The monstrosity of the multitude: unredeeming radical theology

If its power comes from the very value held so dear by neoliberalism—that of productivity—can the “multitude” as conceived by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri ever fully resist the neoliberal Empire? Engaging the Autonomous Marxism of Franco “Bifo” Berardi, I argue that continued philosophical and theological emphases on productivity resonate with a soteriological narrative embedded in neoliberalism’s promise that work is redemptive. As both counter and supplement to such emphases, this essay offers an alternate reading of Hardt and Negri’s multitude through the lens of crip (disability) theory. In Sex and Disability crip theorists Anna Mollow and Robert McRuer argue that counter to Joseph Conrad’s assertion that “ ‘A man is a worker. If he is not then he is nothing,’ ” a crip politics says, “fuck employability: I’m too sick to work” (25). To embrace the stigma of sickness is to question the demands of productive labour on offer by society. A similar crip politics, one that tells the Empire it is too sick to work and too slow to be efficient, might loose the multitude from its redeployment in the very technologies of power Hardt and Negri hope to counter. Looking to figures of monstrosity, I argue that productivist tendencies within radical theology betray the field’s crip potential. Ultimately, this essay seeks to recover the multitude’s monstrosity from within Hardt and Negri’s corpus. A return to its monstrosity returns the multitude to its unproductive potency, that which wanders away from demands of social cohesion, and thus resists redemptive wholeness. This article is published as part of a collection dedicated to radical theologies.