However, Marx’s original is not simply a lapsus calami: not only does it exist (with the same etymology) in an older form of German, but it is to be found in theological contexts

But a more troubling amphibology still possibly ‘inhabits’ our attempts to interpret the intellectual operation whereby Marx deconstructs and redefines what is to be understood by ‘human essence’

the materialist imperative of valorizing the ‘productive forces’ in the face of bourgeois hegemony and its intellectual forms

It is also one of those that most clearly affirm the eschatological postulate of an ‘end of politics’, at the cost of profound obscurity as regards the notion of power (and, consequently, the state)

This contradiction, or scission, was reproduced throughout the historical trajectory of Marxism, at the cost of increasingly intense internal conflicts

this theme is central in an argument like that of Hardt and Negri, who make the antithesis between global civil war (itself comprising multiple visible or invisible wars) and the multitude (with its forms of resistance and modes of communication) the defining characteristic of the new revolutionary politics they propose, dubbing it ‘bio-politics’