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New Slant: Religion, Politics, Ontology
The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor
In The Labor of Job , the renowned Marxist political philosopher Antonio Negri develops an unorthodox interpretation of the Old Testament book of Job, a canonical text of Judeo-Christian thought. In the biblical narrative, the pious Job is made to suffer for no apparent reason. The story revolves around his quest to understand why he must bear, and why God would allow, such misery. Conventional readings explain the tale as an affirmation of divine transcendence. When God finally speaks to Job, it is to assert his sovereignty and establish that it is not Job’s place to question what God allows. In Negri’s materialist reading, Job does not recognize God’s transcendence. He denies it, and in so doing becomes a co-creator of himself and the world. The Labor of Job was first published in Italy in 1990. Negri began writing it in the early 1980s, while he was a political prisoner in Italy, and it was the first book he completed during his exile in France (1983–97). As he writes in the preface, understanding suffering was for him in the early 1980s “an essential element of resistance. . . . It was the problem of liberation, in prison and in exile, from within the absoluteness of Power.” Negri presents a Marxist interpretation of Job’s story. He describes it as a parable of human labor, one that illustrates the impossibility of systems of measure, whether of divine justice (in Job’s case) or the value of labor (in the case of late-twentieth-century Marxism). In the foreword, Michael Hardt elaborates on this interpretation. In his commentary, Roland Boer considers Negri’s reading of the book of Job in relation to the Bible and biblical exegesis. The Labor of Job provides an intriguing and accessible entry into the thought of one of today’s most important political philosophers.
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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321 people want to read
About the author
Antonio Negri
199 books296 followersAntonio 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.
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.
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March 17, 2011Supposed to be presenting at a conference next month on this book. I should probably read it soon.
July 4, 2022
Here the interpreters of the book of Job do what Job’s interlocutors, from Eliphaz to Bildad, from Zophar to Elihu, had done: they confine to a given form and measure his experience within the dimensions of the theologically known.
God justifies himself, thus God is dead. He saw God, hence Job can speak of him, and he—Job himself—can in turn participate in divinity, in the function of redemption that man constructs within life—the instrument of the death of God that is human constitution and the creation of the world.
The ontological network within which this linking unfolds is not indifferent. The process is not without a subject.
Ontology is a net, an ensemble of echoing voices, a world of profound resonances.
But all of this movement is begun and organized in a moment of extreme clarity, of the highest concentration of forces: the recognition of the divinity, the idea and identification with it as the ontological subject par excellence. The antagonism between life and death is resolved in favor of life.
Creation is the going beyond death. Creation is the content of the vision of God. Creation is the meaning of life.
Prophecy is seeing history as the occasion for the revelation of God, and the prophet is himself revelation.
The divine epiphany announced by Job is the end of transcendence—and the revelation of the divinity within history. It is a realization that is struggle, antagonism, and destruction. Ontology is a battlefield, a terrain upon which each leaves his fallen ones.
Job is the greatest thinker of ontology because he shows it to be something lying between cosmogony and redemption.
And yet ontology is not directed to subjectivity but is constructed by it, by antagonisms, machines, and functions.
God’s discourse and Job’s experience of it continually shift us across natural and historical horizons. The world is formed and reformed through the struggle against evil.
Different orders of liberation are presented.
The struggle against the monsters is the condition for the ordering of nature. The order of nature is the condition for the order of the world, and this is the condition of redemption.
There is no objective; there is struggle, invention, victory, there is constitution.
In all these verses the word “love” never appears—but the novelty, the gratuity, the power of this act are always and exclusively present.
Only love is able to construct and reconstruct the world—and help us rise up again from defeat and reform existence.
The return of the folkloric discourse at the end of this enormous, cosmic, theological, human adventure is like a shower, a bath, a rest after having traversed great mountains.
We are not interested in legitimating Job’s “seeing,” other than from the standpoint of practice—that is, identifying it as a creative experience. Job’s “seeing” modifies, transforms, innovates the ontological fabric of the world. And it does so practically—through an activity with immediate ontological relevance.
It does not activate power—but makes power powerful. What is accumulated is not action’s dimension of finality, but its potential energy.
“To see” is an act, an act that does not end but develops power, reproducing it, reinventing it as power. It is this incredible ontological power, which is absolutely interwoven with practice, that the book of Job shows us in motion.
There is what we might call a philological mystery
The problem can be expressed as follows: why does Job accept God’s teaching (in that part that precedes the cosmogonic irruption and appearance of the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan) while he rejects Elihu’s, when both discussions repeat the same refrain and are made with the same ingredients?
First let us check the actual homology of Elihu and Yahweh’s utterances.
“Hear this, O Job; stop and consider the wondrous works of God.
he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.” (37:14–24)
Then the lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
I will question you, and you shall declare to me. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” (38:1–7)
And so these chapters keep on tirelessly. Given this unquestionable thematic unity, what is specific to God’s discourse?
The word is revealed only by vision. Visionprophecy. Now we find ourselves in the place of the divine.
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:17–25)
Paul’s quote from the book of Job is not incidental. With this quote he summarizes the experience of the epiphany that from the prophetic perspective of redemption Job calls vision, whereas Paul translates it as prophecy and perdition.
The Messiah is the second nature: a machine that produces and accumulates energy and applies it to materia prima so as to transform it; a power that is reborn of the ashes of his first consummation; a powerful innovation; a surplus of being, of materiality, that is original and outside all finality, diffused everywhere in the world. This is the Messiah.
The book of Job is the parabola of modernity, of the forever unfinished dialectic of world and innovation, of being and relation, that characterizes it. And the problem of the book of Job is that of modernity—of the alternative between the totalization of the rule of science and technology over the world, and the liberation of new subjectivity.
We begin, for example, with the ethical theme par excellence—the problem of labor that becomes value and the crisis that derives from it when everything becomes value, when every significant practical horizon, every possibility of measure, all valorization appears to fail.
There is only the recognition of the destiny that it imposes upon us, as well as the deepening of the analysis and the consciousness of our destiny—until, singularly or collectively, we rise from the nothing in which the progress of value has constituted us, discovering in labor, in a new form of it, the foundation of a new destiny. We are able to change our destiny.
It is impossible to conceive the materiality of the form of value and its capacity to free itself, to subvert and to innovate, if it is not inscribed in a power. Power [potenza] of a subject, power of subjects, collective power.
When this passage is not given, its condition is posed—the condition of a necessity—and it is manifested as the presupposition of the investigation. This material datum is the condition of every genealogy: hermeneutics is the symptom and the exposition of this passage. Subjectivation is a fact.*
That is to say, the problem is not in the passage from the structure to the subject but in the nature of the ontology that sustains this passage. If there is an idealist ontology, the passage is absurd. But if the ontology is historical, if power has the weight of living and dying, and of their intertwining, if pain is the basis of invention—of the tear that constructs new being, of the subversion that creates—then there is no difficulty in establishing the passage from the structure to the subject.
We can see no better way to periodize the time within which we live than through the analogy with the suffering and resurrection of Job.
And it appears beautiful to us to conceive of redemption as the growth of our passion. Of course, it is paid for by an even higher possibility of suffering.
It is must be underlined that Job’s conversion involves no repentance.
Job’s situation at this moment is qualitatively different from that which supposes a mere retraction or a simple expression of disdain or hatred of himself.
The creature is gripped by the sense of his own finitude at the very moment that the infinite that creates is revealed to it.
The idea is not that of repentance, the technical term of Judaic and Christian prophetic thought, because Job does not admit to having carried out crimes against morality. . . . Lastly, Job rejects the thesis defended by his friends in the course of the debate. . . .
. He is not absolved, nor does he ask to be. . . .
He does not repent for a moral wrong—he is converted from his metaphysical pride. . . .
That is, not only does repentance not appear here as a specific moment in Job’s liberation (in the story as in the metaphor) but neither can it be assumed as an element or complement of the concept of redemption. Job’s conversion is a violent tension, directed not against the past but within the real.
Liberation is realized through an ontological mutation that excludes all repentance—because it is of a different nature, for repentance is irrelevant from the standpoint of being. Job does not repudiate, nor does he retract—because he accepts his own dramatic destiny as something from which he was produced, and from which he was then freed after falling into the abyss of evil and pain. His confession is not one of repentance, for it does not reveal constituted experiences, but it constructs an absolute, it “sees.”
Whether the overcoming is dialectical or formal, the subject can no longer be found. Because it can always be found. Because it cannot be defined in relation to another.
Hegel, like Habermas, shows us modernity transcending itself, like a packet moved from one shelf to another. But then this false overcoming is nothing but the demonstration of the impossibility of transcending modernity.
The subject is born again on the limit of this impossibility of overcoming and this possibility of movement. Deleuze and Guattari, in their formidable A Thousand Plateaus, describe precisely the dynamics that follow the metaphysical crisis (of overcoming the dialectic) within modernity.
The philosophical discourse of modernity in this case becomes a practical, political discourse on modernity. Bataille and Foucault come to the same conclusion as do Deleuze and Guattari via other paths. These paths are rich—paths that lead not to undefined nothingness but to the fullness of destiny, to an objective and dramatic limit that will, through pain, become subject—a process of redemption
God justifies himself, thus God is dead. He saw God, hence Job can speak of him, and he—Job himself—can in turn participate in divinity, in the function of redemption that man constructs within life—the instrument of the death of God that is human constitution and the creation of the world.
The ontological network within which this linking unfolds is not indifferent. The process is not without a subject.
Ontology is a net, an ensemble of echoing voices, a world of profound resonances.
But all of this movement is begun and organized in a moment of extreme clarity, of the highest concentration of forces: the recognition of the divinity, the idea and identification with it as the ontological subject par excellence. The antagonism between life and death is resolved in favor of life.
Creation is the going beyond death. Creation is the content of the vision of God. Creation is the meaning of life.
Prophecy is seeing history as the occasion for the revelation of God, and the prophet is himself revelation.
The divine epiphany announced by Job is the end of transcendence—and the revelation of the divinity within history. It is a realization that is struggle, antagonism, and destruction. Ontology is a battlefield, a terrain upon which each leaves his fallen ones.
Job is the greatest thinker of ontology because he shows it to be something lying between cosmogony and redemption.
And yet ontology is not directed to subjectivity but is constructed by it, by antagonisms, machines, and functions.
God’s discourse and Job’s experience of it continually shift us across natural and historical horizons. The world is formed and reformed through the struggle against evil.
Different orders of liberation are presented.
The struggle against the monsters is the condition for the ordering of nature. The order of nature is the condition for the order of the world, and this is the condition of redemption.
There is no objective; there is struggle, invention, victory, there is constitution.
In all these verses the word “love” never appears—but the novelty, the gratuity, the power of this act are always and exclusively present.
Only love is able to construct and reconstruct the world—and help us rise up again from defeat and reform existence.
The return of the folkloric discourse at the end of this enormous, cosmic, theological, human adventure is like a shower, a bath, a rest after having traversed great mountains.
We are not interested in legitimating Job’s “seeing,” other than from the standpoint of practice—that is, identifying it as a creative experience. Job’s “seeing” modifies, transforms, innovates the ontological fabric of the world. And it does so practically—through an activity with immediate ontological relevance.
It does not activate power—but makes power powerful. What is accumulated is not action’s dimension of finality, but its potential energy.
“To see” is an act, an act that does not end but develops power, reproducing it, reinventing it as power. It is this incredible ontological power, which is absolutely interwoven with practice, that the book of Job shows us in motion.
There is what we might call a philological mystery
The problem can be expressed as follows: why does Job accept God’s teaching (in that part that precedes the cosmogonic irruption and appearance of the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan) while he rejects Elihu’s, when both discussions repeat the same refrain and are made with the same ingredients?
First let us check the actual homology of Elihu and Yahweh’s utterances.
“Hear this, O Job; stop and consider the wondrous works of God.
he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.” (37:14–24)
Then the lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
I will question you, and you shall declare to me. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” (38:1–7)
And so these chapters keep on tirelessly. Given this unquestionable thematic unity, what is specific to God’s discourse?
The word is revealed only by vision. Visionprophecy. Now we find ourselves in the place of the divine.
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:17–25)
Paul’s quote from the book of Job is not incidental. With this quote he summarizes the experience of the epiphany that from the prophetic perspective of redemption Job calls vision, whereas Paul translates it as prophecy and perdition.
The Messiah is the second nature: a machine that produces and accumulates energy and applies it to materia prima so as to transform it; a power that is reborn of the ashes of his first consummation; a powerful innovation; a surplus of being, of materiality, that is original and outside all finality, diffused everywhere in the world. This is the Messiah.
The book of Job is the parabola of modernity, of the forever unfinished dialectic of world and innovation, of being and relation, that characterizes it. And the problem of the book of Job is that of modernity—of the alternative between the totalization of the rule of science and technology over the world, and the liberation of new subjectivity.
We begin, for example, with the ethical theme par excellence—the problem of labor that becomes value and the crisis that derives from it when everything becomes value, when every significant practical horizon, every possibility of measure, all valorization appears to fail.
There is only the recognition of the destiny that it imposes upon us, as well as the deepening of the analysis and the consciousness of our destiny—until, singularly or collectively, we rise from the nothing in which the progress of value has constituted us, discovering in labor, in a new form of it, the foundation of a new destiny. We are able to change our destiny.
It is impossible to conceive the materiality of the form of value and its capacity to free itself, to subvert and to innovate, if it is not inscribed in a power. Power [potenza] of a subject, power of subjects, collective power.
When this passage is not given, its condition is posed—the condition of a necessity—and it is manifested as the presupposition of the investigation. This material datum is the condition of every genealogy: hermeneutics is the symptom and the exposition of this passage. Subjectivation is a fact.*
That is to say, the problem is not in the passage from the structure to the subject but in the nature of the ontology that sustains this passage. If there is an idealist ontology, the passage is absurd. But if the ontology is historical, if power has the weight of living and dying, and of their intertwining, if pain is the basis of invention—of the tear that constructs new being, of the subversion that creates—then there is no difficulty in establishing the passage from the structure to the subject.
We can see no better way to periodize the time within which we live than through the analogy with the suffering and resurrection of Job.
And it appears beautiful to us to conceive of redemption as the growth of our passion. Of course, it is paid for by an even higher possibility of suffering.
It is must be underlined that Job’s conversion involves no repentance.
Job’s situation at this moment is qualitatively different from that which supposes a mere retraction or a simple expression of disdain or hatred of himself.
The creature is gripped by the sense of his own finitude at the very moment that the infinite that creates is revealed to it.
The idea is not that of repentance, the technical term of Judaic and Christian prophetic thought, because Job does not admit to having carried out crimes against morality. . . . Lastly, Job rejects the thesis defended by his friends in the course of the debate. . . .
. He is not absolved, nor does he ask to be. . . .
He does not repent for a moral wrong—he is converted from his metaphysical pride. . . .
That is, not only does repentance not appear here as a specific moment in Job’s liberation (in the story as in the metaphor) but neither can it be assumed as an element or complement of the concept of redemption. Job’s conversion is a violent tension, directed not against the past but within the real.
Liberation is realized through an ontological mutation that excludes all repentance—because it is of a different nature, for repentance is irrelevant from the standpoint of being. Job does not repudiate, nor does he retract—because he accepts his own dramatic destiny as something from which he was produced, and from which he was then freed after falling into the abyss of evil and pain. His confession is not one of repentance, for it does not reveal constituted experiences, but it constructs an absolute, it “sees.”
Whether the overcoming is dialectical or formal, the subject can no longer be found. Because it can always be found. Because it cannot be defined in relation to another.
Hegel, like Habermas, shows us modernity transcending itself, like a packet moved from one shelf to another. But then this false overcoming is nothing but the demonstration of the impossibility of transcending modernity.
The subject is born again on the limit of this impossibility of overcoming and this possibility of movement. Deleuze and Guattari, in their formidable A Thousand Plateaus, describe precisely the dynamics that follow the metaphysical crisis (of overcoming the dialectic) within modernity.
The philosophical discourse of modernity in this case becomes a practical, political discourse on modernity. Bataille and Foucault come to the same conclusion as do Deleuze and Guattari via other paths. These paths are rich—paths that lead not to undefined nothingness but to the fullness of destiny, to an objective and dramatic limit that will, through pain, become subject—a process of redemption
September 21, 2020
An interesting application of the Book of Job to the modern predicament. I found the afterword by David Boer to be the most interesting part. This is the first work of Negri's that I've read; I don't think that I'll want to read more, although I gather this is only the beginning of his rethinking of Marxism that gets developed in later work.
June 2, 2016
A frequently fascinating interpretation of the book of Job as a kind of commentary (a "parable") of the fate of labor in late- or hyper-capitalist society.
Job's persecution by his God and his friends is a figure for the utter devaluation of labor in face of capital's demand for "productivity" and its monetization of everything; and Job's stand-off against God and his friends is a figure of a possible stance for labor to defy this cruelty of capital. Job's very defiance exposes the meaninglessness of every "theodicy of Capital." Moreover, it points to the power to turn away from the divinized order of Capital to create a new world.
I don't have Italian, but the translation is quite readable and at times gripping. The "commentary" by Roland Boer is also useful.
Job's persecution by his God and his friends is a figure for the utter devaluation of labor in face of capital's demand for "productivity" and its monetization of everything; and Job's stand-off against God and his friends is a figure of a possible stance for labor to defy this cruelty of capital. Job's very defiance exposes the meaninglessness of every "theodicy of Capital." Moreover, it points to the power to turn away from the divinized order of Capital to create a new world.
I don't have Italian, but the translation is quite readable and at times gripping. The "commentary" by Roland Boer is also useful.
March 13, 2012
Almost done - a mix of new information and insight I don't fully trust that I understand.
Read
April 8, 2013Finiti
Read
September 26, 2014Only read some of this. I just wasn't that interested in Job. Really cannot rate it
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews