THE GENEALOGY OF IMMANENT MATERIALISM IN ANTONIO NEGRI'S THOUGHT

This article traces, genealogically, the materialism of the immanence that characterises the thinking of Antonio Negri. Although connected to the evolution of the five Books on Working Class Autonomy, the origins of this philosophical operation can be situated in the late 1970s when Negri wrote The Savage Anomaly, giving rise to a 'return to Spinoza'. His goal was to rediscover an ontological, materialist handle; a philosophical operation that would mark his subsequent work. While Negri's early legal training had been accompanied by a transcendental subjectivity and a Hegelian and Marxist dialectic, from the late 1970s his thinking turned to a constituent materialism of the multitude marked by the presence of Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx.