitalist forms of production and the development of the administration, the territory of the State and the subjects which populate it in an abstract ideal and a political concept. “The modern concept of nation inherits the patrimonial body of the monarchical state to reinvent a new form of it” (p.95). New form traversed by tensions and contradictions which unceasingly tend to tear it and to persecute it: sovereignty can be essential only by creating the crises essential to the legitimation of its force (capitalist accumulation, bureaucratization of the administration, practices disciplinary). It is by the integration of these various processes that the nation can from now on be identified with people on whom she exerts her absolute sovereignty. Negri and Hardt underline in this respect the enormous theoretical work achieved by Sieyès and Burke: production of an national identity like ultimate representation of popular sovereignty, in other words like historic summit reached by the economic and political hegemony of the middle-class woman. National sovereignty sanctions a victory of class: the revolutionary dynamics of the multitude, marked by the difference and the singularities of its components, is absorbed, as of the end of the XVIIIème century, by the homogenisation and the identity fold of the people-middle-class - only and single base of the State.

The construction of the national identity also constitutes the mediation indépassable leading the great European States to colonialism and the imperialism. The legitimation of the exploitation imposed on the conquered countries is carried out through the definition of dialectical anthropological opposing the “Same one” and the “Other”. “Colonialism is an abstract machine which produces otherness and identity” (p. 129). The State-nation European can hardly remain without the alleged otherness of colonized: it is precisely this otherness which justifies the intervention imperialist, i.e. the foreign politics finalized with the introduction of the centralized model of sovereignty. However, “the end of colonialism and the decline of the capacity of the nation testify to the passage which, of the paradigm of the modern sovereignty, led to the paradigm of imperial sovereignty” (p. 137). This passage, fundamental and major, falls under the history even American nation and of its model of sovereignty. “The American Revolution represents one moment of great innovation and rupture in the genealogy of modern sovereignty” (p. 160). They are this innovation and this rupture which the two authors clarify in an extremely dense and fertile way. The history of American sovereignty is configured according to a dynamics of expansion which associates the democratic project of the Founding fathers with the desire of inclusion of a constituting capacity acting by networks and procedures of compensation of the conflicts. All the phases of the American history are determined by this double stake: of Thomas Jefferson in Bill Clinton, this dynamics as well guides the choices operated by the United States out of economic material as political and social - and that on a worldwide scale. Upon the departure, the American Constitution is “imperial”: “The contemporary idea of Empire was born through the total expansion from the American constitutional project” (p.182). It is to say that American sovereignty does not make distinction between the “interior” and “outside”: the horizon of its deployment is potentially infinite and does not recognize borders. Or better still: the limit, the borders represent challenges which the Constitution must with each stage take up and gain in order to be able to show its effectiveness and, especially, its superiority.
The genealogy of the Empire is thus identified with the planetary assertion of the American power and its model of inclusive sovereignty. It is which the decisive rupture with modern sovereignty resides, founded on the nation. This one cannot exist without a “outside” which legitimates the use of its force and its right: this is why the European imperialism requires the invention of the “other” (race, economic system or “underdeveloped” policy). The “outside” where the “other is” thus allows the people which incarnates the policy of the nation to define its identity and to justify his function with respect to the people to be fixed. It is not thus in the Empire. For imperial sovereignty, there does not exist “outside”. Indeed, “the dialectical modern one of the inside and the outside was replaced by a set of degrees and of intensity, hybridization and artificiality… the space striated with modernity built places continuously taken in a play dialectical and based on their outside. On the other hand, the space of imperial sovereignty is smooth… In this smooth space of the Empire, there does not exist any place to be able - the capacity is at the same time everywhere and nowhere. The Empire is one or-topie, or truly a withdrawal of case”. (p.187-190). This is why corruption, and not the crisis, are the method of assertion suitable for imperial sovereignty. With the difference of the modern nation, the Empire needs, to exist, of delocalized and élusives contradictions, unstable and accidental relations: its “stability” refers to instability, the impurity and the mixture of the reports/ratios. Its “ontology” is weak and pacificatory - and thus it can exert its principal functions of command: inclusion, differentiation and management. The imperial apparatus initially feeds a liberal consensus dedicated to the pacification and the stabilization of the political relations and social; secondly, it celebrates the worship of the differences (national, cultural, ethnic), and finally it applies, with these identities and these differences, an economic management hierarchical by the capitalist command [4].
The imperial political model thus does not imply only one redefinition of sovereignty and of its modes of enforcement, it also updates the deep changes, and irreversible, of the modes of production. And it is there that one finds the question of the biopolitique one. Indeed, one saw that imperial sovereignty crosses, in a manner immanente, all subjectivitys on which she exerts her action. It is about an eminently bio-productive sovereignty. In the third part of the work, Mr. Hardt and A. Negri describe the passages of production which define the transition from modernity in themodern one. The history of the capital and its post-modern transformations is contemporary with the decline of the modern State and the birth of the Empire. The concept in the center of this part is naturally that of work - and its exploitation. Indeed, the biopolitique one which founds imperial sovereignty determines new forms of exploitation, perfectly compatible with the novel modes of production expressed by the biopuissance of the multitude. Hardt and Negri insist in this respect on the “ontological” centrality of immaterial work in the productive sphere of biopolitic imperial. This concept marxien of Grundrisse becomes in optics adopted here the sign of a true “anthropological change” (p.289). Computerization, the production in networks, the abstract character and symbolic system of the value, the emotional investment in the tasks indicate as many changes which reveal the emergence of a “new human condition” (291). The cognitive economy - interactive and cybernetic - us shows a human nature more and more “mechanical” - bodies of the body and brains connected with tools, languages and codes. Immaterial work is consequently decentralized and deterritorialized, it develops by means of horizontal connections which tend to escape vertical control from the capital. It can be only co-operative, creator of shared value, immanent with the methods of its deployment and its assertion. It is besides there that its potential of release with respect to the capitalist sovereignty resides, which already continued in a series of post-modern fights (Los Angeles, Chiapas, Korea, France). These fights, unlike the “systemic” fights which characterized the combat of the modern working class, are “event-driven”, i.e. they are presented as being the extension of the singularities acting on space smoothes to biopouvoir imperial. Immaterial work, in its claims, cyclic but serial - is not registered in the creepage distances which constitute the direction of its dynamics.
From where answers of the capital imperial and biopolitic. Control on the biopuissance expressed by the immaterial work of the multitude finds its point of application in the infinite ramifications of real subsumption. The autonomous and co-operative production of the multitude requires a standardization which is carried out through the introduction of a “total constitution” which represents and synthesizes the imperial sovereignty of the post-modern capital. Hardt and Negri describe this total constitution like a pyramid on three levels, of which each one includes/understands several components. At the top the United States is, who act as agreement with the components represented by the United Nations, the countries of G7 and associations of the great financial groups. The multinationals which, thanks to their networks, control flows of the capital, state-of-the-art technologies and the populations, constitute the intermediate level. The capacity of the multinationals in networks acts directly on the State-nations, to which they entrust the “local regulation” of the biopolitic production. As this direction, the State-nation act like the “filters” of planetary real subsumption. The last level is incarnated by the supposed organizations to represent the authorities of the multitude, such as certain States not belonging G7 or certain ONG escaping the purely imperial functions (p. 309-314). The aim in view by the “pyramid” consists obviously of the segmentation of the multitude and the weakening of its power. The means on which it rests to exert its authority and its control biopolitic are primarily three: the atomic weapon, finance (globalisation of the markets) and the communication (televisions, strategies educational and cultural) (p. 345). These three methods of control are closely related to the three principal levels of the imperial “pyramid”: their inclusive operation ensures the government (or, could one say, the gouvernementality) multitude through alliance founder of sovereignty deterritorialized real subsumption.

However, and it of the last part of the book, “how the multitude can is there the object become a political subject in the context of the Empire? ”. Indeed, “the constitution of the Empire is not the cause but the consequence of the emergence of the power of the multitude” (p.394). A first brief reply resides in the collective construction of spaces of release: “The commun run is the incarnation, the production and the release of the multitude” (p. 303). The power of the multitude can - and must itself - become common, create a material constitution and materialist of the policy, processes of differentiation opposed to the stabilizing difference of imperial sovereignty and economy. The construction of the commun run configures the multitude like the new proletariat of the Empire, in other words like the source, autonomous and powerful, of the generalized and globalized value - immediately co-operative (p. 402). It is about a proletariat wandering, mobile, able, from the mechanical complexity of its “bodies” (affects, brains, knowledge) and by the hybridization of its actions (fights, resistances), to adapt the richness which he produces. The appropriation of the value - to become political multitude - is carried out precisely on the ground of the nomadism, the exodus, the escape and the desertion. Like the Empire, the power of the multitude-proletariat does not take place any more, it does not know any more borders nor limits. The experiment of the Empire - undoubtedly tearing, sometimes tragic - represents the only possibility offered to the multitude to affirm its constituting capacity [5]. Possibility which fits in-depth in the biopolitique one defining imperial sovereignty and the economy. It is initially by producing its life that the multitude adapts all its power. This production is identified with the appropriation of the language and the communication. The constituting capacity of the multitude lies in the transformation of the language and the communication in the forms of life émancipatrices, creative of a new legal horizon (returned guaranteed) and centered on the co-operation of immaterial work.
Empire is a large book of political philosophy. Initially by the astonishing richness as of its analyses, then by the force of its constructivism. To conclude, two remarks are essential all the same. The first relates to the role of Europe. Is it erased truly world scene after the end of colonialism? Doesn't it probably shelter, in its declining State-nations, of the networks of biopuissance necessary to the construction of alternatives and resistances to the Empire? Certain structures of Welfare State (health, education) can still represent, in a context biopolitic and not disciplinary, real spaces of emancipation and provide means of hybridization able of increasing the potential of release of the multitude. In addition, why think the power of the multitude in terms of subject? In other words, why introduce a unifying and organisational element into the wandering and dispersed multiplicity multitudes? The concept of subject is not likely it to introduce the shade threatening of dialectical where, precisely, there does not exist any more the dialectical one, where the nomadism of the biopuissance of the multitudes is already constituent. The nomadism or the exodus is expressed on a plan of immanence which recognizes only common singularities. The oximore clarifies at our post-modern direction the “ontological specificity” of the multitude, their irreducible plurality which tends to escape the transcendantal adding up subject (even carrying release). The disseminated multiplicities of the multitudes probably act according to trajectories and courses which are in the Empire while being already well beyond its action and of its history.