For more than six months, dozens of Israelis and hundreds of Palestinians have been demonstrating every weekend against the construction of the separation fence near the West Bank village of Bil'in. These demonstrations, defined by participants as peaceful, frequently turn into violent clashes with the Border Police's Company 22, assigned to disperse the demonstrations.
An investigation by Haaretz has found that policemen from that company have made false accusations against demonstrators and even made arrests on the basis of those accusations. Palestinians thus detained can be held for eight days before being brought before a judge.

House Beats Back Challenges to Patriot Act
By Eric Lichtblau
The New York Times

Friday 22 July 2005

Washington - The House voted Thursday to extend permanently virtually all the major antiterrorism provisions of the USA Patriot Act after beating back efforts by Democrats and some Republicans to impose new restrictions on the government's power to eavesdrop, conduct secret searches and demand library records.

The legislation, approved 257 to 171, would make permanent 14 of the 16 provisions in the law that were set to expire at the end of this year. The remaining two provisions - giving the government the power to demand business and library records and to conduct roving wiretaps - would have to be reconsidered by Congress in 10 years.

The House version of the legislation essentially leaves intact many of the central powers of the antiterrorism act that critics had sought to scale back, setting the stage for what could be difficult negotiations with the Senate, which is considering several very different bills to extend the government's counterterrorism powers under the act.

"Transparency To Exodus"
Brian Holmes

On Political Process in the Mediated Democracies

"What is it that separates the left from the right?... Fundamentally, it is nothing but a processual calling, a processual passion." — Felix Guattari [1]
In October of 1968, in Rosario, Argentina, the artist Graciela Carnevale invited visitors to what would be the final opening of a "Cycle of Experimental Art" held in a storefront space in the city. Her contribution to the series consisted in luring the public inside, then slipping out to lock the door and enclose the crowd within the gallery. The visitors became the material of a social artwork. The question was: How would they react to this imprisonment? Who would finally shatter the glass to release the captives from the trap? "Through an act of aggression, the work tends to provoke the spectator to a heightened consciousness of the power whereby violence is exerted in the everyday world," wrote the artist. "On a daily basis we passively submit, through fear, connivance and complicity, to all the degrees of violence, from the most subtle and degrading violence that coerces our thinking via communications media broadcasting false contents provided by their owners, to the most provocative and scandalous violence exerted on a student's life." [2] In the event, the public submitted. After an hour, the blow that finally shattered the glass came from outside. A photograph shows a woman crouching down to exit through a jagged hole in the window.
At the same time, Graciela Carnevale was also part of the project known as Tucuman Arde, or "Tucuman is Burning" — an experimental process of information analysis, multimedia reportage and artistic display, involving some thirty artists in an attempt to expose the conditions of exploitation, expropriation and impoverishment in an Argentinean province. The participants, who had drawn their conclusions from the most advanced theoretical positions and technical experiments of the time, chose to break with the existing institutions in the hope of infiltrating the national information system and contributing directly to the political struggle against the Ongan — a dictatorship. Tucuman Arde is increasingly recognized as a genealogical departure point for the kinds of media activism practiced today.[3] But can we not also read Carnevale's enclosure piece as an allegory of the way that social classes are transformed under conditions of urgency?

The $256 Question

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted July 25, 2005.
http://www.alternet.org/story/23601/

By prosecuting Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, is the Justice Department
trying to clamp a lid on political art or looking to chalk up a win by
exploiting fears of bioterrorism?

by Stan Cox

S. marcescens: dangerous bacteria or harmless art material?

The way William Hochul sees it, the situation couldn't be simpler: "We take
an oath to follow the Constitution and enforce the law. The law says you
can't acquire any property by fraud -- whether it's a gun or an automobile
or something biological, it doesn't matter."

As an assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, based in
Buffalo, Hochul is leading the prosecution of Steven Kurtz and Robert
Ferrell, who were indicted a little over a year ago for mail and wire fraud.
Kurtz, a professor of art at the University of Buffalo and co-founder of the
internationally acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), is accused of
obtaining bacterial cultures illegally through the mail.

Ferrell, a geneticist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh,
allegedly provided Kurtz the organisms for use in an artwork, rather than
using them in his own research, thereby violating an agreement he had signed
when he purchased the cultures for $256 from the American Type Culture
Collection (ATCC).

Jacques Rancière's
ELEVEN THESES ON POLITICS
1. Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics must be defined by itself, as a specific way of acting put into practice by a particular kind of subject and deriving from a particular kind of rationality. It is the political relationship which makes it possible to conceive of the political subject, not the reverse.
2. What is peculiar to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in opposites. Politics is a paradoxical type of action.
3. Politics is a specific rupture of the logic of the arkhe. For it does not simply presuppose the rupture of the "normal" distribution of positions between the one who exercises a power and the one who undergoes it, but also a rupture in the idea of dispositions that make people "suitable" for these positions.
4. Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a rupture of the logic of the arkhe, in other words, of the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it, it is the regime of politics as a form of relationship defining a specific subject.
5. The people which is the subject of democracy, and so the matricial subject of politics, is not the collection of members of the community or the labouring class of the population. It is the supplementary part in relation to any counting of the parts of the population which makes it possible to identify the count of the uncounted with the whole of the community.
6. The essence of politics is the action of supplementary subjects inscribed as surplus in relation to any count of the parts of a society.
7. If politics is the outline of a vanishing difference with the distribution of social parts and shares, then it follows that its existence is in no way necessary, but that it happens as an always provisional accident in the history of forms of domination. It follows from this also that the essential object of political litigation is the very existence of politics.
8. Politics is specifically opposed to the police. The police is a partition (partage) of the perceptible whose principle is the absence of void and of supplement.
9. The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to get the world of its subjects and its operations to be seen. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in a single one.
10. Inasmuch as it is characteristic of political philosophy to ground political action in a specific mode of being, so it is characteristic of political philosophy to efface the litigation which is constitutive of politics. It is in the very description of the world of politics that philosophy effects this effacement. Moreover, its effectiveness is perpetuated right down to non philosophical or anti-philosophical descriptions of this world.
11. The "end of politics" and the "return of politics" are two complementary ways of cancelling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the social and a state of state apparatuses. Consensus is the vulgar name for this cancellation.

Anti-Oedipus – Thirty Years On
(Between Art and Politics)
Éric Alliez

‘A kind of entrance into politics took place for me in May 68…’
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

‘One must not look for a ‘philosophy’ amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel. I think that Anti-Oedipus can best be read as an ‘art’. (...) Questions that are less concerned with why this or that than with how to proceed. How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? (...) Anti-Oedipusis a book of ethics…’
Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus

1

This title was suggested to me some time ago by my best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: Alain Badiou. It was originally intended for a lecture I was to deliver under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Philosophy which Badiou recently set up at the École Normale Supérieure. The idea was to use the occasion to pursue our dispute – or chicane, to use a favourite expression of his – a dispute instigated by the publication in 1997 of Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being.

Let it be noted in passing that this dispute prolonged a problematic that I had previously examined in a book-intervention entitled Of the Impossibility of Phenomenology: On Contemporary French Philosophy, first published in 1994. The intervention was aimed at the institutional partition of the philosophical world into two blocs, phenomenological and analytic, as well as against the repercussions of this division within France. In the book I showed that, ever since Husserl, this partition has been governed by an axiom of complementarity between the ‘phenomenology’ of the failure of logical formalism and the ‘analysis’ of the collapse of intentionality, in its theological reality as well as its philosophical impossibility. On this basis, I argued that the philosophical field with a grip on our present – in other words, contemporary philosophy as a political ontology of the present –could be, and must be, thought starting from the idea of a maximal ontological tension between Deleuze and Badiou. In my view, Deleuze and Badiou constitute the extreme polarities, not only of the contemporary domain of French philosophy, but perhaps of the real of thought as such, to the extent that thought, in accordance with the plurality of all its modalities, has no other choice today than to counter the pseudo-democracy of Empire with a materialist necessity that can no longer be elaborated except in terms of singularities and multiplicities. These are notions that our two philosophers entrust with absolutely antagonistic missions, renegotiating (remettant en jeu) the theoretical and practical sense of the very idea of materialism.

Reflections on the Case by the U.S. Justice Department against Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell
by Claire Pentecost[1]

Many people have asked us why the Justice Department is pursuing this case.

Meaning, when the Buffalo Health Department affirmed that there was nothing dangerous in the Kurtz home and that Hope Kurtz died of natural causes, when the FBI saw that the possession of scientific equipment and materials in Kurtz's home studio was completely consistent with his practice as an artist and that his practice has a long, public and institutionally validated record, then, why didn't they drop the case? When it became clear even through the Grand Jury investigation that this was not a case of bioterrorism, why did they pursue it? Couldn't they see that this is art?

As often as not the questioner answers their own question, saying it must be a matter of saving face: the Justice Department now has to justify the time and money they spent on this case in the first few weeks and has to answer to the publicity the case has attracted.

An overview of prosecutions since 9/11 originating with suspicion of terrorism suggests that the Department has a different logic of evaluating its results than might first be apparent to the public. And "saving face" is not at the top of the list.

We have posted most of the stories on the case, and this one slipped through the cracks, so I thought it is good to have online.
-rg

Kurtz views his prosecution as 'fanaticism'
By DAN HERBECK
News Staff Reporter
5/18/2005

Steven J. Kurtz contended Tuesday that "fanaticism" and "neo-McCarthyism" in the federal government are behind efforts to prosecute him for obtaining bacterial agents through the mail.

The University at Buffalo art professor and artist spoke to reporters for the first time about the case after legal arguments were heard by a federal magistrate judge.

While not discussing the specifics of his case, Kurtz said he believes that the charges filed against him last year were part of a Bush administration campaign to keep artists from protesting government policies.

"There's no doubt that this is a politically motivated case, to my mind," said Kurtz, 47. "Look back to the tendencies of the government and the Department of Justice. . . . There's fanaticism in the air.

"I think we're in a very unfortunate moment now in U.S. history. A form of neo-McCarthyism has made a comeback. . . . We're going to see a whole host of politically motivated trials which have nothing to do with crime but everything to do with artistic expression."

After a probe that began when police were called to his home following his wife's death, Kurtz was indicted last June on felony charges of mail and wire fraud. He is accused of working with a Pittsburgh genetic researcher to obtain bacteria for an art exhibit protesting government policies on genetic engineering.

Homo SACER AS THE OBJECT OF THE DISCOURSE OF THE UNIVERSITY
09/25/2003

by Slavoj Zizek

L'envers de la psychanalyse, Seminar XVII (1969-1970) on the four discourses, is Lacan's response to the events of 1968 - its premise is best captured as his reversal of the well-known anti-structuralist graffiti from the Paris walls of 1968 "Structures do not walk on the streets!" - if anything, this Seminar endeavors to demonstrate how structures DO walk on the streets, i.e. how structural shifts CAN account for the social outbursts like that of the 1968. Instead of the one symbolic Order with its set of a priori rules which guarantee social cohesion, we get the matrix of the passages from one to another discourse: Lacan's interest is focused on the passage from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of University as the hegemonic discourse in contemporary society. No wonder that the revolt was located at the universities: as such, it merely signaled the shift to the new forms of domination in which the scientific discourse serves legitimizes the relations of domination. Lacan's underlying premise is sceptic-conservative - Lacan's diagnosis is best captured by his famous retort to the student revolutionaries: "As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!" This passage can also be conceived in more general terms, as the passage from the prerevolutionary ancien regime to the postrevolutionary new Master who does not want to admit that he is one, but proposes himself as a mere "servant" of the People — in Nietzsche's terms, it is simply the passage from Master's ethics to slave morality, and this fact, perhaps, enables us a new approach to Nietzsche: when Nietzsche scornfully dismisses "slave morality," he is not attacking lower classes as such, but, rather, the new masters who are no longer ready to assume the title of the Master - "slave" is Nietzsche's term for a fake master. — How, then, more closely, are we to read the university discourse?

The university discourse is enunciated from the position of "neutral" Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real (say, in the case of pedagogical knowledge, the "raw, uncultivated child"), turning it into the subject ($). The "truth" of the university discourse, hidden beneath the bar, of course, is power, i.e. the Master-Signifier: the constitutive lie of the university discourse is that it disavows its performative dimension, presenting what effectively amounts to a political decision based on power as a simple insight into the factual state of things. What one should avoid here is the Foucauldian misreading: the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity which arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. "Production" (the fourth term in the matrix of discourses) does not stand simply for the result of the discursive operation, but rather for its "indivisible remainder," for the excess which resists being included in the discursive network, i.e. for what the discourse itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart. Perhaps the exemplary case of the Master's position which underlies the university discourse is the way in which medical discourse functions in our everyday lives: at the surface level, we are dealing with pure objective knowledge which desubjectivizes the subject-patient, reducing him to an object of research, of diagnosis and treatment; however, beneath it, one can easily discern a worried hystericized subject, obsessed with anxiety, addressing the doctor as his Master and asking for reassurance from him. At a more common level, suffice it to recall the market expert who advocates strong budgetary measures (cutting welfare expenses, etc.) as a necessity imposed by his neutral expertise devoid of any ideological biases: what he conceals is the series of power-relations (from the active role of state apparatuses to ideological beliefs) which sustain the "neutral" functioning of the market mechanism.

Tariq Ali on London Bombings

http://203.15.102.140/elg/f110010995.mp3

Also this article from:

Tariq Ali on politics and the bombs

People on a peace vigil in London last week hold up their hands to show there is no blood on them (Pic: Jess Hurd/reportdigital.co.uk)

In the wake of the attacks in London, veteran anti-war activist Tariq Ali spoke on Iraq, Vietnam, terrorism and resistance
Dear friends, we meet in sad times. Before I start talking about the subject of this evening’s meeting, I think it’s important to speak a few words about what we’re living through at the moment.

What we’re living through is an attack, by a group of terrorists, on ordinary working people in London. It is not behaviour that anyone on the left can support.

But why did these attacks happen? That is the key question which the entire media and the entire political class in this country is trying to ignore. They are trying to ignore it because the government and the main opposition party know perfectly well why it happened. They have a guilty conscience.

It happened, without any doubt, because Tony Blair decided to lock himself in a coital embrace with the US president, from which he could not be easily dislodged. He decided to take a sceptical public into a war it did not support.

We have been doing our best to post some updates and relevant articles on the unfolding situation in Darfur, this article does not connect all the dots, but does attempt to place the genocide's causes right into the heart of the drive for profit and oil, rather than ethnic/religious divisions.
-rg

Blood, Ink, and Oil: the Case of Darfur
by David Morse

The ink is scarcely dry on oil deals signed between the Islamist dictatorship that rules Sudan from the northern capital, Khartoum, and an eager bevy of oil companies from China, India, Japan, and Britain - even as the genocide continues full tilt in the western region known as Darfur. Every new contract signed in Khartoum makes it clearer that this genocide is fueled by the world's unquenchable thirst for petroleum.
Oil rigs are now drilling on land seized from black African farmers - who have been killed, raped, and driven off their land by their own government through its proxy militias, known as Janjaweed, in a campaign of ethnic cleansing now in its third year.

The Islamist regime of Lt. General Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir bears primary responsibility for the slaughter. Khartoum's claims that it can't control the Janjaweed are refuted by United Nations observers and by human rights organizations, as are Bashir's denials that rape of women and children is used systematically to intimidate and demoralize black farmers and prevent them from returning to their ruined villages. Khartoum's continuing slaughter of its own people should make it a pariah among nations.

New Left Review 33, May-June 2005

Meditation on the meaning of the No in the 2005 Euro-referendum as anti-consensual response to the authorities’ directive, ‘Say yes to yes’. The reversal of representative institutions to function from the top down, and capture of the hostage-citizenry by the state.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

HOLY EUROPE

The intriguing thing about the trompe l’oeuil Euro referendum is the No that lies beyond the official No; beyond political reason. This is the No that resists. There must be something very dangerous about it to have mobilized all the authorities so determinedly behind the Yes. Such defensive panic is a sure sign of a corpse in the wardrobe.

This No is clearly an instinctive reaction to the ultimatum that the referendum has been from the start. A reaction to the complacent coalition around an infallible, universal Holy Europe. A reaction to the Yes as a categorical imperative whose backers did not dream for a moment that it might be seen as a challenge, and a challenge to be met. It does not therefore say No to Europe, it says No to the unquestionable Yes.

Rene -- The Future of Europe?

ed. note:
These three articles outline two "rising stars" in European politics, in Germany and France respectively. Hard to imagine that given the popular resistance to the war in both those countries, what may follow from the debacle in Iraq, the continued fears over America's unilateralism are two candidates that are characterized as "pro-America."

Contents:
0. Rising stars plan Franco-German strategy
1. Transcript of Angela Merkel interview
2. The talented Mr Sarkozy

Biopolitics/Bioeconomics : a politics of multiplicity
par Maurizio Lazzarato
Mise en ligne le samedi 9 juillet 2005

We have never understood the word of liberalism as much as during the referendum campaign. However, have these passionate debates contributed to make the logic of liberalism intelligible ? According to the two courses by Michel Foucault, recently published as “Security, Territory, Population” and “The Birth of Biopolitics”, this is dubious.

These books trace a genealogy and a history of liberalism and effectively present a way of reading capitalism which differs from Marxism, from political philosophy and from political economy at once. In this genealogy of liberalism, I will concentrate on the analysis of the relation between the economy and politics and on the question of labour developed by the French philosopher. The remarkable novelty introduced by Foucault in the history of capitalism since its origins, is the following : the problem that arises from the relation between politics and the economy is resolved by techniques and dispositifs that come from neither. This “outside”, this “other” must be interrogated. The functioning, the efficacy and the force of politics and the economy, as we all know today, are not derived from forms of rationality that are internal to these logics, but from a rationality that is exterior and that Foucault names “the government of men”. Government is a “human technology” that the modern State has inherited from the Christian pastoral technique (a specific technique that is absent from the Roman and Greek traditions) and liberalism has adapted it, changed it and enriched it by turning it from a government of souls into a government of men !). To govern means to ask the question of how to conduct the conduct of others. To govern is to exercise an action on possible actions. To govern means to act upon subjects who ought to be considered free.

For a full archive of the memos, please visit:

http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

Unnamed and Unnoticed

Iraqi Casualties
By Judith Coburn
How many Iraqis have died in our war in their country? Is there a better symbol of how the war for Iraq has already been lost than our ignorance about the cost of the war to Iraqis?

"Cost of the war": a cliché to normalize the carnage, like the anaesthetizing term "collateral damage" and that new semantic horror, "torture lite." And yet the "cost of the war" report, by now a hackneyed convention of American journalism, includes only American casualties -- no Iraqis -- itself a violation of the American mainstream media's own professed commitment to "objectivity." Three years of "anniversary" articles in the American media adding up the so-called "cost of the war" in Iraq have focused exclusively on Americans killed, American dollars spent, American hardware destroyed, with barely a mention of the Iraqi dead as part of that "cost."

The dead are counted. But they are Americans. The names are named. But they are Americans. The names and numbers of the dead are intoned aloud or their photographs papered on media "walls" and they are always only American.

Gate to nowhere
By Amira Hass

For the past two months and more, 7,500 olive saplings ready for
planting have lain scattered about the village of Qafin, in the
northwest area of the West Bank. Al Ahali, an association from
Nazareth, donated the trees as part of an effort to help
Palestinian farmers who have been adversely affected by the
separation fence. The saplings are growing, their roots have begun
to stretch their tight nylon wrapping, and the budding leaves have
begun to go dry, but the unlucky villagers cannot plant them. We
went there to find out why.

Most of the village's farmland - 5,000 of the 8,200 dunams (1,250
of 2,050 acres) - is on the opposite side of the separation fence
from their homes. According to the calculation of Tawfiq Harsha,
the head of the local council, about 100,000 trees, mostly olive,
are still growing in this area, after 12,600 were uprooted during
the building of the fence. On the land between the groves people
grew wheat, tobacco, watermelons and okra - crops that require
daily care.

1. The Price of Occupation by Tariq Ali
2. The Reality of This Barbaric Bombing by Robert Fisk
3. Over There by William Rivers Pitt

The Price of Occupation
By Tariq Ali
The Guardian UK

Friday 08 July 2005

During the last phase of the Troubles, the IRA targeted mainland
Britain: it came close to blowing up Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet
in Brighton. Some years later a missile was fired at No 10. London's
financial quarter was also targeted. There was no secret as to the
identity of the organization that carried out the hits or its demands.
And all this happened despite the various Prevention of Terrorism Acts
passed by the Commons.

The bombers who targeted London yesterday are anonymous. It is
assumed that those who carried out these attacks are linked to
al-Qaida. We simply do not know. Al-Qaida is not the only terrorist
group in existence. It has rivals within the Muslim diaspora. But it
is safe to assume that the cause of these bombs is the unstinting
support given by New Labour and its prime minister to the US wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.

Make for the Boondocks

Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri · Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp, London Review of book

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n09/nair01...
by Tom Nairn

Better to wonder if ten thousand angels Could waltz on the head of a pin And not feel crowded than to wonder if now’s the time for the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire To teach the Serbs a lesson they’ll never forget For shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo

Carl Dennis, ‘World History’1

The cover of Multitude invites bookshop browsers not just to read it, but to ‘Join the many. Join the Empowered.’ The missionary tone is underlined by Naomi Klein’s blurb - ‘inspiring’ - and a frisson added by the book’s appearance : a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers that go further are reminded that this book succeeds Empire (2000), by the same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have followed the Cold War - not the American Empire, but a wider settlement of which US supremacy was just one part. This imperium has generated global resistance, which all purchasers are now invited to approve, in the name of democracy.

Hardt and Negri’s multitude should not be confused with the working class, or any ethnic and national group. It seems to mean humanity in general - ‘The multitude is many-coloured, like Joseph’s magical coat,’ but the coat hides an increasingly common will, summed up by the authors as ‘democracy’. Readers are warned that the book’s argument may not be ‘immediately clear’ and are exhorted to be patient, for Multitude is ‘a mosaic from which the general design gradually emerges’. Before turning to that design, it’s important to stress how welcome this expansiveness is. In a venture like this, social anthropology and philosophy are as important as economics or conventional international relations. As Gopal Balakrishnan wrote in his review of Empire in New Left Review, it seems apposite to cite Virgil : ‘The final age that the oracle foretold has arrived ; the great order of the centuries is born again.’