The philosophy of Antonio Negri. / Vol. 2, Revolution in theory

241 Pages·2007·0.79 MB·English

by  Murphy

The Philosophy of
Antonio Negri
Volume Two
Revolution in Theory
Edited by
Timothy S. Murphy
and
Abdul-Karim Mustapha
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
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First published 2007 by Pluto Press
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and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
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Copyright © Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha 2007
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2610 8
ISBN-10 0 7453 2610 2
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Contents
Editors’ Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: A Free Man’s Wisdom . . . 1
Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha
Part I: Extensive Engagements
1. Negri’s Spinoza: From Mediation to Constitution 7
Pierre Macherey
2. The Potentia of Living Labor: Negri and the Practice of
Philosophy 28
Jason Read
3. Legality and Resistance: Arendt and Negri on Constituent
Power 52
Miguel Vatter
Part II: Intensive Encounters
4. Antonio Negri, French Nietzschean? From the Will to Power
to the Ontology of Power 87
Judith Revel
5. Always Already Only Now: Negri and the Biopolitical 109
Alberto Toscano
6. Marxist Wisdom: Antonio Negri on the Book of Job 129
Ted Stolze
Part III: Constitutive Ontology
7. Difference, Event, Subject: Antonio Negri’s Political Theory
as Postmodern Metaphysics 143
Mahmut Mutman
8. Antonio Negri and the Temptation of Ontology 169
Alex Callinicos
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vi Revolution in Theory
9. Materialism and Temporality: On Antonio Negri’s
‘Constitutive’ Ontology 198
Charles T. Wolfe
Bibliography 221
Contributors 230
Index 231
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Editors’ Acknowledgements
Like the first volume of The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, this one has been in
the works for many years, so our first words of thanks must go to our endlessly
patient contributors. We are very grateful to Pluto Press and especially David
Castle for their long-term commitment to this very large project. We would
also like to thank Sebastian Budgen for suggestions regarding the contents
of the volume and Ted Stolze for his translation of Pierre Macherey’s essay.
And since our editorial collaboration has again taken place electronically,
each of us has separate personal acknowledgements to make.
Timothy S. Murphy would again like to thank Abdul-Karim Mustapha
for his foresight in getting this project rolling and generating so much of
its momentum, and Steve Wright for his unflagging interest in these books
and for his willingness to discuss critically many of their elements over the
past several years. The everyday energy necessary to complete this labor,
like so many others, came from Julie (along with Iris and Daisy). He would
like to dedicate this book to the memory of his brother, Kevin John Murphy
(1965-2006).
Abdul-Karim Mustapha would like to thank Timothy S. Murphy for the
spirit of mind to see this project through in all the years it has been in the
making, and for his commitment to enriching both the content and the
effectivity of Negri’s philosophy in general. He would also once again like
to thank Guiseppe Cocco, Yann Moulier-Boutang, Antonella Corsani, Bruno
Karsenti, Maurizio Lazzarato, François Matheron, and Charles Wolfe. Lastly,
he would like to thank Bruce, Debra, Avi and Ellie Feinberg for cultivating a
world of grace and hope, Bruce Speight for his tenacity and wit, Joyce Payne
for her pedagogy of perseverance, Stephen, Louise and Mark Garrell for
their immeasurable scope of the world, José Rabasa and Catherine Durand
for continuity, and his wife Robin Felice for all things possible and her
sensitivity to the poetic and metaphysical in all that seems impossible. He
would like to dedicate the book project to his late grandmother L. Duro
MacRae, his late grandfather Alhaji M. Sanusi Mustapha, his late uncle
Ibn Muktarr Mustapha, and to his daughter and the promises of the world
that is hers.
Pierre Macherey’s contribution originally appeared in French in Cahiers
Spinoza 4 (1983), and was later reprinted, with substantial revisions, in
vii
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viii Revolution in Theory
Macherey’s book Avec Spinoza (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992).
It is translated here by permission of Presses universitaires de France.
Miguel Vatter’s contribution originally appeared in Kairos: Revue de
philosophie 20 (2002), and it is reprinted here by permission of Kairos and
the author.
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Introduction: A Free Man’s Wisdom . . .
Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha
This book is the companion to our previous volume, The Philosophy of
Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, published by Pluto Press in 2005. The
essays in that volume focus primarily on the theoretical and practical
contributions that Antonio Negri has made to radical activism over the
course of his long and varied career: his conceptions of the socialized worker,
the refusal of work, immaterial labor and constituent power, as well as his
critiques of the Leninist party form and Althusser’s notion of history as a
‘process without a subject’, among many other things. The essays in this
volume, Revolution in Theory, focus primarily on Negri’s originality and
influence both as an innovative historian of philosophy and as a systematic
philosopher, the author of a surprising new ‘constitutive’ ontology that has
become increasingly controversial over the past few years. We frankly admit
that this division of subjects we have devised, both within this volume and
between the two, is somewhat tendentious and open to dispute, since on the
one hand Negri’s activism has always been informed by his philosophical
background and the novel conceptions to which that led him, and on the
other, Negri’s philosophical work has always developed directly out of his
passionate engagement in practical political activity (or, more recently,
his equally passionate interest in the many singular social and political
movements currently under way around the globe). We doubt that there is
any single, definitively coherent and consistent arrangement to be made of
the essays we have included in these two volumes, essays which represent
a very broad spectrum of critical responses to an equally broad selection of
the elements that constitute the singular multiplicity that is Negri’s work.
Nevertheless, the material constraints of book production have compelled
us to divide our project into two volumes, and each individual volume
into sections composed of the essays that we feel resonate most strongly
with one another.
Although Negri’s work is singular, its correlative multiplicity means that it
is not without precedents in and debts to the history of philosophy, and not
without important ramifications for contemporary philosophy. The sections
into which this volume is divided address these debts and ramifications, as
we shall explain below. One of Negri’s favorite propositions from Spinoza’s
Ethics is the famous claim that ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than of
death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death’ (Spinoza 1985:
1
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2 Revolution in Theory
E IV P67, 584), which could well describe Negri’s own philosophy as readily
as it does Spinoza’s. If his work is not strictly a philosophy of life or vitalism,
as some critics claim, it is at very least a philosophy of living labor and
constituent power directed against the dead labor of accumulated capital
and constituted power. The general perspective and tone of affirmation that
his thought shares with that of Gilles Deleuze represent another aspect of
this ‘wisdom’, in that Spinoza conceives of death as the decomposition of
the relation that constitutes the body, and thus death can come not only to
individuals but to social movements, nation states and constitutions, but
such decomposition is no cause for regret or melancholy. On the contrary,
the finitude of all such bodies is a constantly renewed challenge for us
to construct new bodies, new constitutive relations, a new common on
the plane of immanence that is human history. One consequence of this
affirmation is Negri’s preference, which he raises to the level of a meth-
odological principle, for looking ahead, into ‘time-to-come’, rather than
backward in continual self-criticism, a choice that has attracted and repelled
readers in equal measure. We will leave the question of whether or not
Negri really is Spinoza’s ‘free man’ to the judgment of our readers—but we
strongly recommend that, before deciding, they read his ‘Author’s Preface
to the English Language Edition’ of Marx Beyond Marx, which stages itself
as a dialogue between a ‘free man, the author of Marx Beyond Marx’, and a
prisoner, which Negri was when the translation was originally published.
The dialogue concludes with the ‘free man’ admonishing the prisoner, who
had complained of experiencing the capitalist ‘world as a prison’, ‘[D]on’t
pretend to total impatience when you know very well that theory allows
you to cope’ (Negri 1991a: xv–xvii). If theory can allow us too to cope with
the world, then perhaps Negri’s philosophy can offer us at least a hint of
what a ‘free man’s’ life, a life of immanent creation, might be like.1
Unlike Resistance in Practice, which we divided into two sections focused
on Negri’s work in the historical context of 1970s Italy on the one hand and
on contemporary critiques, displacements, and applications of his ideas on
the other, this volume is divided into three sections according to the subjects
addressed by our contributors. The first section, ‘Extensive Engagements’,
examines Negri’s lifelong relationships to the major figures in the history
of philosophy whose ideas have influenced his in significant and widely
acknowledged ways, namely Spinoza, Marx, and Machiavelli. In the opening
essay, Pierre Macherey examines Negri’s reading of Spinoza in The Savage
Anomaly in order to identify its fundamental and recurring gesture, which he
suggests characterizes Negri’s philosophical (and political) work as a whole:
the identification of a (logical, phenomenological, historical) crisis that
interrupts the calm deduction of a philosophical system and drives thought
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Introduction 3
ahead of itself in search of a resolution that would be constitutive and open
instead of dialectical and teleological. Jason Read takes up Macherey’s insight
regarding the crisis in order both to deepen it with respect to Negri’s account
of Spinoza and also to extend it to encompass an examination of Negri’s
reading of Marx. In so doing Read more fully explicates Negri’s gesture as a
powerful methodological instrument for reinventing both the practice of
philosophy and the philosophy of praxis. The final essay in this section,
by Miguel Vatter, confronts Negri’s account of constituent power, which
underpins his influential work on empire and the multitude, with Hannah
Arendt’s countertheory of the relation between state and revolution, in
order to bring to light Negri’s reliance on a contentious and partial reading
of Machiavelli’s distinction between virtue and fortune.
The second section, ‘Intensive Encounters’, examines the intersections,
interferences and antagonisms between Negri’s work and other philosophical
perspectives whose influences on him are both more recent and more ‘local’
than those of Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx, but which nevertheless help
to situate and clarify Negri’s thought in relation to other contemporary
philosophical currents. This section opens with Judith Revel’s essay, which
takes up the challenge of accounting for Negri’s relatively recent open
engagement with the philosophical legacy of Nietzsche. Revel poses the
necessary question of why and how Negri adopted (and adapted) concepts
and strategies drawn from Nietzsche’s great French disciples Michel Foucault
and Gilles Deleuze, rather than those approaches that gave rise to the major
Italian current of Nietzsche interpretation represented by Gianni Vattimo
and Massimo Cacciari. Alberto Toscano critically examines Negri’s use of a
concept of biopolitics which he derives, rather tendentiously, from the late
work of Foucault. Toscano intervenes with great care to differentiate Negri’s
‘epochal’ use of the concept both from Foucault’s microphysical interpreta-
tion and from the parallel philosophical projects of Paolo Virno and Giorgio
Agamben. Ted Stolze’s concluding essay in this section introduces English-
language readers to an aspect of Negri’s thought that has aroused intense
suspicion and hostility—when it has been noticed at all: his unexpected
engagement with religion and theology in the wake of his experience in
prison. While recent works by Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben have
brought the tools of contemporary continental philosophy to bear on the
reading of biblical texts, Negri anticipated them by 20 years with his atheist
and Marxist meditation on the Book of Job (soon to appear in English
translation) as a parable of materialist resistance to suffering.
The third section, ‘Constitutive Ontology’, presents responses to and
assessments of Negri’s ongoing attempt to construct a viable ontology in
the wake of both the Marxist critique of metaphysics as an exorbitantly
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4 Revolution in Theory
mediated form of repressive ideology and the deconstructive critique of
metaphysics as the incessantly repeated gesture than encloses thinking
within a specular system of binary essences. Mahmut Mutman approaches
Negri’s metaphysical project by means of a nonlinear set or ‘constellation’ of
pointed questions posed from the margins of Negri’s discourse and cutting
transversally across it, questions that seek to deconstruct the residual
binarisms on the basis of which Negri’s ontological claims continue to
operate. Alex Callinicos, one of Negri’s most relentless yet careful critics,
views Negri’s ‘flight into ontology’ as a belated attempt to salvage his
philosophical categories and activist strategies, which represent at best
creative misreadings of Marx, from the generalized catastrophe experienced
by the global left at the end of the 1970s. In the book’s final essay, Charles
T. Wolfe asks whether Negri’s constitutive ontology is really a version of
the age-old doctrine of materialism as he sometimes claims, and comes
to the conclusion that if so, it must be a materialism not of nature but of
artifice, not of atoms but of relations (and thus language), and not of orderly
and predictable growth but of radical new production, indeed innovation,
particularly in its emphasis on human temporality. Wolfe’s conclusions
bring the book full circle, back to a new formulation of the crisis that
continually drives thought ahead of itself, which Macherey saw as Negri’s
characteristic philosophical gesture.
Although some of these arguments may strike hard-headed activists as so
much other-worldly or at best superstructural hair-splitting that bears little or
no relation to political practice, we would remind them of what Marx writes
in his second thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Man [Mensch] must prove the truth, i.e.,
the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice’ (Marx
1970b: 121). Negri has faced up to the challenge of practice throughout his
life as a philosopher–activist, with more or less success as situations have
unfolded, and he continues to face it with every new concept he posits
and every new stand he takes. The this-worldliness of his thinking, which
is to say the radical immanence of both his philosophy and his activism,
leaves him with no transcendent ideological refuge from the defeats he has
experienced, but only his own extraordinary theoretical creativity, his ‘free
man’s wisdom’—and the common bonds of the movements to which he
has always devoted that creativity.
NOTE
1. We apologize for the gender bias in the language of this paragraph (and also a later
one), but it is there in our sources and our chain of allusions depends upon it.
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