Antonio Negri

Works

• 1981The Savage Anomaly

  Written in prison: reads Spinoza as a thinker of the productive power (potentia) of the multitude against constituted power (potestas).

• 2000Empire

  Written with Michael Hardt: describes a new, decentred form of global sovereignty and the multitude as its potential counter-power.

Position

Negri joined a reading of Marx centred on the Grundrisse with a philosophy of power drawn from Spinoza. Operaismo reversed the usual perspective: workers’ struggles drive capitalist development, not the other way round. Negri extended this from the factory worker to the “social worker” and later to immaterial and cognitive labour. In “The Savage Anomaly” he read Spinoza as the thinker of potentia, the constitutive power of the multitude, against potestas, the power of the constituted order; Gilles Deleuze wrote a preface to the French edition, and the book belongs to the late twentieth-century revival of Spinoza in France and Italy. “Insurgencies” (Il potere costituente, 1992) made constituent power the core of democracy; Giorgio Agamben discussed it critically in “Homo Sacer” (1995). “Empire”, written with Michael Hardt, joined this to Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Deleuze’s society of control and found a wide readership in the movements against neoliberal globalisation. Slavoj Žižek objected that it offered no concrete politics, and other critics argued that the wars after 2001 showed the continuing weight of states and of American power. Negri’s responsibility for the political violence of the 1970s remains contested. The charge of involvement in the Moro kidnapping was dropped; in 1984 a Rome assize court sentenced him in absentia to 30 years, and on appeal, in a judgment confirmed by the Court of Cassation in 1988, he was convicted of subversive association and membership of an armed band and of moral complicity (concorso morale) in a failed robbery at Argelato in 1974, in which a carabiniere was killed. Negri contested the charges; he gave his own account of the trials, prison and exile in “Galera ed esilio” (2017).

Life & context

Antonio Negri was born on 1 August 1933 in Padua. He studied philosophy there, published early studies on the young Hegel’s philosophy of law and on German historicism, and from 1967 held the chair of state theory (dottrina dello Stato) at the University of Padua. In the 1960s he worked on the journals Quaderni rossi and Classe operaia, the organs of operaismo, and was a leading figure of Potere Operaio (1969–1973) and then of the movement of Autonomia. In 1978, at Louis Althusser’s invitation, he gave seminars on Marx’s Grundrisse at the École normale supérieure in Paris (“Marx beyond Marx”, 1979). On 7 April 1979 he was arrested; the investigation named after that date at first also accused him of taking part in the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, a charge that was soon dropped. In prison he wrote “The Savage Anomaly” (1981). Elected to parliament for the Partito Radicale in 1983, he was released; when his immunity was lifted in September 1983 he fled to France, where he was protected under the “Mitterrand doctrine” and taught in Paris, while Italian courts convicted him in absentia, among other things of subversive association. He returned voluntarily in 1997 and was imprisoned, received semi-liberty in 1999 and was free from 2003. He died in Paris on 16 December 2023.

Further main works

• Marx beyond Marx (Marx oltre Marx, 1979)
• Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Il potere costituente, 1992)
• Multitude (with Michael Hardt, 2004)
• Commonwealth (with Michael Hardt, 2009)