"The Collaborator and the Multitude:

An Interview with Michael Hardt"

Caleb Smith and Enrico Minardi, the minnesota review

A major event in political and critical theory, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (Harvard, 2000) turned orthodox thinking about imperialism around, proposing a decentered global network and redescribing capital, in the poststructuralist terms of Deleuze and Guattari, as a dynamic pattern of breaks and flows. The book is one fruit of the continuing collaboration of Hardt, a literature professor at Duke, and Negri, an Italian radical theorist; previously they co-authored Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minnesota, 1994) and most recently they have written Multitude (Penguin, 2004), which develops a concept of cooperative resistance to the reimagined global order as an alternative to the idea of national liberation.

Before joining the faculty at Duke, Michael Hardt did his graduate work at the University of Washington. He is also the author of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minnesota, 1993) and numerous pieces of political journalism and criticism. In addition, he has translated Negri’s The Savage Anomaly (Minnesota, 1991) and coedited Radical Thought in Italy (with Paolo Virno; Minnesota, 1996) and The Jameson Reader (with Kathi Weeks; Blackwell, 2000). Relevant to this interview, see also Michael Hardt's essay "Prison Time" in the Yale Review 91 (1997): 64-79. This interview took place on 5 March 2004 in Hardt’s office at Duke. It was conducted by Caleb Smith, a doctoral student in English at Duke, and Enrico Minardi, a lecturer in Romance Studies.

Smith: Most people will know you as Antonio Negri's collaborator in the authorship of Empire. Your new project, again with Negri, grows out of that book and the promises made in its final chapters. Did you have the sense from the beginning that Empire was unfinished?

Financial Times commentary writes

Time to consider Iraq withdrawal

September 10 2004

This week a macabre milestone was passed in Iraq. More than 1,000 American soldiers have now been killed since the US-led invasion of the country began nearly 18 months ago. The overwhelming majority lost their lives after President George W. Bush declared major combat operations over in his now infamous "Mission Accomplished" photo-opportunity in May last year.

In that time, an unknown number of mostly civilian Iraqis, certainly not less than 10,000 and possibly three times that number, have perished, and hundreds more are dying each week. After an invasion and occupation that promised them freedom, Iraqis have seen their security evaporate, their state smashed and their country fragment into a lawless archipelago ruled by militias, bandits and kidnappers.

Keith Wigdor writes:

"Surrealism in 2004"

Keith Wigdor

My name is Keith Wigdor and I am a Surrealist! Surrealism is a movement that involves all forms of mental activity intended to destroy logic. There is no orthodox tradition when it comes to a Revolution of the Mind, an overwhelming desire to embrace chance, and contempt against hypocrisy most of all! There are no leaders here, there exists no groups, no closed doors. There exists the need to free humanity from its own predispositions toward conformity and enslavement to thought control, to eliminate all rational states of mind, to overcome subordination to the social order and to exorcise all the demons of tradition from one's life.

An anonymous coward writes:

"Eye for an Eye:

Bush Braining Storms"

President Bush addressed the nation today from the oval office, “My fellow Americans, due to the grave threat posed by future hurricanes like Charlie and Frances, I have asked Congress to declare war on hurricanes and they have done so.”

The move comes as a surprise to many. A senior administration official familiar with the matter said, “We had no choice. We face a canny enemy. Hurricane Frances targeted Florida and Ohio and appears to be an attempt to alter the result of November's election.”

Anonymous Comrade submits:

Wolfowitz Corrupts Directive Regulating Political Activity by Military

Department of Defense directive 1344.10 regulates political activity on the part of active-duty military personnel. On August 2, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, amended directive 1344.10.

A comparison of the previous and revised versions of 1344.10 can be found on the Daily KOS, a blog frequented by Democratic Party activists and professionals/operatives:

More on Active Duty Military Attending the RNC

Additional Daily KOS commentary and discussion

"Depleted Uranium:

Dirty Bombs, Dirty Missiles, Dirty Bullets"

Leuren Moret, SF BayView.com

“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” — Henry Kissinger, quoted in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam”

Vietnam was a chemical war for oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia have been permanently contaminated with radiation.

"9/11: The Day the World Ended, Three Years On"

John Chuckman

A lot can happen in three years.

In the United States since 9/11, about 4,000 children died from child abuse and neglect; in more than 80 percent of cases, parents were the perpetrators. About 36,000 Americans died from unnecessary surgery. Another 21,000 died from medication errors in hospitals, along with another 60,000 from other errors in hospitals. Adverse reactions to prescription drugs killed about 100,000. Roughly 10,000 Americans died from accidental drowning. About 2,100 died from bicycle accidents. Homicidal Americans killing other Americans took another roughly 60,000 lives. Suicide took more than 90,000. Traffic deaths amounted to well over 120,000.

Rob Eshelman writes:

"American Lawyer Finds New Evidence of Recent Torture in Iraq"
Lisa Ashkenaz Croke, The New Standard

August 30 — While the latest reports investigating the widely condemned events at Abu Ghraib prison attempt to close the book on the Pentagon's culpability with a somber critique, new evidence gathered for a class action lawsuit filed against two US-based private contractors could prove that the scandal at Abu Ghraib was far from an isolated series of incidents perpetrated by a few rowdy "bad apples" working the night shift during Ramadan.

hydrarchist writes: this article is really about p2p power and bit torrent. Jo ta ke!

Must-Download TV:
The Latest Developments in TV-Show-Trading Technology Mean You Don't Need
TiVo To Watch What You Want, When You Want

Farhad Manjoo

When the Federal Communications
Commission gave its blessing on Aug. 4 to a new TiVo service that Hollywood has opposed, the
decision was widely hailed as a triumph for techies. The news was both
unexpected and unlikely -- these days, government officials rarely move
against the wishes of giant media companies.

The Trouble With Electing Caesar

America's campaign for Emperor is becoming nasty.

What shameful accusations are being tossed around: an ambitious, privileged young John Kerry, who spent a brief stint in Vietnam beefing up the hero section of his resume, never actually did some of the things he claims or at least didn't do them under the circumstances he claims. Since his heroic deeds included chasing after a wounded man and shooting him in the back and skippering a machine gun-mounted speed boat that ran up and down rivers shooting peasants desperate enough to appear in their own fields, there is reason for concern.