4 - Immeasurable Life: Negri
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
The good, the infinite, are nothing less than pure construction. Let's dare hope, let's dare build something!
Antonio NegriAntonio Negri is the philosopher who has done most to re- tool an affirmative thinking of immanence for the contemporary conjuncture. This work was formed in the matrix of the 1970s; in the situation of grasping the rebellious subjectivities of Italy's ‘long '68’ (from 1968 to the repression of 1979) through a meeting between the conceptuality of a ‘Marx beyond Marx’ and the currents of French thinking in the 1970s (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari). As Negri puts it: ‘I went to wash my clothes in the Seine!’ The well- known result of this synthesis is his work with Michael Hardt: Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004) – the recto and verso of contemporary power. Empire composes a new ‘decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’. Hardt and Negri argue, in line with the accelerationist thinking of the 1970s, that ‘[w]e must push through Empire to come out the other side’. Rather than simply being a hymn to capitalist power, however, Hardt and Negri read Empire as the production of the power of the multitude: resistance ‘is entirely positive’. It is this positive power of resistance that has forced capitalism to transform itself from an imperial system anchored in the nation- state into this new global form.
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- The Persistence of the NegativeA Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, pp. 106 - 133Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010