Sandro Mezzadra - Antonio Negri, 1933-2023
Faced with Toni Negri’s work, consisting of dozens of books and hundreds of articles written over a period of seventy years, the search for some criteria for interpretation is as necessary as it is arduous. In a beautiful interview, conducted by Vittorio Morfino and Elia Zaru in 2018, Negri essentially accepted the division of his thought into three main phases, marked respectively by the dominant presence of Marx, that of Spinoza, and the confrontation with Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault. However, it is clear that Negri’s Marx in the 1960s is very different from that of the 1970s, while his work on Spinoza is also intertwined, in terms of time, with his dialogue with contemporary French philosophy. More than forty years passed between the publication of Negri’s first major book on Spinoza, written in prison and published in 1981, and his death, most notably marked by his encounter with Michael Hardt and the writing of Empire, which also constituted an important turning point from a philosophical point of view. Moreover, from the outset, Negri’s intellectual work has been, in an irreducible way, an expression of radical militancy and political passion he chose to title his autobiography Story of a Communist. Other turning points marked his life: Quaderni rossi, Potere Operaio, Workers’ Autonomy, the great French strikes of 1995, the global movement between Seattle and Genova, his involvement in the Latin American struggles and the debates of the last twenty years, to name but a few. It is in this sense that, in his own words, ‘the presence of Marx holds all the phases together’ in his thinking
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/rp220_mezzadra_negri.pdf