№ 2 - 2007
Magun A.V.
Imperialization (The Notion of Empire and the Modern World)

The article offers an original interpretation of empire – one that infers the phenomenon not only and not so much from a positive activist principle, as from a negative, inertial process in its quality of an indirect consequence of active-negative revolutionary destruction. The author proposes to regard the imperial paradigm in the New Time history as the moment of negative universalism. According to his conclusion, empire not so much spreads Messianic ideas, as captures territories and resources which otherwise could be captured by somebody else, and constructs all-round defence on account of its seeming weakness and vulnerability. The world is being unified not as a form or idea, but as the “funnel” (centred in the revolutionary point) of decomposition of the borders. As is convincingly demonstrated in the article, it is only awareness of pseudo-activity of empire that enables one to properly criticize imperial paradigm – as activity which by its essence is passive-inertial. Negativity of empire is consequence of negativity of revolution, but the latter, while being negative, is active, it bears in itself the potential of creation from nothing. Empire, instead, is a protective reaction to the negative universalization of the world opened by revolution.