Bøker av Paolo Virno

Paolo Virno on the rich concept of the “multitude” as crucial to understanding contemporary life.Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude became the Italian theorist’s best-known work in English, influencing a generation of activists and performance artists, when it was first published by Semiotext(e) in 2004. Two decades later, this new edition proves Virno’s conception of contemporary life—as a cartography of virtualities made possible by post-Fordism—to have been strikingly prescient. At the start of the twenty-first century, globalization forced a rethinking of some of the categories—such as “the people”—that had been traditionally associated with the now-eroding state. Virno argues that the category of “multitude,” elaborated by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth century, is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of “people” favored by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the notion of multitude, defined it as shunning political unity, resisting authority, and never entering into lasting agreements. “When they rebel against the state,” Hobbes wrote, “the citizens are the multitude against the people.” But the multitude isn’t just a negative notion; it is a rich concept that allows us to examine anew plural experiences and forms of nonrepresentative democracy. Drawing from philosophy of language, political economics, and ethics, Virno shows that being foreign, “not-feeling-at-home-anywhere,” is a condition that forces the multitude to place its trust in the intellect. In conclusion, Virno suggests that the metamorphosis of the social systems in the West during the 1980s and 1990s precipitated a paradoxical “Communism of the Capital.”

A vital addition to Seagull's growing Italian List that focuses on leftist Italian thought, bringing famous as well as little-known yet crucial voices into the English language. As speaking animals, we continuously make use of an unassuming grammatical particle, without suspecting that what is at work in its inconspicuousness is a powerful apparatus, which orchestrates language, signification, and the world at large. What particle might this be? The word not. In Essay on Negation, Paolo Virno argues that the importance of the not is perhaps comparable only to that of money--that is, the universality of exchange. Negation is what separates verbal thought from silent cognitive operations, such as feelings and mental images. Speaking about what is not happening here and now, or about properties that are not referable to a given object, the human animal deactivates its original neuronal empathy, which is prelinguistic; it distances itself from the prescriptions of its own instinctual endowment and accesses a higher sociality, negotiated and unstable, which establishes the public sphere. In fact, the speaking animal soon learns that the negative statement does not amount to the linguistic double of unpleasant realities or destructive emotions: while it rejects them, negation also names them and thus includes them in social life. Virno sees negation as a crucial effect of civilization, one that is, however, also always exposed to further regressions. Taking his cue from a humble word, the author is capable of unfolding the unexpected phenomenology of the negating consciousness.

A philosophical exploration of what capitalistic societies truly mean for the individual. A short vade mecum for unrepentant materialism, The Idea of World collects three essays by Italian philosopher Paulo Virno that are intricately wrapped around one another. The first essay, "Mundanity," tries to clarify what the term "world," as referred to as the perceptual and historical context of our existence, means-both with and against Kant and Wittgenstein. How should we understand expressions such as "worldly people," "the course of the world," or "getting by in this world"? The second, "Virtuosity and Revolution," is a minor political treatise. Virno puts forward a set of concepts capable of confronting the magnetic storm that has knocked out the compasses that every reflection on the public sphere has relied on since the seventeenth century. The third, "The Use of Life", is the shorthand delineation of a research program on the notion of use. What exactly are we doing when we use a hammer, a time span, or an ironic sentence? And, above all, what does the use of the self-of one's own life, which lies at the basis of all uses-amount to in human existence? Presenting his ideas in three distinct vignettes, Virno examines how the philosophy of language, anthropology, and political theory are inextricably linked.

The first English translation of the book that established Paolo Virno as one of the most influential Italian thinkers of his generation.With the 1986 publication of this book in Italy, Paolo Virno established himself as one of the most influential Italian thinkers of his generation. Astonishingly, this crucial work has never before been published in an English translation. This MIT Press edition, translated by Italian philosopher and Insubordinations series editor Lorenzo Chiesa, is its first English-language version. Virno here engages, in an innovative and iconoclastic way, with some classical issues of philosophy involving experience, singularity, and the relation between ethics and language, while also offering a profoundly transformative political perspective that revolves around the Marxian notion of the "general intellect." Virno reconsiders Walter Benjamin's idea of a "loss of the aura" (brought on, Benjamin argued, by technical reproducibility), and postulates instead the existence of a new experience of uniqueness that, although deprived of every metaphysical aura, resides in the very process of late-capitalist serial reproduction. Writing after the defeat of contemporary leftist revolutionary movements in the West, Virno argues for the possibility of a "good life" originating immanently from existential and political crises. Taking speculative detours through the thought of philosophers ranging from Aquinas and Berkeley to Heidegger and Wittgenstein, with a specific focus on Kant and Hegel, Virno shows how a renewed reflection on basic theoretical problems helps us to better grasp what is happening now. This edition features a preface written by Virno in 2011.

"Originally published as Paolo Virno, Saggio sulla negazione. per una antropologia linguistica"--Title page verso.

Dej vu, which doubles and confuses our experience of time, is a psychological phenomenon with peculiar relevance to our contemporary historical circumstances. From this starting point, the acclaimed Italian philosopher Paolo Virno examines the construct of memory, the passage of time, and the ';end of history.' Through thinkers such as Bergson, Kojeve and Nietzsche, Virno shows how our perception of history can become suspended or paralysed, making the distinction between ';before' and ';after,' cause and effect, seem derisory. In examining the way the experience of time becomes historical, Virno forms a radical new theory of historical temporality.