The Labor of Job

“Antonio Negri takes the ideas he developed in reading Spinoza, the Jewish heretic, and brings them to bear on one of the most crucial texts of orthodox Christianity to show how much unrealized potential for radical change persists even within those theoretical formations that seem the most monolithic and reactionary. Negri’s approach prefigures efforts by philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben to re-read the history of Christian thought against the grain. It also connects to and explicates the language of Christian asceticism that informs Empire.”— Timothy S. Murphy, coeditor of The Philosophy of Antonio Negri and editor and translator of Antonio Negri’s Subversive Spinoza

“Job regards God, according to Negri, not as judge or father or even as the source of discipline and mediation, but merely as antagonist, the locus of an empty, unjust command. There is no more question of measure—equating sins and punishment or virtues and rewards—that could support a conception of divine justice. But Job is not powerless. . . . According to Negri’s reading he stands before God angry, indignant, unrepentant, and rebellious.”—from the foreword by Michael Hardt, co-author, with Antonio Negri, of Empire and Multitude

“The book of Job is the first (and, in many ways, still unsurpassed) exemplary case of the critique of ideology, teaching us how to resist legitimizing our misfortunes with any kind of ‘deeper meaning’––and who is more suitable to actualize this book for our times as Antoni Negri? In his hands, The book of Job turns into a revolutionary text, into a true manual of resistance.”—Slavoj Žižek