A Theopolitical Ethics of Space. A Meta-Ethical Exploration of Social-Structural Sin with Antonio Negri in Labor Migration Context

This interdisciplinary research formulates a theopolitical ethics of space as a method to go beyond the inadequacies of the Cartesian subject-object divide that has been hounding the contemporary human sciences. This issue is manifested 1) in migration studies through the United Nations’s rigid classification of ‘voluntary’ migration and ‘forced’ migration, 2) in sociopolitical philosophy through the ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ debate between existential phenomenology and structuralism, and 3) in theological ethics through the debate between the Catholic Church magisterium and liberation theologians concerning the nature of sin whether it is merely personal or also due to social-structural causes. It argues that a meta-ethical exploration of these threefold impasses from the perspective of spatiality allows us to develop new spatial preconditions as grounding for normative reasoning, a metaphysics of morals, through the ideas of the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri.

            The research begins with the transnational economy of Philippine labor migration as a case study to criticize its rigid categorization as voluntary migration. It fails to consider that consider poverty is structurally caused by state crises that force people to emigrate. Since labor migration involves the movement of citizen bodies from one political economic space to another, the research then genealogically traces the conceptual development of spatiality vis-à-vis political ethics. Before the 20th century, ancient organic and mechanical spatial traditions were the (meta)physcial foundation for political ethics of prioritizing identity over difference and transcendental representations respectively. By the 20th century, the inadequacy of the modern mechanistic worldview led to the conceptualization of the libidinal economy. Inspired by constructivist spatial tradition, which influenced existential phenomenologists and structuralists, and quantum physics’s paradoxical understanding of reality, political philosophers like Negri developed an immanent critique of the state. He argues that all metaphysics, although a formulation of objective realities, is a transcendental expression of the political, thus exposing its subjective side, making it a non-dualistic political ontology. Given that spatiality determines political ethics, the research then applies a hermeneutics of spatiality to show how spatiality determines the expressions of sin in the divine economy. Following Negri’s immanentist philosophy, the research then deploys his concepts of Empire, the multitude, common, and assembly to provide a meta-ethical critique of the war economy of labor migration and its underlying spatial preconditions to develop an alternative theopolitical ethics and understanding of social-structural sin.

            The research concludes that: 1) migration is a continuum that cannot be reduced to either voluntary or forced since migrant subjectivity is liminally caught in-between structural forces and a network of social relationships, 2) labor migrants as a multitude are the immanent side of Empire who desire to resist or escape while paradoxically participating in the latter, which dissolves the agency-structure divide, and 3) the spatial preconditions for social-structural sin are the imperialistic rationality of Empire, the multitude’s heterotopic network of corrupted love, and their lack of common virtue to assemble against incommensurable pain.