Best known as the author, with Michael Hardt, of [Empire] (English, PDF), the Italian moral and political philosopher Antonio Negri (date tk)is currently serving out a felony conviction, on charges that he and his writings were "moral culpable" in acts of violence stemming from his advocacy or "armed insurrection" against the Italian state during the 1960s and 1970s. Negri returned voluntarily returning from a 14-year exile in France in 1997, after having been elected to the legislature while imprisoned and released on grounds of parliamentary immunity.
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 [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.
(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
Perhaps the most telling synopsis 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: 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.
Although he acknowledges the influence of Michel Foucault, Frederic Jameson's The Postmodern Condition (1991) and Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism, 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)
Empire
[precis tk]
[critical responses]Central Themes in Negri: Marxism, Antiglobalization, Anticapitalism, Postmodernism, Neoiberalism, Democracy, the Common, and the Multitudes
Recent Works, Affiliations, and Influence
Bibliography/Webography
Critical Sources
[more to come] Biographical Sources
