Table Of ContentTRILOGY OF RESISTANCE
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TRILOGY OF RESISTANCE
ANTONIO NEGRI
Translated by Timothy S. Murphy
Afterword by Barbara Nicolier
REVERSE REVERSE
POS/BOX NEG/BLOCK
university of minnesota press
minneapolis
london
Quotations from Euripides in Cithaeron are from The Bacchae of Euripides,
trans. G. S. Kirk (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); copyright 1979
Cambridge University Press; reprinted with the permission of Cambridge
University Press.
Published in French in 2009 as Trilogie de la différence. Copyright 2009
Éditions Stock.
English translation copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Negri, Antonio, 1933–
[Trilogia della resistenza]
Trilogy of resistance / Antonio Negri ; translated by Timothy S. Murphy ;
afterword by Barbara Nicolier.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7293-6 (acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-7294-3 (pbk. :
acid-free paper)
I. Murphy, Timothy S., 1964– II. Title.
PQ4874.E326T7513 2011
852'.914—dc22
2010044066
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
vii Translator’s Note
ix Translator’s Introduction: Pedagogy of the Multitude
TRILOGY OF RESISTANCE
3 Preface
5 Swarm: Didactics of the Militant (2004)
33 The Bent Man: Didactics of the Rebel (2005)
77 Cithaeron: Didactics of Exodus (2006)
119 Afterword: Staging the Plays BARBARA NIColIER
123 Translator’s Notes
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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
In order to produce a functional dramatic text of these plays, I had to
modify the translations of two of Negri’s key philosophical terms that
have become standard over the past two decades. The linked Italian
terms potere and potenza, which correspond to the French pouvoir and
puissance, refer respectively to power in an institutionalized, repressive,
hierarchical, or transcendent sense and to power in a fluid, creative,
constituent, and immanent sense. Potere/pouvoir and potenza/puissance
are normally translated into English as Power and power, often with
the Italian or French term included in brackets for clarity. Because
the typographical distinction of capitalization is inaudible and the
inclusion of bracketed terms is likely to impede the performance of the
plays, I simply translated potere/pouvoir as “power” and potenza/puis-
sance as “potency.” Adjectives derived from these nouns are translated
accordingly: “powerful,” “potent,” and so on.
The title of the French volume on which the present translation is
based is Trilogie de la différence (Éditions Stock, 2009). In discussions
after the publication of the French edition, Negri expressed to me a
preference for a different English title, Trilogy of Resistance, which the
publisher has respected.
vii
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TRANSLATOR’S INTROduCTION
Pedagogy of the Multitude
The theatre became an affair for philosophers, but only
for such philosophers as wished not just to explain the
world but also to change it.
— Bertolt Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of
an Aesthetic
Antonio Negri’s militant experiences and critical writings have never
lacked drama in a colloquial sense—political imprisonment, parlia-
mentary elections, and clandestine border crossings, on the one hand,
and panegyrics to anonymous militants, rationalist metaphysicians,
and Roman Catholic saints, on the other, give his career a “marquee
value” that other thinkers simply can’t match—but they have rarely
touched on the theater. Indeed, little in his work suggested any inter-
est in drama in the strict sense of writing for theatrical performance,
yet in 2004 his first play, Swarm, premiered at the Théâtre de Vidy-
Lausanne in a production directed by Barbara Nicolier that later moved
to the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris. Two years later, The Bent
Man premiered in Viterbo before moving to Rome and Vienna. Ci-
thaeron was first staged by students from the Sorbonne at La Colline
in the summer of 2007. In October of that year the same theater staged
dramatic readings of Negri’s entire Trilogy of Resistance, which were
broadcast on France Culture in 2008. What, if anything, do these plays
have to do with Negri’s better-known work in political and ontological
iixx
