Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 1

Ethics in Empire: The Human Subject of Ethics after 9-11

In his Very Short Introduction to Ethics (2001), Simon Blackburn proposes that ethics

should be thought of in the contexts of different “ethical climates” in which humans make

judgments and decisions. Arguably, the most important recent events to mark the global

“ethical climate” are the terrorist attacks in the U.S. of September 11, 2001 and the

subsequent “War on Terror” by the U.S. and its allies. What my paper will explore are: 1)

the ways in which George W. Bush’s ethical rhetoric of 9/11 and its aftermath might be

read as symptoms of the contemporary discourse of globalization which Michael Hardt

and Antonio Negri have dubbed “Empire,” and 2) how this ethical rhetoric and the Global

War on Terror it is designed to authorize are working as particularly dominant, arguably

the most dominant forces currently shaping the global discourse of humanity and the

rights and ethical limits attached to the subject of that universalized humanity.

Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s model of globalization as Empire, for me, offers

a useful method of reading late-globalization and its symptoms differently; in particular,

on the infrastructural level of biopower. Their (nearly) totalizing concept of Empire as

biopolitical totality I view as an infrastructure – or a kind of structural ground that calls

attention to its own finitude or “limit;” the tain of its subjectivizing mirror – because their

project employs a two-fold method that plays one fold against the other: The first part of

their critique is a deconstruction of Empire that pinpoints its dangerous supplement in the

subject position of “the multitude,” comprised of everyone who lives in Empire and

whose multiple, heterogeneous desires are both the productive fuel upon which the

machinery of Empire depends, as well as its most dangerous element which must be

biopolitically contained and managed for Empire to maintain its integrity as a hegemonic
Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 2

system and to protect the illusion of its having “no outside.” The second part of Hardt’s

and Negri’s methodology, the more “positivistic” or ontological part, is their taking up

the discourse of Empire for its liberatory potential as the flawed, self-contradictory home

of the multitude. Together, these competing, yet unified strategies form an aporia that, for

me, invokes a kind of strategic reading practice – a reading of Empire that involves the

accorporation of Empire as the more anti-ontological, or “finite” form of

multitude/Empire. Empire as multitude is thus reduced to (or rather revealed to be) a

collection of multiple, heterogeneous, ever shifting desires and singularities with the

provisional, strategic collective aim of working through to the “end,” or finite limit, of

Empire.

One of the ways in which Hardt’s and Negri’s project achieves this (anti-)ontological

critique of late-globalization, I argue, is through their book’s bifurcated, aporetic

structure. For example, scattered throughout Empire and Multitude are short, italicized

sections at the end of the chapters which Imre Szeman and Nicholas Brown explain are

meant partly as an homage to Spinoza’s use of scholie in the Ethics. These “impassioned,

utopian bursts of highly charged language” (Brown and Szeman, 84) offset the more

deconstructive sections, offering alternative ways of reading the book. Another part of

this strategically schizophrenic structure is that imbedded in Empire’s and Multitude’s

very terms are what I call the spectral remainders of major critiques of power and

ontological unity such as Spinoza’s, Derrida’s, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s, Nietzsche’s,

Nancy’s, Agamben’s, and Butler’s, which are thereby both invoked and put

hauntologically at play in, through, and against each other as part of Hardt’s and Negri’s
Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 3

method. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus mainly on Hardt’s and Negri’s

spectral invocation of Nancy and Agamben as examples of this haunted method.

Hardt and Negri argue that with the shift to the new “turbocapitalist” context of late-

globalization, older modernist institutions designed around national and international

structures and containment strategies with which to order and manage their political

subjects, or “the people,” are over with. The new subject of Empire, for Hardt and Negri,

is managed and contained through the biopolitical production of human life itself, and

exists not so much within solid, defined political entities, but as so many shifting nodes

without central affiliation connected through virtual network systems of global

sovereignty. In short, the subject of Empire, for them, is less mediated and more

immanent. This is not to say that for Hardt and Negri, the nation and modernist

international institutions are no longer relevant, but rather that their functions and

efficacy as sovereign collectivities have dramatically changed, such that they can no

longer be seen in isolation from their nodal functioning in the wider biopolitical matrixes

of Empire.

While Hardt and Negri allow that with Empire’s new global form of sovereignty, “the

United States does indeed occupy a privileged position in Empire,” they argue,

nonetheless, that the U.S. “does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the

center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over” (Empire, xii). (Perhaps someone

should tell that to George Bush!) Instead, Hardt and Negri argue that “Empire establishes

no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a

decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the

entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid
Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 4

identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of

command” (Empire, xii-xiii). In their follow-up book to Empire called Multitude, Hardt

and Negri emphasize and expand upon the way Empire is comprised, not of “peoples” in

nationally territorialized regions, but of multiple, heterogeneous “nodes” interconnected

by “biopolitical network structures.”

One of the key historical examples that Hardt and Negri provide to demonstrate how

network structures work is the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle Washington where a well

organized multitude comprised of many different interests, walks of life, political, and

subjective affiliations came together – not against “America” or any other single nation –

but to protest the World Trade Organization and its neo-capitalist, neo-liberal policies.

Perhaps an even more dramatic example of the effects of Empire’s biopolitical network

structure, however, is the “global” nature of the “terror” threat that the Bush

administration saw itself faced with after the 9/11 attacks, and the “new kind of war” that

the Bush administration felt they had to wage in order to deal with this threat. As Bob

Woodward reports in his book Bush At War (2002), a “key component [of the war in

Afghanistan, which was staged in direct retaliation against al Qaeda for its attacks on

U.S. targets, said CIA Director George J. Tenet,] was to ‘use exceptional authorities to

detain al Qaeda operatives worldwide’,” and to “approve ‘snatch’ operations abroad, truly

exceptional power” (76). This strategy, Woodward goes on to report, was outlined in the

days following the 9/11 attacks in a CIA document called “the ‘Worldwide Attack

Matrix,’ which described covert operations in 80 countries either underway or that

[Tenet] was now recommending. […] It was stunning in its sweep – a secret global war

on terror” (78). Without an identifiable (meaning identifiably modernist state or

Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 5

“national”) enemy to target, the Bush administration, purportedly speaking on behalf of

the collective interests of “the people” of its nation, redefines the playing-field of

international conflict as, quote, “a monumental struggle between good and evil” (45).

These so-called “national” interests, however, as many critics including the linguist

Sandra Silberstein have pointed out, tend to construe the American “way of life” in

largely neo-capitalist, neo-liberal terms (i.e., the conflation of patriotism and

consumerism in post-9/11 American propaganda campaigns [Silberstein, 107-26]). This

conflation points to both “national” and supra-national sovereign interests that are

apparently driving U.S. foreign policy, an ambivalent source of sovereign power that

seems less national and more global in character. And just as the highly abstracted enemy

– terror itself – defies easy demarcation within national borders or by any one

ideological/political “center,” the Bush administration likewise broadens and abstracts its

own sovereign authority to encompass “the world,” a U.S. sovereign exceptionalism that

Bush sees as authorized by God himself.

The War on Terror is thus a war about ethics, and for Bush, a war in defense of a

certain infinite, idealized subject of universal humanity. As he later tells Woodward in

interview material, “there is a human condition that we must worry about in times of war.

There is a value system that cannot be compromised – God-given values. These aren’t

United States-created values. There are values of freedom and the human condition and

mothers loving their children. What’s very important as we articulate foreign policy

through our diplomacy and military action, is that it never look like we are creating – we

are the author of these values. ‘It leads to a larger question of your view about God.’ And

the lesson, he said, was, ‘We’re all God’s children’” (131; emphasis added). In other
Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 6

words, any attack on the United State and/or its “freedom” is, for Bush, necessarily also

an attack on God and on freedom in-itself.

Bush repeats over and over that he is defending “freedom” itself, and by inference, a

certain universal human subject of freedom. In Bush’s words, as transcribed by Bob

Woodward, “either you believe in freedom, and want to– and worry about the human

condition, or you don’t” (340). Much like Hegel’s paradoxical concept of an infinite,

universal spirit of human freedom to which we are all individually subject, George

Bush’s ethical rhetoric (and the leviathan-like “force of law” backing this rhetoric)

subjects the whole human race to a particular, finite concept of its own freedom – the end

of history that somehow justifies the means by which it must be defended – of which

Bush and his administration become the sole authors and arbiters; God’s “elected”

defenders of freedom itself.

Intriguingly, Hardt and Negri seem to invoke at least two key critiques of just such a

neo-Hegelian subject of freedom in their book Multitude with their concept of multitude

as comprised of singularities. “The multitude[, they write,] is composed of a set of

singularities – and by singularity here we mean a social subject whose difference cannot

be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different. The component parts of the

people [(“the people” of the older modernist national model)] are indifferent in their

unity; they become an identity by negating or setting aside their differences. The plural

singularities of the multitude thus stand in contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the

people” (99). The spectral remainder of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of singularity haunts

this passage, but in a distorted, or hauntologically “exorc-analyzed” way. That is partly

because Hardt’s and Negri’s term also invokes Giorgio Agamben’s concept of singularity
Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 7

which he lays out in The Coming Community (1993), a book translated by Michael Hardt

and obviously in dialogue with Nancy’s project.

For Nancy, singularity represents the beingness of a non-subject who lacks identity or

identifiable community. A community of singularities, for Nancy, is thus more accurately

a kind of immanent being-in-common that comes about despite one’s existence receding

from any essence of politics or community. Nancy proposes in his book The Inoperative

Community that “the thinking of community as essence – is in effect the closure of the

political. Such a thinking constitutes closure because it assigns to community a common

being, whereas community is a matter of something quite different, namely, of existence

inasmuch as it is in common, but without letting itself be absorbed into a common

substance” (xxxviii). In Nancy’s relentless pursuit of what he sees as the immanent

themes that doggedly haunt philosophy, such as “freedom” and “community,” he exhausts

these terms, enacting a kind of framing of the political that denies any infinite essence to

politics. In Christopher Fynsk’s words, “Nancy is attempting to expose what still speaks

in a term like ‘community’ when we assume the closure of the metaphysics of

subjectivity – any communion of the subject with itself, any accomplished self-presence

– and with it the closure of representation or signification[…] He is trying to work a

thought of difference, or a thought of finitude, into political terms that continue to speak

to us as imperatives despite their loss of philosophical meaning” (Inoperative

Community, Foreword, xi). In his book The Experience of Freedom, Nancy explains that

“freedom” is ex-istence, which “signifies simply the freedom of being, that is, the infinite

inessentiality of its being-finite, which delivers it to the singularity wherein it is ‘itself’”

(14). Thus, far from President Bush’s neo-Hegelian, universalist notion of freedom
Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 8

which implies an infinite, and definite human subject of freedom, Hardt’s and Negri’s

invocation of Nancy’s equally all-encompassing notion of freedom nonetheless denies

essences or a defined political existence with which to map human subjectivity.

But this is not quite Hardt’s and Negri’s usage of the term singularity, even though the

specter of Nancy’s concept is certainly invoked and put into dialogue with their more

ontological, utopic concept of the multitude. And Hardt’s and Negri’s term is certainly

meant to be in the spirit of Nancy’s quasi-Marxist political critique of state politics,

which brings us to the second remainder at play in their concept: Giorgio Agamben’s

(re)thinking of Nancy’s concept of singularity in The Coming Community.

Whereas Nancy sees the realization of being-in-common only in the “ecstatic”

moments of loss (of community) or birth, moments that, for him, come closest to

articulating the inarticulability of singularity, Giorgio Agamben rethinks singularity in

what Antonio Negri sees as more “positivist,” strategically utopic, quasi-ontological

terms. Similar to Nancy’s concept, Agamben views singularity as “neither apathy nor

promiscuity nor resignation. These pure singularities communicate only in the empty

space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by any identity. They

are expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself” (10-11). What is

slightly different here from Nancy’s project is the strategic force of the linguistic

“example,” which, for Agamben, holds the political potential for resistant utopic politics.

Thus, through the example, singularity becomes “whatever singularity, which wants to

appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and

every condition of belonging, [and] is [therefore] the principal enemy of the State.

Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be
Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 9

a Tiananmen, and sooner or later, the tanks will appear” (87). Whatever being – simply,

the thing with all its properties, none of which, however, constituting difference

(Agamben 19) – reclaims a politics of being-in-common without actually “being”

anything through the strategic linguistic ontology of the example – the banner, or

“multitude” under which these singularities-in-common can congregate against the

state’s sovereign exception over political association, over its ontological demarcation of

what counts and doesn’t count as viable human life itself.

Thus, through Hardt’s and Negri’s spectral juxtaposition of Nancy’s and Agamben’s

concepts of singularity which are set at play with, in, and against their own singular

subject of multitude, this one term, in Hardt’s and Negri’s text, contains within it the

aporetic, dual structure of deconstructive critique set against utopic, ontological politics

that characterizes their project. The sovereign exception over what counts as

biopolitically viable human life, which Hardt and Negri invoke as a symptom of Empire

through the specter of Agamben who haunts their concept of singularity, is nowhere more

clearly demonstrated than in George W. Bush’s 2005 innaugural address in which he

melds political (or Wilsonian) idealism (read moralism) and political realism as

unproblematically one-and-the-same. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs

are now one” Bush proclaims in that address. He goes on to assert that the “survival of

liberty” in the U.S. “increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” He

then takes on a threatening tone, warning that the U.S. “will persistently clarify the

choice before every ruler and every nation: the moral choice between oppression, which

is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right” (Bush 2005, n.p.). The

presupposition that the moral values of freedom and liberty as construed by U.S. law and
Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 10

enforced by its sovereign exception, or “force of law,” are “eternal,” God-given moral

imperatives and thus universally applicable to the rest of global humanity lends Bush’s

Global War on Terror the self-authorizing ethical alibi of divine authority. But this

(almost) totalizing biopolitical map of universal collective consciousness that Bush’s

speech lays out with which to chart his Global War on Terror, Hardt’s and Negri’s project

remind us, is riven with singularities and irredeemably haunted by the spectral

remainders of former Empire’s that have already passed through to the other side of their

own hegemonic finitude.

Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 11

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Don Moore, PhD Candidate, McMaster University MOORE 12

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