Multitude between Innovation and Negation (Semiotext

by Paolo Virno, James Cascaito (Translator)

The influential Italian thinker offers three essays in the political philosophy of language. Multitude between Innovation and Negation by Paolo Virno translated by James Cascaito. The publication of Paolo Virno's first book in English, Grammar of the Multitude , by Semiotext(e) in 2004 was an event within the field of radical political thought and introduced post-'68 currents in Italy to American readers. Multitude between Innovation and Negation , written several years later, offers three essays that take the reader on a journey through the political philosophy of language. “Wit and Innovative Action” explores the ambivalence inevitably arising when the semiotic and the semantic, grammar and experience, rule and regularity, and right and fact intersect. Virno unravels the infinite potential and wonders of everyday linguistic praxis and ambiguity. Wit, he argues, is a public performance, and its modus operandi characterizes human action in a state of emergency; it is a reaction, an articulate response, and a possible solution to a state of crisis. “Mirror Neurons, Linguistic Negation, and Mutual Recognition” examines the relationship of language and intersubjective without language, would human beings be able to recognize other members of their species? And finally, in “Multitude and Evil,” Virno challenges the distinction between the state of nature and civil society and argues for a political institution that resembles language in its ability to be at once nature and history. Few thinkers take the risks required by innovation. Like a philosophical entrepreneur, Virno is engaged in no less than rewriting the dictionary of political theory, an urgent and ambitious project when language, caught in a permanent state of emergency impossible to sustain, desperately needs to articulate and enact new practices of freedom for the multitude. Paolo Virno is the author of several books, including A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004).

Genres: Philosophy

199 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2007

About the author

Paolo Virno (1952–2025) was an Italian philosopher, semiologist and a figurehead for the Italian Marxist movement. Implicated in belonging to illegal social movements during the 1960s and 1970s, Virno was arrested and jailed in 1979, accused of belonging to the Red Brigades. He spent several years in prison before finally being acquitted, after which he organized the publication Luogo Comune (Italian for "commonplace") in order to vocalize the political ideas he developed during his imprisonment. At the time of his death, Virno was teaching philosophy at the University of Rome.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there is a ‘method’ to the work of Paolo Virno, it consists of this: in finding, in the occasional operations of language, monuments to the real-time genesis of the human; linguistic traces of human potential exhibited right at the level of the already-actual, persisting as potential despite it all. A book of three essays, Multitude is exemplary of just this program of philosophy, which takes as its centrepiece the work of the joke. For in the joke - linguistic phenomenon par excellence - does Virno find a model for human action more generally, a ‘miniature’ for the way in which, in contexts far beyond the joke, we bring something new into the world: the joke as a model of human innovation. The joke as a model for social revolution even!

But why the joke? How does this mirthful artefact of language and communality speak to these weighty themes of ‘potential’ and ‘revolution’? Well, as it turns out, what jokes so wittily exhibit is the irreducible gap - normally ‘covered over’ - between a rule and its application. For the whole point of jokes are to subvert the rules, without, for all that, destroying them. Turning rules to other possible uses, hewing to alter-logics that, by any normal metrics of logic, would not be allowed to work - except in the comic situation. Freud’s example: Have you taken a bath? What, is there one missing? A misunderstanding or a joke? To read it as a joke is of course to see in it potentials unrealizable in the normal course of communication.

To come back to the idea of a ‘gap’ however, the idea that rules can be applied-otherwise speaks, for Virno, to one of the most consequential philosophical debates of our time: the debate over so-called ‘political theology’. The issue by now is well trodden ground: by what means is it decided that a rule - or law more specifically - should be interpreted as such and not so? Infamously in the history of philosophy, for the Nazi juror Carl Schmitt, the means of such a decision lies with ‘the sovereign’. For Schmitt, only the sovereign - read: the führer - could ever bridge the gap between rule and application, without which only a certain anarchy could reign. How to respond to this unhappy state of affairs? Well, with jokes.

Or at least, it’s the joke that provides a model for the escape from this Nazi snare. For what is missing from Schmitt’s account is nothing less than shared norms of our life-worlds themselves, the regularities and habits of living that are not yet rules, but not anarchy either. It’s from this well of anthropological commonality that jokes draw their own power to reformat the rules, providing a means by which sovereignty itself can be worked upon otherwise. Needless to say, there’s a lot that the humble joke tells us about who and what we are - and can be! All of which only scratches the surface of course, and in here you’ll find elaborations by way of Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Freud, and mirror-neutrons too, each turn as surprising as the last. A quick and engaging read.

[Chris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quite honestly: a rather dense and unenlightened book.

[Shi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Confusing book. References are outdated.
Bad writing style. Dense and unclear. Always trying to squeeze tons of non-essential meaning into each sentence.