Antonio Negri

Template:Copyedit Antonio Negri (born 1933 in Padua) is an Italian moral and political philosopher.

Contents

1 Life and work 2 Religious themes 3 Central themes in Negri 4 Bibliography/Webography 4.1 Critical Sources 4.2 Biographical Sources

Life and work

The intolerance towards the authorities that has characterised Negri's political career arose during his participation in the GIAC (Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica) in the 1950s in Padua. In the 1960s, Negri became well-known as an original member of the Italian Potere Operaio and the succeeding Autonomia group. He wrote together with many other famous autonomists associated with the movements of Italian workers, students and feminists of the 1960s and 70s, including Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, Romano Alquati, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and François Berardi. He later wrote for Futur Antérieur (Future Perfect) with people such as Paolo Virno.

Negri was convicted of charges that he and his writings were "morally culpable" for acts of violence against the Italian state during the 1960s and 1970s, due to his advocacy of "armed insurrection". Negri was elected in 1983 to the Italian legislature while imprisoned, and so was released on grounds of parliamentary immunity. When the legislature attempted to strip him of immunity, he fled to France, where he remained for 14 years before voluntarily returning to Italy in 1997 to serve the remainder of his sentence. He was released in spring 2003, but is not allowed to take part in elections or to teach.

He is now best known as the co-author, with Michael Hardt, of the bookEmpire. The prolific, iconoclastic, cosmopolitan, highly original and often dense and difficult philosophical writings of Negri attempt to come to critical terms with most of the major world intellectual movements of the past half-century, in the service of a new Marxist analysis of capitalism. The controversial thesis of Empire, that the globalization and informatization of world markets since the late 1960s has produced an unprecedented historical development — what he calls "the real subsumption of social existence by capital" — touches rather directly and forcefully upon a number of issues related to the Information Society, the Network Economy, and globalization, which may account for the relatively high degree of mainstream interest it attracted when it was published in 2000.

Empire has grown in influence since its publication and has inspired the work of many projects around the world. Some of these include No_Border_network, Libre Society, KEIN.ORG, NEURO-networking europe, D-A-S-H, and many others.

The sequel to Empire, called Multitude, was published in August of 2004.

Religious themes

An alternative to the strictly political characterisations of Negri's project comes from a neoliberal critic, John 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 rather 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.

Central themes in Negri

Among the central themes in Negri are Marxism, Antiglobalization, Anti-capitalism, Postmodernism, Neoliberalism, Democracy, the Common, and the Multitudes.

Although he acknowledges the influence of Michel Foucault, David Harvey's The Condition of Post Modernity (1989), Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia (in two volumes, Anti-oedipus and A thousand plateaux, Negri is on the whole 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.

Bibliography/Webography

1. Multitudes (http://multitudes.samizdat.net)
2. Empire (http://www.infoshop.org/texts/empire.pdf)
3. Negri and Hardt, Empire and other writings (http://usuarios.lycos.es/pete_baumann/toninegri.html) (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian)
4. Toni Negri, Multitudes contributions (http://multitudes.samizdat.net/auteur.php3?id_auteur=13)
5. Maurizio Lazzarato and Toni Negri, Travail immatériel et subjectivité (http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=474)
6. Marx's Mole is Dead (http://www.eurozine.com/article/2002-02-13-hardtnegri-en.html) (Hardt)
7. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/tanegrimbm1.pdf) (Spanish translation) (2 (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/mbm2es.pdf) | 3 (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/mbm3es.pdf) | 4 (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/mbm4es.pdf) | 5 (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/mbm5es.pdf) | 6 (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/mbm6es.pdf) | 7 (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/mbm7es.pdf) | 8 (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/mbm8es.pdf) | 9 (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/mbm9es.pdf) )
8. The Savage Anomaly (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/negri_savage.html) (precis)
9. The Labor of Dionysus (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/hardt_labor.html) (precis)
10. Insurgencies (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/negri_insurgencies.html) (precis)
11. Negri Links (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNlinks.htm) (U. Virginia)
12. Italy One Year After Genoa (http://www.eurozine.com/article/2002-09-04-negri-de.html)
13. And Thus Began the Fall of Empire (http://www.eurozine.com/article/2002-02-21-negri-fr.html)
14. Negri&Hardt, The Informatization of Production (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/negri.htm) (2000)
15. Archives Futur Antérieur (http://multitudes.samizdat.net/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=117)
16. Negri Links (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNlinks.htm) (U. Virginia)
17. Philosophy's Hostage (http://www.oneworld.org/index_oc/news/italy241197.html) (Michael Hardt)
18. MULTITUDE, war and democracy in the age of empire (http://usuarios.lycos.es/pete_baumann/autonomial.html) (Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt)

Critical Sources

1. Cleaver, Harry Reading Capital Politically (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357krcp.html)
2. Texas Archives of Autonomist Marxism (http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/taalphacomplete.html)
3. Witheford, Nick Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society (http://www.endpage.com/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Dyer_Witheford/Autonomist_Marxism_and_Information_Soc.htm)
4. The Empire Does Not Exist (http://www.marxist.com/Theory/review_toni_negri_empire.html)
5. Wright, The Limits of Negri's Class Analysis (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html/opsoc.html)
6. Marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/front_pg.htm) (library of readings)

Biographical Sources

1. Eurozine brief biography (http://www.eurozine.com/biography/negri.html)
2. The Negri prosecution (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNmain.htm)
3. Documents on Negri prosecution (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNdocuments.htm) 1979
4. Chronology of Negri arrest (http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNChronology.htm)
5. Italy: Behind the Ski Mask (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7727), New York Review of Books (Volume 26, Number 13 · August 16, 1979)ca:Antonio Negri

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