Talking Negri
From a letter to a friend in Italy
I guess what I sense in Negri’s language is a capacity to recognize and interact with social evil, on a massive scale, with a confidence that it will be eventually overcome, sans any kind of happy communist eschatology or messianic Jewish versions of hope.
There’s a kind of self-assurance that I see in his work, which, while quietly remaining committed to Marx’s concept of contradiction – the ultimate irrationality of capitalist development – nevertheless appreciates the growing complexity of domination.
Is this a coded way of saying that the guy remains dialectical despite recognizing how bad things continue to get? That’d be entirely fair.