The Empire as Rhizome and Assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari's Reading of Hardt and Negri's Empire

Abstract

The book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), followed by two sequels (2004, 2009), intended to be a twenty-first century Communist Manifesto, searching to explain systematically and holistically the current globalization. Nevertheless, their main influence would not be only Marx. A careful reading of their work shows that, along with the influence of Machiavelli, Spinoza and Foucault, it has as one of its main influences the book A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). However, references to the two central concepts of this work, the "rhizome" and the "assemblage", are not systematically referred to in the text of Hardt and Negri. This article explains the concept of Empire through such concepts, looking to contribute to a better conceptualization of the myriad of diffuse and diverse processes known as “globalization.”