Antonio Negri

The prolific, iconoclastic, cosmopolitan, highly original and often dense and difficult philosophy 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 , 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.

(Antonio Gramsci as point of reference)

The passage toward an informational economy necessarily involves a change in the quality and nature of labour. This is the most immediate sociological and anthropological implication of the passage of economic paradigms. Today information and communication have come to play a foundational role in production processes. [cite]

Biography and Historical Milieu

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: His most recent work, 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.

Empire

Capitalism has invested the whole of life; its production is biopolitical. In production, Power is the 'superstructure' of that which stretches out, and is reproduced through society. ... It no longer exploits only workers, but all citizens; it does not pay, but makes others pay it to command and order society. [cite]

[precis tk] [critical responses]

Central Themes in Negri: Marxism, Antiglobalization, Anticapitalism, Postmodernism, Neoiberalism, Democracy, the Common, and the Multitudes

Although he acknowledges the influence of Michel Foucault, David Harvey's The Postmodern Condition (1989), Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Deleuze & Guattari's , 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.

(Points of contact with contemporary non-Marxist thought, esp. on globalization)

Recent Works, Affiliations, and Influence

Bibliography/Webography

1. (multilingual study group)
2. (English, PDF)
3. Negri and Hardt, (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian)
4. Toni Negri,
5. Maurizio Lazzarato and Toni Negri,
6. (Hardt)
7. (Spanish translation) ( | | | | | | | )
8. (precis)
9. (precis)
10. (precis)
11. (U. Virginia)
14. Negri&Hardt, (2000)
16. (U. Virginia)
17. (Michael Hardt)

Critical Sources

1. Cleaver, Harry
3. Witheford, Nick
5. Wright,
6. (library of readings)

Biographical Sources

3. 1979
5. , NY Review of Books (Volume 26, Number 13 · August 16, 1979)

Referenced By