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.
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.”
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 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)
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)
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)