Negri, Antonio (1933—)
Italian Marxism political philosopher best known for his collaborative writings with Hardt, Michael. A measure of his significance may be gauged from Foucault, Michel’s remark in 1980 that Negri had been imprisoned for his ideas---very few theorists can claim that status. Negri was born in Padua, in Italy. He became politically active at a young age, via the Roman Catholic youth organization, ‘Gioventù Italiana di Azione Cattolica’, which he joined in the early 1950s. He joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1956. He studied political theory at the University of Padua and obtained a position there as a professor upon graduation, teaching state and constitutional theory. In 1969 Negri co-founded ‘Potere Operaio’ (Workers’ Power), a political group advocating ‘workerism’ (operaismo) that organized protests in factories on behalf of labour. The group disbanded in 1973 and Negri joined the Autonomia Operaia Organizzata (Autonomous Workers’ Organization), contributing numerous theoretical articles. In April 1979 Negri was arrested along with several other members of the Autonomia movement and charged with several offences alleging a connection with the ‘Brigate Rosse’ (Red Brigades). Negri was also charged with masterminding the Red Brigades’ 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party. He was exonerated of the latter charge, but was nevertheless convicted on the association charge and in 1984 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. He spent four years in jail waiting for his trial, in which time he was elected to the Italian legislature on the Radical Party’s ticket. He was freed from prison on parliamentary privilege grounds, but this was revoked by the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Rather than return to prison he fled to France with the aid of Amnesty International and Guattari, Félix. In France, he obtained a position at the University of Paris VIII in Saint Denis, where his colleagues included Badiou, Alain and Deleuze, Gilles. It was while he was teaching in Paris that he met a young student by the name of Michael Hardt, with whom he would produce a number of collaborative works in the decades to follow. In 1997 he returned to Italy to voluntarily serve out his sentence, hoping the gesture would raise awareness concerning the situation of the hundreds of other political exiles involved in radical activities in the 1960s and 1970s. His sentence was commuted and in 2003 he was released. The time in prison was productive for Negri: the first of his collaborations with Michael Hardt were completed there, The Labor of Dionysus (1994), which combined translations of older pieces by Negri with some new pieces written by Hardt, and the international bestseller Empire (2000). It was the publication of Empire that catapulted both Negri and Hardt to the front ranks of critical theory. The book appeared shortly after the so-called ‘Battle in Seattle’ (November 1999) in which the worldwide anti-globalization social movement shot to prominence and it seemed to offer a powerful new message of hope. Hardt and Negri propose that a new form of sovereignty has emerged since World War II, which they term Empire, and argue that it is global in nature and already more potent than any nation state. They also argue that the new global processes of manufacturing, managing labour, and finance, known as globalization, are changing the very composition of capital, and in doing so creating a new class, which they term the multitude, and thereby opening up a new chapter in the history of class struggle. In an era when most other writers on the Left are making gloomy pronouncements about the rise of neoconservativism, Hardt and Negri’s work is a breath of fresh air. Not surprisingly, then, Empire was a runaway bestseller. The events of September 11, 2001, changed the international political climate quite dramatically and Hardt and Negri’s sequel to Empire, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005) was, comparatively speaking, cold-shouldered. The critics who greeted Empire enthusiastically now sharpened their knives. In part this was because Multitude does not really answer the questions raised by the previous book---it still doesn’t explain how the multitude will bring about social change. Hardt and Negri tend to take the view that the sheer fact that the multitude exists means that social change has already occurred, and regardless of how technically accurate this might be it doesn’t satisfy most readers. Time will tell if the third volume of the trilogy, Commonwealth (2009), will answer this demand. The decade since the publication of Empire has been incredibly productive for Negri. In addition to the Empire trilogy he has produced several volumes of essays and interviews adding to and explaining the basic theses entailed in that trilogy. Further Reading: T. Murphy and A-K. Mustapha (eds.) The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, 2 vols (2005, 2007). négritude (blackness) A neologism coined by Martinican poet and politician Césaire, Aimé that appropriates the derogatory ‘nègre’ (whose cognates in English would include ‘negro’ and ‘nigger’) and turns it into a positive. The most famous instance of this is in Césaire’s powerful prose poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (2001), which contains the line ‘Haiti, where négritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity’. The reference to Haiti is in fact a reference to the leader of the slave revolt of 1791, Toussaint Louverture. As a movement, négritude was established by a small group of African-Caribbean scholars in Paris in the 1930s---including the future leader of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor and the poet Léon Damas---who, under the influence of the Harlem Renaissance in the US (particularly the poet Langston Hughes, who spent time in Paris in the early 1920s, but also Du Bois, W. E. B. and Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey) as well as Surrealism in Paris, undertook a kind of mental decolonization through poetry and writing. It was primarily aimed at celebrating African heritage (in a deliberately essentialist manner), specifically an African personality or affectivity, as a means of affirming existence in a racist, white-dominated world. It took as its purview the entire black diaspora as well as Africa itself. This bold standpoint was praised by Sartre, Jean-Paul in his famous preface to Senghor’s 1948 collection of poetry, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry). Négritude was not without its critics, however, even from within the black community. It was attacked by the Creoleness writers for its monolithic outlook; it was also attacked by Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka for accepting the inferior term handed out by the European powers instead of constructing its own positive term. Soyinka saw in négritude what he thought of as an unhealthy fetishism of the ‘native’ state. Although it was an important movement for several decades, its force is all but spent now. Further Reading: B. Moore-Gilbert Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (1997). V. Mudimbe The Idea of Africa (1994). E. Said Culture and Imperialism (1993).