Interregnum: The Crisis of the Left in the World

by Antonio Negri

What is the current state of leftist politics in the world, in the age of globalization and crisis within the social-democratic model of thought? In an attempt to answer this question, one of the world's leading philosophers of Western thought turns his critical gaze to the crucial phases that the Left has faced since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In an extensive interview, Antonio Negri offers his views on the fall of the wall, the Balkan wars, the Seattle protests, the Mexican Zapata movement, the new waves of immigration, the Lula experiment in Brazil, regime change in Europe, Davos, post-Tiananmen China, the Middle East, and much more.Negri's analyses are of great interest if for no other reason than historical continuity. He was an active member of the Italian extra-parliamentary Left in the 1960s and 1970s and was indeed found guilty by an Italian court of being "morally responsible" for the existence of the Red Brigades. Time has not softened his views, but has given him new scenarios with which to exercise his particular intellect. Negri dissects and critiques the moments and episodes in the last fifteen years that have afforded the Left opportunities to rethink its strategies, both in terms of organization and of political programs and objectives, concluding that transformation is still possible.

Paperback

Published February 1, 2007

About the author

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 and his work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. 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 (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, he Negri was arrested and charged with a long list of crimes including the Moro murder. Most charges were dropped quickly, but in 1984 he was still 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 complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) 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. He hence lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel. He was the father of film director Anna Negri.
Like Deleuze, Negri's preoccupation with Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. Along with Althusser and Deleuze, he has been one of the central figures of a French-inspired neo-Spinozism in continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after a well-known rediscovery of Spinoza by German thinkers (especially the German Romantics and Idealists) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.