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

Abstract 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.