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  • Innovation and Negation
  • Steven Shaviro
Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation by Paolo Virno. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. Pp. 188. $14.95 paper.

Paolo Virno's newly translated book, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, is somewhat misleadingly titled, since it has very little to say about the concept of the multitude as featured in Virno's previously translated book, as well as in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Rather, it is a text composed of three essays: a longish one about jokes and the logic of innovation, flanked by two much shorter ones that deal with the ambivalent legacy of humanity's linguistic powers.

The first essay argues against the notion, crystallized by Carl Schmitt but held more generally in the "common sense" of political philosophy and conceptual thought (from Hobbes, we might say, through Freud, right down to Steven Pinker), that any democratic or liberatory political theory is founded in the naïve view that human nature is innately harmonious and good, whereas the more "realistic" view of the human capacity for "evil" mandates belief in a strong and repressive state. Virno argues, to the contrary, that if we are to worry about the "evil" in human nature—which is really our "openness to the world," or our underdetermination by our biology, which is what makes it possible for us to have "a virtually unlimited species-specific ambivalence"—then we have all the more reason to worry about what happens when the power to act (to do evil as well as to mitigate it) is concentrated in something like the state's "monopoly of violence." [End Page 319]

Theorists of the state, from Hobbes to Schmitt, posit the transition from a state of nature to a civil state, involving the rule of a sovereign (in the conservative version), or the rule of law (in the liberal version), as a defense against this innate aggressiveness that would be endemic to the state of nature. But Virno says that this transition is never complete; even a sovereignty based on laws still has to declare a "state of exception" in order to maintain its rule; and this state of exception is, in effect, a return to the never-surpassed "state of nature." The state of exception is a state in which rules are never firm, but are themselves subject to change and reinvention. We move back from the fixed rules to the human situation that gave rise to them in the first place. Though the "state of exception" has often been described as the totalitarian danger of our current situation, it is also a state in which the multitude can itself elaborate new practices and new forms of invention.

The third essay in the book makes a similar argument, in a somewhat simpler form. Sympathy with others of our kind is an innate biological endowment of our species—here Virno makes reference to recent discoveries involving mirror neurons. But language frees us, for both good and ill, from this state of sympathy. Language gives us the power of negation, which is the ability to deny the humanity of the other (the Jew, the "Musselman," the nonwhite) and hence to torture and kill them mercilessly. Since there is no possibility of returning to a prelinguistic state, the only solution to this potentiality for evil is to potentialize language to a further level, make it go meta-, have it reflect back on itself, in a "negation of the negation." The power to objectify and kill is also the power to heal, to establish "reciprocal recognition." Just as the state of exception is the ambivalent locus both of tyrannical imposition and of democratic redemption, so the potentiality of language is the ambivalent locus both of murderous destruction and of the elaboration of community, or of the multitude.

But both of these essays are little more than footnotes to the long central essay, "Jokes and Innovative Action," that comprises most of the book. Virno rather curiously takes Freud's book on jokes as his primary text, despite disclaiming any interest in the Freudian theory of the unconscious. All of his examples of jokes come from...

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