In memory of Toni Negri
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 18, 2023
Two nights before the news of Antonio — Toni — Negri’s death came to me, I dreamed of him for a long time and his presence was so alive that, upon awakening, I felt the need to write to him. My message to the old e-mail address — to which I hadn’t written for years — couldn’t reach him. When I told her of my dream, a friend said to me: “he wanted to say goodbye to you before leaving”. Even in the divergences of our thoughts, clearer and clearer over time, something stubbornly bound us together, something that, first and foremost, had to do with his generous, restless, punctilious vitality, which I immediately felt when I met him for the first time in Paris in 1987.
With Toni’s passing I feel like I’m missing something — inside me, under my feet, perhaps above all behind me, as if a part of my past made it abruptly present and addressed me by missing. And this missing does not concern only me, but our whole country and its history, more and more false, more and more oblivious, as it is shown by the odious obituaries, which only remember the bad teacher and not the bad, atrocious country where he was given to live in and which he tried, perhaps mistakenly, to make better. Because Toni, starting from the Marxist tradition to which he belonged and which perhaps conditioned and betrayed him, has certainly tried to measure himself with the destiny of Italy and the world in the extreme phase of capitalism we are going through towards who knows what wretched destination. And this is what those who continue to outrage his memory neither dare nor would they ever be capable to do.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, December 18, 2023
Two nights before the news of Antonio — Toni — Negri’s death came to me, I dreamed of him for a long time and his presence was so alive that, upon awakening, I felt the need to write to him. My message to the old e-mail address — to which I hadn’t written for years — couldn’t reach him. When I told her of my dream, a friend said to me: “he wanted to say goodbye to you before leaving”. Even in the divergences of our thoughts, clearer and clearer over time, something stubbornly bound us together, something that, first and foremost, had to do with his generous, restless, punctilious vitality, which I immediately felt when I met him for the first time in Paris in 1987.
With Toni’s passing I feel like I’m missing something — inside me, under my feet, perhaps above all behind me, as if a part of my past made it abruptly present and addressed me by missing. And this missing does not concern only me, but our whole country and its history, more and more false, more and more oblivious, as it is shown by the odious obituaries, which only remember the bad teacher and not the bad, atrocious country where he was given to live in and which he tried, perhaps mistakenly, to make better. Because Toni, starting from the Marxist tradition to which he belonged and which perhaps conditioned and betrayed him, has certainly tried to measure himself with the destiny of Italy and the world in the extreme phase of capitalism we are going through towards who knows what wretched destination. And this is what those who continue to outrage his memory neither dare nor would they ever be capable to do.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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René Magritte, Clear ideas, 1958. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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