Antonio Negri

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Antonio Negri
Antonio Negri

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 early 1980s of being 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 in 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.

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[edit] Early years

Antonio (Toni) Negri was born in Padua, Italy in 1933. 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. According to some (including but not limited to the Italian Wikipedia), his quick university career might have been helped by his active participation to the socialist party and his connections to influential politicians such as Raniero Panzieri (and philosopher Norberto Bobbio, strongly engaged with the socialist party).

He began his career as a militant in the 1950s with the activist Catholic youth organization Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica (GIAC). He joined the International 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.

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

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.

[edit] Arrest and flight

On April 7, 1979, at the age of forty-six, Antonio Negri was arrested along with the others leaders of Autonomia (Scalzone, E. Vesce, A. Del Re, L. Ferrari Bravo, Piperno and others). Attorney Pietro Calogero (close to the PCI) accused the Autonomia group of being the mastermind 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 and self-proclaimed Marxist revolutionary and advocate of armed insurrection.

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 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. Amnesty International drew attention to the "serious legal irregularities" in the handling of the Negri case. French philosopher Michel Foucault later commented, "Isn't he in jail simply for being an intellectual?" [1].

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" (Lead Years). 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."

[edit] Political thought and writings

Among the central themes in Negri's work are Marxism, democratic globalization, Anti-capitalism, Postmodernism, Neoliberalism, Democracy, the Common, 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.

Although 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, 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.

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[citation needed]. 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 published by Harvard University Press and was therefore targeted at a predominantly academic audience, 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.

[edit] 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." [2]

[edit] footnotes

  1. ^ Michel Foucault, "Le philosophe masqué" (in Dits et écrits, volume 4, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 105)
  2. ^ Preface to his The Savage Anomaly. The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics. [A study "drafted by the light of midnight oil in prison" (ibid.), from April 1979 to April 1980]. Minneapolis/Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, p. xxiii

[edit] Books in English by Antonio Negri

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[edit] Articles by Antonio Negri

[edit] Books on Negri

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  • (2005) The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, vol. 1: Resistance in Practice, ed. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha. London: Pluto Press.
  • (2007) The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, vol. 2: Revolution in Theory, ed. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha. London: Pluto Press.
  • (2002) "Dossier on Empire: a special issue of Rethinking Marxism", ed. Abdul-karim Mustapha. London: T&F/Routledge.

[edit] External links

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