Theory & Event

Democracy is the project of the multitude, a creative force, a living god.

Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State

(p.307)

In his innovative work on Spinoza—written while serving a prison sentence for his support of the Autonomia Operaia movement during the 1970’s—Antonio Negri delineated a counter-tradition of modern political metaphysics, one directly opposed to the state form and to its mystification of democratic materialism through the devices of sovereignty and representation.[1] Insurgencies is a continuation of this project (its original subtitle being saggio sulle alternative del moderno-“essays on the alternatives of the modern”), but one that turns Negri’s attention not only to the theorists of this counter-tradition (Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx), but to the radically democratic events of which they were a part: the revolutions of the modern West. Together these works, with their complicated interweaving of theory and practice, comprise the fullest expression of Negri’s democratic theory, a theory unfortunately neglected by most democratic theorists in the Anglo-American world.

At the center of both works stands Negri’s distinction between constituent power and constituted power, between potenza and potere. Through this distinction Negri elaborates an intransigent division at the heart of modern politics. On the one hand, constituent power evokes the ungrounded and intrinsically disruptive strength of institutionally unmediated collective action; it is a form of power actualized through boundless and creative praxis, through the politics of revolutionary councils, Rate, and Soviets. Constituent power, moreover, only exists in the event of its enactment: it “is grounded on nothing more than its own beginning and takes place through nothing more than its own expression.” (p.16) Constituted power, on the other hand, marks the end of constituent power’s expression, its capture and institutionalization into various political and social forms, most obviously the form of the modern state itself. The static field of constituted power is maintained only through countless acts of violence and domination, acts which work to transform political action into political behavior, living labor into dead labor, and to eliminate altogether the innovative unpredictability of democratic materialismcat least until constituent power roars forth again.

Negri’s historical narrative in Insurgencies—and it is a narrative despite his non- teleological emphasis on “the radical continuity of the discontinuous” (p.321)—emerges in the dynamic and ongoing confrontations between these two forms of power. Through these confrontations the particular historicity of the modern is generated, and it in turn transforms its own constitutive elements. Each of the book’s central chapters marks another step in this transformation with regard to constituent power. From Machiavelli’s elaboration of the difference between constituent and constituted time, through Sieyès articulation of the world making capacities of labor during the French Revolution, and up to Lenin’s attempt to unify democratic spontaneity and instrumental rationality, Negri elaborates constituent power’s changing ontological basis.

The readings that Negri provides of key political theorists along the way are always intriguing, if also idiosyncratic. He takes Machiavelli well beyond his recent republican interpreters to read The Discourses as “an explicit declaration of the absoluteness of democracy as government” (p. 68); Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana is “democratic and revolutionary rather than constitutional and traditionalist” (p.129); and Negri’s defense of Lenin’s institutionalism in the face of Trotsky’s and Luxemburg’s spontaneist critique is not only counterintuitive, but seems to work against the grain of his own analysis. Occasionally the forced contrarianism of these readings detracts from what best distinguishes Negri’s contribution to contemporary democratic theory, which is his emphasis throughout on the materiality of political action. Unlike Claude Lefort’s well-known account of the “adventure” of modern democracy, for example, Negri’s history of constituent power is not primarily concerned with modern democracy’s symbolic dimensions. Rather than reexploring how the “empty space” of modern power is constituted through the “dissolution of the markers of certainty,” Negri turns his readers attention to the diverse and antagonistic appearance of...