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.And the Marxian version is scarcely different: society had to supersede primitivecommunism and pass through the whole hell of class division to develop theproductive forces of humanity, and it is only at the end of the process, in a fullydeveloped communism, that the rationality of all this suffering become visible.7What are, however, really important in reference to these theological debatesare the other existing alternatives in case the immanentist route is not followed.For in that case evil is not the appearance of a rationality underlying andexplaining it, but a brute and irreducible fact.As the chasm separating good andevil is strictly constitutive and there is no ground reducing to its immanentdevelopment the totality of what exists, there is an element of negativity thatcannot be eliminated either through dialectical mediation or through Nietzscheanassertiveness.We are not very far here from the alternatives referred to byRancière in his interview.(Let us observe that, strictly speaking, the category ofexcess is not incompatible with the notion of a nondialectical negativity that weare proposing.It is only if we try to combine excess with immanence that thenonpolitical turn that we will presently discuss is unavoidable.)In the same way that, with modernity, immanence ceased to be a theologicalconcept and become fully secularized, the religious notion of evil becomes, withthe modern turn, the kernel of what we can call social antagonism. What thelatter retains from the former is the notion of a radical disjuncture radical in thesense that it cannot be reabsorbed by any deeper objectivity that would reducethe terms of the antagonism to moments of its own internal movement, forexample, the development of productive forces or any other form of immanence.Now, I would contend that it is only by accepting such a notion of antagonismand its corollary, which is radical social division that we are confronted withforms of social action that can truly be called political Why so? To show this Iwill consider an early text by Marx that I have discussed fully elsewhere.8 In it,Marx opposes a purely human revolution to a merely political one.Thedifferential feature is that in the former a universal subject emerges in and foritself.In the words of Marx: By proclaiming the dissolution of the hithertoworld order the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it isin fact the dissolution of that world order. To put it in terms close to Hardt andNegri: the universality of the proletariat fully depends on its immanence within 24 EMPIRE S NEW CLOTHESan objective social order that is entirely the product of capitalism which is, inturn, a moment in the universal development of the productive forces.Butprecisely because of that reason, the universality of the revolutionary subjectentails the end of politics that is, the beginning of the withering away of theState and the transition (according to the Saint-Simonian motto adopted byMarxism) from the government of men to the administration of things.As for the second revolution the political one its distinctive feature is, forMarx, an essential asymmetry: that between the universality of the task and theparticularism of the agent carrying it out.Marx describes this asymmetry innonequivocal terms: a certain regime is felt as universal oppression, and thatallows the particular social force able to lead the struggle against it to presentitself as universal liberator universalizing, thus, its particular objectives.Herewe find the real theoretical watershed in contemporary discussions: either weassert the possibility of a universality that is not politically constructed andmediated or we assert that all universality is precarious and depends on ahistorical construction out of heterogeneous elements.Hardt and Negri acceptthe first alternative without hesitation.If, conversely, we accept the second, weare on the threshold of the Gramscian conception of hegemony.(Gramsci isanother for whom understandably given their premises Hardt and Negri showlittle sympathy
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