A sequent calculus methodology for systems of agency based on branching-time frames with agents and choices is proposed, starting with a complete and cut-free system for multi-agent deliberative STIT; the methodology allows a transparent justification of the rules, good structural properties, analyticity, direct completeness and decidability proofs.

The contraction-free sequent calculus G4 for intuitionistic logic is extended by rules following a general rule-scheme for nonlogical axioms. Admissibility of structural rules for these extensions is proved in a direct way by induction on derivations. This method permits the representation of various applied logics as complete, contraction- and cut-free sequent calculus systems with some restrictions on the nature of the derivations. As specific examples, intuitionistic theories of apartness and order are treated.

_Factory of Strategy_ is the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's theoretical trajectory. Lenin is the only prominent politician of the modern era to seriously question the "withering away" and "extinction" of the state, and like Marx, he recognized the link between capitalism and modern sovereignty and the need (...) to destroy capitalism and reconfigure the state. Negri refrains from portraying Lenin as a ferocious dictator enforcing the proletariat's reappropriation of wealth, nor does he depict him as a mere military tool of a vanguard opposed to the Ancien Régime. Negri instead champions Leninism's ability to adapt to different working-class configurations in Russia, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. He argues that Lenin developed a new political figuration in and beyond modernity and an effective organization capable of absorbing different historical conditions. He ultimately urges readers to recognize the universal application of Leninism today and its potential to institutionally--not anarchically--dismantle centralized power. (shrink)

Large portions of mathematics such as algebra and geometry can be formalized using first-order axiomatizations. In many cases it is even possible to use a very well-behaved class of first-order axioms, namely, what are called coherent or geometric implications. Such class of axioms can be translated to inference rules that can be added to a sequent calculus while preserving its structural properties. In this work, this fundamental result is extended to their infinitary generalizations as extensions of sequent calculi for both (...) classical and intuitionistic infinitary logic. As an application, a simple proof of the infinitary Barr’s theorem without the axioms of choice is shown. (shrink)

Antonio Negri, one of the world's leading scholars on Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and his contemporary legacy, offers a straightforward explanation of the philosopher's elaborate arguments and a persuasive case for his ongoing relevance. Responding to a resurgent interest in Spinoza's thought and its potential application to contemporary global issues, Negri demonstrates the thinker's special value to politics, philosophy, and related disciplines. Negri's work is both a return to and an advancement of his initial affirmation of Spinozian thought (...) in _The Savage Anomaly_. He further defends his understanding of the philosopher as a proto-postmodernist, or a thinker who is just now, with the advent of the postmodern, becoming contemporary. Negri also connects Spinoza's theories to recent trends in political philosophy, particularly the reengagement with Carl Schmitt's "political theology," and the history of philosophy, including the argument that Spinoza belongs to a "radical enlightenment." By positioning Spinoza as a contemporary revolutionary intellectual, Negri addresses and effectively defeats twentieth-century critiques of the thinker waged by Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

In Subversive Spinoza , Antonio Negri spells out the philosophical credo that inspired his radical renewal of Marxism and his compelling analysis of the modern state and the global economy by means of an inspiring reading of the challenging metaphysics of the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Spinoza. For Negri, Spinoza's philosophy has never been more relevant than it is today to debates over individuality and community, democracy and resistance, modernity and postmodernity.

Negri, a leading Marxist philosopher, has inspired anti-empire movements around the world through his writings and personal example. This work, which began as a conversation between Negri and literary critic Casarino, is the most complete review of the philosopher's work.

That every first-order theory has a coherent conservative extension is regarded by some as obvious, even trivial, and by others as not at all obvious, but instead remarkable and valuable; the result is in any case neither sufficiently well-known nor easily found in the literature. Various approaches to the result are presented and discussed in detail, including one inspired by a problem in the proof theory of intermediate logics that led us to the proof of the present paper. It can (...) be seen as a modification of Skolem’s argument from 1920 for his “Normal Form” theorem. “Geometric” being the infinitary version of “coherent”, it is further shown that every infinitary first-order theory, suitably restricted, has a geometric conservative extension, hence the title. The results are applied to simplify methods used in reasoning in and about modal and intermediate logics. We include also a new algorithm to generate special coherent implications from an axiom, designed to preserve the structure of formulae with relatively little use of normal forms. (shrink)

Anti-realist epistemic conceptions of truth imply what is called the knowability principle: All truths are possibly known. The principle can be formalized in a bimodal propositional logic, with an alethic modality ${\diamondsuit}$ and an epistemic modality ${\mathcal{K}}$, by the axiom scheme ${A \supset \diamondsuit \mathcal{K} A}$. The use of classical logic and minimal assumptions about the two modalities lead to the paradoxical conclusion that all truths are known, ${A \supset \mathcal{K} A}$. A Gentzen-style reconstruction of the Church–Fitch paradox is presented (...) following a labelled approach to sequent calculi. First, a cut-free system for classical bimodal logic is introduced as the logical basis for the Church–Fitch paradox and the relationships between ${\mathcal {K}}$ and ${\diamondsuit}$ are taken into account. Afterwards, by exploiting the structural properties of the system, in particular cut elimination, the semantic frame conditions that correspond to KP are determined and added in the form of a block of nonlogical inference rules. Within this new system for classical and intuitionistic “knowability logic”, it is possible to give a satisfactory cut-free reconstruction of the Church–Fitch derivation and to confirm that OP is only classically derivable, but neither intuitionistically derivable nor intuitionistically admissible. Finally, it is shown that in classical knowability logic, the Church–Fitch derivation is nothing else but a fallacy and does not represent a real threat for anti-realism. (shrink)

In this article, we begin from the assertion that global war does not affirm itself as an imperial ordering power without `opacifying' every regulative idea of peace, which is thereby reduced to the status of a deceptive illusion. `Postmodern' peace, which is absolutely contemporaneous with war, is deduced from war in the guise of the `post-democratic' institution of a permanent state of exception, of a continuation of war by other means, and of a reduction of sovereignty to the imbalance of (...) terror, in accordance with the principle of distinction that opposes friend and enemy. Once war, peace and barbarism interact with no rule other than the common sense of the unworldly squalor, only Combat against War can destroy the sensorial evidence of a false social peace and open on to the construction of a World that is once again possible for the singularities that we are in common. Whence derives the character of social threat that marks out contemporary art when it focuses on the mediatic world-image by putting to work a new transversalist aesthetic paradigm, exposing itself to the tearing asunder of the sensible in the over-exposition of peace to war. This could be art's new address, tracing its difference in a creative machination of affects that can no longer find support in any remembrance of the being of peace. (shrink)

A constructivisation of the cut-elimination proof for sequent calculi for classical, intuitionistic and minimal infinitary logics with geometric rules—given in earlier work by the second author—is presented. This is achieved through a procedure where the non-constructive transfinite induction on the commutative sum of ordinals is replaced by two instances of Brouwer’s Bar Induction. The proof of admissibility of the structural rules is made ordinal-free by introducing a new well-founded relation based on a notion of embeddability of derivations. Additionally, conservativity for (...) classical over intuitionistic/minimal logic for the seven (finitary) Glivenko sequent classes is here shown to hold also for the corresponding infinitary classes. (shrink)

This book continues from where the authors' previous book, Structural Proof Theory, ended. It presents an extension of the methods of analysis of proofs in pure logic to elementary axiomatic systems and to what is known as philosophical logic. A self-contained brief introduction to the proof theory of pure logic is included that serves both the mathematically and philosophically oriented reader. The method is built up gradually, with examples drawn from theories of order, lattice theory and elementary geometry. The aim (...) is, in each of the examples, to help the reader grasp the combinatorial behaviour of an axiom system, which typically leads to decidability results. The last part presents, as an application and extension of all that precedes it, a proof-theoretical approach to the Kripke semantics of modal and related logics, with a great number of new results, providing essential reading for mathematical and philosophical logicians. (shrink)

With the economy deindustrialized and the working class decentralized, a call for alternative horizons for resistance: the university and the art world. What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig's new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative labor (...) has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of “modulation” as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience. (shrink)

_Factory of Strategy_ is the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's theoretical trajectory. Lenin is the only prominent politician of the modern era to seriously question the "withering away" and "extinction" of the state, and like Marx, he recognized the link between capitalism and modern sovereignty and the need (...) to destroy capitalism and reconfigure the state. Negri refrains from portraying Lenin as a ferocious dictator enforcing the proletariat's reappropriation of wealth, nor does he depict him as a mere military tool of a vanguard opposed to the Ancien Régime. Negri instead champions Leninism's ability to adapt to different working-class configurations in Russia, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. He argues that Lenin developed a new political figuration in and beyond modernity and an effective organization capable of absorbing different historical conditions. He ultimately urges readers to recognize the universal application of Leninism today and its potential to institutionally -- not anarchically -- dismantle centralized power. (shrink)

Geometric theories are presented as contraction- and cut-free systems of sequent calculi with mathematical rules following a prescribed rule-scheme that extends the scheme given in Negri and von Plato. Examples include cut-free calculi for Robinson arithmetic and real closed fields. As an immediate consequence of cut elimination, it is shown that if a geometric implication is classically derivable from a geometric theory then it is intuitionistically derivable.

A way is found to add axioms to sequent calculi that maintains the eliminability of cut, through the representation of axioms as rules of inference of a suitable form. By this method, the structural analysis of proofs is extended from pure logic to free-variable theories, covering all classical theories, and a wide class of constructive theories. All results are proved for systems in which also the rules of weakening and contraction can be eliminated. Applications include a system of predicate logic (...) with equality in which also cuts on the equality axioms are eliminated. (shrink)

In this essential rereading of Spinoza's (1632-1677) philosophical and political writings, Negri positions this thinker within the historical context of the development of the modern state and its attendant political economy.

Proofs and countermodels are the two sides of completeness proofs, but, in general, failure to find one does not automatically give the other. The limitation is encountered also for decidable non-classical logics in traditional completeness proofs based on Henkin’s method of maximal consistent sets of formulas. A method is presented that makes it possible to establish completeness in a direct way: For any given sequent either a proof in the given logical system or a countermodel in the corresponding frame class (...) is found. The method is a synthesis of a generation of calculi with internalized relational semantics, a Tait–Schütte–Takeuti style completeness proof, and procedures to finitize the countermodel construction. Finitizations for intuitionistic propositional logic are obtained through the search for a minimal derivation, through pruning of infinite branches in search trees by means of a suitable syntactic counterpart of semantic filtration, or through a proof-theoretic embedding into an appropriate provability logic. A number of examples illustrates the method, its subtleties, challenges, and present scope. (shrink)

The paradox marking Spinoza’s reappearance in modernity is well known. If Mendelssohn wished to “give him new credence by bringing him closer to the philosophical orthodoxy of Leibniz and Wolff,” and Jacobi, “by presenting him as a heterodox figure in the literal sense of the term, wanted to do away with him definitively for modern Christianity”—well, “both failed in their goal, and it was the heterodox Spinoza who was rehabilitated.” The Mendelssohn-Jacobi debate can be grafted onto the crisis of a (...) specific philosophical model. It generates a figure of Spinoza capable of assuaging the exacerbated spiritual tension of that epoch, and of constituting the systematic preamble of the relation between power and substance—between subject and nature. Spinoza, the damned Spinoza, had a resurgence in modernity as a Romantic philosopher. Lessing won out by recognizing in Spinoza an idea of nature which was capable of balancing the relation between feeling and intellect, freedom and necessity, and history and reason. Herder and Goethe, against the subjective and revolutionary impatience of the Sturm und Drang, based themselves on this powerful image of synthesis and recomposed objectivity: Spinoza is not only the figure of Romanticism; he constitutes its grounding and its fulfillment. The omnipotence of nature was no longer to break off into the tragedy of feeling, but it was to triumph over it, by opposing it to a kingdom of completed forms. Spinoza’s first reception within Romanticism was thus an aesthetic reception, a perception of motion and perfection, of dynamism and forms. And it remained such, even when the general frame and the particular components of Romanticism were subjected to the labor of philosophical critique. Fichte, the real philosophical hero of Romanticism, considered both Spinoza’s and Kant’s systems to be “perfectly coherent,” in the incessant ontological movement of the I. For the Schelling of the 1790s, the assertion of a radical opposition between 1 critical philosophy and dogmatic philosophy—that is, between a philosophy of the absolute I founding itself on the critical philosophy and a dogmatic philosophy of the absolute object and Spinozism—was quickly resolved into an analysis of action which dialectically took on the weight of the objective. Far from becoming antinomial, the absolute position of the I composes itself into a necessary process which, above tragedy, exalts the “spiritual automatism” of the relation between subject and substance. The aesthetic dimension of this synthesis consists in ceaselessly and tirelessly bringing back power and substance, the productive element and the form of production, to perfection. Romanticism, according to Hegel, is characterized by a capacity to overcome the pure objectivity of the ideal and the natural as a true idea of beauty and truth, initially to destroy the union of the idea and its reality, and to locate the latter in the difference, so as then to bring to manifestation the inner world of absolute subjectivity and reconstruct its objectivity where the overcoming of sensibility is appeased in the absolute character of the result. The filiation of this process is still Lessingian, but the new dialectic expresses and articulates its motivations, while insisting on the propaedeutic of the beautiful along the path leading to the absolute. Spinoza, a certain Spinoza, becomes the central figure in this process. (shrink)

The paradox marking Spinoza’s reappearance in modernity is well known. If Mendelssohn wished to “give him new credence by bringing him closer to the philosophical orthodoxy of Leibniz and Wolff,” and Jacobi, “by presenting him as a heterodox figure in the literal sense of the term, wanted to do away with him definitively for modern Christianity”—well, “both failed in their goal, and it was the heterodox Spinoza who was rehabilitated.” The Mendelssohn-Jacobi debate can be grafted onto the crisis of a (...) specific philosophical model. It generates a figure of Spinoza capable of assuaging the exacerbated spiritual tension of that epoch, and of constituting the systematic preamble of the relation between power and substance—between subject and nature. Spinoza, the damned Spinoza, had a resurgence in modernity as a Romantic philosopher. Lessing won out by recognizing in Spinoza an idea of nature which was capable of balancing the relation between feeling and intellect, freedom and necessity, and history and reason. Herder and Goethe, against the subjective and revolutionary impatience of the Sturm und Drang, based themselves on this powerful image of synthesis and recomposed objectivity: Spinoza is not only the figure of Romanticism; he constitutes its grounding and its fulfillment. The omnipotence of nature was no longer to break off into the tragedy of feeling, but it was to triumph over it, by opposing it to a kingdom of completed forms. Spinoza’s first reception within Romanticism was thus an aesthetic reception, a perception of motion and perfection, of dynamism and forms. And it remained such, even when the general frame and the particular components of Romanticism were subjected to the labor of philosophical critique. Fichte, the real philosophical hero of Romanticism, considered both Spinoza’s and Kant’s systems to be “perfectly coherent,” in the incessant ontological movement of the I. For the Schelling of the 1790s, the assertion of a radical opposition between 1 critical philosophy and dogmatic philosophy—that is, between a philosophy of the absolute I founding itself on the critical philosophy and a dogmatic philosophy of the absolute object and Spinozism—was quickly resolved into an analysis of action which dialectically took on the weight of the objective. Far from becoming antinomial, the absolute position of the I composes itself into a necessary process which, above tragedy, exalts the “spiritual automatism” of the relation between subject and substance. The aesthetic dimension of this synthesis consists in ceaselessly and tirelessly bringing back power and substance, the productive element and the form of production, to perfection. Romanticism, according to Hegel, is characterized by a capacity to overcome the pure objectivity of the ideal and the natural as a true idea of beauty and truth, initially to destroy the union of the idea and its reality, and to locate the latter in the difference, so as then to bring to manifestation the inner world of absolute subjectivity and reconstruct its objectivity where the overcoming of sensibility is appeased in the absolute character of the result. The filiation of this process is still Lessingian, but the new dialectic expresses and articulates its motivations, while insisting on the propaedeutic of the beautiful along the path leading to the absolute. Spinoza, a certain Spinoza, becomes the central figure in this process. (shrink)

A proof-theoretical analysis of elementary theories of order relations is effected through the formulation of order axioms as mathematical rules added to contraction-free sequent calculus. Among the results obtained are proof-theoretical formulations of conservativity theorems corresponding to Szpilrajn’s theorem on the extension of a partial order into a linear one. Decidability of the theories of partial and linear order for quantifier-free sequents is shown by giving terminating methods of proof-search.

It is in Sein und Zeit that Heidegger decrees the end of the Geisteswissenschaften and their tradition, when, as he is commenting on the Briefwechsel [exchange of letters] between Dilthey and Yorck von Wartenburg, he pays homage to the latter for “his full understanding of the fundamental character of history as virtuality [...] [which he] owes to his knowledge of the character of being of human Dasein itself.” Consequently, Heidegger continues, “the interest of understanding historicality” is confronted with the task (...) of an elaboration of the “generic difference between the ontic and the historical.” But he must part ways with Yorck when the latter, after having clearly established that difference, moves from virtuality to mysticism. If, on the other hand, once separated from the ontic, “the question of historicality shows itself to be an ontological question which inquires into the constitution of being of historical being”, it is once again towards Dilthey that one must turn, in spite of his confused vitalism. Heidegger effects two operations at once. On the one hand, he expels the Geisteswissenschaften from the position they occupied at the heart of metaphysics, as the inheritors of the Enlightenment and the outcome of Hegelianism. On the other hand, he brings to fulfillment the critical labor which had precisely shown its value in Dilthey’s historicism —acritical labor which develops the search for the meaning of historicity and allows one to move from the theory of objectivity to that of expression, from the acknowledgment of historiography in the context of the critique of cognition to its definition at the heart of the transcendental schematism. Historicity is then posited as an ontological dimension and leaves only its ontic residue for historiography. (shrink)

Antonio Negri’s article explores the relationship between the juridical categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and the political concept of the common through the theme of the ‘material constitution’ defining actual relations of power which defy the crystallization of ‘formal constitutions’. The financial convention shaping the material constitution of contemporary capitalism refers to the rise of what Foucault called biopower, where value is no longer the expression of a mere quantity of commodities but of a set of activities and services, (...) which are immediately cooperative. In this context, any form of measure cannot but be political and hence it must be established through new forms of economic governance. The social relation of capital becomes immediately political once money displaces labour as rule, norm and measure of value. As a result, processes of political subjectivation within the Eurocrisis combine de-stituent and con-stituent movements: requests for insolvencies, social occupations, commoning and mutualization are the means through which social struggles formulate the multitudes’ demands for ‘equality as a condition of freedom’. (shrink)

Writings by Negri on the brief thaw in the cold winter of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and counterrevolution. Automation and information technology have transformed the organization of labor to such an extent that the processes of exploitation have moved beyond the labor class and now work upon society as a whole. If this displacement has destroyed the political primacy of the labor class, it has not, however, eliminated exploitation; rather, it has broadened it, implanting it within the given conditions of (...) the most diverse spheres of society. —from The Winter Is Over In late 1995, in opposition to the conservative agenda of Jacques Chirac and his prime minister Alain Juppé and their proposed widespread welfare cuts, French students rose up against their government; public sector workers, together with all the major trade unions, went on strike. When railway workers and Paris Metro personnel joined in the protests, France's public transportation system came to a halt. These extensive social upheavals, the likes of which had not been seen in France since 1968, found widespread public support and fuelled the creation of many political organizations. Chirac backed down from restructuring the public retirement system. Antonio Negri's The Winter is Over comes out of the glimmer of optimism created by the events of 1995, when the long, cold season of neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, reaction, and counterrevolution appeared to have run its course. Published in Italian in 1996, The Winter is Over brings together a series of articles, speeches, and other documents written by Negri between 1989 and 1995 at the threshold of this thaw. It offers a revealing and wide-reaching account of those years of change and brink-of-change, focusing on such topics as the networks of social production, the decline of “limp thought,” the end of applied socialism, the Gulf War, and, finally, Italy's transition to its so-called “Second Republic,” as seen by an exile. (shrink)

This second volume of a new three-part series of Antonio Negri's work is focussed on the consequences of the rapid process of deindustrialisation that has occurred across the West in recent years. In this volume Negri investigates exactly what happens when the class subjects of industrial capitalism are demobilised and the factories close. Evidently capital continues to make profit, but how and where? According to Negri, the creation of value extends beyond the factory walls to embrace the (...) whole of society; the 'mass worker' of industrialism gives way to the 'socialised worker' (operaio sociale) and the terrain of exploitation now becomes the whole of human life. In postmodernity, the metropolis becomes the privileged arena of value extraction. We must therefore understand the global city, with its stratifications, its enclosures and its resistances. Old categories of the private and the public are inadequate to describe the new matrix of production, which is characterised rather by the 'common', the productive space of cognitive and immaterial labour. Today's metropolis can be defined as a space of antagonisms between forms of life produced, on the one hand, by finance capital (the capital that operates around rents), and on the other by the 'cognitive proletariat'. The central question is then how 'the common' of the latter can be mobilised for the destruction of capitalism. In an analysis that runs from the Italian workerism (operaismo) of the 1970s to the present day, From the Factory to the Metropolis offers readers valuable insight into the far-reaching impact of deindustrialisation, presenting both the challenges and opportunities. It will appeal to the many interested in the continuing development of Negri's project and to anyone interested in radical politics today. (shrink)

Four men in a cell in Rebibbia prison, Rome, awaiting trial on serious charges of subversion. One of them, the political thinker Antonio Negri, spends his days writing. Among his writings are twenty letters addressed to a young friend in France Ð letters in which Negri reflects on his own personal development as a philosopher, theorist and political activist and analyses the events, activities and movements in which he has been involved. The letters recount an existential journey that (...) links a rigorous philosophical education with a powerful political passion, set against the historical backdrop of postwar Italy. Crucially, Negri recalls the pivotal moment in 1978 when the former prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades, and how the institutions then pinned that killing onto him and his associates. Published here for the first time, these letters offer a unique and invaluable insight into the factors that shaped the thinking of one of the most influential political theorists of our time and they document Negri’s role in the development of political movements like Autonomia. They are a vivid testimony to one man’s journey through the political upheavals and intellectual traditions of the late 20th century, in the course of which he produced a body of work that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on radical thought and politics around the world. (shrink)

In this book, renowned theorist Antonio Negri examines how Spinoza's thought constitutes a radical break with past ideas and a key tool for envisaging a form of politics beyond capitalism. His philosophy gives us new ways of looking critically at our present, revealing that power must always be seen as a question of antagonism and class struggle.

Cet article s’interroge sur le sens du rapprochement entre Spinoza et Masaniello opéré par Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari dans L’Anti-Œdipe. L’enjeu est de penser une puissance révolutionnaire irréductible à la manière dont se pensait la révolution dans les partis ou les groupuscules d’extrême gauche au moment de Mai 68. Contre le cloisonnement ascétique du désir, Deleuze et Guattari inventent grâce à Spinoza un mode d’être révolutionnaire absolument nouveau : celui d’une libération désirante des singularités nomades qui, en se rencontrant (...) et en s’organisant, créent des collectifs dans lesquels les rapports de pouvoir et la hiérarchie ne reviennent pas entraver les flux du désir. La déception qui a fait suite aux espoirs portés par Mai 68 s’explique en partie par une insuffisante réflexion sur la question de l’institution et sur la manière d’institutionnaliser ces puissances révolutionnaires. Les écrits de Deleuze et Guattari eux-mêmes révèlent l’impasse de cette génération et nous permettent de mieux comprendre ce que signifie, pour nous, aujourd’hui, la révolution. (shrink)

Over the past decade, research has revealed biomolecular condensates' relevance in diverse cellular functions. Through a phase separation process, they concentrate macromolecules in subcompartments shaping the cellular organization and physiology. In the nucleus, biomolecular condensates assemble relevant biomolecules that orchestrate gene expression. We here hypothesize that chromatin condensates can also modulate the nongenetic functions of the genome, including the nuclear mechanical properties. The importance of chromatin condensates is supported by the genetic evidence indicating that mutations in their members are causative (...) of a group of rare Mendelian diseases named chromatinopathies (CPs). Despite a broad spectrum of clinical features and the perturbations of the epigenetic machinery characterizing the CPs, recent findings highlighted negligible changes in gene expression. These data argue in favor of possible noncanonical functions of chromatin condensates in regulating the genome's spatial organization and, consequently, the nuclear mechanics. In this review, we discuss how condensates may impact nuclear mechanical properties, thus affecting the cellular response to mechanical cues and, eventually, cell fate and identity.Chromatin condensates organize macromolecules in the nucleus orchestrating the transcription regulation and mutations in their members are responsible for rare diseases named chromatinopathies. We argue that chromatin condensates, in concert with the nuclear lamina, may also govern the nuclear mechanical properties affecting the cellular response to external cues. (shrink)

We introduce the concept of partial event as a pair of disjoint sets, respectively the favorable and the unfavorable cases. Partial events can be seen as a De Morgan algebra with a single fixed point for the complement. We introduce the concept of a measure of partial probability, based on a set of axioms resembling Kolmogoroff’s. Finally we define a concept of conditional probability for partial events and apply this concept to the analysis of the two-slit experiment in quantum mechanics.

This article focuses on three key points, which, it argues, will help us to find Marx again in a political and critical way. The three threads of antagonism, the crisis of capitalism and the common are those around which communism could be woven anew. Can we envisage to produce a new theory of value that would be adequate to the common dimension inherent in the production of capital? The article suggests that getting hold of Marx’s Capital once again should make (...) this challenge possible. (shrink)

Is it possible to be Communist Without Marx ? It is evident that when Marxist communism achieved its actual realization the State became omnipotent and the Public falsified the Common. Do struggles for communism therefore have to start by eliminating Marx’s thought ? The answer is no. Communism needs Marx in order to root itself within Common praxis. Contrary to what a few contemporary philosophers think, without historical ontology there is no communism. Without a logic of production, the communist struggle (...) cannot become an “event”. (shrink)

We will all have sometimes cried out, while running between the bedroom and the bathroom, in the morning, as did King Peter of Georg Buechner’s Leonce und Lena: “But where is my shirt? and my trousers? Halt, few! Free will is here all open in front of me. Where are morals? Where are my cuffs? The categories are in the most scandalous confusion : two more buttons are sewn on, the snuff-box is stuck in the right pocket; my whole system (...) is in disarray.”. (shrink)

This article investigates three major contexts in which Henry of Ghent’s Summa quaestionum ordinariarum was received from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. The study takes into account the material features of a group of relevant manuscripts of the Summa: Paris, where the Summa was copied and annotated by Godfrey of Fontaines and his socii; the Dominican convent in Bologna at the beginning of the fourteenth century, to which Aimericus de Placentia gave a copy of the Summa corrected against the (...) very manuscript of Godfrey of Fontaines; the Roman Papal Court, where the Summa attracted the special attention of the humanist Pope Nicholas V, who employed the manuscript from the Bolognese convent for producing new copies of the work. In this study, I endeavour to present a late-medieval history of the Summa as a book, and to contribute to the debate about the mutual relationships among some of the most important witnesses of the text. I pay particular attention to the marginal annotations in t... (shrink)

This collection of specially commissioned essays is the first of its kind in English on the work of Antonio Negri, the Italian philosopher and political theorist. The spectacular success of Empire , Negri's collaboration with Michael Hardt, has brought Negri's writing to a new, wider audience. A substantial body of his writing is now available to an English-speaking readership. Outstanding contributors—including Michael Hardt, Sergio Bologna, Kathi Weeks and Nick Dyer-Witheford—reveal the variety and complexity of Negri's thought (...) and explores its unique relevance to modern politics. Negri is one of the most sophisticated analyists of modern political philosophy. Philosophers and critics alike find his work both difficult and exhilarating, engaging as it does with Marx, Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari, Tronti and others. This book is ideal for readers who want to get to grips with Negri's key themes, in particular his theories on labour, capital, power, the state and revolution. It makes a great introduction to his work for students of political philosophy, as well as providing a comprehensive critical approach for Negri enthusiasts. (shrink)

The spectacular success of Empire and Multitude has brought Antonio Negri's writing to a new and wider audience. Negri'as work is singular in its depth and expression. It can be difficult to grasp the complexity of his ideas as they are rooted in the history of philosophy. This book offers an introduction to his thinking and is ideal for readers who want to come to grips with his key themes. Contributors include Pierre Macherey, Daniel Bensai;d, Charles Wolfe, Alex (...) Callinicos, Miguel Vatter, Jason Read, Alberto Toscano, Mamut Mutman, Ted Stolze, and Judith Revel. Written with dynamism and originality, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the evolution of Negri's thought, and especially to students of political philosophy, international studies, and literary theory. This book is the sequel to The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume One: Resistance in Practice , but can be read entirely independently. (shrink)

_A profound meditation on Leopardi’s art and thought as well as a reframing and reassertion of Negri’s own philosophical and political project of liberation._.

The European post-Marxist work Empire by Hardt and Negri points to the theological/metaphysical underpinnings of modernity and global capitalism in the medieval shift from Trinitarian orthodoxy to nominalism. Though Hardt and Negri reject religious or transcendental approaches to the social, their work shows remarkable resemblances with the ontological critique of modernity and economism mounted by John Milbank and Stephen Long among others. By contrast the considerable oeuvre of Ronald Preston on capitalism lacks a deep ontological critique. The return (...) of ontology to theological economics in recent contributions from Gorringe, Long, Milbank and Northcott marks a significant recovery of a more theological orthodoxy, but also a more thoroughgoing critique of economism whether in capitalist or socialist guise. It is moreover a critique which highlights the significance of the economic actions of churches and Christians. (shrink)

With _Trilogy of Resistance_, the political philosopher Antonio Negri extends his intervention in contemporary politics and culture into a new medium: drama. The three plays collected for the first time in this volume dramatize the central concepts of the innovative and influential thought he has articulated in his best-selling books _Empire_ and _Multitude_, coauthored with Michael Hardt. In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, Negri’s political dramas are designed to provoke debate around the fundamental questions they (...) raise about resistance, violence, and tyranny. In _Swarm_, the protagonist searches for an effective mode of activism; with the help of a Greek-style chorus, she tries on different roles, from the suicide bomber and party apparatchik to the multitude. _The Bent Man_, set in fascist Italy, focuses on a woodcutter who resists fascism by bending himself in two and using his own now-twisted body as a weapon against war. In _Cithaeron_, perhaps the most audacious of the three plays, Negri reworks Euripides’s _Bacchae_ to explore the circumstances that would compel a diverse and creative community to withdraw from both the despotic government that constrains it and the traditional family relationships that reinforce that despotism. First published in France in 2009 and featuring an introduction by Negri, _Trilogy of Resistance_ provides a direct and passionate distillation of Negri’s concepts and offers insights into one of the most important projects in political philosophy currently under way, as well as a timely reminder of the power of theater to effectively dramatize complex and challenging ideas. (shrink)

Las páginas que siguen escogen una práctica ciudadana y un concepto ya clásico en la filosofía política, la filosofía moral o la filosofía del derecho —la Desobediencia Civil— para realizar una mirada (por fuerza general) a la reflexión filosófica italiana al respecto y su repercusión en el ámbito hispano. Y lo hacen sin olvidar que el diálogo entre la producción académica de uno y otro Estado no siempre ha sido lo fluido que podría haberse deseado y sin dejar de atender (...) a los diálogos que se han dado y dan entre quienes protagonizan y animan dinámicas de desobediencia, resistencia y disidencia. Se traza, pues, una vindicación de la práctica y teoría italianas como punto de referencia para la reflexión y la acción, aquí. En ella, las protesta contra la guerra en Irak, la experiencia de los Centros Sociales Ocupados o los hacklabs se dan la mano con nombres propios como los de Norberto Bobbio, Sergio Cotta o Antonio Negri. (shrink)

Full Professor of Law at the University of Padua and guest lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Antonio Negri, born in 1933 and raised in Catholic Action, had to his credit an impressive series of works on law, historicism, and philosophy before launching himself upon the career of chief philosopher and theoretician of Leninist revolution in Italy. Domination and Sabotage is the fifth in a series of shorter works that have issued from his seminars at the University of Padua, (...) all published by Feltrinelli in the well-known series Opuscoli marxisti and all treating of the relation between advanced industrial society and proletarian revolution. The tract has enjoyed an extraordinarily wide circulation and has been hailed as a new Communist Manifesto. Its particular focus is on the question of Marxist method, and within that question its chief interest for the present reviewer is the secularized religious motif that runs through Negri’s thought. (shrink)