Zahi Zalloua  (Whitman College)
The Future of an Ethics of Difference: The Other After Hardt and Négri's Empire

In their groundbreaking work Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Négri call for a radical break with prior modes of critical discourses, singling out (Anglophone) postcolonial critics "who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty." Those critics such as Homi Bhabha have simply been "outflanked by strategies of power." Globalization theory is an attempt, they argue, to come to terms with changing reality of the present, and to go beyond a "politics of difference," and offer a more efficient mode of critique. In this paper, I propose to scrutinize Hardt and Négri's understanding of difference by juxtaposing it with Edouard Glissant's reflections on opacity (with his ethico-political injunction, "Je réclame pour tous le droit à l'opacité") and Derrida's Levinasian notion of a rapport sans rapport. Drawing on the works of Glissant and Derrida, I would like to theorize and rethink the position of the postcolonial Other within Empire, or the new global order as described by Hardt and Négri. If the authors of Empire rightly underscore the limits of a politics of difference, calling attention to the ways "difference" can always be co-opted by the dominant discourses, they bracket from analysis any discussion of an ethics of difference in the age of globalization. While the ethical briefly reemerges toward the end of Empire in the figure of the nomad—the true subversive subject of globalization: "Nomadism and miscegenation appear here as figures of virtue, as the first ethical practice on the terrain of Empire"—their discussion of the nomad is strikingly romantic, leaving unproblematized the alterity and exemplarity of the nomad.