The Multitudo According to Negri: On the Disarticulation of Ontology and History

This article focuses on the concept of the multitude, especially as it appears in the earlier work of Negri on Spinoza. In Negri's reading the multitude coincides with the collective plane, forming the multitudinis, potentia that founds the political, recreating it instant by instant. The potentia multitidinis founds the power, but at the same time is a separate reality which lives in the space produced by the disarticulation of ontology and history. The constitutive praxis of the multitude is thus in an ontological present but is not in the history. This disarticulation of ontology and history depends on Negri's misreading of multitudo as a present, a fullness, whereas it is a complex network of relations, a textura in Lucretius's sense. © 2014 Association for Economic and Social Analysis.