The Cell: Antonio Negri

November 19, 2008
Little Theatre, National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai

Antonio Negri is a renowned Italian Marxist political philosopher. For Negri, and author of the international bestseller “Empire” (co-authored with Michael Hardt, 2000), a 17 year long chapter of repressive Italian politics of detention, exile, and imprisonment recently ended in 2003. The question for Negri is how one can preserve the freedom of spirit within a penal structure that focuses more on the interior than exterior life of the prisoner. For Antonio Negri, the cell of resistance from which he wrote became an enclosure of peace.

Among the central themes in Negri’s work are Marxism, democratic globalization, anti-capitalism, postmodernism, neo-liberalism, democracy, the commons, and prolific, iconoclastic, cosmopolitan, and the multitude. His highly original philosophical writings attempt to reconcile critical terms with most of the major global intellectual of the past half-century in the service of a new Marxist analysis of capitalism.

The Cell is a DVD of three video interviews with Antonio Negri: 1997 while he was in exile in Paris, 1998 in the Roman prison of Rebibbia, and 2003 after his release in Rome. Negri’s report on his experience as a prisoner describes new control forms in the execution of sentences, aimed at the psyche and the mind of the inmates and he talks about forms of resistances that allowed him to retain the “liberty of the spirit”.