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35 L. & Critique 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq35 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique (2024) 35:1-5 https://doi.org/1 0.1007/si10978-024-09374-9 Negri's Minor Jurisprudence Costas Douzinas1 Accepted: 8 February 2024 / Published online: 6 April 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024 The fifteenth Critical Legal Conference at the University of Kent has become legend- ary in critical lawyers' lore. The keynote speech was given on 8 September 2001 by Toni Negri. He spoke by video link from Rome. Maria Drakopoulou was the organ- iser of this most memorable conference and Harm Schepel helped organise the event. Toni was in prison in Rome after returning from his stay in Paris to serve the last few years of his term. He had to ask for special permission to speak to us. This was our first keynote speech delivered from prison by one of the great radical thinkers of our age. Toni looked sober and slightly anxious. He sat with his notes on a table with an elegantly dressed woman sitting a few meters away. According to the rumour that circulated soon, she was a prison guard assigned to ensure that Toni would not say anything breaching his licence conditions. The prison guard did not speak during the session and kept looking at Toni intently and impassively. Toni would occasionally turn towards her with a wry smile on his classical Italian face. We were transfixed. The talk, as much as the circumstances of its delivery, were striking. Its full text was published in this journal in 2005 (16: 27-46) translated by Julia Chryssostalis and Patrick Hanafin. Emilios Chrisodoulidis' essay in this issue charts Toni Negri's journey through radical activism and theory (and see Christodoulidis 2021). What is immediately striking is that Negri's political work and theoretical development travel in strictly parallel lines, something that cannot be said for many other critical theorists. Negri exemplifies the idea that without radical politics critical theory can become irrelevant, the reverse side of mainstream doctrinalism, a version of Hegel's clean hands. In Negri's case, the experience of politics creates the ground for the development of the- ory while theory moves radical politics in new directions. The three phases of Negri's The Reference 'minor Jurisprudence' is to Deleuze and Guattari's 1986 book on Kafka, toward a Minor Literature. Costas Douzinas C.Douzinas@bbk.ac.uk Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK Springer