Description

The starting point for this series of lectures, delivered at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris in 2004–05, is to examine the consequences of the transition from modernity to postmodernity for political thought. With the death of socialism, it is not only the ideas and concepts of the traditional left that have been left behind by history; on the contrary, the entire vocabulary of modern politics, with its notions of the state, the nation, the people, rights, sovereignty, borders, etc., has now fallen into crisis. What our current situation demands, therefore, is nothing less than a new political lexicon, free from the inherited conceptual frameworks of modernity.

Through his books Empire and Multitude (written together with Michael Hardt), the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri has made a name for himself as one of the most controversial political thinkers of our time. In his new book, The Porcelain Factory, he turns his attention to the very linguistic conditions of our ability to think politically, and invites us to reflect on a range of new concepts capable of capturing the radical force of the dramatic changes that characterise today’s world.