CESARE CASARINO: I would like to begin this conversation by turning to those contemporary thinkers who I believe come closest in some respects to your philosophical positions and political projects, namely, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Clearly, you have much in common with each of them. There are also, however, important and substantial differences that separate your positions from theirs. You have at times drawn attention to such differences. At the end of your Twenty Theses on Marx, for example, you, on the one hand, acknowledge their importance for your work, and, on the other hand, point out their limitations, which for you consist of the fact that ultimately they refuse to identify a constituent power, intended as the collective organ of subversive minorities; (you are also quick to add, however, that at times they implicitly overcome such limitations).' Moreover, at several points in Empire, you and Michael Hardt in essence reiterate this assessment of their positions.2 I would like you to start from precisely such an assessment in order to discuss your relations to these thinkers. Could we begin perhaps with Deleuze? ANTONIO NEGRI: My encounter with Deleuze took place via Spinoza. I had read Foucault quite carefully already in the 1970s, and, in fact, I wrote back then an essay on Foucault for Aut Aut, which later became a chapter in Macchina Tempo. In this essay, on the one hand, I discussed and defended Foucault's methodology as being essential for any demystification of the great juridical-political institutions of modernity as well as for any analysis of the phenomenology of power-which at the time we used to call