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A politics of love? Antonio Negri on revolution and democracy

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Abstract

This article critically analyzes Antonio Negri's democratic theory by exploring the theoretical significance of a concept that begins to appear in his writings after the 1990s, namely the concept of ‘love’. Negri's turn to love in the closing pages of his most recent books is puzzling, especially given his earlier recourse to notions of antagonistic struggle, direct confrontation and even violence. Using Jacques Derrida's conception of ‘the supplement’ for interpretive purposes, I argue that the concept of love not only enriches Negri's account of democracy, but also points to a lack within his political thought. During the 1970s, as one of the leading figures of autonomist Marxism, Negri called for a radicalization of antagonism and the use of violence to ensure the political organization of the revolutionary subject without giving up on the emancipatory potential of ‘direct and immediate’ action. In his recent writings, Negri has supplemented the notion of ‘love’ for his earlier emphasis on antagonism to address autonomist Marxism's unresolved question of political organization. And yet, this turn to love comes at a price. Negri's understanding of love as the creative force of revolutionary consciousness leads him to erase the process of political contestation and mediation involved in the constitution of political struggles. Love, then, operates as a dangerous supplement, undermining Negri's commitment to multiplicity and diversity as central aspects of his democratic theory.

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Notes

  1. As Steve Wright writes, ‘[m]aking sense of autonomia as a whole is no simple matter’. Autonomia was composed of numerous collectives which were ‘[i]deologically heterogeneous, territorially dispersed, organizationally fluid, politically marginalized’ (Wright, 2002, p. 152).

  2. By making this point, I do not want to imply, in any way, that Negri supported, or even condoned, the activities of these radical militant organizations. As Timothy Murphy convincingly argues, a careful reading of Negri's writings from this period demonstrate that while he highlighted the need for the working class resistance to make use of ‘its own organic forms of illegal mass violence’, Negri ‘consistently and adamantly’ ‘criticized the elitist forms of violence’ such as the ones utilized by the Red Brigades (Murphy, 2005, p. xv).

  3. In 1986, reflecting on the effects of the escalation of violence on ‘the defeat of the 1970s’ (Negri, 2005g, p. 163), Negri made a case for exploring alternative methods of militancy to invent a new life from which ‘terrorism and state violence are banished’ (Negri, 2005g, pp. 167–168). Such an exploration required a degree of theoretical rigor which, as Negri accepts, was missing in his pamphlets from the 1970s, since at the time ‘[i]t was not possible, on the terrain of political practice, to do a theoretical analysis as complete as the analysis made in French post-structuralism’ (Negri, 2005f, p. xviii).

  4. The move away from this particular notion of politics is another aspect of the shift that took place in Negri's political thought after the 1970s. In contrast to his former position, which called for the use of violence against the state, during the 1980s, emphasizing the nuclear state's enormous destructive potential, Negri wrote that to eliminate fear from politics, it is necessary ‘to transform the general conditions of collective existence and to destroy the destructive content which … the nuclear state carries within itself … Peace is thus the basic watchword of our times’ (Negri, 2005h, p. 198).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ayten Gündoğdu and Michael Nordquist for their generosity in reading and commenting on multiple versions of this article. I would like thank Mary Dietz, Bud Duvall, Jim Farr, J.B. Shank, two anonymous reviewers and Sam Chambers for their constructive criticisms and insightful suggestions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Western Political Science Association and the First Graduate Conference in Frankfurt am Main. I wish to thank the participants of these meetings for their helpful comments.

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Çıdam, Ç. A politics of love? Antonio Negri on revolution and democracy. Contemp Polit Theory 12, 26–45 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2011.44

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