The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty First Century

by Antonio Negri

English, Italian (translation)

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

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.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

The language is impenetrable. Good ideas, but tough to read.

[Leonardo]

Los movimientos se anticiparon a la percepción capitalista de la necesidad de un cambio de paradigma en la producción, y dictaron su forma y naturaleza. Si la Guerra de Vietnam no hubiese tenido lugar, si no hubiera habido revueltas estudiantiles y obreras en los ´60, si no hubiese ocurrido el 1968 y la segunda ola de movimientos feministas, si no hubiese estado toda la serie de luchas anti-imperialistas, el capital se habría conformado con mantener su propio dispositivo de poder, ¡feliz de evitarse el problema de modificar el paradigma de la producción! Y hubiera estado feliz por múltiples razones: porque los límites naturales al crecimiento aún le servían; porque estaba amenazado por el desarrollo del trabajo inmaterial; porque sabía que la movilidad transversal e hibridización de la fuerza de trabajo mundial abrían la posibilidad de nuevas crisis y conflictos de clase, en una magnitud nunca antes experimentada. La reestructuración de la producción, desde el Fordismo hasta el pos-Fordismo, desde la modernización a la posmodernización, fue anticipada por el ascenso de una nueva subjetividad.

Ver Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversión: A manifesto for the Twenty-first Century, trad. James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989)

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