Antonio Negri is known in the English-speaking world primarily through his collaborations with Michael Hardt; Empire , Multitude, and Commonwealth have become some of the most widely discussed political works of recent times. Here, Reading Negri unravels the ideas and life of the man whose work has become a rallying point for students, workers, and intellectuals opposing capitalist globalization. It also delves into many of the thinker's other writings, such as his novel readings of Machiavelli, Descartes, and Spinoza — revolutionary reinterpretations of the central texts of Marx — and his works of contemporary political analysis. Whereas most critical accounts of Negri focus only on his collaborations with Hardt, this insightful collection of essays presents readers with a fuller picture of his thoughts, one that does justice to his ability to use the great texts of the philosophical tradition to illuminate the present. This collection contains essays from scholars representing a broad spectrum of disciplines and interests, and offers both criticism of and positive commentary on Negri's work.

Hobbes, the human body is that of a badly constructed robot, driven by vital springs and forces that cannot be controlled or dampened by some internal extra-physical agent (as in Descartes’ model). The Passions are the invisible voluntary motions within the body that precede visible voluntary motion: “These small beginnings of Motion, within the body of Man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions, are commonly called ENDEAVOUR” (Hobbes 1985, 118). One is

In addition to Guilbaut’s and Crow’s, a third reappraisal of the Greenberg legacy appears in the work of Rosalind Krauss, to whom we now return. Krauss’s The Originality Of The Avant-Garde And Other Modernist Myths amounts, again, to a frank declaration of war against her modernist mentors.217 Holding even the most rarefied Humanist ideals in contempt, Krauss constructs an unapologetically provocative counter-history of modern art, one whose parameters were first staked out by Bataille and

wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labor of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. (Marx 1993, 705–706)

Spinoza; the first being explicable via a theory of ideology and another as an exception to it:The first [Spinoza] expresses the highest consciousness that the scientific revolution and the civilization of the Renaissance have produced; the second produces a philosophy of the future. The first is the product of the highest and most extensive development of the cultural history of its time; the second accomplishes a dislocation and projection of the ideas of crisis and revolution. The first is the

letter to Boyle he mentioned that Spinoza’s passage on “the agreement and coherence of the parts of the world with the whole” entertained him. Unfortunately, Oldenburg’s reply of December 8, 1665 was the last correspondence between Spinoza and the secretary of the English Royal Society for another decade; consequently, we cannot know what he would have said to Oldenburg’s probing criticism: “I do not follow sufficiently how we can exclude order and symmetry from Nature, as you seem to do. ...”