This thesis highlights the practice of writing as a way to engage with the amorphous thing-space-State-city-nation-citizens that is

This thesis examines how corporations use North Korea’s media portrayal to profit. By gaining government contracts to develop weapons and missile defense systems, companies such as Lockheed Martin make billions of dollars. The thesis will examine how this is accomplished in three stages: first, by examining how soft power is generated and used to build a consensus. Then, government usage of soft power to rationalize North Korea as a threat is discussed. Finally, how corporations profit from government-authorized weapons programs will be detailed. The thesis will incorporate theory based off of the ideas of Joseph Nye, as well as geopolitical concepts promulgated by Michael Hardt. / Graduate

[pt] O presente trabalho pretende apresentar e discutir a perspectiva teórica de constituição de uma democracia absoluta pelo poder constituinte da multidão no pensamento de Antonio Negri (inclusive nas elaborações nascidas de seu trabalho conjunto com Michael Hardt). Com este objetivo, numa primeira etapa buscar-seá abordar as principais bases filosóficas da reflexão de Negri sobre o tema, identificadas aqui nas obras de Nicolau Maquiavel, Baruch Espinosa e Karl Marx. Através de tais autores, Negri realiza o resgate de uma modernidade emancipatória bastante diferente da modernidade hegemônica – cujo projeto temse afirmado através do recurso à representação e à criação de figuras transcendentes como a soberania, o povo e a nação –, a partir da constatação da possibilidade de construção de uma outra forma de democracia, imanente e absoluta. Uma segunda etapa será dedicada à reflexão em torno da recuperação categoria de multidão, defendida por Negri, a partir de suas reflexões sobre Espinosa, como sujeito adequado e potente para a constituição do projeto democrático na pós-modernidade, momento em que as transformações no mundo do trabalho são tidas como tão profundas que impõem uma nova concepção de sujeito revolucionário. Numa terceira etapa, tratar-se-á então da democracia absoluta concebida por Negri, referida neste trabalho como democracia do comum. O comum é aqui categoria conceitual chave para a compreensão do projeto negriano, motivo pelo qual nos debruçaremos sobre tal noção antes de articular sujeito multidão e projeto constituinte da democracia. Por fim, serão apresentadas as conclusões resultantes da discussão proposta neste trabalho. / [en] This paper intends to present and discuss Antonio Negri s theoretical perspective about the constitution of an absolute democracy by constituent power of the multitude (including elaborations born in his joint work with Michael Hardt). For this purpose, the firtst stage will deal with the main philosophical bases of Negri reflection on the topic, here identified in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, Baruch Spinoza and Karl Marx. Through these authors, Negri performs a rescue of a _ emancipatory modernity a quite different of the hegemonic modernity - whose design has been argued through the use of representation and the creation of transcendent figures as sovereignty, people and nation - starting from the verification of the possibility to build another form of democracy, immanent and absolute. The second stage will be dedicated to reflection on the recovery of the multitude category, held by Negri, from his reflections on Spinoza as an appropriate and powerful subject to the constitution of the democratic project in postmodernity, at which the transformations in world of work are considered so deep that require a new conception of a revolutionary subject. On the third stage, will then be addresses the absolute democracy conceived by Negri, referred to in this paper as the common democracy. Here, the common is a concept key to understanding the Negri s project, reason why this paper devotes on this idea before connect multitude subject and constitutional project of democracy. Finally, the conclusions will be presented as contributions to the discussion proposed in this paper.

Ce mémoire propose une analyse de l’imagination, ou connaissance du premier genre, dans la philosophie de Baruch Spinoza, qui vise à mettre de l’avant son rôle de constitution du réel. Pour ce faire, nous aborderons la manière dont la pensée de Spinoza a évolué, en nous inspirant des thèses d’Antonio Negri. Cela nous permettra d’apercevoir chez Spinoza le développement d’un concept d’imagination qui soit essentiellement positif et constitutif, et seulement accidentellement cause de l’erreur. Nous expliquerons ainsi les causes de l’interruption de la rédaction de l’Éthique pour celle du Traité théologico-politique, en exposant la double nécessité (à la fois socio-politique et philosophique) qui impose à Spinoza le thème de la positivité de l’imagination, à travers laquelle le monde se constitue lui-même, sans besoin aucun de transcendance. Nous verrons ainsi avec Negri que c’est l’imagination qui permet à Spinoza d’enfin concevoir pleinement l’immanence. Le rôle constitutif de l’imagination est chez Spinoza à la fois ce qui résulte et ce qui lui permet de dépasser l’horizon philosophique traditionnel désirant organiser le monde par la Totalité, ou la Substance, qui conserverait toujours dans cet horizon une trace de transcendance par rapport au monde qui est à organiser. Par la suite, nous définirons l’imagination, en nous appuyant principalement sur le texte de l’Éthique, avant d’exposer le processus constitutif du réel qui lui est propre. Nous montrerons ainsi la portée de la puissance constitutive de l’imagination, en expliquant le processus de constitution des objets, du temps, du sujet pratique, à travers l’habitude et la mémoire, puis la constitution de toute forme de société et de toute vie sociale à travers l’imitation des affects. Nous terminerons ce parcours en jetant un regard sur les thèses politiques qui découlent immédiatement du rôle constitutif de l’imagination, et qui répondent à l’exigence socio-politique qui a poussé Spinoza, face à l’intolérance religieuse et au retour sauvage de la monarchie en Hollande, à se pencher sur ces questions. / This work offers an analysis of the concept of imagination, also called knowledge of the first kind, in order to put forward its constitutive role. For this, we will first discuss the way Spinoza’s philosophy evolved, following Antonio Negri’s interpretation. We will then account for Spinoza’s approach of imagination, making it essentially positive and constitutive, and only accidentally the origin of error. With this, we will explain what causes Spinoza to interrupt his work on the Ethics to write the Theological-Political Treatise, by exposing the need (both socio-political and philosophical) forcing Spinoza to develop imagination’s positivity and power, through which the world constitutes itself without any transcendence whatsoever. We will see, along with Negri, that this positive concept of imagination enables Spinoza to fully embrace immanence. This is how he can go beyond the traditional philosophical horizon which wants the world to be organized by Totality or, in Spinoza’s case, by the Substance, which in this horizon always retains a hint of transcendence. Subsequentially, we will define imagination, mainly from the Ethics, and then we will present the scope of imagination’s constitutive power by presenting the process by which are constituted objects, subjects and time, by means of habit and memory, and then the process by which are constituted all kinds of society and even all types of social life, by means of imitation of the affects. We will conclude our research by looking at the political theory immediately resulting of imagination’s constitutive role. This will also reveal how Spinoza’s positive concept of imagination answers the socio-political need that motivated him, while witnessing religious intolerance and the resurgence of monarchy in Holland, to reorient his work towards these questions and towards the role of imagination.

The category of life is considered central to the heterogeneous field known as Italian thought or Italian theory. Its centrality helps explain the outsized role that Italian thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, Roberto Esposito, and Toni Negri play in international conceptualizations of biopolitics. Scholars have attempted to trace the roots of this emphasis on life back to thinkers such as Vico and Croce, Italian Marxist traditions such as workerism, “imports” like Heideggerian ontology and Foucauldian critique, and even Italy’s geography. These histories fail to interrogate the paradox that Italian thought usually deals with life in abstract terms, rather than with real, embodied lives. Styles of Existence, Italy 1961–1982 offers an alternative genealogy of Italian thought that focuses on the role that philology played in transforming conceptions of life and self in postwar Italy. It argues that the poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and art critic and feminist Carla Lonzi show us what living looks like by applying the tools and concepts of interpretation and criticism they acquired as artists and critics to their own lives. It makes the case for their inclusion in the unofficial canon of Italian thought, and for acknowledging the debts that later philosophical treatments of life owe to Pasolini and Lonzi’s existential attempts to overcome the distance between theory and praxis. Pasolini and Lonzi, both well-known for their polemical contributions to debates about politics, gender, and sexuality in Italy’s long 1968, are discussed here together for the first time. Styles of Existence lays out the theoretical tenets, preferred methodologies, and historical arcs of their life philologies, tracing them across an array of sources including diaries, screenplays, television talk shows, and newspaper columns. Both authors’ projects are examined from a comparatist perspective, which means that they are situated in Pasolini and Lonzi’s cultural and discursive contexts as Marxist and feminist intellectuals, respectively, and in relation to contemporaneous domestic and international trends and debates. Responding to a request by Pasolini that his works be read philologically, chapter one proposes a philological rereading of his corpus that takes into account his love for space and dedication to the irrational. Proposing the notion of “lunar hermeneutics” as a conceptual frame, it demonstrates that Pasolini incorporates tools from philology and stylistic criticism in his social critique and filmmaking in response to changing global and national political landscapes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and especially the developments of the space race. Chapter two elaborates the features of Pasolini’s project of “Marxist linguistics” in the mid-1960s as a political answer to rapid industrialization and globalization, demonstrating that Pasolini expands the scope of lunar hermeneutics with contributions from semiotics and insights from his work as a filmmaker. Close readings of Pasolini’s aesthetic writings in Empirismo eretico (1972) and his film Uccellacci e uccellini (1966) illustrate the importance of cinema to his revised theory of language and understanding of self. Chapter three examines Pasolini’s collection of political writings, Scritti corsari (1975), as an example of Auerbachian-inspired Weltliteratur, showing that the work is designed as a philological exercise dedicated to the critical preservation of human forms of life threatened with extinction. Turning to Lonzi, chapter four provides the first theoretical and historical account of autocoscienza or self-consciousness making, the feminist, relational practice that Lonzi developed with other members of the group Rivolta femminile in the early 1970s. Lonzi formulates autocoscienza as a subversive mediation of critical and postcolonial theory as well as of modern art, and envisions an “unforeseen subject” who refuses to comply with the misogyny and inequalities inherent to prevailing models of liberational subjectivity. Chapter five reassesses Lonzi’s rejection of Hegelian and psychoanalytic theories of recognition, and her engagement with Alexander Kojève’s anthropomorphizing rendition of Hegel, to argue that autocoscienza provides its own affirmative feminist theory and practice of recognition focused on listening and responsiveness among equals. Chapter six considers the diary’s central role in Lonzi’s philological project of self by linking it to autocoscienza and her theory of clitorality. It argues that the sexed dimension of autocoscienza is what makes viable a transition from theory to praxis, and from emphasis on the collective to the self. By focusing on the diary, it restores the contributions of “Sara,” another Rivolta member, and the influence of hagiographical writings on Lonzi’s conception of female freedom. Finally, chapter seven unearths Lonzi’s obsessive “dialogue” with Pasolini in her “feminist diary” Taci, anzi parla [Hush, No Speak] (1978) as a case study in the practice of autocoscienza. Lonzi’s disagreements with Pasolini about culture, sexuality, and women’s rights, and their largely overlapping views on freedom and expression, are situated in the context of Italian debates about abortion in the mid-1970s. This chapter argues that Lonzi’s relation to Pasolini transforms her understanding of self and helps her refine and recalibrate the goals of autocoscienza. In conceiving of the self and selfhood in philological rather than philosophical terms, Pasolini and Lonzi challenge theories of the subject predominant in critical theory and offer precursors to contemporary concepts like Agamben’s homo sacer. Their aesthetics of existence require a reconsideration of the scope of philology in the twentieth century, the parameters of political theory, the legacy and historiography of Italy’s long ’68, and our understanding of what it means to live a meaningful human life. The detailed recovery of Lonzi’s intensive engagement with Pasolini and his work, finally, points to an unlikely source of influence on radical Italian feminism.

Le point de départ des travaux entrepris est la définition lefortienne de la démocratie par opposition au totalitarisme. Le totalitarisme est l’institution d’une société organique, une et homogène, dans laquelle aucune division sociale, aucun désaccord avec l’idéologie véhiculée par le parti ne sont possibles. La spécificité de la démocratie, a contrario, est de s’enrichir de la désintrication du pouvoir, du droit, et du savoir. Les citoyens, dotés de droits fondamentaux, sont juges de la légitimité du pouvoir établi. Leurs désaccords ainsi que l’antagonisme entre les classes sociales nourrissent l’exercice d’un commun litigieux. De là, une question fondamentale : une telle définition de la démocratie est-elle historiquement datée, ou continue-t-elle d’être pertinente aujourd’hui ? Doit-on encore concevoir la démocratie, pour la rendre authentique, par le conflit civil érigé en principe politique, ou faut-il l’envisager de manière consensualiste au lendemain de son opposition avec le totalitarisme ? Claude Lefort s’inspirait de Machiavel pour dépasser les limites du marxisme et repenser la démocratie par la valorisation du conflit civil, indissociable de la figure de l’imaginaire social. La thèse ici soutenue adopte différemment une perspective néo-machiavélienne. Elle revient à proposer un espace public dissensuel à partir du modèle machiavélien de l’entente dans le conflit, par confrontation avec l’espace public habermassien et d’autres conceptions du tort et du conflit dans les démocraties contemporaines. Comment concevoir aujourd’hui les figures du conflit civil et de l’imaginaire social, en s’inspirant paradoxalement de Machiavel pour interroger la démocratie ? / The starting point of the present work is the Lefortian definition of democracy as opposed to totalitarism. Totalitarism is the institution of an organic society, one and homogeneous, where no social division, no disagreement with the party’s ideology are possible. On the contrary democracy’s specificity consists in enriching itself with the disentanglement of power, law and knowledge. Citizens, endowed with fundamental rights can judge of the legitimacy of the power in place. Their disagreements as well as the antagonism between social classes fuel the dispute about common good.Hence a fundamental question: is such a definition of democracy historically dated or is it still relevant today? To make it authentic should democracy be seen through civil conflict made into a political principle or should it be viewed in a consensualist way just after its opposition to totalitarism? Claude Lefort drew from Machiavelli to go beyond the limits of Marxism and rethink democracy by giving more importance to civil conflict as an integral part of the theme of social imaginary. The present dissertation adopts in a different way a neo-Machiavellian perspective. It amounts to proposing a dissensual public space on the Machiavellian model of understanding within conflict by confronting it with the Habermassian public space and with other conceptions of wrong and conflict in contemporary democracies.Today how can the themes of civil conflict and social imaginary be viewed – paradoxically drawing from Machiavelli- to question democracy?

Le point de départ des travaux entrepris est la définition lefortienne de la démocratie par opposition au totalitarisme. Le totalitarisme est l'institution d'une société organique, une et homogène, dans laquelle aucune division sociale, aucun désaccord avec l'idéologie véhiculée par le parti ne sont possibles. La spécificité de la démocratie, a contrario, est de s'enrichir de la désintrication du pouvoir, du droit, et du savoir. Les citoyens, dotés de droits fondamentaux, sont juges de la légitimité du pouvoir établi. Leurs désaccords ainsi que l'antagonisme entre les classes sociales nourrissent l'exercice d'un commun litigieux. De là, une question fondamentale : une telle définition de la démocratie est-elle historiquement datée, ou continue-t-elle d'être pertinente aujourd'hui ? Doit-on encore concevoir la démocratie, pour la rendre authentique, par le conflit civil érigé en principe politique, ou faut-il l'envisager de manière consensualiste au lendemain de son opposition avec le totalitarisme ? Claude Lefort s'inspirait de Machiavel pour dépasser les limites du marxisme et repenser la démocratie par la valorisation du conflit civil, indissociable de la figure de l'imaginaire social. La thèse ici soutenue adopte différemment une perspective néo-machiavélienne. Elle revient à proposer un espace public dissensuel à partir du modèle machiavélien de l'entente dans le conflit, par confrontation avec l'espace public habermassien et d'autres conceptions du tort et du conflit dans les démocraties contemporaines. Comment concevoir aujourd'hui les figures du conflit civil et de l'imaginaire social, en s'inspirant paradoxalement de Machiavel pour interroger la démocratie ?

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