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  • I'ts a Powerful Life:A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy
  • Cesare Casarino (bio) and Antonio Negri (bio)

CESARE CASARINO: I would like to begin this conversation by turning to those contemporary thinkers who I believe come closest in some respects to your philosophical positions and political projects, namely, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Clearly, you have much in common with each of them. There are also, however, important and substantial differences that separate your positions from theirs. You have at times drawn attention to such differences. At the end of your "Twenty Theses on Marx," for example, you, on the one hand, acknowledge their importance for your work, and, on the other hand, point out their limitations, which for you consist of the fact that ultimately they refuse to identify a constituent power, intended as the collective organ of subversive minorities; (you are also quick to add, however, that at times they implicitly overcome such limitations).1 Moreover, at several points in Empire, you and Michael Hardt in essence reiterate this assessment of their positions.2 I would like you to start from precisely such an assessment in order to discuss your relations to these thinkers. Could we begin perhaps with Deleuze?

ANTONIO NEGRI: My encounter with Deleuze took place via Spinoza. I had read Foucault quite carefully already in the 1970s, and, in fact, I wrote back then an essay on Foucault for Aut Aut, which later became a chapter in Macchina Tempo. In this essay, on the one hand, I discussed and defended Foucault's methodology as being essential for any demystification of the great juridical-political institutions of modernity as well as for any analysis of the phenomenology of power—which at the time we used to call [End Page 151] "microphysics of power."3 On the other hand, I also reached the conclusion there that his methodology ultimately was stuck, was unable to open itself up to social recomposition. In other words, I felt that in the end Foucault's archeology was unable to turn into an effective process of power: the archeological project always moved from above in order to reach below, while what concerned me most was precisely the opposite movement from below. For me, this was his project's main limitation. I never met Foucault, even though I knew well and saw frequently throughout the second half of the 1970s his Italian translators—such as Giovanna Procacci, et cetera—as well as all the other figures who were working with Foucault as he was beginning his lectures at the Collège de France.

CC: But Foucault was perfectly aware of the limitations you ascribe to his project. It seems to me that it was precisely in order to overcome such an impasse that his research took a different turn precisely in those years, beginning at least with Discipline and Punish but especially later with the first volume of The History of Sexuality.

AN: Yes, you are right. I heard him lecture a couple of times at the Collège de France, and each time his arguments were almost the arguments of a historian. He would always leave me profoundly dissatisfied—and it was evident to me that he shared such dissatisfaction. At any rate, it was around this time that I returned to Spinoza. As usual, this return was dictated by my need to find conceptual forms that would adequately describe the positive recomposition of power [potenza] taking place at the time, the exponential intensification of political struggles, the expansion of the political movement throughout the social terrain as a whole. While rereading Spinoza, I also studied all the major interpreters of his thought, and, above all, Matheron. And then I came across Deleuze's study of Spinoza, and so I began to attend his new lectures on Spinoza at Vincennes.4 My theoretical engagement with Deleuze begins precisely with his work on Spinoza, since I had never read any of his other works before—and I was right away extremely intrigued by him. Guattari and I were already very close friends by then. But in those years my friendship with Guattari essentially revolved around politics and we discussed philosophy...

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