“He will have been a reader and continuator of Karl Marx, in an astonishing combination of literality and freedom”

2023-12-19 20:00:08

What was first striking about him, in addition to his incredibly youthful figure at any age, was a unique smile, sometimes predatory, sometimes ironic or full of affection. He had struck me from our first meeting, after leaving a seminar at the International College of Philosophy. He, escaped from Italy thanks to an election which temporarily released him from prison. We, dejected by the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism, which shattered the illusions born from the socialist victory of 1981. What to do in this debacle? But the revolution!, Toni explained to us, beaming with optimism: it is advancing through countless social movements, each more inventive than the last. I’m not sure I really believed it, but I came out of it, rid of my dark moods and conquered forever.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers The death of the philosopher Antonio Negri, intellectual figure of the alter-globalization left

I had not followed the famous seminar on Floor plans by Karl Marx [manuscrits de 1857-1858, considérés comme un sommet de son œuvre économique avant Le Capital], organized in 1978 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure by Yann Moulier-Boutang, who I was told was fascinating as well as esoteric. And I knew almost nothing about “workerism”, [d’« operaio », « ouvrier » en italien] of which he was one of the thinking heads.

For me, Negri was this theoretician and practitioner of “workers’ autonomy”, of which the Italian state, corrupted by the collusion of the army and the American secret services, had tried to make it the mastermind of far-left terrorism; an accusation that collapsed like a house of cards, but which sent him behind bars for years. Before and after this stay, surrounded by comrades with relaxed lives and intact passions, he was the pillar of this French Italy, an inverted image of the Italian France that we had dreamed of establishing before 1968. Taken together, around a few magazines and seminars, they would launch a new philosophical and political season. Through his provocations and his studies, Negri would be the inspiration.

Freedom and emancipation of work

I will only give a few elliptical references, choosing the references according to my affinities. Spinoza, obviously. After the thunderclap of The Wild Anomaly (PUF, 1982 for the French edition, preceded by prefaces by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Macherey and Alexandre Matheron) will come other essays placed under the banner of the last words of the Political treatise (Le Livre de Poche, 2002), published in 1670 by the Hague solitaire: “The rest is missing.”

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