hydrarchist writes "This essay was recently republished in Make World 2, Magazine.

Nothing appears so enigmatic today as the question of what it
means to act. This issue seems both enigmatic and out of reach--
up in the heavens, one might say. If nobody asks me what political
action is, I seem to know; but if I have to explain it to somebody
who asks, this presumed knowledge evaporates into incoherence.
And yet what notion is more familiar in people's everyday speech
than action? Why has the obvious become clothed in mystery?
Why is it so puzzling?

Virtuosity and
Revolution,
The Political
Theory of Exodus


Paolo Virno

According to a long tradition
of thought, the realm of political action can
be defined fairly precisely by two boundaries. The
first relates to labor, to its taciturn and instru-mental
character, to that automatism that makes
of it a repetitive and predictable process. The
second relates to pure thought, to the solitary
and non-appearing quality of its activity. Political
action is unlike labor in that its sphere of inter-vention
is social relations, not natural materials.
It modifies the context within which it is inscribed,
rather than creates new objects to fill it.
Unlike intellectual reflection, action is public,
geared to exteriorization, to contingency, to the
hustle and bustle of the multitude.

But the customary frontiers separating Intellect,
Work, and Action (theory, poiesis, and praxis)
have given way, and everywhere we see the signs
of incursions and crossovers. I will propose first
that Work has absorbed the distinctive traits of
political action and second that this annexation
has been made possible by the intermeshing between
modern forms of production and an Intellect
that has become public, that has erupted
into the world of appearances. Finally, what has
provoked the eclipse of Action has been precisely
the symbiosis of Work with "general intellect," or
"general social knowledge," which, according to
Marx, stamps its form on "the process of social
life itself.

I will then advance two hypotheses. The first is
that the public and worldly character of the nous
- or the material potentiality (potenza) of general
intellect - has to be our starting point for a redefinition
of political praxis and its salient problems:
power, government, democracy, violence, and so
on, a coalition between Intellect and Action is
counterposed to the coalition between Intellect
and Work. Second, whereas the symbiosis of
knowledge and production produces an extreme,
anomalous, but nonetheless flourishing legitimation
for a pact of obedience to the State, the intermeshing
between general intellect and political
Action enables us to glimpse the possibility of
a non-State public sphere.

Activity without Work

The dividing line between Work and Action, which
was always hazy, has now disappeared altogether.
In the opinion of Hannah Arendt, this hybridizatoin
is due to the fact that modern political
praxis has internalized the model of Work and
come to look increasingly like a process of making
(with a "product" that is, by turns, history, the
State, the party, and so forth). This diagnosis
must be inverted and set on its feet. The important
thing is not that political action may be conceived
as a form of producing, but that the producing
has embraced within itself many of the
prerogatives of action.

In the post-Fordist era, we have Work taking on
many of the attributes of Action: unforeseeability,
the ability to begin something new, linguistic
"performances," and an ability to range among
alternative possibilities. In relation to a Work that
is loaded with "actionist" characteristics, the
transition to Action comes to be seen as some-how
falling short, or as a superfluous duplication.
In its structuring according to a rudimentary logic
of means and ends, politics offers a communicative
network and a cognitive content that are
weaker and poorer than those to be found within
the present-day process of production. Action
appears as less complex than Work, or as too
similar to it, and either way it appears as not very
desirable.

Marx distinguishes two principal kinds of intellec-tual
labor. On the one hand, there is the immaterial
activity that has as its result "commodities
which exist separately from the producer..., e.g.
books, paintings and all products of art as distinct
from the artistic achievement of the practising
artist." On the other hand, he defines those
activities in which "the product is not separable
from the act of producing" - in other words, activ-ities
that find their fulfilment in themselves, with-out
being objectivized in a finished work existing
outside and beyond them. The second kind of intellectual
labor may be exemplified by "performing
artists" but also includes more generally various
kinds of people whose work involves a
virtuosic performance - a wide cross section of
human society, ranging from Glenn Gould to the
impeccable butler of the classic English novel.

Of the two categories of intellectual labor, for
Marx only the first appears to fit fully with the definition
of "productive labor" (defined as work that
procures surplus value). Virtuosos, who limit
themselves to playing a "musical score" and
leave no lasting traces, on the one hand "are of
microscopic significance when compared with
the mass of capitalist production" and on the
other are to be considered as "wage-labour that
is not at the same time productive labour." Al-though
it is easy to understand Marx's observations
on the quantitative irrelevance of virtuosos,
one experiences some perplexity at his observation
that they are "non-productive." For Marx, the
absence of a finished work that lives on beyond
the activity of performance puts modern intellectual
virtuosity on a par with actions undertaken in
the provision of a personal service: services that
are seen as being non-productive, because in order
to obtain them one spends income, not capital.
The "performing artist" is thus consigned to
the limbo of service work.

The activities in which "the product is not separable
from the act of producing" have a mercurial
and ambiguous status that is not always and not
completely grasped by the critique of political
economy. Well before becoming swallowed up
within capitalist production, virtuosity was what
qualified Action, as distinct from (and in fact op-posed
to) Work. The pianist and the dancer stand
precariously balanced on a watershed that di-vides
two antithetical destinies: on the one hand,
they may become examples of "wage-labour that
is not at the same time productive labour"; on the
other, they have a quality that is suggestive of po-litical
action. Each of the potential developments
inherent in the figure of the performing artist -poiesis
or praxis, Work or Action - seems to exclude
its opposite. From a certain point onward,
however, the alternative changes into a complicity:
the virtuoso works (in fact she or he is a worker
par excellence) precisely because of the fact that
her or his activity is closely reminiscent of political
praxis.

Within post-Fordist organization of production,
activity-without-a-finished-work moves from being
a special and problematic case to becoming
the prototype of waged labor in general. When labor
carries out tasks of overseeing and coordination,
its function consists no longer in the carrying
out of a single particular objective, but in the
modulating (as well as the varying and intensifying)
of social cooperation, in other words, that
ensemble of relations and systemic connections
that as of now are "the great foundation-stone of
production and of wealth." This modulation takes
place through linguistic services that, far from
giving rise to a final product, exhaust themselves
in the communicative interaction that their own
"performance" brings about.

Post-Fordist activity presupposes and, at the
same time, unceasingly re-creates the "public
realm" (the space of cooperation, precisely) that
Arendt describes as the indispensable prerequisite
of both the dancer and the politician. The
"presence of others" is both the instrument and
the object of labor; therefore, the processes of
production always require a certain degree of virtuosity,
they involve what are really political actions.
Mass intellectuality (a rather clumsy term
that I use to indicate a quality of the whole of
post-Fordist labor power) is called upon to exercise
the art of the possible, to deal with the unforeseen,
to profit from opportunities. Now that
the slogan of labor that produces surplus value
has become, sarcastically, "politics first," politics
in the narrow sense of the term becomes discredited
or paralyzed.

What other meaning can we give to the capitalist
slogan of "total quality" if not the attempt to set
to work all those aspects that traditionally it has
shut out of work - the ability to communicate and
the taste for Action? And how is it possible to encompass
within the productive process the entire
experience of the single individual, except by
committing her or him to a sequence of variations
on a theme, performances, improvisations? Such
a sequence, in a parody of self-realization, represents
the true acme of subjugation. There is none
so poor as the one who sees her or his own ability
to relate to the "presence of others," or her or his
own possession of language, reduced to waged
labor.

Public Intellect, the Virtuosos' Score

What is the "score" that post-Fordist workers
have unceasingly had to play from the moment
they were called upon to give proof of virtuosity?
The answer is something like this: the sui generis
"score" of present-day labor is Intellect qua public
Intellect, general intellect, global social knowledge,
shared linguistic ability. Production demands
virtuosity and thus introjects many traits
that are peculiar to political action, precisely and
solely because Intellect has become the principal
productive force, premise, and epicenter of every
poiesis.

Marx conceives general intellect as "a scientific
capacity" objectified within the system of machines,
as fixed capital. He reduces the external
or public quality of intellect to the technological
application of natural sciences to the process of
production. The crucial step consists rather in
highlighting to the full the way in which general
intellect comes to present itself finally as a direct
attribute of living labor, as a repertoire of a diffuse
intelligentsia, as a "score" that creates a
common bond among the members of a multitude.
In post-Fordist production, a decisive role is
played by conceptual constellations and
schemes of thinking that cannot ever be recuperated
within fixed capital, given that they are actually
inseparable from the interaction of a plurality
of living subjects. What is in question here
is not the scientific erudition of the particular
worker. What comes to the fore - to achieve the
status of a public resource - is the faculty of language,
the ability to learn, the ability to abstract
and correlate, and access to self-reflection.

By general intellect we have to understand, literally,
intellect in general. Intellect-in-general is the
faculty that makes possible all composition (not
to mention all experience). Virtuosic performance
consists in making Intellect resonate precisely as
attitude. Its only "score" is, as such, the condition
of possibility of all "scores." This virtuosity is
nothing unusual, nor does it require some special
talent. One need only think of the process whereby
someone who speaks draws on the inexhaustible potential of language (the opposite of a de-fined
"work") to create an utterance that is
entirely of the moment and unrepeatable. Intellect
becomes public when it joins together with
Work, but once it is conjoined with Work, its characteristic
publicness is inhibited and distorted.
Ever anew called upon to act as a force of production,
it is ever anew suppressed as public
sphere, as possible root of political Action, as
different constitutional principle.

General intellect is the foundation of a kind of social
cooperation that is broader than the social
cooperation based specifically on labor - broader
and, at the same time, entirely heterogeneous.
Whereas the interconnections of the process of
production are based on a technical and hierarchical
division of functions, the acting-in-concert
implied by general intellect takes as its starting
point a common participation in the "life of the
mind," a prior sharing of communicative and cognitive
attitudes. Rather than eliminating the coercions
of capitalist production, the excess cooperation
of Intellect figures as capital's most
eminent resource. Its heterogeneity has neither
voice nor visibility. Rather, because it becomes a
technical prerequisite of Work, the acting-in-concert
outside of labor that it engenders in its turn
becomes subjected to the kinds of criteria and hierarchies
that characterize the factory regime.

The principal consequences of this paradoxical
situation are twofold. The first relates to the form
and nature of political power. The peculiar publicness
of Intellect, deprived of any expression of its
own by that labor that nonetheless claims it as a
productive force, manifests itself indirectly within
the realm of the State through the hypertrophic
growth of administrative apparatuses. Administration
has come to replace the political, parliamentary
system at the heart of the State, but it
has done this precisely because it represents an
authoritarian concretion of general intellect, the
point of fusion between knowledge and command,
the reverse image of excess cooperation.
For decades there have been indications of a
growing and determining weight of the bureaucracy
within the "body politic," the predominance
of decree over law. Now, however, we no longer
have the familiar process of rationalization of the
State, but rather a Statization of Intellect. If Hobbes
and the other great theoreticians of "political
unity" saw the principle of legitimation of absolute
power in the transfer of the natural right of
each single individual to the person of the sovereign,
nowadays we might speak of a transfer of
Intellect, or rather of its immediate and irreducible
publicness, to State administration.

The second consequence relates to the effective
nature of the post-Fordist regime. Because the
public realm opened by Intellect is every time
anew reduced to labor cooperation, to a tight-knit
web of hierarchical relations, the interdictive
function that comes with "presence of others" in
all concrete operations of production takes the
form of personal dependency: virtuosic activity
comes across as universal servile labor. When
"the product is not separable from the act of producing,"
this act calls into question the self of the
producer and, above all, the relationship between
that self and the self of the one who has
ordered it or to whom it is directed. The setting-to-
work of what is common of Intellect and Language,
although on the one hand renders fictitious
the impersonal technical division of labor,
on the other hand, given that this commonality is
not translated into a "public sphere" (that is, into
a political community), leads to a stubborn personalization
of subjugation.

Exodus

The key to political action (or rather the only possibility
of extracting it from its present state of paralysis)
consists in developing the publicness of
Intellect outside of Work, and in opposition to it.
On the one hand, general intellect can only affirm
itself as an autonomous public sphere, thus
avoiding the "transfer" of its own potential into
the absolute power of Administration, if it cuts
the linkage that binds it to the production of commodities
and wage labor. On the other hand, the
subversion of capitalist relations of production
henceforth develops only with the institution of a
non-State public sphere, a political community
that has as its hinge general intellect. The salient
characteristics of the post-Fordist experience
postulate as a conflictual response nothing less
than a radically new form of democracy.

I use the term Exodus here to define mass defection
from the State, the alliance between general
intellect and political Action, and a movement to-ward
the public sphere of Intellect. The term is
not at all conceived as some defensive existential
strategy, quite the contrary: Exodus is a full-fledged
model of action, capable of confronting
the challenges of modern politics. Today, a realm
of common affairs has to be defined from
scratch. Any such definition must draw out the
opportunities for liberation that are to be found
in taking command of this novel interweaving
among Work, Action, and Intellect, which up until
now we have only suffered.
Exodus is the foundation of a Republic. The very
idea of "republic," however, requires a taking
leave of State judicature: if Republic, then no
longer State. The political action of the Exodus
consists in an engaged withdrawal.

The Virtue of Intemperance

"Civil disobedience" is today the sine qua non of
political action - but only if it is conceived differently
and freed from the terms of the liberal tradition
within which it is generally encapsulated.
Radical Disobedience must bring into question
the State's very faculty of command. According
to Hobbes, with the institution of the body politic
we put an obligation on ourselves to obey even
before we know what that obedience is going to
entail - one will find no specific law that says explicitly
that one is not to rebel. If the unconditional
acceptance of command were not already pre-supposed,
the actual provisions of the law would
have no validity. Hobbes maintains that the original
bond of obedience derives from natural law,
from a common interest in self-preservation and
security. He hastens to add, however, that this
natural law, or the Superlaw that requires obedience
to all the commands of the sovereign, becomes
effectively a law only when one emerges
from the state of nature, in other words, when the
State is already instituted. What we have here is
a paradox: the obligation to obedience is both
cause and effect of the existence of the State; it
is maintained by that of which it is also the foundation;
it simultaneously precedes and follows
the formation of the "supreme power." Political
Action takes as its target the preliminary and
content-less obedience that provides the only
basis for the subsequent development of the
baleful dialectic of acquiescence and "transgression."
In contravening a particular decree on the
dismantling of the health service, or on the banning
of immigration, one goes right back to the
hidden presupposition of every imperative prescription
and saps the force of that prescription.
Radical Disobedience not only violates the laws,
but also challenges the very foundation of their
validity.

In the same way as we saw with "natural law," the
"law of general intellect" also has a paradoxical
structure: whereas on the one hand it seems to
provide the basis of the State Administration's
powers of command, demanding the respect of
any decision that it may happen to take, on the
other hand, it appears as a real law only because
(and after) Administration already exercises an
absolute command.

Radical Disobedience breaks this circle within
which public Intellect figures simultaneously as
both premise and consequence of the State. It
highlights and develops positively the aspects of
general intellect that are at odds with the continued
existence of waged labor and sets in motion
the practical potentiality of Intellect against the
decision-making faculty of Administration.
Delinked from the production of surplus value, Intellect
becomes the matrix of a non-State Republic.

The breeding ground of Disobedience consists of
the social conflicts that manifest themselves not
only and not so much as protest, but most particularly
as defection, not as "voice" but as "exit"
(Albert 0. Hirschman). Nothing is less passive
than flight. The "exit" modifies the conditions
within which the conflict takes place, rather than
presupposes it as an irremovable horizon; it
changes the context within which a problem arises,
rather than deals with the problem by choosing
one or another of the alternative solutions already
on offer. The "exit" can be seen as a free-thinking
inventiveness that changes the rules of
the game and disorients the enemy.

Defection stands at the opposite pole to the desperate
notion of "You have nothing to lose but
your chains." It is postulated, rather, on the basis
of a latent wealth, on an abundance of possibilities-
in short, on the principle of the tertium datur.
But how are we to define, in the post-Fordist era,
the virtual abundance that favors the escape option
at the expense of the resistance option?
What I am talking about here is an abundance of
knowledges, communication, and acting-in-concert
implied by the publicness of general intellect.
The act of collective imagination that we call
"defection" gives an independent, affirmative,
high-profile expression to this abundance, thus
stopping its being transferred into the power of
State administration.

Radical Disobedience involves, therefore, a complex
ensemble of positive actions. It is not a resentful
omission, but a committed undertaking.
The sovereign command is not carried out, be-cause,
above all, we are too busy figuring out how
to pose differently the question that it would interdict.

We have to bear in mind the distinction between
"intemperance" and "incontinence." Incontinence
is a vulgar unruliness, disregard for laws, a
giving way to immediate appetite. Intemperance
is something very different - it is the opposition
of an intellectual understanding to given ethical
and political standards. In Intemperance the Exodus
has its cardinal virtue. The pre-existing obligation
of obedience to the State is not disregarded for reasons of incontinence, but in the
name of the systematic interconnection between
Intellect and political Action. In the intemperate
recourse to Intellect-in-general there is finally
outlined a possibility of a non-servile virtuosity.

Multitude, General Intellect, Republic

The decisive political counterposition is what opposes
the Multitude to the People. The concept of
"people" in Hobbes (but also in a large part of
the democratic-socialist tradition) is tightly correlated
to the existence of the State and is in fact
a reverberation of it. The progressivist notion of
"popular sovereignty" has as its bitter counter-point
an identification of the people with the sovereign,
or, if you prefer, the popularity of the king.
The multitude, on the other hand, shuns political
unity, is recalcitrant to obedience, never achieves
the status of juridical personage, and is thus unable
to make promises, to make pacts, or to acquire
and transfer rights. It is anti-State, but, precisely
for this reason, it is also antipopular: the
citizens, when they rebel against the State, are
"the Multitude against the People." For the seventeenth-
century apologists for sovereign power,
"multitude" was a purely negative defining concept:
a regurgitation of the state of nature within
civil society, a continuing but somewhat unformed
leftover, a metaphor of possible crisis.
Liberal thinking, then, tamed the unrest provoked
by the "many" through the dichotomy between
public and private: the Multitude is "private" both
in the literal sense of the term, being deprived of
both face and voice, and in the juridical sense of
being extraneous to the sphere of common affairs.
In its turn, democratic-socialist theory produced
the dichotomy "collective/individual": on
the one hand, the collectivity of "producers" (the
ultimate incarnation of the People) comes to be
identified with the State, be it with Reagan or with
Honecker;on the other, the Multitude is confined
to the corral of "individual" experience - in other
words, condemned to impotence.

We can say that this destiny of marginality has
now come to an end. The Multitude, rather than
constituting a "natural" ante-fact, presents itself
as a historical result, a mature arrival point of the
transformations that have taken place within the
productive process and the forms of life. The
"Many" are erupting onto the scene, and they
stand there as absolute protagonists while the
crisis of the society of Work is being played out.
Post-Fordist social cooperation, in eliminating
the frontier between production time and person-al
time, not to mention the distinction between
professional qualities and political aptitudes,
creates a new species, which makes the old dichotomies
of "public/private" and "collective/individual"
sound farcical. Neither "producers" nor
"citizens," the modern virtuosi attain at last the
rank of Multitude.

What we have here is a lasting and continuing reality,
not some noisy intermezzo. Our new Multitude
is not a whirlpool of atoms that "still" lacks
unity, but a form of political existence that takes
as its starting point a One that is radically heterogeneous
to the State: public Intellect. The Many
do not make alliances, nor do they transfer rights
to the sovereign, because they already have a
shared "score"; they never converge into a "general
will" because they already share a "general
intellect." The Multitude obstructs and dismantles
the mechanisms of political representation.
It expresses itself as an ensemble of "acting minorities,"
none of which, however, aspires to
transform itself into a majority. It develops a power
that refuses to become government. Now, it is
the case that each of the "many" turns out to be
inseparable from the "presence of others," inconceivable
outside of the linguistic cooperation or
the "acting-in-concert" that this presence implies.
Cooperation, however, unlike the individual
labor time or the individual right of citizenry, is
not a "substance" that is extrapolatable and
commutable. It can, of course, be subjected, but
it cannot be represented or, for that matter, delegated.

The States of the developed West are today characterized
by a political non-representability of the
post-Fordist workforce. In fact, they gain strength
from it, drawing from it a paradoxical legitimation
for their authoritarian restructuring. The tangible
and irreversible crisis of representation offers an
opportunity for them to eliminate any remaining
semblance of "public sphere"; to extend enormously,
as observed above, the prerogatives of
Adminstration at the expense of the politico-parliamentary
process; and thus to make an every-day
reality of the state of emergency. Institutional
reforms are set in motion to prepare the requisite
rules and procedures for governing a Multitude
upon whom it is no longer possible to superimpose
the tranquilizing physiognomy of the "People."
As interpreted by the post-Keynesian State,
the structural weakening of representative democracy
comes to be seen as a tendency toward
a restriction of democracy tout court. Opposition
to this course of events, if conducted in the name
of values of representation, is pathetic and point-less
- as useful as preaching chastity to spar-rows.
Democracy today has to be framed in terms
of the construction and experimentation of forms
of non-representative and extra-parliamentary
democracy. All the rest is vacant chitchat.

The democracy of the Multitude takes seriously
the diagnosis that Carl Schmitt proposed, some-what
bitterly, in the last years of his life: "The era
of the State is now coming to an end... .The State
as a model of political unity, the State as title-holder
of the most extraordinary of all monopolies,
in other words, the monopoly of political decision-
making, is about to be dethroned." And
the democracy of the Multitude would make one
important addition: the monopoly of decision
making can only really be taken away from the
State if it ceases once and for all to be a monopoly.
The public sphere of Intellect, or the Republic
of the "many," excludes not only the continued
existence, but also the reconstitution in any form
of a unitary "political body." The republican conspiracy,
to give lasting duration to the antimonopoly
impulse, is embodied in those democratic
bodies that, being non-representative, prevent,
precisely, any re-proposition of "political unity" -leagues,
councils, and Soviets. We are not dealing
with ephemeral appearances whose insurgence
leaves undisturbed the rights of sovereignty.
The organs of non-representative democracy
give political expression to the "acting-in-concert"
that, having as its network general intellect,
already always enjoys a publicness that is completely
different from what is concentrated in the
person of the sovereign.

The Soviets of the Multitude interfere conflictually
with the State's administrative apparatuses, with
a view to eating away at its prerogatives and absorbing
its functions. They translate into republican
praxis, into a care for common affairs, those
same basic resources--knowledge, communication,
a relationship with the "presence of others"
- that are the order of the day in post-Fordist production.
They emancipate virtuosic cooperation
from its present connection with waged labor,
showing with positive actions how the one goes
beyond the other.

To representation and delegation, the Soviets
counterpose an operative style that is far more
complex, centered on Example and political reproducibility.
What is exemplary is a practical initiative
that, exhibiting in a particular instance the
possible alliance between general intellect and
Republic, has the authoritativeness of the proto-type,
but not the normativity of command.
Whether it is a question of the distribution of
wealth or the organization of schools, the functioning
of the media or the workings of the inner
city, the Soviets elaborate actions that are paradigmatic
and capable of blossoming into new
combinations of knowledge, ethical propensities,
technologies, and desires. The Example is not the
empirical application of a universal concept, but
it has the singularity and the qualitative completeness
that, normally, when we speak of the
"life of the mind," we attribute to an idea. The Example
may be politically reproduced, but never
transposed into an omnivorous "general program."

The Right to Resistance

The atrophy of political Action has had as its corollary
the conviction that there is no longer an
"enemy," but only incoherent interlocutors,
caught up in a web of equivocation, and not yet
arrived at clarification. The theory of the Exodus
restores all the fullness of the concept of "enmity,"
while at the same time highlighting the particular
traits that it assumes once "the epoch of
the State comes to an end." The question is, how
is the friend-enemy relationship expressed for the
post-Fordist Multitude, which, while on the one
hand tending to dismantle the supreme power,
on the other is not at all inclined to become State
in its turn?

In the first place, we should recognize a change
in the geometry of hostility. The "enemy" no longer
appears as a parallel reflection or mirror image,
matching point by point the trenches and
fortifications that are occupied by the "friends";
rather, it appears as a segment that intersects
several times with a sinusoidal line of flight - and
this is principally for the reason that the "friends"
are evacuating predictable positions, giving rise
to a sequence of constructive defections. The
very fact that hostility becomes asymmetrical
makes it necessary to give a certain autonomy to
the notion of "friendship." The characteristic of
the "friend" is not merely that of sharing the
same "enemy"; it is defined by the relations of
solidarity that are established in the course of
flight - by the necessity of working together to in-vent
opportunities, and by the fact of their common
participation in the Republic.

Second, one has to be careful in defining today
the degree or gradation of hostility. The model of
"absolute" enmity is thus seen to be deficient -not
so much because it is extremist or bloody,
but, paradoxically, because it is not radical
enough. The republican Multitude actually aims
to destroy what is the much-desired prize of the
victor in this model. On the one hand, the battle
for "the most extraordinary of all monopolies" is
premised on either total victory or total defeat;
on the other, the more radical scenario (which is
anti-monopolistic) alternates between negotiation
and total rejection, between an intransigence
that excludes all mediation and the compromises
necessary for carving out free zones and neutral
environments.

It is neither "relative" in the sense of the ius publicum
Europaeum that at one time moderated the
contests between sovereign States, nor is it "absolute"
in the manner of civil wars; if anything,
the enmity of the Multitude may be defined as
unlimitedly reactive. The new geometry and the
new gradation of hostility, far from counseling
against the use of arms, demands a precise and
punctilious redefinition of the role to be fulfilled
by violence in political Action. Because the Exodus
is a committed withdrawal, the rec