The encounter of Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri took place in 1977. So this approchement serves merely to mark, with perhaps too far-fetched an image, the way that this book could be read today: as a call to respond to defeat by reaffirming faith in collective revolutionary action; with new forms of organising, new ways of association, and new singularisations of collective subjectivity combining militancy with creativity.
This response to a defeat of a collective movement asks us to recommence thinking a way out from the defeat; recognising the depth of the defeat while at the same time declaring faith in the ideas and practices that characterised the movement. This book can, in many ways, be said to sum up a whole period of theoretical reflection of both theorists. To that extent, there are perhaps no theoretical advances in this book – although what an extraordinary confluence of ideas and common interests and desires are to be found here, in this book that emerges, as Negri tells us in his 1990 Postscript, from correspondence between the two authors while the one was in prison.
