Antonio Negri
Antonio 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. 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 group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published highly influential books, including Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades, which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, Negri was arrested and charged with a number of crimes, including the Moro murder. Most charges were quickly dropped, but in 1984, having fled to France, he was 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 involvement with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state", and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII 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. After his release he lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel. He was the father of film director Anna Negri.
Early years
Antonio Negri was born in Padua, in the Northeastern Italian region of Veneto, in 1933. His father was an active communist militant from the city of Bologna, and although he died when Negri was two years old, his political engagement made Negri familiar with Marxism from an early age, while his mother was a teacher from the town of Poggio Rusco. He began his career as a militant in the 1950s with the activist Roman Catholic youth organization Gioventù Italiana di Azione Cattolica. Negri became a communist in 1955 when working at the Nahsonim kibbutz in central Israel. The kibbutz was organised according to ideas of Zionist socialism and its the members were Jewish communists. He joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1956 and remained a member until 1963, while at the same time becoming more and more engaged throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s in Marxist movements.Negri studied philosophy and was hired as a professor at the University of Padua, soon after receiving his doctorate in 1956. There, he taught dottrina dello Stato, an Italian field similar to the philosophy of law, covering state and constitutional theory. In the early 1960s, Negri joined the editorial group of Quaderni Rossi, a journal that represented the intellectual rebirth of Marxism in Italy outside the realm of the Communist party. In 1969, together with Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno, Negri was one of the founders of the group Potere Operaio and the operaismo movement.
Arrest and flight
On 16 March 1978, Aldo Moro, the party leader of Christian Democracy and the former Italian prime minister, was kidnapped in Rome by the Red Brigades. Forty-five days after the kidnapping and nine days before Moro's death, the Red Brigades called his family and informed Moro's wife of his impending death. The conversation was recorded and later broadcast. While a number of people who knew Negri at the time identified him as the probable author of the call, the caller was later revealed to be Valerio Morucci.On 7 April 1979, Negri and other activists were charged with kidnapping, assassination and insurrection. Padua's Public Prosecutor Pietro Calogero accused them of being involved in the political wing of the Red Brigades, and thus behind left-wing terrorism in Italy. Negri was charged with a number of offences, including leadership of the Red Brigades, masterminding the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the President of the Christian Democratic Party, Aldo Moro, and plotting to overthrow the government. At the time, Negri was a political science professor at the University of Padua and visiting lecturer at Paris' École Normale Supérieure. The Italian public was shocked that an academic could be involved in such events.
A year later, a leader of the BR, having decided to cooperate with the prosecution, testified that Negri "had nothing to do with the Red Brigades." The charge of 'armed insurrection against the State' against Negri was dropped and he consequently did not receive the 30-year plus life sentence requested by the prosecutor, but did receive 30 years for being the instigator of political activist Carlo Saronio's murder and having 'morally concurred' with the murder of Andrea Lombardini, a carabiniere, during a failed bank robbery.
Some of his peers found little fault with Negri's activities. Michel Foucault commented, "Isn't he in jail simply for being an intellectual?" French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze also signed in November 1977 L'Appel des intellectuels français contre la répression en Italie in protest against Negri's imprisonment and Italian anti-terrorism legislation. On the other hand, in the late 1980s Italian President Francesco Cossiga described Antonio Negri as "a psychopath" who "poisoned the minds of an entire generation of Italy's youth."
In 1983, four years after his arrest and while he was still in prison awaiting trial, Negri was elected to the Italian legislature as a member for the Radical Party. He was freed from prison claiming parliamentary immunity and was released, fleeing to France with the help of Félix Guattari and Amnesty International. His release was later revoked when the Chamber of Deputies voted to strip him of his immunity. Negri remained in exile in France for the next 14 years, where he was protected from extradition by the Mitterrand doctrine.
In France, Negri began teaching at the Paris VIII, and also at the Collège international de philosophie founded by Jacques Derrida. Although the conditions of his residence in France prevented him from engaging in political activities, he wrote prolifically and was active in a broad coalition of left-wing intellectuals. In 1997, he returned to Italy to serve out his sentence, hoping to raise awareness of the status of hundreds of other political exiles from Italy. His sentence was commuted and he was released from prison in 2003, having written some of his most influential works while behind bars.
Political thought and writing
Negri was one of the central theorists of autonomist Marxism, and was a prominent philosopher within libertarian socialism, communism, and Marxism. He also wrote various works on imperialism, radical democracy, and political praxis.''Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form'' (1994)
Written together with Michael Hardt, the authors ask themselves in this book, "How is it, then, that labour, with all its life-affirming potential, has become the means of capitalist discipline, exploitation, and domination in modern society?" The authors expose and pursue this paradox through a systematic analysis of the role of labour in the processes of capitalist production and in the establishment of capitalist legal and social institutions. Critiquing liberal and socialist notions of labour and institutional reform from a radical democratic perspective, Hardt and Negri challenge the state-form itself.''Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State'' (1999)
This book, written solely by Negri, "explores the drama of modern revolutions-from Machiavelli's Florence and Harrington's England to the American, French, and Russian revolutions-and puts forward a new notion of how power and action must be understood if we are to achieve a radically democratic future."''Empire'' (2000)
In general, the book theorises an ongoing transition from a "modern" phenomenon of imperialism, centred around individual nation-states, to an emergent postmodern construct created among ruling powers which the authors call "Empire", with different forms of warfare:According to Hardt and Negri's Empire, the rise of Empire is the end of national conflict, the "enemy" now, whoever he is, can no longer be ideological or national. The enemy now must be understood as a kind of criminal, as someone who represents a threat not to a political system or a nation but to the law. This is the enemy as a terrorist ... In the "new order that envelops the entire space of ... civilization", where conflict between nations has been made irrelevant, the "enemy" is simultaneously "banalized" and absolutized.
Empire elaborates a variety of ideas surrounding constitutions, global war, and class. Hence, the Empire is constituted by a monarchy, an oligarchy and a democracy. Part of the book's analysis deals with "imagin