New Left Review 35, September-October 2005

MALCOLM BULL

THE LIMITS OF MULTITUDE

How can a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wants . . . undertake so vast and difficult an enterprise as a system of legislation?
Rousseau, The Social Contract

The worst of all the multitude
Did something for the common good
Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive

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By the same author:

• Levelling Out Beyond existing arguments about equality, might the praxes of permanent and passive revolution offer a way to conceptualize a more expansionary levelling? Drawing on motifs from Nietzsche, Babeuf, Marx and Gramsci, Malcolm Bull traces the contours and consequences of extra-egalitarianism.
• Green Cabinet, White Cube The necessity of Arcadia, as fabular vantage-point for clear vision of the world we inhabit. Malcolm Bull follows a wooded path leading from the mythological parallels of Renaissance art to the modern gallery space.
• Introduction to Special Issue on Globalization and Biopolitics
• Vectors of the Biopolitical Taking coordinates from Aristotle, Malcolm Bull finds in Agamben’s biopolitics and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach the disconnected fragments of a lost vision of society, adumbrated by Marx, glimpsed and rejected by Arendt. Strange meetings as the trajectories of the disenfranchised and the empowered, human and non-human, converge.
• States of Failure The question of agency remains the central lacuna in the construction of systemic alternatives. Building on ‘The Limits of Multitude’ in NLR 35, Malcolm Bull proposes a reconceptualization of the relation between collective will and invisible hand. Can bearings drawn from Hegel, Gramsci, Sartre indicate the route to a new global order through dissolution of the Western imperial state?
• Between the Cultures of Capital T. J. Clark’s landmark study, Farewell to an Idea, takes the art of modernism to be a convulsive attempt to imagine modernity in forms other than the triumph of capitalism. Malcolm Bull suggests it might be better conceived as a fold in the overlap between two contrasting cultures of capitalism, classical and commodity, of which only one is left today.
• Where is the Anti-Nietzsche? If uncritically lyrical receptions of Nietzsche are receding, who has truly resisted his ultimate seduction—‘reading for victory’? Mere rejection of Nietzsche’s ideals does not escape his lure, Malcolm Bull argues. Only the standpoint of the subhuman is proof against his ecology of value.
• Slavery and the Multiple Self
• The Ecstasy of Philistinism
• Vision and Totality