Extracted from publication Filosofia italiana
«Produzione biopolitica». Sull’uso operaista di Foucault
DOI: 10.53136/97912218243157
Pages: 93-106
Publication date: Dicember 2025
Publisher: Aracne
SSD:
IUS/20 M-FIL/01 M-FIL/03 M-FIL/06 SPS/01
Since the 1990s, the notion of ‘biopolitical production’ developed in the collaborative works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has arguably been the most inventive use of Foucault in renewing Marxist analyses of global capitalism. Twenty-five years after the publication of Empire, this paper reassesses both the potentials and the limits of this concept through a critical examination of Negri’s reading of Foucault from the mid-1970s onward. It argues that, while productively integrating Foucault’s insights into the Marxist framework of Italian operaismo, Negri’s interpretation raises a central problem: how to articulate unity and multiplicity, form and figures of the revolutionary subject – that is, the ontology and historicity of the multitude
