In this interview recorded in September 2022 in Paris, Toni Negri talks about his political philosophy, its most important concepts and their contemporary relevance. In the first of the four-part conversation the Italian philosopher develops the concept of “constituent power” from the historical struggles for constitutions in modernity to his own experiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Negri wrote his influential book Potere Costituente in 1992, previous to the anti-globalization movement and the publication of the political bestsellers Empire and Multitude, but there is also a strong afterlife of the concept of constituent power: Since the 2000s, the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, the constituent processes and new constitutions in Ecuador and Bolivia led to actualizations of Negri’s concept, up to today’s struggles around a new constitution in Chile. In all of these contexts, constituent power becomes more than a component of a constitutional process, it is “a revolutionary power that wins in struggle”.
Source : Toni Negri, Constituent Power | transversal texts
https://transversal.at/audio/negri-conversation2
In this interview recorded in September 2022 in Paris, Toni Negri talks about his political philosophy, its most important concepts and their contemporary relevance. In the second of the four-part conversation the Italian philosopher develops the concept of mesopolitics as the ability of being in the milieu. From the times, when he wrote “Les nouveaux espaces de liberté” together with Félix Guattari in the mid 1980s, the two friends and activist intellectuals tried to assemble the multiple social movements, including the emerging movement of the Greens. Alongside what Guattari then coined as the three ecologies, mental, social and environmental ecology, today Negri insists on countering ideologies of degrowth and techno-pessimism with the construction of a mesopolitics that is also an environmental technopolitics.
https://transversal.at/audio/negri-conversation3
In this interview, recorded in September 2022 in Paris, Toni Negri talks about his political philosophy, its most important concepts and their contemporary relevance. In the third part of this four-part conversation, the Italian philosopher arrives at his central concept of the multitude. From its origins in Spinoza’s writings and its connections to absolute democracy, down to the historical events of liberation movements in early European modernity, the multitude has always been the concept for a composition of singularities, of forms of life that assemble. In the 20th century, capitalism transformed from Fordism to post-Fordism, and new multitudinous forms of subjectivation also arose with feminist and anti-colonial movements. From 1968 to the turn of the century, when in the anti-globalization movement text machines intertwined with social machines, and up to the occupy movements and Black Lives Matter, the multitude emerged again and again as a marker that another world is possible.
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