The Italian philosopher and activist Toni Negri (Padua, 1933) He died at the age of 90 in Paris. The news was given by his wife, the French philosopher Judith Revel, and his daughter Anna, who remembered him with a publication on Instagram. Professor of State Theory at the University of Padua, he was involved in the revolutionary struggle since the sixties of the last century, as a thinker and as an activist. He participated in different initiatives, such as Poder Obrero or Worker Autonomy, who questioned the role of workers in the large mechanized factory, and he went to prison accused of terrorist acts. Negri was a giant of thought, one of the last bridges between ideas and political change, between the university and the street.
Negri had the best and worst of possible times for the construction of a political ideology that would colonize the desire for change from thought. To say that Italy was going through a turbulent period, given its history, would be practically like saying nothing. But it is true that at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies a diabolical whirlpool formed in the drain of politics that led to the famous Years of Lead. Ideas, culture and politics became an unusual cocktail – especially seen from the current plain – in which some intellectuals, university professors without special gifts for agitation became references of the struggle and the noise that came from the street. Negri was one of those masters, “cattivi maestri [malos maestros]”, as some called it in Italy and as the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, reminded him on Saturday. And there his legend began.
The thinker—author of works such as The Finnish Train (1990), Subversive Spinoza (1994), Europe and Empire (2003) or the exciting Empire (2000), written with Michael Hardt— He was already a great intellectual with international recognition. But he had a complex life, a full life full of shortcuts between academia and the dangerous adventure of political struggle. A man of books, in short, who ended up living his time in a stormy way. In his origins, in his native Padua and in his own way, influenced by a certain Italian Catholic world (he belonged to Azione Catolica), he was a socialist. But substantially he was already important at that time for being a great student of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century thinker of freedom.
May '68, however, crossed Negri's work and life decisively and the revolutionary outburst emerged in him, an impulse to revolt in the most romantic forms. Without having been purely communist at the beginning (he was somewhat critical), rather a very Marxist. sui generis, living the political story from the universities and entering the heat of the student struggles through those walls, necessarily became a reference for an extra-parliamentary left that had yet to be created. A new world with very concrete temptations for revolution. Gestures, such as violence or the use of weapons, that would prevent many from turning back. Negri never held a gun, but in the 70s he became a legitimizer of this as a political form, even if it was from a certain aesthetic and romanticism. “When I put on the balaclava, I feel the heat of the working class struggle,” he once said.
Negri, who some acquaintances now remember as someone distrustful, with a hieratic gesture and a certain intellectual arrogance, founded Autonomía Obrera. It occurred a year after the murder of Aldo Moro at the hands of the Red Brigades – of which he was also accused and acquitted – and was created as a political artifact that fundamentally revolved around the idea of the spontaneity of revolt and insurrection and that existed between 1973 and 1979. It was a violent time, in which every morning Italy woke up to someone who had been shot in the leg, a package bomb or a threat. To the right and left. And many intellectuals saw how their ideas went beyond the walls of the university – that of Padua, in the case of Negri – and ended up becoming ammunition for the revolt that set fire to the street, the courtyard of the factories in northern Italy.
On April 7, 1977, Judge Pietro Calogero, in an operation named after the date it was carried out, ordered the arrest of Negri and other intellectuals. Negri was tried and accused of participating in terrorist acts and carrying out an armed insurrection. He was acquitted of these charges, but not of complicity in a robbery in 1974, for which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. When he went to prison, however, the leader of the Radical Party, Marco Pannella, decided in 1983 to include him on his list and make him a deputy of Parliament. A condition that allowed him to leave prison and, at the same time, generate a new scandal due to his inclusion in the country's political life. The image of a convict accused of terrorism entering the Montecitorio Palace revolted the right of the entire country.
But Negri, in reality, deceived Pannella. Or maybe not so much, because the leader of the Radicals was already a generous liberal who allowed himself certain deviations from the script (he also elected Cicciolina as a deputy in 1987). And the movement fundamentally served the thinker to flee from Italy to France, where he could benefit from the Mitterrand doctrine, by which the French Government refused to extradite members of the Italian extreme left who had taken refuge in the country. There Negri, perhaps a man too serious to be Italian – in Paris he found a perfect setting for his way of being in the world – worked at the Sorbonne University and the International College of Philosophy, among other institutions.
Paris, however, was not a quiet period either. The philosopher had too many pending accounts in Italy and suffered an attempted kidnapping by the transalpine secret services. Negri did not return to his country until the summer of 1997 to serve the sentence that he had pending and end that persecution. Two years later, he was granted parole. He finished his sentence in 2003. “He was a bad teacher because, after '68, the passage of the youth movement to the dark page of the Years of Lead, with terrorism from the right and the left, caused many innocent victims,” declared the Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, on Italian radio. “In legal terms, the expression of ideas is one thing and the material practice of violence is another,” he added. It should also be remembered that Sangiuliano was part of the post-fascist Italian Socialist Movement and is the man to whom Meloni has entrusted the mission of turning culture into a workhorse of the radical right to control the political narrative.
The minister's words also reflect a change of era in which Negri was increasingly less known in a country that founded the edifice of modernity on the university, ideas and policies. A moment, however, in which some of the wounds of that time have not yet completely healed.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
#Toni #Negri #philosopher #insurrection #dies