Michael Hardt Quotes

Revolution does have to be violent precisely because the Pharaoh won't let you go. If the Pharaoh would let you go, the revolution won't have to be violent.

Events of resistance have the power not only to escape control but also to create a new world.

Don't think that the lack of leaders and of a party ideological line means anarchy, if by anarchy you mean chaos, bedlam, and pandemonium. What a tragic lack of political imagination to think that leaders and centralized structures are the only way to organize effective political projects!

The hegemony of finance and the banks has produced the indebted. Control over information and communication networks has created the mediatized. The security regime and the generalized state of exception have constructed a figure prey to fear and yearning for protection—the securitized. And the corruption of democracy has forged a strange, depoliticized figure, the represented. These subjective figures constitute the social terrain on which—and against which—movements of resistance and rebellion must act.

In the United States, rising esteem for the military in uniform corresponds to the growing militarization of the society as a whole. All of this despite repeated revelations of the illegality and immorality of the military's own incarceration systems, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, whose systematic practices border on if not actually constitute torture.

Let's call this then, only half facetiously, a new patristic, in which the intellectual is charged with the task not only to denounce error and unmask illusions, and not only to incarnate the mechanisms of new practices of knowledge, but also, together with others in a process of co-research, to produce a new truth. -- Commonwealth, 118

Through luminous and erudite readings of the texts, Hasana Sharp shows us how profound and radical is Spinoza's conception of nature and his claim that humans always remain part of nature, acting solely according to the same rules. She demonstrates the political consequences of adopting this perspective through a provocative intervention in contemporary feminist theory, while along the way opening promising avenues for future work in a variety of other fields, such as animal studies and ecology. This is a challenging and important book.