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.9 This contradiction is particularly noteworthy because Empire s 236 EMPIRE S NEW CLOTHESmillennialism is what makes it compelling.Millennial rhetoric stirs theimagination toward exhilarating poles of fear and hope, promising a culminatingand righteous telos to those who adhere to its tenets of belief.It is hard not to bedrawn in.A second interrelated contradiction arises from the fact that Hardt and Negrispecifically reject transcendence, making numerous explicit claims for theimmanence of their materialist approach, often drawing on Foucault to helpmake their case.In their opening pages, for example, they rule out the ideathat order is dictated by a single power and a single center of rationalitytranscendent to global forces (3).Nevertheless, their recurrent appeals to certaincategories of thought cast their theoretical framework back into transcendentalmolds integral to millennialism, which is both totalizing and abstractionist in itshistory and basic formulation.As a result, Hardt s and Negri s theory of Empire may be best understood as akind of secular millennialism or millennial immanence.As such, theirformulation rests all too firmly on the twin pillars of millennialist thought:endism and electism.Their incorporation of these two foundational structures ofmillennial belief converts their secular ideas into messianic visions and pushestheir claims of immanence toward transcendence.Endism operates as the glue that holds together both apocalyptic fear andmillennial hope.As Charles Strozier has shown, endism is different fromreflection on the fact that we die, that we experience collective as well asindividual endings.As he explains, endism, or the location of self in somefuture, ultimate narrative, pushes such reflection into a profoundly differentrealm, wrapping the future in magical projections that isolate it from meaningful,human connection with the past. 10 In apocalyptic and millennial belief, thatmagical projection typically claims transcendent authorization.The Greek word apocalypse, which translates as unveiling, suggests a revelation of somesort, in the sense of a disclosure.Primarily under the influence of Christianity,however, it has come to mean the absolute truth about the final end of things.Similarly, the word millennium simply means a period of one thousand years,but over the past two millennia it has come to mean the particular thousand-yearperiod that follows the divinely wrought End Times.These shifts are central tomillennialism as a system of belief, that is, as a coherent worldview that has longpredominated in the Christian West.As the Time magazine polls indicate, for many who adhere to this view, thismeans a literal end to the world.In fundamentalist Christian belief, divinedestruction of the earth is what makes possible a new heaven on a new earth inthe form of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21).In secular versions ofmillennial belief, large-scale natural or technological destruction replaces divineaction, but a new era nonetheless follows in which those who survive create anew and deserving life on earth.While Hardt and Negri venture the possibility TAKING THE MILLENNIALIST PULSE OF EMPIRE S MULTITUDE 237that an actual end to the world might come from inadvertent technologicaldestruction, their greater concern and focus is on this secular version of endism,namely, the conviction that the end of the world as we have known it is upon us,or as they put it in their opening sentence: Empire is materializing before our veryeyes (xi).Empire is, by their definition, a new global form of sovereignty (xii) that comprises the new world order (36).Within millennial belief, the end of one order enables the beginning ofanother, most typically entailing an elect group that will prove victorious overforces of evil.Electism is the notion that there is a deserving group, the chosen,who defeat their foes and then reign supreme.11 Typically, the chosen believethemselves to have absolute or at least greater truth on their side, while theiropponents are deceived
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