The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and Abstraction in Negri

摘要

Through a detailed reading of Antonio Negri's collection of letters on art, Arte e Multitudo, this article enquires into the place and the uses of art in his writings. It identifies abstraction as the pivotal theme in the Italian philosopher's reflections on aesthetics. Abstraction is a cipher for the defeats of the extra-parliamentary left and the imposition of a seemingly inescapable postmodern capitalism, but it is also the starting-point for an attempt to reconstruct a potent political subject in the midst of a world wholly subsumed by capital and the commodity-form. The article critically explores Negri's attempt to tie together a theory of the periodisation of capitalism (and anti-capitalism) with a prophetic discourse on sensuous politics which explicitly repeats the early German Idealists' search for a 'sensuous religion' that would serve as the prelude to a new politics.