Antonio Negri | |
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.jpg) Negri in 2009 | |
| Born | (1933-08-01)1 August 1933 Padua, Kingdom of Italy |
| Died | 16 December 2023(2023-12-16) (aged 90) Paris, France |
| Alma mater | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
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| Part ofa series on |
| Libertarian socialism |
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Antonio Negri (/ˈnɛɡri/;Italian:[ˈneɡri]; 1 August 1933 – 16 December 2023) was an Italianpolitical philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists ofautonomism, as well as for his co-authorship ofEmpire withMichael Hardt. Born inPadua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at theUniversity of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory.[4] Negri founded thePotere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member ofAutonomia Operaia, and published highly influential books, includingEmpire andMultitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of being the mastermind of the left-wingurban guerrilla organizationRed Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR),[5] which was involved in theMay 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime ministerAldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, Negri was arrested and charged with a number of crimes including the Moro murder. Most charges were quickly dropped, but in 1984, having fled to France, he was sentencedin absentia to 30 years in prison. He was given an additional four years on the charge of being "morally responsible" for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s.[6] The question of Negri's involvement withleft-wing extremism is a controversial subject.[7] He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by theMitterrand doctrine, he taught at theParis VIII (Vincennes) and theCollège international de philosophie, along withJacques Derrida,Michel Foucault, andGilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years,[8] he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. After his release he lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopherJudith Revel. He was the father of film directorAnna Negri.
Antonio Negri was born inPadua, in theNortheastern Italian region ofVeneto, in 1933. His father was an active communistmilitant from the city ofBologna (in the NortheasternItalian region ofEmilia-Romagna), and although he died when Negri was two years old, his political engagement made Negri familiar withMarxism from an early age, while his mother was a teacher from the town ofPoggio Rusco (in theprovince of Mantua, Lombardy).[9] He began his career as a militant in the 1950s with the activist Roman Catholic youth organization Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica (GIAC). Negri became acommunist in 1953–54 when he worked at akibbutz in Israel for a year. The kibbutz was organised according to ideas ofZionist socialism and all the members were Jewish communists.[10] He joined theItalian Socialist Party in 1956 and remained a member until 1963, while at the same time becoming more and more engaged throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s in Marxist movements.[11]
Negri studied philosophy and was hired as a professor at theUniversity of Padua, soon after receiving his doctorate in 1956.[12] There. he taughtdottrina dello Stato ("state doctrine"), an Italian field similar to thephilosophy of law, covering state and constitutional theory.[4][11] In the early 1960s, Negri joined the editorial group ofQuaderni Rossi, a journal that represented the intellectual rebirth of Marxism in Italy outside the realm of theCommunist party.[13] In 1969, together withOreste Scalzone andFranco Piperno, Negri was one of the founders of the groupPotere Operaio (Workers' Power) and theoperaismo (lit. 'workerism') movement.[13]
On 16 March 1978,Aldo Moro, the party leader ofChristian Democracy and the former Italian prime minister, was kidnapped in Rome by theRed Brigades. Forty-five days after the kidnapping and nine days beforeMoro's death,[8] the Red Brigades called his family and informed Moro's wife of his impending death.[8] The conversation was recorded and later broadcast. While a number of people who knew Negri at the time identified him as the probable author of the call, the caller was later revealed to beValerio Morucci.[14][15]
On 7 April 1979 Negri and other activists were charged with kidnapping, assassination and insurrection.[11] Padova's Public Prosecutor Pietro Calogero accused them of being involved in the political wing of the Red Brigades, and thus behindleft-wing terrorism in Italy. Negri was charged with a number of offences, including leadership of the Red Brigades, masterminding the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the President of the Christian Democratic Party Aldo Moro, and plotting to overthrow the government.[16] At the time, Negri was a political science professor at the University of Padua and visiting lecturer at Paris'École Normale Supérieure. The Italian public was shocked that an academic could be involved in such events.[8]
A year later a leader of the BR, having decided to cooperate with the prosecution, testified that Negri "had nothing to do with the Red Brigades."[5] The charge of 'armed insurrection against the State' against Negri was dropped and he consequently did not receive the 30-year plus life sentence requested by the prosecutor, but did receive 30 years for being the instigator of political activist Carlo Saronio's murder and having 'morally concurred' with the murder of Andrea Lombardini, acarabiniere, during a failed bank robbery.[5]
Some of his peers found little fault with Negri's activities.Michel Foucault commented, "Isn't he in jail simply for being an intellectual?"[17] French philosophersFélix Guattari andGilles Deleuze also signed in November 1977L'Appel des intellectuels français contre la répression en Italie (The Call of French Intellectuals Against Repression in Italy) in protest against Negri's imprisonment and Italiananti-terrorism legislation.[18][19] On the other hand in the late 1980s Italian PresidentFrancesco Cossiga described Antonio Negri as "a psychopath" who "poisoned the minds of an entire generation of Italy's youth."[20]
In 1983, four years after his arrest and while he was still in prison awaiting trial, Negri was elected to the Italian legislature as a member for theRadical Party.[21] He was freed from prison claiming parliamentary immunity and was released, fleeing to France with the help of Félix Guattari andAmnesty International.[4] His release was later revoked when theChamber of Deputies voted to strip him of his immunity.[11][4] Negri remained in exile in France for the next 14 years, where he was protected from extradition by the "Mitterrand doctrine".[4]
In France, Negri began teaching at theParis VIII (Vincennes),[4] and also at theCollège international de philosophie founded byJacques Derrida. Although the conditions of his residence in France prevented him from engaging in political activities, he wrote prolifically and was active in a broad coalition of left-wing intellectuals.[11] In 1997, he returned to Italy to serve out his sentence hoping to raise awareness of the status of hundreds of other political exiles from Italy.[4] His sentence was commuted and he was released from prison in 2003, having written some of his most influential works while behind bars.[4]
Negri was one of the central theorists ofautonomist Marxism,[22][23][24][25] and was a prominent philosopher withinlibertarian socialism,communism, andMarxism.[26][27][28][29][30] He also wrote various works onimperialism,radical democracy, andpolitical praxis.
Written together with Michael Hardt, the authors ask themselves in this book, "How is it, then, that labour, with all its life-affirming potential, has become the means of capitalist discipline, exploitation, and domination in modern society?" The authors expose and pursue this paradox through a systematic analysis of the role of labour in the processes of capitalist production and in the establishment of capitalist legal and social institutions. Critiquing liberal and socialist notions of labor and institutional reform from a radical democratic perspective, Hardt and Negri challenge the state-form itself.[31]
This book, written solely by Negri, "explores the drama of modern revolutions-from Machiavelli's Florence and Harrington's England to the American, French, and Russian revolutions-and puts forward a new notion of how power and action must be understood if we are to achieve a radically democratic future."[32]
In general, the book theorizes an ongoing transition from a "modern" phenomenon ofimperialism, centered around individualnation-states, to an emergentpostmodern construct created among ruling powers which the authors call "Empire", with different forms of warfare:
According to Hardt and Negri'sEmpire, the rise of Empire is the end of national conflict, the "enemy" now, whoever he is, can no longer be ideological or national. The enemy now must be understood as a kind of criminal, as someone who represents a threat not to a political system or a nation but to the law. This is the enemy as a terrorist ... In the "new order that envelops the entire space of ... civilization", where conflict between nations has been made irrelevant, the "enemy" is simultaneously "banalized" (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (like the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order"[33]).[34]
Empire elaborates a variety of ideas surrounding constitutions, global war, and class. Hence, the Empire is constituted by a monarchy (the United States and theG8, andinternational organizations such asNATO, theInternational Monetary Fund or theWorld Trade Organization), anoligarchy (themultinational corporations and other nation-states) and a democracy (the variousnon-government organizations and the United Nations). Part of the book's analysis deals with "imagin[ing] resistance", but "the point of Empire is that it, too, is "total" and that resistance to it can only take the form of negation – "the will to be against".[35] The Empire is total, buteconomic inequality persists, and as all identities are wiped out and replaced with a universal one, the identity of the poor persists.[36]
Multitude addresses these issues and picks up the thread whereEmpire leaves off. In order to do so, Hardt and Negri argue, one must first analyze the present configuration of war and its contradictions. This analysis is performed in the first chapter, after which chapters two and three focus on multitude and democracy, respectively.Multitude is not so much a sequel as it is a reiteration from a new point of view in a new, relatively accessible style that is distinct from the predominantlyacademic prose style ofEmpire. Multitude remains, the authors insist, despite its ubiquitous subject matter and its almost casual tone, a book of philosophy which aims to shape a conceptual ground for a political process of democratization rather than present an answer to the question 'what to do?' or offer a programme for concrete action.[37]
In 2009 Negri completed the bookCommonwealth, the final in a trilogy that began in 2000 withEmpire and continued withMultitude in 2004, co-authored with Michael Hardt.[38]
In this book, the authors introduce the concept of "the republic of property": "What is central for our purposes here is that the concept of property and the defence of property remain the foundation of every modern political constitution. This is the sense in which the republic, from the great bourgeois revolutions to today, is a republic of property".[39] Part 2 of the book deals with the relationship between modernity and anti-modernity and proposes "altermodernity". Altermodernity "involves not only insertion in the long history of antimodern struggles but also rupture with any fixed dialectic between modern sovereignty and antimodern resistance. In the passage from antimodernity to altermodernity, just as tradition and identity are transformed, so too resistance takes on a new meaning, dedicated now to the constitution of alternatives. The freedom that forms the base of resistance, as we explained earlier, comes to the fore and constitutes an event to announce a new political project."[40]
ForAlex Callinicos in a review "What is newest inCommonwealth is its take on the fashionable idea of the common. Hardt and Negri mean by this not merely the natural resources that capital seeks to appropriate, but also "the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships", which are both the means and the result of biopolitical production. Communism, they argue, is defined by the common, just as capitalism is by the private and socialism (which they identify in effect with statism) with the public."[41] ForDavid Harvey Negri and Hardt "in the search of an altermodernity – something that is outside the dialectical opposition between modernity and anti-modernity – they need a means of escape. The choice between capitalism and socialism, they suggest, is all wrong. We need to identify something entirely different, communism – working within a different set of dimensions."[42] Harvey also notes that "Revolutionary thought, Hardt and Negri argue, must find a way to contest capitalism and 'the republic of property.' It 'should not shun identity politics but instead must work through it and learn from it,' because it is the 'primary vehicle for struggle within and against the republic of property since identity itself is based on property and sovereignty.'"[42] In the same exchange inArtforum between Harvey and Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri, Hardt and Negri attempt to correct Harvey in a concept that is important within the argument ofCommonwealth. As such, they state that "We instead define the concept ofsingularity, contrasting it to the figure of the individual on the one hand and forms of identity on the other, by focusing on three aspects of its relationship to multiplicity: Singularity refers externally to a multiplicity of others; is internally divided or multiple; and constitutes a multiplicity over time – that is, a process of becoming."[42]
AfterCommonwealth, he wrote multiple notable articles on theArab Spring andOccupy movements along with other social issues.[43][44]
In May 2012 Negri self-published (with Michael Hardt) an electronic pamphlet on theoccupy and encampment movements of 2011–2012 calledDeclaration that argues the movement explores new forms of democracy. The introduction was published atJacobin under the title "Take Up the Baton". He also published an article with Hardt inForeign Affairs in October 2011 stating "The Encampment in Lower Manhattan Speaks to a Failure of Representation."[44]
In 2013, Negri publishedSpinoza: Politics and Postmodernity, a collections of essays on Spinoza and his contemporary relevance to philosophy and political theory, translated into English by William McCuaig.[45]
In 2017, Negri and Michael Hardt publishedAssembly.[46] The book provides a series of reflections on the nature of contemporary capitalism and social movements, drawing together the concepts and ideas explored previously in theirEmpire 'trilogy' such as the common, the multitude, and globalisation. It also introduces a new political concept of 'assembly', which draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of an 'assemblage' (French:agencements) as a way of thinking about mass movements and the role of constituent power. It also provides analyses of events that occurred in the years sinceCommonwealth was published in 2009, such as the rise ofright-wing populism,Occupy Wall Street, theautomation of work, and thedigital economy. It continues their reflections on the character and goals of leaderless movements, and especially focuses on the ways in which these movements can seek to self-organise inradically democratic and egalitarian ways. They propose that instead of the usual model of leadership and movement in which leadership serves to articulate the long-term and 'large scale' programme of the multitude, this relationship should instead be inverted: leadership instead comes to serve specific, tactical, and short-term ends (such as the organisation of specific moblisations, protests, direct action, strikes, etc.), while the multitude (or collective) serves to "articulate the long-term goals and objectives" to which the leadership must submit and facilitate.
The book received generally positive reviews. Writing forCritical Inquiry, Kyle Perry argues that the central claim of the book is that "advocates for a truly democratic world must no longer refuse the demands of leading, strategizing, decision making, and institution building that can otherwise remain variously secondary, absent, or anathema amid left, liberatory, and progressive causes."[47] It also rejects as a false binary the idea that liberal-democratic institutions should either be occupied or destroyed; instead, "The better move is to get creative about inventing new, effective, and crucially 'nonsovereign' institutions. Such institutions are not meant to 'rule over us' but to 'foster continuity and organization" and to "help organize our practices, manage our relationships, and together make decisions'." Writing for theLos Angeles Review of Books, Terence Renaud argues that "Given how much the political terrain has changed sinceEmpire appeared in 2000, much of Hardt and Negri's project appears dead. It has said all that it's going to say. Even so, the authors do an excellent job of highlighting the internal challenges that a resurgent left will face. Every new left risks degenerating into sectarian conflict, heavy-handed leadership, and complacency about its own righteousness. Hardt and Negri insist on a self-critical and internally democratic left that never ceases to call its own assumptions into question. In order to transform society, the left must first transform itself."[48]
Between 2016 and 2019, Negri published a three-volume collection of essays written in various years, but translated, collected and published together in English in these volumes. The first volume was titledMarx and Foucault, and published on 16 December 2016.[49] In this first volume, Negri aims to show "how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis – particularly in the context of Italy from May '68 onwards." The second volume was titledFrom the Factory to the Metropolis, and was published in February 2018. This second volume turns towards an analysis of the passage from the traditional proletarian 'mass worker' of industrial capitalism (especially as found in Marx's writing) to the contemporary 'socialised worker', as well as of the modern 'metropolis', which Negri describes as "a space of antagonisms between forms of life produced, on the one hand, by finance capital (the capital that operates around rents), and on the other by the 'cognitive proletariat'. The central question is then how 'the common' of the latter can be mobilised for the destruction of capitalism."[50] The third and final volume of this 'trilogy' was titledSpinoza: Then and Now, which was published in February 2020.[51] In this third volume, Negri "examines how Spinoza's thought constitutes a radical break with past ideas and an essential tool for envisaging a form of politics beyond capitalism."
On 29 October 2021, Negri published the first volume of a new trilogy of books. This first volume is titledMarx in Movement: Operaismo in Context, and seeks to provide an account and examination of the history of Italian Autonomist (or 'Autonomist Marxist') thought, particularly in terms of Negri's theoretical development of the concept of the 'social worker' as an attempt to update Marxism in light of the changes since the factory-based industrial labour of Marx's time.[52]
Negri married Paola Meo in 1962.[53] They had two children (Anna and Francesco) and later divorced.[12] He has another daughter, Nina Negri, from a separate relationship. He met the philosopherJudith Revel in 1996; they married in 2016.[12]
Negri died in Paris on 16 December 2023, at the age of 90.[54]
Listed in order of their first publication in English.
Transcendence, Spirituality, Practices, Immanence: A Conversation with Antonio Negri by Judith Revel,Rethinking Marxism,28(3–4), 470–478, (2016).doi:10.1080/08935696.2016.1243627
With the publication of Empire, the oeuvre of the Italian political philosopher and critic Antonio Negri – until recently an intellectual presence confined to the margins of Anglo-American libertarian Marxist thought – has been transported into what is fast becoming an established and influential domain of transnational cultural theory and criticism.
This challenge to Leninism – perhaps in part as a result of the weakness of Italian Trotskyism – resulted in a strong libertarian anti-statist aspect in autonomist thought in general, and Negri's thought in particular.
The libertarian aspects of Marxist theory, as Price indicates, were later developed by council communists such as Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick and by autonomist Marxists such as C.L.R. James and Antonio Negri. Both these libertarian tendencies rejected Bolshevism, and emphasised the autonomous self-activity of the working class, or with Negri, the 'multitude'.
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