The Multitude as the Grammatical Subject of Politics

In this paper I will focus on the concept of the multitude as put forward by the philosophers Agamben, Negri and Virno in the debate on democracy and forms of rule. Starting from the Italian revolutionary movement of the 70s these thinkers all formulate an ethical critique of modern politics and theory.
Since the concept of the multitude was launched with the publication in 1981 of his book on Spinoza, it is Negri who takes up a key position, delineating an alternative modernity that begins with Machiavelli, is corroborated by Spinoza and leads to and beyond Marx. He links criticism and resistance to the production of collective subjectivity. He adopts the perspective of the multitude in light of a radical democracy. Negri talks about love as constituent power and common forms based on a multiplicity of differences rather than identity. Within Spinoza's paradigm he applies the procedure of the reversal, and underlines the role of the imagination, the antagonism between the power of resistance and the institutional power, the priority of the relationship on the terms. All this fits with a conception of time and causation as bidirectional network structures.
In Agamben and Virno we see how attention shifts towards art and language practice. Agamben returns to the principles: he challenges teleological thinking, probes the paradigmatic analogical method, which is based on the multiplicity of particularities. He discovers the concept of the multitude as the grammatical subject of politics in the early renaissance and in Dante's writings. Virno explores applications of the teleological view, especially processes of labor. He exploits the concept of transduction and the individuation process, looks for the multitude in the ambiguous, undefined nature of human beings, and in the phenomenology of current forms of labor, speech and life.