Michael Hardt. About Love. 2007 1/6

http://www.egs.edu/ Michael Hardt, the author of Multitude and Empire talks about love, how can love function as a political concept, why love, the proper and improper ways love has functioned politically, love as activism, and evil and its relationship to love. Public open video philosophy lecture for the faculty and students of the European Graduate School, Media and Communication Studies Department Program, EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007. Michael Hardt. Michael Hardt, born 1960 is an American literary theorist and political philosopher based at Duke University. Perhaps his most famous work is Empire written with Antonio Negri. The sequel to Empire, called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, was released in August, 2004, and details the idea of the multitude (which Hardt and Negri initially elaborated in Empire) as the potential site of a global democratic movement.

Sometimes referred to as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century", Empire proposes that the forces of current class oppression, namely - corporate globalization and commodification of services (or "production of affects") have the potential to fuel social change of unprecedented dimensions.

Born in Washington DC, Hardt attended Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He studied engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1983. In college during the 1970s energy crisis, he began to take an interest in alternative energy sources. Talking about his college politics, he said, "I thought that doing alternative energy engineering for third world countries would be a way of doing politics that would get out of all this campus political posing that I hated."

After college, he worked for various solar energy companies. Hardt also worked with NGOs in Central America, doing tasks like bringing donated computers from the U.S. and putting them together for the University of El Salvador. Yet, he says that this political activity did more for him than it did for the El Salvadoreans. In 1983 he moved to Seattle to study comparative literature. From there he went to Paris where he would meet Negri and write his dissertation under Negri's guidance. Michael Hardt speaks fluent French and Italian, and is Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University. In 2006, he was a member of the group of 88 Duke professors who signed a statement supporting the accuser in the Duke rape case.

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• activism

[JosephKnight93]

is there footage of the "deleuze and guattari seminar" he mentions? I would love to see that

[egsvideo]

@JosephKnight93 thank you for the comment. european graduate school is recording every class since 2009. the lecture however was given in 2007 - unfortunately there wont be any material about the deleuze and guattari seminar. thank you.

[aimeeplltr]

Will you be posting the rest of this presentation? I don't see the clips 3-6. I hope you do.

[egsvideo]

thank you for the comment. i checked it right away, and the videos are still here - where they belong. may i suggest that you search for the video names directly or view the playlist as a whole? thank you.

[illustratistefani]

you must have had a bad day, but your vocabulary says enough. hardt is trying to redevelop marxism and philosophy. he is certainly not a stalinist.

[bestdressedrefugee]

Just a word on historical correctness: the terms "stalinist-style purge" and "Stalinist witchhunt" cannot really describe what happened to the Duke Lacrosse team because, unlike the people in the actual Stalinist purges, NONE OF THE TEAM PLAYERS lost their life.

The kind of "witchunt," that took place was much more in the style of Nancy Grance and North American cable news media.

[zvexevz]

people can only change themselves? this is assuming that an individual can somehow exist outside of society which we of course know to not be true. they are always interpellated into an ideological context that structures their subjectivity. it's irrelevant solipism to talk about people 'changing themselves' in some Dr. Phillesque new agey terms the way you do.

[sebastianquilt]

this bit about 'transformation in the name of love' as a political crutch is too bewildering and SILLY.

-the silly goose.

[WeWillWinAnarchy]

People can only change themselves. Society can point the direction, but neither dictatorship nor spontaneous rebellion can make the change in and of itself.

[WeWillWinAnarchy]

What's so great about the Nicomachean Ethics?

[brokennarcissist]

His comments on friendship are a tad perplexing. Just think of what shape one's life would take without friends. Friendship is transformative. Its as if he's taking a snide shot at the Nicomachean Ethics.

[brokennarcissist]

sports, sports, sports....