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September 19, 2004
Anthony Burke asks some good questions that impinge upon Negri and Hardt's Empire:
"In the face of this, a number of questions arise. Why is there this persistence of the idea of modern territorial sovereignty as passing away in the face of economic globalisation, neo-liberal ascendancy, the transnational corporation and so on? What other complexities and understandings does this obscure and occlude? Why does this idea of temporal passage coexist, in Empire, with Hardt and Negri's very suggestive account of a new global apparatus of rule? Is it possible and indeed crucial to argue that sovereignty still exists in a complex (and in many ways enabling or ideal) relation to the new imperial space under construction? Are there violences and struggles whose names still need to be heard from beneath the ongoing wreckage of modern sovereignty?"
Burke says that his essay will argue that, "whatever the loss of economic autonomy experienced under globalisation, sovereignty is not passing away: it forms, instead, a complex and malign articulation of law, power, possibility and force that thwarts a totalising image of decline and irrelevance."
And it will argue against essentialist notions of sovereignty----a closed, egoistic mode of national identity intolerant and repressive of otherness?
It sounds promising.
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