On the plane I got a chance to look through Hardt and Negri's follow-up to Empire (blogged previously), Multitude, which I enjoyed quite a bit. In terms of what I sometimes loosely imagine to be my project, the first chapter ("War") is clearly the most helpful, and not coincidentally the bit I read most carefully:

War really became absolute only with the technological development of weapons that made possible for the first time mass and even global destruction. Weapons of global destruction break the modern dialectic of war. War has always involved the destruction of life, but in the twentieth century this destructive power reached the limits of the pure production of death, represented symbolically by Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

If you've talked to me about my thoughts of apocalypse before, you know that I think of these as two importantly distinct figurations central to the way the world has been spatialized in late capitalism—Tribulation and Rapture—though for Hardt and Negri's purposes that distinction isn't necessarily all that important at the moment.

They go on:

The capacity of genocide and nuclear destruction touches directly on the very structure of life, corrupting it, perverting it. The sovereign power that controls such means of destruction is a form of biopower in this most negative and horrible sense of the term, a power that rules directly over death—the death not simply of an individual or group but of humanity itself and perhaps of all being. When genocide and atomic weapons put life itself on center stage, then war becomes properly ontological.

War thus seems to be heading at once in two opposite directions: it is, on the one hand, reduced to police action and, on the other, raised up to an absolute, ontological level by technologies of global destruction. These two movements, however, are not contradictory: the reduction of war to police action does not take away but actually confirms its ontological dimension. The thinning of the war function and the thickening of the police function maintain the ontological stigmata of absolute annihilation: the war police maintain the threat of genocide and nuclear destruction as their ultimate foundation.

What's most important, I think, about the impulse Hardt and Negri are identifying is that in either case the specter of Tribulation/Auschwitz/genocide or Rapture/Hiroshima/nuclear war wind up motivating Empire always in the same direction, that is, the repeated and "necessary" application of bios-preserving violence in the post-colonial spaces it has incorporated into itself but yet still keeps perpetually at a remove.

The later chapters about the Utopian possibilities of the networked multitude are interesting, though it's probably this first chapter that I'll most need to return to at some point.