Perception, Jurisdiction, and Valorization in Colonial Modernity – On the Nexus of Accumulation, Race, and Aesthetics

constituent power, and maroon resistances

“The Irrepressible Lightness and Joy of Being Communist. A Tribute to Toni Negri.”

Katja Diefenbach, Ruth Sonderegger, and Pablo Valdivia

The last talk in the lecture series “The Irrepressible Lightness and Joy of Being Communist. A Tribute to Toni Negri,” hosted by transversal texts, is given by Katja Diefenbach, Ruth Sonderegger, and Pablo Valdivia. The series celebrates Toni Negri, an Italian Marxist of operaist orientation, who turned ninety this year. Negri’s philosophical work, intellectual courage, and unshakeable confidence in the multitude’s power of acting has inspired the speakers’s thinking in ever new dimensions, even if in sceptical ways at times. These inspirations reach from Negri’s early interventions in Marx’s Grundrisse to the rereading of Baruch de Spinoza’s concept of potentia multitudinis and the five books co-authored with Michael Hardt – all aimed at renewing the critique of capitalist society formations from the viewpoint of the autonomisation and self-valorisation of living labor.

The three speakers collaborate on a research project about perception, jurisdiction, and valorization in colonial modernity from the 16^th to the 18^th century and examine the repercussions of these instances in today’s racial capitalisms with their complex modes of accumulation and dispossession. The research project’s questions intersect with those posed by Negri and Hardt while rethinking the power of the multitude against the horizon of altermodernities in Commonwealth. In adopting Negri’s figure of the monster in colonial modernity, together with its shifting meanings and political metonymies, the lecture proceeds in three steps: After reconstructing the basic specificities of Negri’s reading of Spinoza, the speakers first debate Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza’s dream of an Afro-Brazilian maroon soldier. In light of this debate, they propose four theses regarding a decolonial reformulation of the concept potentia multitudinis based on a contextualization of Spinoza’s dream about which Spinoza kept silent and which Negri also largely overlooked – the Dutch colonization of Pernambuco, its racist economies of fear, and the military strength of the Northern Brazilian settlements of fugitive slaves and maroons. The speakers then comment on Negri and Hardt’s reference to a minoritarian Kant in Commonwealth, the limits of which they examine in a discussion of Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique as well as by way of some remarks on Iroquoian federalism. The latter will be related to Kant’s racist account of First Nations and, in particular of the Iroquois, in his Critique of Judgement. The talk’s third part focuses on the position of the Mestiza in Negri and Hardt’s reflections on altermodernity in Commonwealth that is reread together with José María Arguedas’s statement against acculturation and Gloria Anzaldúa’s double figure of an indigenously-marked Mestiza and a queer Chicana.