A Grammar of Hope in an Age of Empire?

“If there is to be hope or optimism, it must rest firmly on the real constitutive power of the multitude.”

— Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

“Today, all forms of life have the experience of ‘not feeling at home,’ which, according to Heidegger, would be the origin of anguish. Thus, there is nothing more shared and more common, and in a certain sense more public, than the feeling of ‘not feeling at home.’ No one is less isolated than the person who feels the fearful pressure of the indefinite world. In other words, that feeling in which fear and anguish converge is immediately the concern of many. One could say, perhaps, that ‘not feeling at home’ is in fact a distinctive trait of the concept of the multitude...The multitude is united by the risk which derives from not feeling at home, from being exposed omnilaterally to the world.”

—Paolo Virno

While Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt deserve credit (or blame, depending on one’s perspective) for introducing the concept of multitude to a vast readership in the United States, Paolo Virno remains relatively unknown to those without specific interest in the past five decades of Italian Marxism, specifically the Operaismo(workerist) and Autonomiamovements. The translation of Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude, then, serves both to introduce political theorists to one of the most significant figures in the contemporary Italian thought and to enrich the emerging dialogue on the politics of multitude, a dialogue that has, if nothing else, at least renewed interest in the question of revolutionary subjectivity. Virno’s grammar of multitude differs in crucial respects from the positions advanced by Hardt and Negri in Empireand, more recently, Multitude. Born of the political experiments of Italian Left and the revival of Spinoza in radical Italian philosophy, the concept of multitude has taken center stage in the critical reception of Empire. Political theorists, therefore, have much to learn from Virno’s explication of multitude, particularly in his departuresfrom Hardt and Negri. ¹

As theorists and practitioners, workerists and autonomists emphasized the capacity for the laboring class to force systemic transformation independent of the state, trade unions, and political parties. Rejecting both the socialist exaltation of work and the statism of actually existing socialism, they proposed instead a revitalization of individual life through a general refusal of work. Consequently, they devoted greater attention to the spontaneous, autonomous, and experimental practices of collective resistance against the state and capital than to questions of party organization or doctrine, even to the point of challenging the centrality of the proletariat in revolutionary struggle. Virno, whose political and intellectual life begins with his membership in Potere Operaio(Worker’s Power), is a resolutely political thinker, who traded direct membership in subsequent workerist and autonomist organizations for the political insights derived from fellow traveling and the lived experience of resistance against capital. He is, moreover, a philosopher by training. During the so-called “movement of ‘77,” in which autonomist Marxists occupied large parts of Rome and Bologna, swept universities in Rome, Naples, and Palermo, and enjoyed short-lived hegemonic grip over the extraparlimentary Italian left, Virno was completing a dissertation on the thought of Theodor W. Adorno at the “La Sapienza” University in Rome.

Virno is precisely the kind of European intellectual who triggers a sense of guilt in his American counterpart, apparently managing to bridge that enduring divide between politics and philosophy, between the vita activaand the vita contemplativa. ²The fact that he, like Negri, served some years in prison for his alleged involvement in insurrectionary activities against the state in the 1970s (he served two years in prison before being cleared of all charges) only adds to his potential cachet of among would-be revolutionaries in the American university. Yet, lest one allow these seductions to overdetermine one’s encounter with A Grammar of the Multitude, this work – a mere 120-pages written...