Antonio Negri Quotes
Antonio Negri was an Italian Marxist political philosopher and revolutionary intellectual, a leading figure of the Italian operaismo movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and a co-author with Michael Hardt of the influential Empire trilogy. Marx Beyond Marx, written during his imprisonment, developed a heterodox reading of the Grundrisse, in which living labor is the constitutive force from which capital must always extract itself. The quotes below are attributed to Antonio Negri, organized by topic.
Browse Antonio Negri by topic
Antonio Negri on Freedom
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Attributed to Antonio Negri:
“Living labor is always already in excess of what capital can capture.”
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Attributed to Antonio Negri:
“Constituent power must never be reabsorbed into constituted power.”
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“Perhaps some day soon we will have arrived at the point when we can look back with irony at the barbaric old times when in order to be free we had to keep our own brothers and sisters slaves or to be equal we were constrained to inhuman sacrifices of freedom.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
Antonio Negri on Happiness
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“Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.”
(49)
Antonio Negri on Knowledge
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“We are by no means opposed to the globalization of relationships as such—in fact, as we said, the strongest forces of Leftist internationalism have effectively led this process. The enemy, rather, is a specific regime of global relations that we call Empire.”
(45–46) -
“[The] fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class.”
(53) -
“It is a commonplace of the classical literature on Empire, from Polybius to Montesquieu and Gibbon, that Empire is from its inception decadent and corrupt.”
(201)
Antonio Negri on Life
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“We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (128) -
“Fleeing from a life of constant insecurity and forced mobility is good preparation for dealing with and resisting the typical forms of exploitation of immaterial labor.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | 133
Antonio Negri on Nature
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“Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order — and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.”
(20) -
“The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development," cruel "civilization," and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world.”
(46) -
“Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.”
(210) -
“the question to ask, in other, is not "What is the multitude?" but rather "What can the multitude become?" … common condition, of course, does not mean sameness or unity, but it does require that no differences of nature or kind divide the multitude.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (105-106)
Antonio Negri on Politics
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Attributed to Antonio Negri:
“Empire is the political form of post-Fordist capitalism.”
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“The multitude is the productive flesh of the world.”
(62) -
Attributed to Antonio Negri:
“The struggle is the source; capital is the parasite.”
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“The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.”
(204) -
“[No] effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.”
(206) -
“[on zapatistas] The goal has never been to defeat the state and claim sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking power.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (85) -
“The task of a theory of class is to identify the existing conditions for potential collective struggle and express them as a political proposition.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (104) -
“Our claim is that a common political project is possible. This possibility of course will have to be verified and realized in practice. … We are capable of democracy. The challange is to organize it politically.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (226) -
“The political program of nation building in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is one central example of the productive project of biopower and war. Nothing could be more postmodernist and antiessentialist than this notion of nation building.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
Antonio Negri on Time
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“Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.”
(131) -
“The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.”
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (xi)