ABSTRACT
Antonio Negri's and Paulo Virno's politics is a politics of going beyond capitalism, of escaping the society of control. This is realised in what both call exodus, the attempt to create non-state, non-representative democratic forms that manifest the common; and practices of disobedience that disarm and dissolve sovereignty and the state. Their response to capitalism is creativity and generation capitalist society is resisted by posing a counter-society that arises out of and melts away the one it emerges from. Exodus is the core of the communist praxis put forwards by both Negri and Virno. This exodus is the direct generation of alternatives, a non-State public sphere' that Virno calls Republic. Republic is the rethinking of notions of democracy based on the revolutionary capacities of the multitude. Negri uses the notions of republic and republicanism differently in different works, thus in Empire it signifies communist practice whilst in Commonwealth it is a target of critique.
