Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Postmodernism, Marxism
Main interests	Political philosophy, Class conflict, Globalization
Notable ideas	Philosophy of globalization

Antonio ("Toni") Negri (born August 1, 1933) is an Italian Marxist political philosopher.

Negri is perhaps best-known for his co-authorship of Empire and his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of the Autonomia Operaia. Accused in the late 1970s of being among other the mastermind of the Red Brigades (BR), involved in the May 1978 assassination of Aldo Moro, leader of Christian-Democrat Party, Negri was later cleared of any links with the BR. He was, however, sentenced to a long-term prison sentence on controversial charges of "association and insurrection against the state." Negri went to France and taught at the Université de Vincennes (Paris-VIII) and the Collège International de Philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, he voluntarily returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. He now lives in Padua.

Early years

Antonio (Toni) Negri was born in Padua, Italy in 1933. He began his career as a militant in the 1950s with the activist Roman Catholic youth organization Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica (GIAC). He joined the Italian 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.

He had a quick academic career at the University of Padua and was promoted to full professor at a young age in the field of "dottrina dello Stato" (State theory), a particularly Italian field that deals with juridical and constitutional theory. This might have been faciliated by his connections to influential politicians such as Raniero Panzieri and philosopher Norberto Bobbio, strongly engaged with the Socialist Party.

In the early 1960s Negri joined the editorial group of Quaderni Rossi, a journal that represented the intellectual rebirth of Marxism in Italy outside the realm of the communist party.

In 1969, together with Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno, Negri was one of the founders of the group Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and the Operaismo (workerist) Communist movement. Potere Operaio disbanded in 1973 and gave rise to the Autonomia Operaia Organizzata (Organised Workers' Autonomy) movement.

He wrote with many other writers associated with the Autonomist movement of Italian workers, students and feminists of the 1960s and 70s, including Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, Romano Alquati, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Franco Berardi (the latter being known for his participation to the free Radio Alice in Bologna).

Arrest and flight

On April 7, 1979, at the age of forty-six, Antonio Negri was arrested along with the other persons associated with the Autonomy movement (Emilio Vesce, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, Mario Dalmaviva, Lauso Zagato, Oreste Scalzone, Pino Nicotri, Alisa del Re, Carmela di Rocco, Massimo Tramonte, Sandro Serafini, Guido Bianchini, and others). Padova's Public Prosecutor Pietro Calogero accused those involved in the Autonomia movement of being the political wing of the Red Brigades and thus behind left-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 Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and plotting to overthrow the government. At the time, Negri was a political science professor at the University of Padua, visiting lecturer at Paris' École Normale Supérieure.

A year later, Negri was exonerated from Aldo Moro's kidnapping. No link was ever established between Negri and the Red Brigades and almost all of the charges against him (including 17 murders) were dropped within months of his arrest due to lack of evidence. Those who support the hypothesis of the Gladio organization being behind Aldo Moro's death see his arrest as an attempt to cover its hidden responsibilities. Negri was convicted of crimes of association and insurrection against the state (a charge that was later dropped) and, in 1984, sentenced to 30 years in jail. Two years later he was sentenced to an additional four and a half years on the basis that he was morally responsible for acts of violence between activists and the police during the 1960s and 1970s largely due to his writing and association with revolutionary causes and groups. Throughout the 1980s Amnesty International drew attention to the "serious legal irregularities" in the handling of the Autonomia trials, specifically concerns over the holding of suspects for long periods without trial, and accompanied by long periods of judicial inactivity, the evasion of legal limits to preventive detention and the retroactive application of legislation to extend periods of detention, the lack of availability of a key prosecution witness (Carlo Fioroni), as well as potential threats to Human Rights posed by changes to Italian law . Regarding Negri himself, French philosopher Michel Foucault later commented, "Isn't he in jail simply for being an intellectual?" . French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze also signed in November 1977 L'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 Italian anti-terrorism legislation.

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 Marco Pannella's Radical Party. A parliamentary privilege that allowed Negri to leave prison in order to serve in an elected position was revoked by the Italian Chamber of Deputies a few months later. At this point, he went to France where he remained for 14 years, writing and teaching, protected from extradition in virtue of the "Mitterrand doctrine."

In France, Negri began teaching at the Université de Paris VIII (Saint Denis) and the Collège International de Philosophie, founded by Jacques 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. In 1990 Negri with Jean-Marie Vincent and Denis Berger founded the journal Futur Antérieur. The journal ceased publication in 1998 but was reborn as Multitudes in 2000, with Negri as a member of the international editorial board.

In 1997, Negri returned to Italy voluntarily to serve the remainder of his sentence (which had since been reduced on appeal to 17 years), in the hope that this act would raise awareness of the situation of hundreds of exiles and prisoners (including Adriano Sofri from Lotta Continua) involved in radical left political activities in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called "Anni di Piombo" (Years of Lead). Negri was released from prison in the spring of 2003, having served his full sentence of 17 years. "I am taking up my political work again starting from the ground up, from prison," said Negri, who wrote L'anomalia selvaggia and Empire in his prison time. "With my return, I would like to give a push to the generation that was marginalized by the anti-terrorist laws of the 1970s so that they will leave their internal or foreign exile and again take part in public and democratic life."

Political thought and writings

Among the central themes in Negri's work are Marxism, democratic globalization, anti-capitalism, postmodernism, neoliberalism, democracy, the commons, and the multitude. His prolific, iconoclastic, cosmopolitan, highly original and often dense and difficult philosophical writings attempt to reconcile critical terms with most of the major global intellectual movements of the past half-century in the service of a new Marxist analysis of capitalism.

Negri is extremely dismissive of postmodernism, whose only value, in his estimation, is that it has served as a symptom of the historical transition whose dynamics he and Hardt set out to explain in Empire. He acknowledges the influence of Michel Foucault, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Today, Antonio Negri is best known as the co-author, with Michael Hardt, of the book Empire (2000). The thesis of Empire is that the globalization and informatization of world markets since the late 1960s have led to a progressive decline in the sovereignty of nation-states and the emergence of "a new form [of sovereignty], composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule." The authors call this new, global reconfiguration of sovereignty Empire. This shift both enacts and results from "the real [as opposed to formal] subsumption of social existence by capital," wherein there is no longer any "outside" to capital—everything is always already subsumed into the capitalist network. In order to resist and to oppose what they identify as the injustices resulting from this imperial sovereignty, the authors call for autonomous constitutive resistance epitomyzed by the Wobblies, the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, and other loosely structured, autonomous resistance movements—what they call the multitude.

The book has had widespread influence in Europe, Australasia and North America but Black and Southern activists and scholars have tended to be critical of the work. It has inspired many initiatives including No Border network, Libre Society, KEIN.ORG, NEURO-networking europe, and D-A-S-H. A follow-up to Empire, called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, was published in August of 2004. Unlike Empire, which was only published by Harvard University Press and was therefore targeted at a predominantly academic audience,the paperback edition of Multitude was released by Penguin Books and addresses a much less specialized readership. Whereas Empire, despite its explicit political orientation, is largely focused on describing the conditions of globalization, Multitude evinces a somewhat more activist bent than its precursor.

An alternative to the strictly political characterisations of Negri's project comes from a neoliberal critic, John J. Reilly, who calls Empire "a postmodern plot to overthrow the City of God." In fact, Negri's involvement in the early 1950s with the Catholic Worker Movement and liberation theology seems to have left a permanent mark upon his thought. One of his most recent works, Time for Revolution (2003), relies heavily on themes drawn from Augustine of Hippo and Baruch Spinoza and might be described as an attempt to found the City of God without the aid of the "transcendental illusions" and the "Theology of Power" that he finds in thinkers as disparate as Martin Heidegger and John Maynard Keynes, extending and attempting to correct the critique of ideology as false consciousness set forth by Karl Marx.

Now in his 70s, Negri continues to teach and write. He divides his time between Rome, Venice and Paris, where he delivers political seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie and the Université Paris I.

Quotes

• "Prison, with its daily rhythm, with the transfer and the defense, does not leave any time; prison dissolves time: This is the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society."

• "Nothing in my books has any direct organizational relationship. My responsibility is totally as an intellectual who writes and sells books!"

• "...it is indeed necessary to recognize as a fact the emergence of the B.R. [Red Brigades] and NAP [Armed Proletariat Nuclei] as the tip of the iceberg of the Movement. This does not require one in any way to transform the recognition into a defense, and this does not in any way deny the grave mistake of the B.R. line. At one point I defined the B.R. as a variable of the movement gone crazy... I state again that terrorism can only be fought through an authentic mass political struggle and inside the revolutionary movement."

Books in English by Antonio Negri

• Antonio Negri, Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project. Translated by Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano. New York: Verso, 2007.
• Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri: In Conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle London: Routledge, 2004
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press, 2004.
• Antonio Negri, Subversive Spinoza: (Un)Contemporary Variations, edited by Timothy S. Murphy, translated by Timothy S. Murphy, Michael Hardt, Ted Stolze, and Charles T. Wolfe, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.
• Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution. Translated by Matteo Mandarini. New York: Continuum, 2003.
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000. (full text online in PDF format)
• Antonio Negri Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State Translated by Maurizia Boscagli. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
• Antonio Negri The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, Translated by Michael Hardt. University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
• Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, New York: Autonomedia, 1991.
• Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967-83, trans. Ed Emery and John Merrington, London: Red Notes, 1988. ISBN 0-906305-09-8 [Hb]; 0 906305 10 1 [Pb] Available from the SOAS Bookshop in London: bookshop@soas.ac.uk
• Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.
• Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, Communists like us, 1985.

Articles by Antonio Negri

• Multitudes quarterly journal (in French)

• Archives of the journal Futur Antérieur (in French)

• English translations of recent articles by Antonio Negri from Generation Online

• Hardt & Negri (2002), "Marx's Mole is Dead" in Eurozine

• Between "Historic Compromise" and Terrorism: Reviewing the experience of Italy in the 1970s Le Monde Diplomatique, August-September 1998

• Articles by and about Toni Negri, translated by Ed Emery

• "Towards an Ontological Definition of Multitude" Article published in the French journal Multitudes.

• Extract from Negri and Hardt's Empire at Marxists.org

Books on Negri

• Empire and Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Atilio A. Boron, London: Zed Books, 2005. (Publisher's announcement)
• Reading Capital Politically, Harry Cleaver. 1979, 2nd ed. 2000.

• The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, vol. 1: Resistance in Practice, ed. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha. London: Pluto Press, 2005.
• The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, vol. 2: Revolution in Theory, ed. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
• Dossier on Empire: a special issue of Rethinking Marxism, ed. Abdul-karim Mustapha. London: T&F/Routledge, 2002.
• Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvere Lotringer & Christian Marazzi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1980, 2007. (Includes transcripts of Negri's exchanges with his accusers during his trial.) ISBN-10:1-58435-053-9, ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-053-8. Available online at Semiotext(e)

External links

• Empire, Multitude and the “Death of Communism” : The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism, from Spartacist, English edition, No. 59, Spring 2006.
• Toni Negri in perspective by Alex Callinicos, 2001.
• Statement by Antonio Negri - broken link 2006-10-15 in refutation of the allegations made against him by Keith Windschuttle in The Australian, 16th March 2005.
• Italy: Behind the Ski Mask, in New York Review of Books, Volume 26, Number 13 ? August 16, 1979.
• The Empire Does Not Exist: A critique of Toni Negri's ideas by Pietro Di Nardo, 2003.
• Negri resources at generation-online
• "Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society" by Nick Dyer-Witheford in Multitudes, June 3, 2004.
• Persian Empire: Antonio Negri in Iran by Nina Power, in Radical Philosophy, 2005.
• Recycling Marx: Autonomism and The Rejection of Orthodoxy, 2005.
• BARBARIANS: the disordered insurgence by Crisso and Odoteo.
• Force, Relation, Resistance, Constituent Power and the Potential For Another World, 2005.
• Empire built on shifting sand Critical review of recent English language works by and about Antonio Negri, by Joseph Choonara, 2006.
• Naked Punch Review Interview with Antonio Negri discussing its recent take on his theory of Empire.

Video

• "N" de Negri (in Spanish)
• Antonio Negri, A Revolt That Never Ends