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 --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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