Estrapolazioni selvagge. Antonio Negri lettore di Michel Foucault

The article examines Antonio Negri’s reading of Michel Foucault through a conceptual and non-chronological lens. First, it explores how Negri originally engaged with Foucault politically, employing his concepts to articulate a specific understanding of labour and class struggle in Marx’s writings, in contrast to other strands of Italian leftist thought. Second, it shifts to Hardt and Negri’s concept of ‘biopolitical production’, revealing the original interplay between Foucauldian, Marxist and Spinozian references that shape this notion. Finally, the article returns to Negri's Paris research workshops in the 1980s to illuminate the problem of the “production of subjectivity” that emerges from his dialogue with Althusser, Foucault, and the early Lukács. By tracing the “savage extrapolations” that Negri performed on Foucault’s work, the author argues that his reading is not philological or merely explanatory, but rather heretical and creative.