세계화 시대의 제국과 다중 여성 = Empire and Women as Multitude in the Global Era

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper explores the meaning of Empire and multitude developed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their co-worked book, Empire, adding the transformative perspective of women as multitude. In this book, they introduce a renewed term of Empire which is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Empire, like Roman Empire, is seen as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits with hybrid identities and expanding frontiers. Empire is the system that regulates global flows of information, capital, and people, the sovereign power that governs the world. Hardt and Negri give Empire a positive meaning in that its existence stands as a resounding, if paradoxical, testimony to the heroic mass struggles that shattered the Eurocentric old regime of national states and colonialism. Contemporary capitalism, although seemingly impervious to anti-systemic challenge, is in fact vulnerable at all points to riot and rebellion. The increasing importance of immaterial, intellectual labour in high value-added sectors of the economy is shaping a collective labourer with heightened powers of subversion. This subversive power belongs to multitude. Unlike the people which reduces social differences into one identity, the multitude is not unified but remains plural and multiple. The multitude, although it remains multiple and internally different, is able to act in common and thus rule itself. Rather than a political body with one that commands and others that obey, the multitude is living flesh that rules itself. The multitude lives and organizes its political space against Empire and yet within the ontological conditions that Empire presents. If we apply women to multitude, we can get a transformative view on women as an active and singular subject. Women who are not divided into the first world women, the third world women and the subaltern women any longer pursue immanent ethics with differential intensity within non-mediation philosophy.