As Giacomo Marramao warns, The Passage West is a book organised radially. What this means is that, after defining in the first chapter the radical mutation that globalisation imposes on the forms of government and on the definition of the political; after announcing the thesis of the ‘passage to the Occident’; he goes on to develop another series of approaches, setting out from peripheral conditions that nevertheless converge within the constitutive dynamic of the ‘passage’. What, then, is this ‘passage’? Marramao writes: ‘my philosophical reading of globalisation [is] as a passage to the Occident, where “passage” draws together the continuous and the discontinuous, the process and the turning point’. In other words, the passage to the Occident is a ‘passage to modernity destined to produce profound transformations in the economy, society, lifestyles and codes of behaviour not only of “other” civilisations but of Western civilisation itself…. Never before the advent of the stereoscopic optic of world-society had the pluriversal nature of the process of civilisation and the plurality of the possible paths towards modernity been so evident’. Mundus and Globus establish between one another (like a syntagma of different linguistic perspectives that form the abstractions ‘mondialisation’ and ‘globalisation’) a paradox that leads one to focus at once on the expansion of the world [mondo] and the closure of the globe. This is the discovery of the ‘passage’. There is no unilateral image, no dialectic between outside and inside, but an opening to a new paradigm that is also the key of a constitutive dynamic: well burrowed, old mole! But one is immediately confronted with the problem of why this phenomenological description of the passage does not bend the perception of mutation to that ontological transformation that most probably underlies it. That is to say, why not interpret the future as ‘to-come’ [a-venire] and then unfold or transform the archaeological method into a genealogical one?
Marramao grasps the problem and immediately gives it an interpretation that excavates it from within: Occident and secularisation, globalisation and secularisation – in line with his previous important and incisive works. His thinking situates itself in the intersection of these dualities. Once again, it is a case of continuity and discontinuity; here lies also the preference for a term like ‘second modernity’, rather than ‘postmodernity’, and the insistence on the historical phylum as well as the slightly paradoxical idea of a conjunction that contains a disjunction, repeating Ulrich Beck. But nota bene: it is not that the radical novelty of the passage is denied! If we want to remain faithful to the direction of Marramao’s argument, we must recognise that he emphatically insists on this novelty, both from the standpoint of the relationship between space and the processes of singularisation, and from that of the relationship between the political Leviathan and other models of political constitution. In each of these cases it is a case of seeing the new arise against the original global horizon: there is no inner analogy between national and global but rather a production of locality, the glocal, and in general the interpenetration of the local and the global; and there is an overcoming of all identitarian models and, consequently, of all the traditional mediations of the political. There is instead the opening towards the constitution of new models and a plurality of levels of the definition of government … We could continue. As we were saying: through the refusal of all dichotomous optics, by exalting the social practice of the imagination, Marramao internalises the passage.
But to what extent can it be said that this internalisation of the passage blocks and empties the passage itself? The continual reprise of the phylum of continuity posits the difference of living as articulation rather than as rupture. And the subjectivity that moves within these passages finds itself consigned to the function of formal organisation; it risks being reduced to an empty transcendental continuity rather than being able to wager itself on the alterity of the processes. There is no longer a subject here. The polyphony of globalisation can certainly open itself to anthropological métissage: but what moves this passage? What are the struggles that determine the development? To put this in the same terms as Weber: what is the passage from the emancipation of instrumental reason to that of the liberation from command? The Angelus novus that rises up at the heart of the passage can only see the to-come [a-venire] when, looking back, he confronts a horizon of struggles, and sees the production of the subject in struggle. So, for example, once again situating itself at the level of empire, the theme of sovereignty may appear incorrect; but only if, with the passage, one ignores a multitude capable of producing new subjectivity and if one fails to oppose the rhizome to the phylum. The problem is not that of the theoretical disproportion of the conceptual relationship, but the ontological immeasurableness [dismisura] of the insurrection of the multitude.
Marramao is intensely aware of this set of problems, as he shows in some beautiful pages where he contrasts Jaspers with Heidegger and turns the analysis of the spiritual situation of the age into the determination of the incompleteness of the project of modernity. In an increasingly forceful way he attacks every identitarian illusion, all religious identifications; he confronts and conjoins opposed models of representation and modelling of reality: difference is also contingency, and is also relativity, and is even the discovery of a true, effective dialogical place that makes the passage real. The critique that Marramao carries out here, in the concluding pages of the first chapter of this book, against Rawls’ and Habermas’ ‘false’ relativisations of the socio-political context, is exemplary: to realise the passage it is necessary that there be a place of conflict.
Our query arises here: who are the subjects of this conflict? What are the directions from which the conflict emanates and what is its genealogy? What is left over from the double injunction of universalism and difference? For what reason (other than banally sceptical ones) must the hands that write and conjoin these words always be wrong?
Marramao’s book is beautiful, and the rhetorical strategy that unfolds the themes raised in the first chapter is powerful. But Marramao is a wise man and hence, before confronting the solution to the problem, he zealously advances its critical exposition. One should approach in this way chapters 3 (‘Dämmerung – The Twilight of Sovereignty: State, Subjects and Fundamental Rights’), 4 (‘The Exile of the Nomos: Carl Schmitt and the globale Zeit’) and 5 (‘Gift, Exchange, Obligation: Karl Polanyi and Social Philosophy’). The analyses in these chapters are tied to those of Dopo il Leviatano. Individuo e comunità, a book that we can say in many ways merges with the one discussed here. In all the works that we have cited, there are cues for the construction of the theory of the passage, as is clear from the very titles of those chapters. But I believe that there is something more. In particular, in the chapter ‘The Twilight of Sovereignty’ there is a formidable reprise of Italian constitutional theory. (This work of recovery of juridical thinkers and texts in philosophical terms is extremely important. Italian constitutional literature is of global value, as has been demonstrated by the success of certain Italian books. The dull emptiness of Italian academic containers, the inability of Italian publishers to test themselves on the world stage, should not therefore worry us in the face of the originality and strength of some works and discourses invented by Italian constitutionalists and jurists). The chapter on Carl Schmitt is excellent. Unfortunately, Schmitt, unlike Marramao, gave a conclusive direction to his political solution (which, alas, was Nazism) to all the contradictions of his thought, both virtual and possible, and that were in this sense extremely productive. The chapter on Polanyi is a superb, although paradoxical (in accordance with the radial procedure prescribed by Marramao), introduction to the analysis and definition of an ethical concept and normative project of the idea of ‘common’, against all the privatising and public law definitions. (This really is a topic that should be launched across the globe in political discussions.)
Chapters 2, 6 and 7 throw themselves into a thematic development of the hypothesis of the ‘passage’. The concept of passage is advanced in terms of the border [confine] zone, as a fan of possibilities, as a self-reflection and assumption of responsibility in the face of all the violent operations aimed at realising the virtual – although the problem is, rather, the opposite one, that of continually virtualising the real. From the standpoint of politics, what will ‘democracy’ mean when it breaks with the abstract universalism of its historical premises? Democracy: a paradoxical community, a community of those without community, democracy as the opening to the to-come [a-venire], as the passion of the disenchanted, as the acceptance of unexpected guests … The thread of the argument is taken up again here, as it is in the subsequent chapter on Voltaire and tolerance … Here the radial form of the book is again problematised, sometimes only slightly, at others with severe determination. The definition of democracy as a paradoxical community is in reality a forceful interpretation of the democratic process: one can in effect glimpse here ‘communities of sans-’, subjects who suffer, flesh that wants to become body … Marramao does not skirt around the problem: the radial organisation becomes a political net, and he declares the side on which he stands.
The final two chapters of the book (chapter 8, ‘Ciphers of Difference’; chapter 9, ‘Europe after the Leviathan: Technology, Politics, Constitution’)1 are very important. They offer some ciphers for an effective reconstruction following the problematic that was posed at the start of the book. Chapter 8 sets out from the critique that second-generation feminism directed to the ontological nomenclature of gender that was fixed by that of the first generation. It finds in Donna Haraway and Judith Butler the principle of a generative logic, and more generally a constructivism that enables one to pose the problem of the production of subjectivity in its own terms. Deleuze’s advancement of the constitutive concept of difference is contemporaneous to this development. The constitutive is the opposite of the identical; and if we insist on games of strategy, we will once again tie the question of the common, of what constitutes us, to the architectonic barriers of the logic of identity. In contrast, we will move constructively only when we traverse relationships, proximities, distances, ties and conflicts: irreducible differences that never identify being but always produce it. Here the production of subjectivity is a veritable production of bodies.
And to conclude: with regard to the final chapter [of the first edition of the book, chapter 9] and the Multiversum that a possible European constitution could bring about, we do not wish to insist on the topic of political federalism (which is nonetheless extremely important). We are more interested in the content of the Multiversum, since it is a matter that spreads everywhere. Each subject, in its singularity, constitutes a multitude. But if the multitude constitutes the subject, every world is a world of worlds; and every subject is a multitude of multitudes. This is probably the key to the crossing, that is, the plot of the passage that we must accomplish or, better still, that we are accomplishing.
Who knows if, looking back on this passage, a man from the year 3000 will still be able to speak of the Occident? He will certainly speak of himself in terms of the passage and struggles that have destroyed the Occident as the matrix of the common and of the transformation of his own body; because this man (or woman) of the year 3000 will be a multiversal body and a common passage.
Antonio Negri
1Translator’s note: This afterword was written following the first edition of this book in 2003.