The Immeasurably Creative Politics of Job: Antonio Negri and the Bible

What a sublime and, at the same time, sordid vocation this theological discipline has.

— Negri, Labor of Job, 29

My major concern is an unfamiliar Antonio Negri, one who engages in some biblical criticism in his recently translated The Labor of Job (2009), a detailed philosophical exegesis of the “marvelous” biblical book of Job.¹ Two features of Negri’s analysis stand out: the oppositions of kairós and ákairos, and measure and immeasure. However, before I explore those oppositions in some detail, two preliminary comments are needed. At the heart of the book is what I would like to call a radical homiletics. A discipline much neglected these days, homiletics is really the art of connecting a text like the Bible with the realities of everyday life, moving from the intricacies of textual analysis to the application to life. Negri’s homiletics is radical for two reasons—one political, resting on Marx, and the other textual, reading Job as a pre-eminent document for our time. Job both describes our time and offers a way through the impasse of Left action. Further, the commentary on Job is a philosophical commentary. Caught in the rough ground between two camps—radical philosophy and biblical criticism—it is not conventional biblical criticism, if such a thing actually exists. Negri does not come to the text with all of those unquestioned assumptions, methods and skills that characterize all too many of your garden-variety biblical critics. Is he then a lone philosopher making a foray into biblical analysis? Without a sense of what may be called the “mega-text” of biblical criticism, is he bound to trip up? Not quite, for there is another patchwork tradition of what may be called philosophical exegesis or commentary. Some texts of the Bible—Genesis 1–11, the letters of Paul, Job—continue to call forth commentary from philosophers and sundry Marxist critics.² Negri’s text falls in with this group.

Kairós and ákairos

What does this philosophical commentary find in Job? I focus on two key features: the opposition between measure (misura) and immeasure (dismisura) and the question of kairós. Briefly put, for Negri (im)measure is the thread—much like a necklace—that strings together value, labor, pain, ontology, time, power, evil, theodicy, creation and cosmogony. It is a complex opposition that has both positive and negative registers for each term, with Negri searching for a way beyond the negative senses of measure and immeasure—as oppressive order and unending evil—to find more positive senses. As for kairós, it falls into a rather conventional sense of the opportune time and thereby, via the New Testament, the time of crisis, the end times with their trials and hopes. Or in Negri’s words, kairós is a time of rupture, an “exemplary temporal point” (Negri on Negri, 104–06). Immediately we face a problem, for Negri does not overtly connect (im)measure and kairós. Nevertheless, they are, as will become clear, involved in an intimate embrace. In what follows, I begin with kairós, exploring what Negri both does and does not say about the term, before offering a rereading of kairós that will bring it into the arms of (im)measure.

For Negri’s most compelling statement concerning kairós we need to turn for a moment to another study, the extraordinary Kairós, Alma Venus, Multitudo (in Time for Revolution, 139–261), as well as his comments in the conversation with Anne Defourmantelle (Negri on Negri). Here two comments capture Negri’s effort to reshape time as kairós: it is the “moment when the arrow of Being is shot” and it is “the immeasurability of production between the eternal and the to-come” (Revolution, 180).³ The first picks up the sense of the “exemplary temporal point.” Kairós is an opening up in time that is eminently creative; it is the edge of time when Being is created. Two brief comments in Negri’s conversations with Anne Defourmantelle reveal the obvious theological connection: we are always at the...