N for Negri: a conversation with Toni Negri
A screening and conversation with Carles Guerra, introduced and chaired by Neil Cummings
Neil Cummings invited his friend and colleague Carles Guerra to show and discuss his rarely seen film, N For Negri, in the context of this event. The screening was followed by Q&A session with Neil and an open discussion with the audience. This day brought together two research projects with different but related emphasis on kinds of ‘practice’ – Thinking Through (Practice) and Critical (Practice) and the discussion was enriched by the considerable presence of Critical Practitioners at the event.
N For Negri (135 mins) was filmed by Carles Guerra on the afternoon of June 6, 2000. The interview with the philosopher and activist Toni Negri took place whilst Negri was serving an open prison sentence and was under remote control surveillance. He had to return to Rebibbia prison to sleep every night. His sentence was completed in 2004.
Carles Guerra had wanted him to participate in conference but as he was unable to travel this filmed interview was to be his contribution. The initial impetus for making ‘N for Negri’ was, then, practical rather than artistic. Nevertheless, the film started to gain attention for its formal and aesthetic qualities as well as for the conceptual content.
Carles Guerra kindly donated a copy of N for Negri to Thinking Through Practice, which is now in Chelsea library.
Guerra’s film is organised alphabetically in a structure reminiscent of the famous interview with Gilles Deleuze. (a series of 24 screenings based on a filmed interview between Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet.
Here this format produces a productive tension between the analytical notions of Negri’s thought (such as constituent power) and those which have more direct and personal implications for him (prison or exile). Indeed the film shows Negri ‘imprisoned’ within the frame of the film (with the exception of a couple of zooms the shots are static).
Negri’s commentary is informative, incisive and moving.
His name is assoicated with both political activism as well as critical thought in the modern capitalist society.
In 1967 he became Professor of State Theory of the Faculty of Political Science in Padua.
He is a skilled organiser and set up journals such as Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia and Contropiano and he was active within ground level movements such as Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power, a radical left-wing Italian political group, 1968 – 1973 with Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone and Valerio Morucci. It sought to base its Marxist theory on the everyday life of supposedly revolutionary factory workers. He was then active in Autonomia Operaia, an Italian extra-parliamentary leftist movement particularly active from 1976 to 1978.
He was arrested in 1979 and released in 1983 after being elected representative of the Radical Party. He was offered political asylum by the French Government and spent fourteen years of exile in Paris. During this time, he lectured at the University of Paris VIII and became a member of the Collège Internationale de Philosophie. In 1997, he voluntarily returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence.
He is author of Empire, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (with Michael Hardt), Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, Marx beyond Marx.
Download a PDF transcript of the whole of Negri’s discourse N for Negri: a conversation with Toni Negri. first published by Grey Room MIT Press Spring 2003, No. 11: 86-109. [TO BE UPLOADED]
See also Neil’s notes for framing the Carles interview.[TO BE INSERTED]
- 01 Prison and Surveillance
- 02 New Modes of Production
- 03 Empire/Autonomia and the Social Factory
- 04 Biopolitics and Gentrification
- 05 Interviewing Negri - Documentary Practice
- 06 U is for Utopia
Read the accompanying discussion at Critical Practice
Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW17 8TP