The Labor of Job

“[E]ven if a materialist and eschatological Christianity looks for liberation from a different incarnate Messiah, it just might be the case that Negri’s Job is right in defying the god of theodicy and transcendent retribution. In which case even biblical commentators (be they in the study or the pulpit) might have something to learn as well.” - Daniel M. Bell Jr, Reviews in Religion and Theology

“In this respect, Negri’s arguments on innovation as an ethical principle and on the political centrality of the body can only receive appreciation from students of Foucault. All in all, Negri’s The Labour of Job will leave the reader with more questions than answers, but maybe this is precisely why reading this short and difficult book is well worth one’s time.” - Salvatore Cucchiara, Foucault Studies

“Negri plots Job’s resistance as this culminates in Job’s response to God’s speech out of the whirlwind. It is here that Negri’s hermeneutical lens allows for a genuinely novel reading.” - Susannah Ticciati, Modern Theology

“The twist is fascinating! The book of Job as a parable of human labor and how it might be measured! Comparing the measurement of justice in a reward-retribution world with the measurement of labor in a capitalist world! . . . A brilliant materialist alternative to other revolutionary readings!” - Norman C. Habel, Review of Biblical Literature

“There is no doubt that Negri’s argument is bold, original, and worthy of careful consideration. It is often strikingly insightful and philosophically profound.” - Jeff Noonan, Labour/Le Travail

“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