The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume One

Edited by Timothy S Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha

Description

This collection of essays is the first of its kind in English on the work of Antonio Negri, the Italian philosopher and political theorist. The spectacular success of Empire, Negri's collaboration with Michael Hardt, has brought Negri's writing to a new, wider audience. A substantial body of his writing is now available to an English-speaking readership.



Outstanding contributors – including Michael Hardt, Sergio Bologna, Kathi Weeks and Nick Dyer-Witheford - reveal the variety and complexity of Negri's thought and explore its unique relevance to modern politics. Negri is one of the most sophisticated analysts of modern political philosophy. Philosophers and critics alike find his work both difficult and exhilarating, engaging as it does with Marx, Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Tronti and others.



This book is ideal for readers who want to get to grips with Negri's key themes, in particular his theories on labour, capital, power, the state and revolution. It makes a great introduction to his work for students of political philosophy, as well as providing a comprehensive critical approach for Negri enthusiasts.
Introduction: The Real Movement and the Present State of Things by Timothy S. Murphy & Abdul-Karim Mustapha

Editors’ Acknowledgments

Contributors

Part I. The Long ’68 in Italy

1. Into the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the Subjective Caesura (1968-73) by Michael Hardt

2. Negri’s Proletarians and the State: A Critique by Sergio Bologna

3. Feminism and Autonomy: Itinerary of Struggle by Alisa del Re

4. A Party of Autonomy? by Steve Wright

Part II. How to Resist the Present

5. The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective by Kathi Weeks

6. Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor by Nick Dyer-Witheford

7. Negri by Zapata: Constituent Power and the Limits of Autonomy by José Rabasa

8. ‘Now Everything Must Be Reinvented’: Negri and Revolution by Kenneth Surin

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie politique
• Communisme
• Communism
• Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Political
• Political Ideologies

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849642514
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Resistance in Practice

The Philosophy of Antonio Negri

Edited by

Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha

First published 2005 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha 2005

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 2338 3 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2337 5 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

Editors’ Acknowledgements

Contents

Introduction: The Real Movement and the Present State of Things Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha

Part I: The Long ’68 in Italy 1. Into the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the Subjective Caesura (1968–73) Michael Hardt 2. Negri’sProletarians and the State: A Critique Sergio Bologna 3. Feminism and Autonomy: Itinerary of Struggle Alisa Del Re 4. A Party of Autonomy? Steve Wright

Part II: How to Resist the Present

5. The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective Kathi Weeks 6. Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor Nick Dyer-Witheford 7. Negri by Zapata: Constituent Power and the Limits of Autonomy José Rabasa 8. ‘Now Everything Must Be Reinvented’: Negri and Revolution Kenneth Surin

Bibliography

Contributors Index

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243 258 260

Editors’ Acknowledgements

This volume has taken much longer to appear than any of its participants could have anticipated when they first became involved, and the fact that it has finally appeared will no doubt surprise some of us. The editors owe this surprise to a number of people, and since our collaboration has taken place electronically, our debts only partially overlap. First of all, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Steve Wright, who, not content with his role as contributor, willingly took on every other job I could find for him: referee, go-between, confidante, introducer, and others hard to name and harder to do without. Next, I owe it to our trans- lators, Arianna Bove and Ed Emery, who met more precipitate deadlines than any other participants were compelled to do. I owe it as well to the anonymous referees who reviewed the project for Pluto Press, and to Enda Brophy and Ida Dominijanni, all of whom made important suggestions that have improved the resulting volume considerably. I owe perhaps most of all to the patience of the contributors to this volume, some of whom have waited more than four years to see their chapters in print. Finally, I owe my coeditor, Abdul-Karim Mustapha, a great debt for origi- nally conceiving this project, gathering the first contributions and then permitting me to participate in it as a partner. Here at home, I want to acknowledge my love for and reliance upon Julie and Blackie through all the years of this project and so many others. Timothy S. Murphy

From the beginning of this project, several people are to be thanked for their resourcefulness and support: Michael Taussig, Jim Fleming, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Brian Massumi. I would also like to thank some members of theMultitudesgroup in Paris, who have shared much infor- mation regarding Toni Negri but also incalculable gifts of knowledge and friendship: Yann Moulier-Boutang, Bruno Karsenti, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonella Corsani, Anne Querrien, Charles Wolfe, François Matheron, Ed Emery, and Guissepe Cocco in Brazil. Furthermore, other people, who do not appear in this volume but who have worked with Negri and his thought for some time, gave their time and wisdom to the project: Gabriel Albiac, Christian Marazzi, Santiago Lopez-Petit, and Fredric Jameson. And without truth and love, scholarship is never what it can be and for that I thank Jill E. Baron, Robin F. Garrell, François Laruelle, José Rabasa and

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Editor’s Acknowledgements

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Catherine Durand. Tim Murphy, my coeditor, deserves much more thanks in an acknowledgement, since we have never had the chance to meet in person. His patience, determination, and belief in Negri are unparalleled. Abdul-Karim Mustapha

Sergio Bologna’s contribution originally appeared in Italian in the journal Primo Maggio7 (1976), and it is translated here by permission of the author. The interview with Alisa Del Re originally appeared in Italian on the CD-ROM that accompanies the volumeFuturo anteriore. Dai ‘Quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano(Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002), edited by Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Roggero. It is translated here by permission of the editors.

Introduction: The Real Movement and the Present State of Things

Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha

The publication ofEmpirein 2000 first alerted many in the English-speaking world to the work of Italian philosopher and militant Antonio Negri. That book, a synthetic overview of what Marx and Engels would call ‘the present state of things’ (Marx and Engels 1970: 57), has become a lightning rod for criticism from the right and the left as well as a fundamental point of ref- erence for many activists in the growing struggle over globalization. The magnitude and intensity of the critical polemics overEmpire’s basic thesis, the claim that centralized, national programs of imperialist expansion and consolidation have given way to a decentered, transnational regime of pro- duction and governance, can be measured in a number of recent journal issues and books dedicated to analyzing that thesis and its consequences (Rethinking Marxism2001;Strategies2003; Balakrishnan 2003; Passavant and Dean 2004). However, many of these recent attempts to assess Negri’s thought (in both its solo and its collaborative manifestations) are seriously weakened by their failure to situateEmpireand its claims within the wider contexts of Negri’s overall body of work and the Italian cultural milieu out of which he emerged. In their haste to theorize the ‘present state of things’, many of these critics overlook the ‘real movement’ of ideas and activism that seeks to abolish that state. Over the past half-century Negri has authored hundreds of articles and authored, coauthored or edited over 40 books on a staggeringly wide array of subjects, as well as wielding a defining editorial influence over some of the most important periodicals and book series in European intellectual 1 history. For much of that time he was also active in several mass move- ments of the Italian extraparliamentary left (most notably Workers’ Power (Potere operaio) and Workers’ Autonomy (Autonomia operaia)) as a militant teacher, strategist and organizer. This unique combination of sophisticated theory and extensive practice, equaled among Western Marxists perhaps only by Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, informs all of Negri’s work, but its import is too often overlooked by his critics. The purpose of this volume is to offer critical assessments of Negri’s work that are informed by more comprehensive engagements with the range of his writings and his militancy, and not just with the handful of his texts currently in vogue in

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Resistance in Practice

the English-speaking world. All of the contributors to this volume have been engaged with Negri’s radical philosophical and/or militant activity since well before the publication ofEmpire, and although some of them analyzeEmpirewith great care and acuity, they grant it no special priority over his other works. Each of their contributions reflects the depth and breadth of engagement that is necessary to understand Negri’s work in the full conceptual and historical density of its ‘real movement’. The first part of the volume is focused on Negri’s place in the Italian countercultural context, which we have labeled ‘the Long ’68’ to mark the similarity of its origin to that of the events of 1968 in France and else- where, as well as its difference in extension and intensity: in Italy, 1968 didn’t come to an end until 1977, while in the rest of Europe and the United States, 1968 was effectively over before 1969. Michael Hardt, Negri’s chief collaborator for more than a decade, provides a precise account of Negri’s complex relationship to Lenin’s thought and its application within the burgeoning Italian New Left of the Long 1968, as well as a perceptive com- parison of Negri’s work with that of important parallel figures in France such as Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Hardt’s chap- ter is followed by contributions from two of Negri’s chief allies and inter- locutors of the Seventies, Sergio Bologna and Alisa Del Re. Bologna’s 1976 review of Negri’s pamphletProletarians and the Stateexemplifies the origi- nality and intensity of critique that characterized the internal intellectual and organizational dynamics of the Seventies movements, while Del Re’s recent interview offers a leading feminist’s assessment of the movements’ historical strengths and weaknesses and their continuing influence, with particular emphasis on Negri’s role as a motivational figure of the era. Concluding this part is Steve Wright’s comprehensive analysis of debates over the party form in different sectors of Autonomy, which situates and criticizes Negri’s (as well as Bologna’s) contributions to these debates by recovering the full range of political positions that emerged throughout the period. The second part provides a set of critical attempts to take up points in Negri’s work that are relevant to radical militancy in the present. Kathi Weeks traces the genealogy of the refusal of work from Paul LaFargue to Negri in order to identify a dissident, antiproductivist legacy within Marxism, a legacy that has become increasingly influential upon today’s global forms of workers’ resistance. Nick Dyer-Witheford restages the debate over the centrality of immaterial labor (that is, intellectual, symbolic and/or affec- tive labor) to the global regime of production, and on the basis of this displacement he proposes a critical recuperation of the concept of species being as a way to fill in the blind spots in Hardt and Negri’s conception of

Introduction

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immaterial labor. In what is perhaps the most far-ranging and complex discussion in this volume, José Rabasa meditates on the relevance of Negri’s philosophical categories and conceptual tools for programs of local and regional militancy in Latin America; in Negri’s work he finds the means to displace the conventional strategies and historical languages of postcolonial critique, and perhaps to begin to escape from the restrictive aporias that postcolonial resistance has inherited from deconstruction. In the concluding essay, Kenneth Surin seeks to expand and intensify Negri’s theory of revolution by confronting the most radically immaterial register of globalization, and thus the one seemingly most difficult to contest through militant practice: the regime of international finance capital. His sophisticated extension of and supplement to Negri’s ideas, taking ‘Negri beyond Negri’ as the other contributors also do, helps to bring the man- darin world of global finance within range of contemporary practices of resistance. The interventions contained in this volume unapologetically attempt to break with the lamentable tradition of internecine squabbling that con- tinues to mark so much left discourse, both theoretical and organizational. In what the editors consider to be genuine communist fashion, these chap- ters strive to join ‘therealmovement which abolishes the present state of things’, not by proclaiming their compliance with or rejection of any immobilizing left orthodoxy, but rather by resonating with the overall move- ment of Negri’s compelling and provocative work—extending it, expand- ing it, displacing it, reworking it and intensifying it. Only in this way, through processes of differentiation, dissensus, experimentation and alliance, can we and they contribute to the construction of a truly global and democratic left, one that abandons the exclusive and reactionary cat- egories of sectarianism and nationalism in favor of the inclusive logic of the multitude.

NOTE

1. In addition to his well-known writings on Marx, Spinoza, Lenin, the state-form, worker phenomenology, postmodernism and globalization, Negri has also published books or essays on the biblical Book of Job, the Italian Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi, mathematical catastrophe theory, and soccer, among other things. He has been the editor or a leading member of the editorial collective of periodicals such as Il Progresso Veneto,Quaderni Rossi,Classe Operaia,Contropiano,Potere Operaio,Rosso, Critica del Diritto,Futur antérieur,MultitudesandPosse, among others.

Part I

The Long ’68 in Italy