File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0106, message 366


From: info <info-AT-j12.org>
Subject: AUT: Dante's Empire
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 14:09:09 +0100



Dear Arianna,

Thanks for this:

Quote from Empire p.71

'The origins of European modernity are often characterised as springing 
from
a secularising process that denied divine and transcendent authority over
worldly affairs. That process was certainly important, but in our view it
was really only a symptom of the primary event of modernity: the 
affirmation
of the powers of this world, the discovery of the plane of immanence. 
"Omnes
ens habet aliquod esse proprium" - every entity has a singular essence. 
Duns
Scots' affirmation subverts the medieval conception of being as an object 
of
analogical, and thus dualistic, predication - a being with one foot in this
world and one in a transcendent realm. We are at the beginning of the XIVth
century, in the midst of the convulsions of the late Middle Ages. Duns
Scotus tells his contemporaries that the confusion and decadence of the
times can be remedied only by recentering thought on the singularity of
being. This singularity is not ephemeral nor accidental but ontological. 
The
strength of this affirmation and the effect it had on the thought of the
period were demonstrated by Dante Alighieri's response to it, thousands of
miles away from Duns Scotus' Britannic north. This singular being is
powerful, Dante wrote, in that it is the drive to actualise "totam 
potentiam
intellectus possibilis" -all the power of the possible intellect. (Dante
Alighieri, De Monarchia, ed. Louis Bertalot (Frankfurt: Friedrichsdorf,
1918), Book I, Chapter 4, p. 14).'

My response:
>From Church's translation (London 1878):

"It has been sufficiently set forth that the proper work of the human race, 
taken as a whole, is to set in action the whole capacity of that 
understanding which is capable of development: first in the way of 
speculation, and then by its extension, in the way of action."

And from the same section:
"Now it is plain that the whole human race is ordered to gain some end, as 
has been shown before. There must therefore be one to guide and govern and 
the proper title for this office is monarch or Emperor. And so it is plain 
that monarchy or the empire is necessary for the welfare of the world."

This seems to be linked to the 'General Intellect' which has emerged in 
Italian autonomist circles and their discussion of immaterial labour. 
Likewise it also relates to Marx's notion of the species-being. How 
annoying that Negri skirted around this so delicately!

Fabian




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