The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume Two

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Pluto Press - Edited by Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha

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246 pages

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The spectacular success of Empire has brought Negri's writing to a new, wider audience. This book reveals the variety and complexity of Negri's thought and its unique relevance to modern politics. Outstanding contributors include Pierre Macherey, Daniel Bensaïd, Alex Callinicos and Judith Revel.

Negri is one of the most sophisticated analysts of modern political philosophy. His work is both difficult and exhilarating, engaging as it does with Marx, Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Tronti and others. This book is ideal for readers who want to get to grips with Negri's key themes. It makes a great introduction to his work for students of political philosophy, as well as providing a comprehensive critical approach for Negri enthusiasts.

This book is the sequel to The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume One: Resistance in Practice (Pluto, 2005) but can be read entirely independently.
Editors' Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Free Man's Wisdom… Timothy S. Murphy & Abdul-Karim Mustapha

Part I: Extensive Engagements

1. Negri's Spinoza: From Mediation to Constitution by Pierre Macherey (University of Lille)

2. The Potentia of Living Labor: Negri and the Practice of Philosophy by Jason Read (University of Southern Maine)

3. Legality and Resistance: Arendt and Negri on Constituent Power by Miguel Vatter (Catholic University of Chile)

Part II: Intensive Encounters

4. Antonio Negri, French Nietzschean? From the Will to Power to the Ontology of Power by Judith Revel (Université de Paris-I, Panthéon-Sorbonne)

5. Always Already Only Now: Negri and the Biopolitical by Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths College, London)

6. Marxist Wisdom: Antonio Negri on the Book of Job by Ted Stolze (Cerritos College)

Part III: Constitutive Ontology

7. Difference, Event, Subject: Antonio Negri's Political Theory as Postmodern Metaphysics by Mahmut Mutman (Bilkent University, Turkey)

8. Antonio Negri and the Temptation of Ontology by Alex Callinicos (King's College London )

9. Materialism and Temporality: On Antonio Negri's 'Constitutive' Ontology by Charles T. Wolfe (University of Quebec)

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Philosophy

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 mai 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849643382
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Philosophy of Antonio Negri

Volume Two

Revolution in Theory

Edited by

Timothy S. Murphy and AbdulKarim Mustapha

P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

First published 2007 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN13 ISBN10

978 0 7453 2610 8 0 7453 2610 2

Paperback ISBN13 978 0 7453 2609 2 ISBN10 0 7453 2609 9

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book in printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed and bound by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

Editors’ Acknowledgements

Contents

Introduction: A Free Man’s Wisdom . . . Timothy S. Murphy and AbdulKarim Mustapha

Part I: Extensive Engagements 1. Negri’s Spinoza: From Mediation to Constitution Pierre Macherey 2. ThePotentiaof Living Labor: Negri and the Practice of Philosophy Jason Read 3. Legality and Resistance: Arendt and Negri on Constituent Power Miguel Vatter

Part II: Intensive Encounters 4. Antonio Negri, French Nietzschean? From the Will to Power to the Ontology of Power Judith Revel 5. Always Already Only Now: Negri and the Biopolitical Alberto Toscano 6. Marxist Wisdom: Antonio Negri on the Book of Job Ted Stolze

Part III: Constitutive Ontology 7. Difference, Event, Subject: Antonio Negri’s Political Theory as Postmodern Metaphysics Mahmut Mutman 8. Antonio Negri and the Temptation of Ontology Alex Callinicos

vii

109

129

143

169

vi Revolution in Theory

9. Materialism and Temporality: On Antonio Negri’s ‘Constitutive’ Ontology Charles T. Wolfe

BibliographyContributorsIndex

198

221 230 231

Editors’ Acknowledgements

Like the first volume ofThe Philosophy of Antonio Negri, this one has been in the works for many years, so our first words of thanks must go to our endlessly patient contributors. We are very grateful to Pluto Press and especially David Castle for their longterm commitment to this very large project. We would also like to thank Sebastian Budgen for suggestions regarding the contents of the volume and Ted Stolze for his translation of Pierre Macherey’s essay. And since our editorial collaboration has again taken place electronically, each of us has separate personal acknowledgements to make. Timothy S. Murphy would again like to thank AbdulKarim Mustapha for his foresight in getting this project rolling and generating so much of its momentum, and Steve Wright for his unflagging interest in these books and for his willingness to discuss critically many of their elements over the past several years. The everyday energy necessary to complete this labor, like so many others, came from Julie (along with Iris and Daisy). He would like to dedicate this book to the memory of his brother, Kevin John Murphy (19652006). AbdulKarim Mustapha would like to thank Timothy S. Murphy for the spirit of mind to see this project through in all the years it has been in the making, and for his commitment to enriching both the content and the effectivity of Negri’s philosophy in general. He would also once again like to thank Guiseppe Cocco, Yann MoulierBoutang, Antonella Corsani, Bruno Karsenti, Maurizio Lazzarato, François Matheron, and Charles Wolfe. Lastly, he would like to thank Bruce, Debra, Avi and Ellie Feinberg for cultivating a world of grace and hope, Bruce Speight for his tenacity and wit, Joyce Payne for her pedagogy of perseverance, Stephen, Louise and Mark Garrell for their immeasurable scope of the world, José Rabasa and Catherine Durand for continuity, and his wife Robin Felice for all things possible and her sensitivity to the poetic and metaphysical in all that seems impossible. He would like to dedicate the book project to his late grandmother L. Duro MacRae, his late grandfather Alhaji M. Sanusi Mustapha, his late uncle Ibn Muktarr Mustapha, and to his daughter and the promises of the world that is hers.

Pierre Macherey’s contribution originally appeared in French inCahiers Spinoza4 (1983), and was later reprinted, with substantial revisions, in

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viii Revolution in Theory

Macherey’s bookAvec Spinoza(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992). It is translated here by permission of Presses universitaires de France. Miguel Vatter’s contribution originally appeared inKairos: Revue de philosophie20 (2002), and it is reprinted here by permission ofKairosand the author.

Introduction: A Free Man’s Wisdom . . . Timothy S. Murphy and AbdulKarim Mustapha

This book is the companion to our previous volume,The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, published by Pluto Press in 2005. The essays in that volume focus primarily on the theoretical and practical contributions that Antonio Negri has made to radical activism over the course of his long and varied career: his conceptions of the socialized worker, the refusal of work, immaterial labor and constituent power, as well as his critiques of the Leninist party form and Althusser’s notion of history as a ‘process without a subject’, among many other things. The essays in this volume,Revolution in Theory, focus primarily on Negri’s originality and influence both as an innovative historian of philosophy and as a systematic philosopher, the author of a surprising new ‘constitutive’ ontology that has become increasingly controversial over the past few years. We frankly admit that this division of subjects we have devised, both within this volume and between the two, is somewhat tendentious and open to dispute, since on the one hand Negri’s activism has always been informed by his philosophical background and the novel conceptions to which that led him, and on the other, Negri’s philosophical work has always developed directly out of his passionate engagement in practical political activity (or, more recently, his equally passionate interest in the many singular social and political movements currently under way around the globe). We doubt that there is any single, definitively coherent and consistent arrangement to be made of the essays we have included in these two volumes, essays which represent a very broad spectrum of critical responses to an equally broad selection of the elements that constitute the singular multiplicity that is Negri’s work. Nevertheless, the material constraints of book production have compelled us to divide our project into two volumes, and each individual volume into sections composed of the essays that we feel resonate most strongly with one another. Although Negri’s work is singular, its correlative multiplicity means that it is not without precedents in and debts to the history of philosophy, and not without important ramifications for contemporary philosophy. The sections into which this volume is divided address these debts and ramifications, as we shall explain below. One of Negri’s favorite propositions from Spinoza’s Ethicsis the famous claim that ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death’ (Spinoza 1985:

2 Revolution in Theory

EIV P67, 584), which could well describe Negri’s own philosophy as readily as it does Spinoza’s. If his work is not strictly a philosophy of life or vitalism, as some critics claim, it is at very least a philosophy of living labor and constituent power directed against the dead labor of accumulated capital and constituted power. The general perspective and tone of affirmation that his thought shares with that of Gilles Deleuze represent another aspect of this ‘wisdom’, in that Spinoza conceives of death as the decomposition of the relation that constitutes the body, and thus death can come not only to individuals but to social movements, nation states and constitutions, but such decomposition is no cause for regret or melancholy. On the contrary, the finitude of all such bodies is a constantly renewed challenge for us to construct new bodies, new constitutive relations, a new common on the plane of immanence that is human history. One consequence of this affirmation is Negri’s preference, which he raises to the level of a meth odological principle, for looking ahead, into ‘timetocome’, rather than backward in continual selfcriticism, a choice that has attracted and repelled readers in equal measure. We will leave the question of whether or not Negri really is Spinoza’s ‘free man’ to the judgment of our readers—but we strongly recommend that, before deciding, they read his ‘Author’s Preface to the English Language Edition’ ofMarx Beyond Marx, which stages itself as a dialogue between a ‘free man, the author ofMarx Beyond Marx’, and a prisoner, which Negri was when the translation was originally published. The dialogue concludes with the ‘free man’ admonishing the prisoner, who had complained of experiencing the capitalist ‘world as a prison’, ‘[D]on’t pretend to total impatience when you know very well that theory allows you to cope’ (Negri 1991a: xv–xvii). If theory can allow us too to cope with the world, then perhaps Negri’s philosophy can offer us at least a hint of 1 what a ‘free man’s’ life, a life of immanent creation, might be like. UnlikeResistance in Practice, which we divided into two sections focused on Negri’s work in the historical context of 1970s Italy on the one hand and on contemporary critiques, displacements, and applications of his ideas on the other, this volume is divided into three sections according to the subjects addressed by our contributors. The first section, ‘Extensive Engagements’, examines Negri’s lifelong relationships to the major figures in the history of philosophy whose ideas have influenced his in significant and widely acknowledged ways, namely Spinoza, Marx, and Machiavelli. In the opening essay, Pierre Macherey examines Negri’s reading of Spinoza inThe Savage Anomalyin order to identify its fundamental and recurring gesture, which he suggests characterizes Negri’s philosophical (and political) work as a whole: the identification of a (logical, phenomenological, historical) crisis that interrupts the calm deduction of a philosophical system and drives thought

Introduction 3

ahead of itself in search of a resolution that would be constitutive and open instead of dialectical and teleological. Jason Read takes up Macherey’s insight regarding the crisis in order both to deepen it with respect to Negri’s account of Spinoza and also to extend it to encompass an examination of Negri’s reading of Marx. In so doing Read more fully explicates Negri’s gesture as a powerful methodological instrument for reinventing both the practice of philosophy and the philosophy of praxis. The final essay in this section, by Miguel Vatter, confronts Negri’s account of constituent power, which underpins his influential work on empire and the multitude, with Hannah Arendt’s countertheory of the relation between state and revolution, in order to bring to light Negri’s reliance on a contentious and partial reading of Machiavelli’s distinction between virtue and fortune. The second section, ‘Intensive Encounters’, examines the intersections, interferences and antagonisms between Negri’s work and other philosophical perspectives whose influences on him are both more recent and more ‘local’ than those of Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx, but which nevertheless help to situate and clarify Negri’s thought in relation to other contemporary philosophical currents. This section opens with Judith Revel’s essay, which takes up the challenge of accounting for Negri’s relatively recent open engagement with the philosophical legacy of Nietzsche. Revel poses the necessary question of why and how Negri adopted (and adapted) concepts and strategies drawn from Nietzsche’s great French disciples Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, rather than those approaches that gave rise to the major Italian current of Nietzsche interpretation represented by Gianni Vattimo and Massimo Cacciari. Alberto Toscano critically examines Negri’s use of a concept of biopolitics which he derives, rather tendentiously, from the late work of Foucault. Toscano intervenes with great care to differentiate Negri’s ‘epochal’ use of the concept both from Foucault’s microphysical interpreta tion and from the parallel philosophical projects of Paolo Virno and Giorgio Agamben. Ted Stolze’s concluding essay in this section introduces English language readers to an aspect of Negri’s thought that has aroused intense suspicion and hostility—when it has been noticed at all: his unexpected engagement with religion and theology in the wake of his experience in prison. While recent works by Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben have brought the tools of contemporary continental philosophy to bear on the reading of biblical texts, Negri anticipated them by 20 years with his atheist and Marxist meditation on the Book of Job (soon to appear in English translation) as a parable of materialist resistance to suffering. The third section, ‘Constitutive Ontology’, presents responses to and assessments of Negri’s ongoing attempt to construct a viable ontology in the wake of both the Marxist critique of metaphysics as an exorbitantly

4 Revolution in Theory

mediated form of repressive ideology and the deconstructive critique of metaphysics as the incessantly repeated gesture than encloses thinking within a specular system of binary essences. Mahmut Mutman approaches Negri’s metaphysical project by means of a nonlinear set or ‘constellation’ of pointed questions posed from the margins of Negri’s discourse and cutting transversally across it, questions that seek to deconstruct the residual binarisms on the basis of which Negri’s ontological claims continue to operate. Alex Callinicos, one of Negri’s most relentless yet careful critics, views Negri’s ‘flight into ontology’ as a belated attempt to salvage his philosophical categories and activist strategies, which represent at best creative misreadings of Marx, from the generalized catastrophe experienced by the global left at the end of the 1970s. In the book’s final essay, Charles T. Wolfe asks whether Negri’s constitutive ontology is really a version of the ageold doctrine of materialism as he sometimes claims, and comes to the conclusion that if so, it must be a materialism not of nature but of artifice, not of atoms but of relations (and thus language), and not of orderly and predictable growth but of radical new production, indeed innovation, particularly in its emphasis on human temporality. Wolfe’s conclusions bring the book full circle, back to a new formulation of the crisis that continually drives thought ahead of itself, which Macherey saw as Negri’s characteristic philosophical gesture. Although some of these arguments may strike hardheaded activists as so much otherworldly or at best superstructural hairsplitting that bears little or no relation to political practice, we would remind them of what Marx writes in his second thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Man [Mensch] must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the thisworldliness of his thinking in practice’ (Marx 1970b: 121). Negri has faced up to the challenge of practice throughout his life as a philosopher–activist, with more or less success as situations have unfolded, and he continues to face it with every new concept he posits and every new stand he takes. The thisworldliness of his thinking, which is to say the radical immanence of both his philosophy and his activism, leaves him with no transcendent ideological refuge from the defeats he has experienced, but only his own extraordinary theoretical creativity, his ‘free man’s wisdom’—and the common bonds of the movements to which he has always devoted that creativity.

NOTE

1. We apologize for the gender bias in the language of this paragraph (and also a later one), but it is there in our sources and our chain of allusions depends upon it.