New Publication by Roberto Nigro: Subversive Negri. From the Refusal of Work to the Multitude

2026-05-29

Roberto Nigro: Subversive Negri. From the Refusal of Work to the Multitude. London: Taylor & Francis, 2026.

Roberto Nigro, Professor of Philosophy at Leuphana University, has written the first English-language introduction to the complete body of work of the internationally renowned theorist and activist Antonio Negri. The book reconstructs Negri’s philosophical trajectory and critically examines the question of the revolutionary power of the multitude. 

While drawing on themes developed in the author’s earlier French, German, and Italian works, this volume substantially extends those investigations through new material, new lines of inquiry, and fresh perspectives on contemporary Marxist thought.

Beginning from an interpretation of the 1960s and 1970s as shaped by the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” in Foucault’s well-known sense, the book examines the expansion of political struggle beyond traditional sites such as the factory to society as a whole. By focusing on the category of the refusal of work, it demonstrates how this form of resistance is central not only to the operaist tradition but also to Foucault’s and Marx’s genealogies of capitalism, as well as to Silvia Federici’s analysis of primitive accumulation.

These debates open new avenues within contemporary Marxism, which the book addresses through the notion of the “other” workers’ movement and its detailed interpretation in the work of the Italian philosopher Nicola Massimo De Feo. Closely aligned with the operaist tradition, De Feo offers a rigorous philosophical engagement with negativity, a crucial concept in Marxist thought. Central to his work is the distinction between political and social revolution, with particular emphasis on social revolution and the question of civil war — a decisive theme in both De Feo’s and Foucault’s writings. The book also foregrounds the plurality of revolutionary temporalities. Building on these theoretical and historical reconstructions, the book reconstructs the core concepts of Negri’s thought.

Although the power of the multitude becomes the dominant theme of Negri’s later writings, beginning with the radical analysis of imperial sovereignty developed in Empire, Roberto Nigro demonstrates that the core of Negri’s philosophy was elaborated decades earlier, within the historical and political conjuncture shaped by the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Nigro argues that Negri’s insistence on the ontological dimension constitutes a response to what he calls the “poverty of the present.” This poverty refers to the difficulty of finding practical answers to the problem of revolutionary subjectivity. If social movements fail to develop durable forms of political organization, and if subjects remain trapped under the weight of capitalist domination, how can political orientation still be possible under such conditions?