Giorgio Agamben—Hardt and Negri: Revolutionary Rupture and Absolute Democracy

Giorgio Agamben and Hardt and Negri converge on the instability built into power but diverge over what political emancipation would require. Agamben’s hope is for a messianic rupture with the bond between law and violence; Hardt and Negri envision resistance opening onto absolute democracy, where the multitude rules directly. The book distinguishes these projects by asking whether a break would merely reverse the existing order or reach a genuinely unmediated Otherness.

Shared Problem: Power and Its Contradictions

Both positions begin from the structural inconsistency of power. For Agamben, the central problem is the vicious circle joining legal authority—the rule of law—to violence. Power is not a stable framework that can simply be accepted or occupied: its authority is entangled with the force that establishes and sustains it. The political question is whether that circle can be broken rather than managed from within.

The book’s wider account of the Hegelian move helps clarify the stakes of this disagreement. A contradiction need not be overcome by restoring a complete reality beyond it; the gap may belong to reality itself. On this account, merely reversing the sides of an opposition does not necessarily escape its structure. That distinction informs the book’s contrast between Agamben’s hoped-for rupture and Hardt and Negri’s projected transformation.

Agamben: A Messianic Break

Agamben’s account of redemption is presented through a theological example drawn from Saint Thomas Aquinas: the souls of unbaptized infants who die without knowing either sin or God. Because they have committed no sin, their punishment is not an affliction like the suffering of hell, but deprivation—the absence of the vision of God. Yet they do not feel that absence, since they do not know they are deprived of the supreme good. What appears to be punishment thus becomes a kind of natural joy: they persist in divine abandon without pain.

For Agamben, this condition models a life that has left the world of guilt and justice behind. The book characterizes his messianic hope as a radical break with the law-and-violence circle, not a transfer of authority to a new bearer. The imagined life after judgment is described as simply human life. Agamben’s political horizon therefore points toward a leap into an Otherness not mediated by the existing order.

Hardt and Negri: Resistance and Absolute Democracy

Hardt and Negri also look beyond the established order. They understand resistance to power as preparing the ground for a leap into absolute democracy, in which the multitude rules itself directly. In that projected condition, tensions would be resolved and freedom would unfold in continuing self-proliferation. The appeal of the vision lies in its promise that resistance can open a passage from the present structure of power to collective self-rule.

The book nevertheless treats this leap as a determinate negation. In its account, the envisioned transformation formally reverses the existing arrangement and frees potentials developed within global capitalism, which is already described as a kind of communism-in-itself. Hardt and Negri’s alternative thus remains connected to capacities produced by the order it opposes, rather than breaking into an entirely unmediated outside.

The Political Difference

The contrast is not that Agamben opposes resistance while Hardt and Negri endorse it. Both make a passage beyond the present order central to their political hopes. Their difference concerns what such a passage can achieve: Hardt and Negri anticipate the release and collective use of potentials formed within global capitalism, whereas Agamben’s messianic model seeks a more radical exit from guilt, justice, and the law’s entanglement with violence.

The book consequently places Agamben closer, despite his hostility toward Theodor W. Adorno, to the utopian longing for the wholly Other associated with Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Against Hardt and Negri’s formal reversal, Agamben’s horizon suggests a redemptive leap into nonmediated Otherness. The comparison turns on a precise political test: whether emancipation completes possibilities immanent to the existing order or breaks with the structure that made those possibilities possible.