Presented at Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural Through Politics, Northwestern University, February 2007. Full paper.

If we still, again, face a crisis of Marxism, it is tempting to quote still, again, Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” But are those of us wrestling with this crisis coming to the recognition that the crisis is the rule, or are we in the melancholy position of the angel of history, seeing crisis pile on crisis with no hope of turning our heads towards the future? The necessity of asking this question can be seen in the fact that contemporary responses to a perceived crisis in Marxism center around attempts to conceptualize differently the locations in which we might uncover a cache of revolutionary potential; the turn to Spinoza is, perhaps the clearest indication. I want to investigate this quest for potential in terms of two sets of concepts: on the one hand, creativity, life, and the organic, and on the other, communication, death, and the inorganic. The relation between the concepts in the first group is, I hope, reasonably self-evident, and their connection to the larger question likewise. Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the Multitude in terms of living flesh draws on an organic and vitalist vocabulary, in which the potential of the Multitude results from their expansive fecundity. But Hardt and Negri also call this flesh “an artificial life,” and it is in this artificiality that my second set of three terms are linked. I will, I hope, make the precise connection between the three terms clear later, through a discussion of Benjamin’s own search for revolutionary potential. The point is to show that severing the link between a transformative potential and a vitalist organicism gives us another way to think through this “crisis of Marxism.”