Events

Can space itself be haunted? Do older theological constructions of space from the past live on in our contemporary figurations of space, as Foucault once suggested? In this lecture I examine a case study, the privileged place of American sovereignty in Hardt and Negri’s book Empire (2000), in order to consider these questions and expose a ‘space ghost’ at work within the smooth secular space of globalization. Occupying an uncanny position in their work as the tacit center of a structure without center and the outside of a structure without an outside, the place of the United States in Hardt and Negri’s reconfiguration of global space is an effect of its exceptionalist history and self-understanding as a messianic promised land. The ghostly survival of an older theological conception of space within a contemporary reconfiguration of space like Empire – their “intersectionality” perhaps – reminds us that our contemporary reconfigurations of space today remain in dialogue with spatial configurations of the past.