This essay celebrates the originality and influence of Antonio Negri's revolutionary interpretation of Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his books The Savage Anomaly (1981) and Subversive Spinoza (1992). Negri produces a genuinely immanent and affirmative reading by identifying with Spinoza, emphasizing his resistance in advance to the Hegelian dialectic and his challenge to the mediating negativity characteristic of modernity. These aspects of his interpretation situate Negri close to Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault. Negri offers the notion of “absolute democracy” as a practical means to grasp the linkage between ontology, ethics, and politics in Spinoza's philosophy.
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© 2013 by University of Oklahoma
2013
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