The Savage Anomaly

Introduction

Negri wrote “The Savage Anomaly” in prison after his arrest in April 1979; it appeared in Italian in 1981 and in French in 1982 with a preface by Gilles Deleuze. Negri reads Spinoza as an “anomaly” in the seventeenth century: in the Dutch Republic, where a market society had formed without a strong absolutist state, Spinoza developed a metaphysics of productive power. Negri distinguishes a first foundation of the system, still marked by Neoplatonic ideas of emanation, from a second one, worked out after an interruption in which Spinoza wrote the Theological-Political Treatise; here being is the constitutive power of things and of the multitude. Potentia, this productive capacity, stands against potestas, the power of the constituted order. The book became a reference in the Spinoza revival of the 1980s and the basis of Negri’s later theory of constituent power.

Connections

Builds on

• Theological-Political Treatise1670 · Baruch de Spinoza
• Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order1677 · Baruch de Spinoza

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