Prison Writings and Radical Philosophy in Agamben, Negri and Virno

Is there a connection between captivity and the radical philosophy of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Giorgio Agamben?

Both Negri and Virno started from the experience of the Italian revolutionary movement of the 60s and 70s. As a result of their activism they both had a prison experience, which represents the start of their philosophical production. In the case of Negri the legal proceedings led to a prison sentence and a long exile after which he remained banned from Italian universities and editorial institutions. Right from the start Negri takes up a key position: the concept of multitude was launched with the publication in the early 80s of his book on Spinoza written in prison. Is there a connection between the radical theory he advances and the captivity? My suggestion is: yes, there is. For Negri this book marks a rupture and the start of a new and philosophical enquiry that has everything to do with the context of prison. In L'Anomalia selvaggia he delineates an alternative modernity that begins with Machiavelli, is corroborated by Spinoza and leads to and beyond Marx. He links criticism and resistance to the imagination, collective subjectivity and creativity, which in prison can be seen as instruments of humanity and maintenance of the self-integrity. But also, prison makes him understand that there are always two antagonistic perspectives, related to the institutional power of the authority on the one hand and to the resistant power of the multitude on the other. It helps him understand the changeability of destiny that often ends in tragedy, especially for the poor and common people. Prison makes him understand the principle of capitalism, which exists in the suppression and the deprivation proper to captivity itself. Capitalism consists in the robbery of ones/the workers lifetime.

For Negri the deprivation of freedom, independence, time and relationships was a traumatic experience, destroying his mental sanity and integrity. He could only cope with it by reading, studying, thinking and writing. His rescue was the discovery of similarities in the destiny of predecessors, which were also captured and banned to exile because of their controversial ideas or failed revolt. The recognition of an analogous destiny in Gramsci, Machiavelli and especially Spinoza, leads him to consider these authors as an example. This means a turn towards philosophy. The previous perspective of the labourer is generalised to the multitude, the political analysis to ethical and epistemological questioning. The effectiveness of realistic knowledge freed from illusions is combined with collective subjectivity; human relations, time experience and knowledge are considered as characterised by a bidirectional reciprocal movement. Within Spinoza's paradigm Negri posits the common based on a multiplicity of differences rather than on identity and claims the priority of the relation. Crucial are the role of the imagination, the procedure of reversal, the antagonism between power of resistance and institutional power. The biographical experiences of Spinoza and Machiavelli as victims of legal persecution, exile and exclusion, resulted in the radical approach of political, ethical and epistemological questions, but also in a specific style of writing; both became to be paradigmatic. Also Negri is starting to write in self-reflecting terms mixing up autobiography with the analysis of capitalism. The philosophical discourse gets interwoven with citations of the literary tradition and with artistic elements such as imagery, fiction and narrative elements.

In prison he writes down his ideas in notebooks, diaries and letters, and finally also publishes them in this Gramscian form, for example the autobiographical epistolary novel Pipe Line (Letters from Rebibbia) and the Diary of an Escape. After leaving prison and being condemned to exile in France, he takes up the same questions over and over again. He thinks that pain, labour and time are immeasurable experiences, which nevertheless represent something liberating because they are connected to creativity. Creativity is reversing directions and is essential in the re-appropriating of one's own subjectivity. Imagination is not necessarily illusion and is crucial in a theory of revolution. Getting older he is more and more convinced that the research of a transformation strategy requires new forms. This brings him to experimenting with the writing of dramatic texts, for example the three plays collected in the Trilogy of the Resistance.

The reason why Negri was in prison is irrevocably related to the declaration of the State of Emergency in Italy and the introduction of exceptional measures. His individual experience was indicative of the persecution suffered by the entire revolutionary movement. He underwent a common experience but conversely also functioned as an example for a lot of intellectuals and activists, especially for those who shared his prison experience. This is particularly true in the case of Virno who takes up the paradigm of Negri in his debut Convenzione e materialismo, written mostly in captivity. The main theme in this essay is time and the question how human beings can intervene in the course of it. Virno searches for a notion of the common emerging from the factual plurality of thoughts and imagination, real democratic forms of the multitude characterized by a network structure and reciprocity. Most interesting is his analysis of the 'repentance' of the so-called 'pentiti', the comrades in prison who became moralistic figures par excellence, who capitulated and conformed to the current balance of power, lost their previous ethical position.

Agamben occupies a place apart from the radical philosophers primarily because he didn't actively participate in the revolutionary movement in the late 70s and did not have problems with the apparatus of the State. Nonetheless, he does discuss the institutional procedures of exclusion applied to Negri, Virno and the movement; the analogies between his reflections and theirs are striking. His ethical political analysis is connected to the testimonial writing of Primo Levi and to what he calls the Auschwitz-paradigm. His analysis of sovereignty and law goes back to the 'exception' of the State of Emergency and to the philosophical confusion between government and mere executive unidirectional power. Real common institutions can't be based upon property and captivity and require the network structure, the priority of the relation. That's why in response to the suppression and the deprivation, and in order to restore the potency of multitude thinking and expressions, Agamben focuses on the means, forms, relations, a discontinues view on time. From the perspective of the multitude it in fact amounts to finding a rhythm, to which the imagination and the artistic production are essential.