ABSTRACT
Hardt and Negri's simultaneous conflation of sovereignty and biopolitics and the demarcation, within the biopolitical terrain, of the space of biopolitical production from the obscene excess of 'sovereign biopower' grants the constitutive concepts of their theory a highly paradoxical status arising out of the disavowal of their autoimmune, inherently pervertible character. This chapter describes this conceptual edifice as a 'museum of impossible objects', an imposing display of extraordinary political possibilities that must nonetheless remain entirely virtual to continue to produce this dazzling impression. Hardt and Negri's discourse on the 'democracy of the multitude', which descends from the autonomia tradition in Italian Marxism, appears to accord with our Foucauldian strategy of refusal of care, which of course resonates with the discourse of 'refusal of work' in the latter tradition. The chapter also the authors' dualism between biopolitical production and biopower obscures the dimension of biopolitical subjection in a self-gratifying denigration of power relations to their empty paradigmatic form.
