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Essays #1
Marx and Foucault: Essays, Volume 1
This the first of a new three-part series in which Antonio Negri, a leading political thinker of our time, explores key ideas that have animated radical thought and examines some of the social and economic forces that are shaping our world today.
In this first volume Negri shows how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis - particularly in the context of Italy from May '68 onwards. At around that time, the structures of industry and production began to change radically, with the emergence of new producer-subjects and new fields of capitalist value creation. New concepts and theories were developed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others to help make sense of these and related developments - concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, subjectivation and subsumption, public and common, power and potentiality. These concepts and theories are examined by Negri within the broader context of the development of European philosophical discourse in the twentieth century.
Marx and Foucault provides a unique account of the development of radical thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and will be a key text for anyone interested in radical politics today.
In this first volume Negri shows how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis - particularly in the context of Italy from May '68 onwards. At around that time, the structures of industry and production began to change radically, with the emergence of new producer-subjects and new fields of capitalist value creation. New concepts and theories were developed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others to help make sense of these and related developments - concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, subjectivation and subsumption, public and common, power and potentiality. These concepts and theories are examined by Negri within the broader context of the development of European philosophical discourse in the twentieth century.
Marx and Foucault provides a unique account of the development of radical thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and will be a key text for anyone interested in radical politics today.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 12, 2017
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About the author
Antonio Negri
199 books297 followersAntonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt and his work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, he Negri was arrested and charged with a long list of crimes including the Moro murder. Most charges were dropped quickly, but in 1984 he was still sentenced (in absentia) to 30 years in prison. He was given an additional four years on the charge of being "morally responsible" for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s. The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. He hence lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel. He was the father of film director Anna Negri.
Like Deleuze, Negri's preoccupation with Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. Along with Althusser and Deleuze, he has been one of the central figures of a French-inspired neo-Spinozism in continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after a well-known rediscovery of Spinoza by German thinkers (especially the German Romantics and Idealists) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, he Negri was arrested and charged with a long list of crimes including the Moro murder. Most charges were dropped quickly, but in 1984 he was still sentenced (in absentia) to 30 years in prison. He was given an additional four years on the charge of being "morally responsible" for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s. The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. He hence lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel. He was the father of film director Anna Negri.
Like Deleuze, Negri's preoccupation with Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. Along with Althusser and Deleuze, he has been one of the central figures of a French-inspired neo-Spinozism in continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after a well-known rediscovery of Spinoza by German thinkers (especially the German Romantics and Idealists) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 14, 2024
I think I finally figured it out. Negri is an anarchist disguised as a communist. Since he is clearly against state, party, and union, I don't know what separates him from anarchism. And no, just being a "left anarchist" doesn't make you a communist. Paradigmatic communists Marx and Lenin clearly were not "left anarchists". Maybe Negri is a libertarian communist or something like that, sure. But to me libertarian communists are just left anarchists by another name.
I feel Negri is disguised as a communist for the clout it brought in Years of Lead Italy. His political context is also why I suspect he is so hung up on Foucault and other crypto-anarchist (as pointed out by Catherine Malabou) French theorists. At the time they seemed to provide a passageway between the Scylla of PCI stalinism and the Charybdis of Frankfurt School pessimism. Foucault must have appeared at that moment like a godsend: a rejection of party socialism while retaining revolutionary aspirations and a faith in militant activism.
But to me this passageway is a dead-end. It's the same dead-end Bakunin and all "actually existing anarchism" always ran into. And I feel Negri somehow recognizes this, because his writing seems to repeatedly devolve into poetry, enchanting at times, yes, but always meaningless as political analysis. Perhaps that's what anarchism is as well: at times beautiful but always meaningless.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book was the very first page where Negri off-hand acknowledged the use his theory has been put to by the most mainstream neoliberalism. I don't think it's a coincidence the same can be said of Foucault as well as most other radical left theorists of the 1968 generation. It forces one to ask: how radical is your theory if Tony Blair and The New York Times can get excited over it?
I feel Negri is disguised as a communist for the clout it brought in Years of Lead Italy. His political context is also why I suspect he is so hung up on Foucault and other crypto-anarchist (as pointed out by Catherine Malabou) French theorists. At the time they seemed to provide a passageway between the Scylla of PCI stalinism and the Charybdis of Frankfurt School pessimism. Foucault must have appeared at that moment like a godsend: a rejection of party socialism while retaining revolutionary aspirations and a faith in militant activism.
But to me this passageway is a dead-end. It's the same dead-end Bakunin and all "actually existing anarchism" always ran into. And I feel Negri somehow recognizes this, because his writing seems to repeatedly devolve into poetry, enchanting at times, yes, but always meaningless as political analysis. Perhaps that's what anarchism is as well: at times beautiful but always meaningless.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book was the very first page where Negri off-hand acknowledged the use his theory has been put to by the most mainstream neoliberalism. I don't think it's a coincidence the same can be said of Foucault as well as most other radical left theorists of the 1968 generation. It forces one to ask: how radical is your theory if Tony Blair and The New York Times can get excited over it?
August 25, 2020
Negri offers a number of interesting essays (and an interview) which elaborate his long-standing position on the Multitude and an emergent 'cooperation' as an antidote to the 'real subsumption of society to capital'.
"The third consequence is that, from the relationship between intensity and density that marks the antagonism, there emerge new qualities of the subjects who participate in development. When, as happens in post-Fordist society, the social relationship that constitutes capital occupies the whole of society and determines its productivity, when productivity becomes cognitive, immaterial, affective, cooperative and so on, in short, a ‘production of subjectivity’, then the exchange becomes ontological and we witness a deepening of the antagonism that invests the subjects – especially the figures of living labour, who increasingly recognise themselves as being capable of appropriating portions of fixed capital and able to develop productive efficacy autonomously, on a basis of cooperation" (p.60).
This was also Marx's hope - that cooperation/combination would provide a foundation for the overcoming of alienation and the domination of capital. On the other hand, it seems that capital continues to bypass this contradiction by creating the 'individual entrepreneur'.
"The third consequence is that, from the relationship between intensity and density that marks the antagonism, there emerge new qualities of the subjects who participate in development. When, as happens in post-Fordist society, the social relationship that constitutes capital occupies the whole of society and determines its productivity, when productivity becomes cognitive, immaterial, affective, cooperative and so on, in short, a ‘production of subjectivity’, then the exchange becomes ontological and we witness a deepening of the antagonism that invests the subjects – especially the figures of living labour, who increasingly recognise themselves as being capable of appropriating portions of fixed capital and able to develop productive efficacy autonomously, on a basis of cooperation" (p.60).
This was also Marx's hope - that cooperation/combination would provide a foundation for the overcoming of alienation and the domination of capital. On the other hand, it seems that capital continues to bypass this contradiction by creating the 'individual entrepreneur'.
July 9, 2023
Bé. He de dir que la part sobre Marx (per què llegir Marx, els punts més conflictius a l'actualitat, el punt de vista marxista als 70 i 80...) no m'ha agradat gaire i, de fet, me l'he hagut de saltar perquè no entenia res. He anat llegint en diagonal, fins que m'he trobat amb l'apartat sobre la lectura de Deleuze-Guattari, que m'ha semblat meravellosa i me n'ha fet venir moltes ganes. He seguit ja fins el final, on apareixen diversos articles i on s'expliquen alguns dels conceptes bàsics foucaultians i la seva vinculació o continuitat amb conceptes marxistes. Així doncs, no és un llibre fàcil de llegir, però té parts que valen molt la pena, especialment per a establir un pont entre el pensament de Marx i el de Foucault.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews