We share below texts by Giorgio Agamben, Alex Foti and by Antonio Negri.
In memory of Toni Negri
Giorgio Agamben
Two nights before I received the news of Antonio, – of Toni Negri’s – death, I dreamed about him for a long time and his presence was so vivid that when I woke up I felt the need to write to him. My message to the old email that he had not used for years could not reach him. When I spoke of the dream, a friend told me: “he wanted to say goodbye to you before she left.” Even in the divergences of our thoughts, which became more and more clear over time, something stubbornly united us, something that had to do above all with his generous, restless and punctilious vitality, which I felt immediately when I met him for the first time in Paris in 1987.
With Toni’s death, I feel like something is missing, inside me, under my feet, perhaps especially behind me, as if a part of my past suddenly became present and challenged me when it was missing. And this lack not only concerns me, but our entire country and its history, increasingly false, increasingly forgotten, as demonstrated by the hateful obituaries, which only remember the bad teacher and not the evil and atrocious country in which he had to live and that he tried, perhaps mistakenly, to improve. Because Toni, starting from the Marxist tradition to which he belonged and which perhaps conditioned and betrayed him, certainly tried to measure himself with the destiny of Italy and the world in the extreme phase of capitalism that we are currently going through towards who knows what unfortunate destiny. And this is what those who continue to insult his memory do not dare and will never be able to do.
(Quodlibet, December 18, 2023)
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Antonio Negri: A Communist Life
I was a communist throughout.
Justly though, the other communists
looked askance at me. I was a communist
despite their certainties, despite my doubts.
Justly they did not see themselves in me.
They would not admit my discipline.
My centralism seemed anarchy to them.
My self-criticisms contradicted theirs.
Special communists cannot be:
to think so is not to be so.
Justly they did not see themselves in me,
my comrades. Like them, I too
was enslaved. Even more so: I tended to forget it.
They did their work, I followed my inclination.
Exactly that: I was a communist throughout.
Despite their certainties, despite my doubts
I always wanted this world ended.
Myself ended too. And it was that exactly
which estranged us. My hopes had no point for them.
My centralism seemed anarchy to them.
As if I wanted more, more truth,
more for me to give them, more
for them to give me. Thus living, dying thus.
I was a communist throughout.
I always wanted this world ended.
I have survived enough to see
comrades who bruised me broken by intolerable truths.
Now tell me: you knew very well I was with you?
Was that why you hated me? My truth is truly needed,
breathed in through space and time, heard patiently.
Franco Fortini, Communism (1958)
Remembering/celebrating Toni Negri, with Alberto Toscano (Side Car/New Left Review, 21/12/2023) …
‘The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’ Toni Negri, who died in Paris at the age of 90 on 16 December, turned this dictum of Spinoza into an ethical and political lodestar. The conclusion of the third and final instalment of his intellectual autobiography, Storia di un comunista, features a moving reflection on aging as a rejoicing in life and a paring down of action. Negri offers the overcoming of death – a resolutely atheist and collective idea of eternity – as the substance of his thought, politics, and life. He writes: ‘And yet the possibility of overcoming the presence of death is not a dream of youth, but a practice of old age; always keeping in mind that organising life to overcome the presence of death is a duty of humanity, a duty as important as that of eliminating the exploitation and disease that are death’s cause.’
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