Negri (Antonio) Archives - Public Seminar

Virno on Human Nature

July 22, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

One of the central arguments of Paolo Virno’s book When Word Becomes Flesh (Semiotext(e), 2015) is that the conditions of possibility of experience can themselves be experienced. There are no transcendental conditions that are ‘out of the frame’ as it were. The transcendental or ontological “are humbly placed within the world ...

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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

June 6, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Where Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri were born in the 30s, Berardi (1948) belongs with Paolo Virno (1952) and Silvia Federici (1942) to a second wave of Italian Marxist thinkers who grew out of the workerist current that struck out on its own path, diverging from the official Gramscian postures of the ...

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Affective Labor in the Post-Fordist Transformation

May 8, 2015 • by Guillermina Altomonte

Conversations about reproductive labor (what it means, how to map its boundaries, and especially how to understand its relation to productive labor in capitalist economies) have loomed large in our discussions of feminism and capitalism. This week, the turn to a more specific form of “female” labor both reanimates and ...

History

Marx and Nature

January 21, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

"What Engels called “the monopolization of the earth by a few” has reached absurdist proportions as I was writing this. (60) It would appear that the 1% now own more than half the wealth of the planet. It is the greatest concentration of wealth ever, and yet it corresponds to ...

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All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

January 4, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) is an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory. Karatani views world history as a history of modes of exchange. He rejects the classical Marxist view of history though as modes of production, to which political, religious and cultural levels ...

All Power to the {Historical} Imagination!

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Spinoza on Speed

November 19, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000) is a book I have always been ambivalent about. It is a kind of Spinozist-accelerationist epic. (As Benjamin Noys has usefully shown). Spinoza on speed. I admire the boldness with which it attempted to describe the situation that was ...

Theory & Practice

#Accelerate in reverse

October 2, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

Nothing seems more urgent now than to find useful ways of thinking what Donna Haraway calls naturecultures, and to do so historically. The elimination in advance of the problem of the continuities from the natural to the cultural that is such an ingrained prejudice in the humanities and social sciences ...

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In Support of PODEMOS

June 17, 2014 • by Public Voices

One of the most appalling and discouraging outcomes of the recent European elections has been the rise and affirmation of a number of far-right, xenophobic, and populist electoral parties in East and Northern Europe and in France. This has been largely the outcome of years of austerity policies and crisis, ...

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The Brazilian Discontents behind the World Cup Stage

Se mancha la pelota? (Does the ball get stained?)

June 10, 2014 • by Mariana Prandini Assis

In a few days, the eyes of millions of people around the world will be fixed on their TV screens, following a ball rolling in some shining green field in Brazil. They will be expecting to witness one of the most exciting World Cups in history; after all, we Brazilians ...

The Brazilian Discontents behind the World Cup Stage

Theory & Practice

Four Cheers for Vulgar Marxism!!!!

April 25, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

If you want to show that your version of Marxism is better than somebody else’s, the quickest way to do so is to call the other version vulgar. One’s own version is nuanced, sophisticated, subtle, erudite, philosophically rich – all the things the vulgar is not. Or so it has ...

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The Forces of Reproduction

Testo Junkie, by Paul Préciado

December 7, 2013 • by McKenzie Wark

“Humanity does not exist under the sign of the divine… but of the monstrous.” -- Paul Préciado “Read, this!,” he said, thrusting a soiled photocopy of a typescript into my hands. “It will change your life!” Then he disappeared back into the public toilet he was cruising. This was my introduction to ...