La fábrica de porcelana: Una nueva gramática de la política (Estado y sociedad)

by Antonio Negri

La crisis del socialismo obliga a plantear cambios profundos en la estructura del cambios en la organización del trabajo y la implantación de nuevas configuraciones de los modos de gobernar. Todo ello en el marco general de una transformación radical de la realidad política y del lenguaje que la expresa.

Genres: Philosophy

216 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2006

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

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though it is very invigorating and powerful, I must admit I was slightly disappointed with the book. I have the same feeling as when I was reading Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude - there are really inspiring ideas in there, but I cannot fully grasp where they are going with them as all the important concepts, e. g. multitude, singularity, crisis, exodus, are cursorily defined. I would have loved to read more on how Negri thinks these ideas could be applied to political action, but as with many such texts, this remains pretty unclear.

[Monokl Kitap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Negri, bu eserinde politikayı her yönden ele alıyor.

[Lorraine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read the first 4 pages or so due to time constraints. Then I went to a faculty discussion where it got TAKEN APART. Having heard how conceptually inaccurate this is, I don't really feel like reading it. The prose style is a little obama-campaignish, which (to me) is kinda hilarious....