Abstract

What is one to do with a work whose modest opening lines by the editor proclaim it to be “one of the most crucial documents in European Marxism since … well, since maybe ever”? Almost as if to reinforce this claim, the book comes padded with no fewer than three introductions, three prefaces, and a long epilogue. This alone should alert the unaware reader that the impenetrability of the text is due not to any conceptual profundity — as epigones would have it — but to an unimaginable theoretical confusion. The publisher's PR frontwoman seeks to market Negri as a “Eurocommunist theoretician” jailed for his explosive revolutionary views