| Full name | Antonio Negri |
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| Born | August 1, 1933 Padua, Italy |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Autonomism · Post-Marxism · Marxism |
| Main interests | Political philosophy · Class conflict · Globalization |
| Notable ideas | Philosophy of globalization · multitude · philosophy of Empire |
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Antonio Negri (born August 1, 1933) is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher.
Negri is best-known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia.[1] As one of the most popular theorists of Autonomism, he has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
He was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing terrorist group[2] Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR). Negri emigrated to France where he taught at the Université de Vincennes (Paris-VIII) and the Collège International de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.[1] He was ultimately convicted of a lesser charge. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years,[3] he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was incarcerated. He now lives between Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel.
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Antonio 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.[4]
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.
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.
On April 7, 1979, at the age of forty-six, Antonio Negri was arrested for his part in the Autonomy Movement, along with others (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 of being the political wing of the Red Brigades, and thus behind left-wing terrorism in Italy. Negri was charged with 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.[5] At the time, Negri was a political science professor at the University of Padua and visiting lecturer at Paris' École Normale Supérieure.
A year later, Negri was exonerated from Aldo Moro's kidnapping after a leader of the BR, having decided to cooperate with the prosecution, testified that Negri "had nothing to do with the Red Brigades."[2] The charge of 'armed insurrection against the State' against Negri was dropped. Therefore, he did not receive the 30-year plus life sentence requested by the prosecutor, but only 30 years for being the instigator of political activist Carlo Saronio's murder and having 'morally concurred' with Lombardini's murder during a failed bank robbery.[2]
His philosopher peers saw little fault with Negri's activities. Michel Foucault commented, "Isn't he in jail simply for being an intellectual?"[6] 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.[7][8]
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 the Radical Party.[9] Claiming parliamentary immunity, he was temporarily released and left for France. There he remained for 14 years, writing and teaching, protected from extradition in virtue of the "Mitterrand doctrine".
In France, Negri began teaching at radical institutions, the Université de Paris VIII (Saint Denis) and the Collège International de Philosophie, founded by Jacques Derrida, François Châtelet and Gilles Deleuze - the latter's radicalism came immediately under attack by the French analyst school, Jacques Bouveresse for instance. 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 1998 he contributed an essay on Deleuze and "political space" to philosophy journal Rue Descartes, a special issue dedicated to Deleuze, along side Guy Lardreau and Alain Badiou[10].
Negri was released from prison in the spring of 2003, having written some of his most influential works while behind bars.
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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 postmodernity, 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 & Félix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Today, Antonio Negri is best known as the co-author, with Michael Hardt, of the controversial Marxist-inspired treatise Empire (2000).[5] 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 control, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule." Their discussion is also concerned with the forms that affective labor takes within this context. The authors call this new, global reconfiguration of control "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 oppose what they identify as the injustices resulting from imperial control, the authors call for the kind of autonomous constitutive resistance epitomized by the Wobblies, the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, and other loosely structured, autonomous resistance movements—of what they call "the multitude."
The book has had widespread influence in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, but many activists and scholars have been critical of the work.[11] It has inspired many initiatives including No Border network, Libre Society, and D-A-S-H. A follow-up to Empire, called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, was published in August 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 more activist bent.
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.[1][12]
In March 2008, Antonio Negri, who had been incarcerated from 1997 to 2003, abandoned procedures to obtain a visa for entry into Japan where he planned to give lectures on labor and other issues at the International House of Japan in Tokyo, Kyoto University, and the University of Tokyo. The Immigrant Control and Refugee Recognition Law bans entry to Japan by a foreign national if he has been given a prison sentence of one year or longer, except for political prisoners.[13]
In 2009 Negri completed the book “Commonwealth”, the final in a trilogy that began in 2000 with “Empire” and continued with “Multitude” in 2004, co-authored with Michael Hardt.[1][14] The book is a "witch’s brew of contemporary radicalism," according to conservative cultural critic Brian Anderson. "Capitalism deserves to die, Messrs. Hardt and Negri believe, for it has abused and corrupted “the common.” The common isn’t just “the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty,” they tell us; it is the universe of things necessary for social life—“knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects.” Under capitalism, nature is ravaged, society brutalized."[15] According to The Independent, the book describes "a borderless cosmopolis in which sovereign states were obsolete", but does not address the "real impact, which is to recreate a decentred world of several great powers competing with one another".[14]