Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri (1 August 1933 – 16 December 2023) was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt and his work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory.

Antonio Negri was born in Padua, in the Northeastern Italian region of Veneto, in 1933.

His father was an active communist militant from the city of Bologna (in the Northeastern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna), and although he died when Negri was two years old, his political engagement made Negri familiar with Marxism from an early age, while his mother was a teacher from the town of Poggio Rusco (in the province of Mantua, Lombardy).

He began his career as a militant in the 1950s with the activist Roman Catholic youth organization Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica (GIAC).

Negri became a communist in 1953–54 when he worked at a kibbutz in Israel for a year.

The kibbutz was organised according to ideas of Zionist socialism and all the members were Jewish communists.

He joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1956 and remained a member until 1963, while at the same time becoming more and more engaged throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s in Marxist movements.

Negri studied philosophy and was hired as a professor at the University of Padua, soon after receiving his doctorate in 1956.

There.

he taught dottrina dello Stato ("state doctrine"), an Italian field similar to the philosophy of law, covering state and constitutional theory.

He was given an additional four years on the charge of being "morally responsible" for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject.

He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.

Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze.

In the early 1960s, Negri joined the editorial group of Quaderni Rossi, a journal that represented the intellectual rebirth of Marxism in Italy outside the realm of the Communist party.

Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness".

In 1969, together with Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno, Negri was one of the founders of the group Potere Operaio (Workers' Power) and the operaismo movement.

Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro.

French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze also signed in November 1977 L'Appel des intellectuels français contre la répression en Italie (The Call of French Intellectuals Against Repression in Italy) in protest against Negri's imprisonment and Italian anti-terrorism legislation.

On 16 March 1978, Aldo Moro, the party leader of Christian Democracy and the former Italian prime minister, was kidnapped in Rome by the Red Brigades.

Forty-five days after the kidnapping and nine days before Moro's death, the Red Brigades called his family and informed Moro's wife of his impending death.

The conversation was recorded and later broadcast.

While a number of people who knew Negri at the time identified him as the probable author of the call, the caller was later revealed to be Valerio Morucci.

Negri was charged with a number of offences, including leadership of the Red Brigades, masterminding the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the President of the Christian Democratic Party Aldo Moro, and plotting to overthrow the government.

At the time, Negri was a political science professor at the University of Padua and visiting lecturer at Paris' École Normale Supérieure.

The Italian public was shocked that an academic could be involved in such events.

A year later, Negri was exonerated of Aldo Moro's kidnapping after a leader of the BR, having decided to cooperate with the prosecution, testified that Negri "had nothing to do with the Red Brigades."

The charge of 'armed insurrection against the State' against Negri was dropped at the last moment, and, because of this, he did not receive the 30-year plus life sentence requested by the prosecutor, but received just 30 years for being the instigator of political activist Carlo Saronio's murder and having 'morally concurred' with the murder of Andrea Lombardini, a carabiniere, during a failed bank robbery.

His philosopher peers saw little fault with Negri's activities.

Michel Foucault commented, "Isn't he in jail simply for being an intellectual?"

On 7 April 1979, in a politically motivated arrest, Negri and other activists were charged with kidnapping, assassination and insurrection.

Padova's Public Prosecutor Pietro Calogero accused them of being involved in the political wing of the Red Brigades, and thus behind left-wing terrorism in Italy.

Nevertheless, he was convicted in 1984 and sentenced (in absentia) to 30 years in prison.

In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence.

Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars.

He hence lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel.

He was the father of film director Anna Negri.

Like Deleuze, Negri's preoccupation with Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy.

Along with Althusser and Deleuze, he has been one of the central figures of a French-inspired neo-Spinozism in continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after a well-known rediscovery of Spinoza by German thinkers (especially the German Romantics and Idealists) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.