Essay on Negation

Paolo Virno is an Italian philosopher, semiologist, and a prominent figure among contemporary Marxist thinkers. He teaches philosophy of language at the University of Rome. He is the author of A Grammar of the Multitude, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, and Déjà Vu and the End of History. Lorenzo Chiesa is director of the Genoa School of Humanities and visiting professor at the European University at St Petersburg, Russia. He is the author of volumes on psychoanalysis and political theory. He has translated books by Giorgio Agamben and Paolo Virno into English and by Slavoj Žižek into Italian.

• 1. PrologueMirror Neurons and the Faculty of Negation1.1 Logic and Anthropology1.2 In the Beginning Was the ‘We’: An Intersubjectivity without Subjects1.3 This is Not a Man1.4 The Public Sphere as Negation of a Negation  2. The Money of Language2.1 Of a Peculiar Omission, and the Possibility of Remedying It2.2 Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘Intimate Though’2.3 Negative Facts2.4 The Deduction of the ‘Not’2.5 A Janus-Faced Sign2.6 Negation as Linguistic Currency  3. The Meaning of ‘Meaning’3.1 Beyond Saussure3.2 Negation and Mental Pictures3.3 Fractures Internal to the Statement3.4 The Neutrality of Sense3.5 Of the Question Mark3.6 The ‘Not’ and the Possible3.7 The Misery of Psychologism  4. On Plato’s Sophist4.1 The Discovery of Negation in Infancy4.2 Drifting and Landing4.3 Complementary Classes4.4 Being What Is Different, Saying What Is Different4.5 Metamorphosis of the Héteron4.6 Non-Being According to Heidegger: The Centrality of Moods  5. Negation and Affects5.1 Natural History5.2 A Twofold Interface5.3 A New Experience of Pain5.4 Freud as a Theorist of Negation5.5 Containing Destruction5.6 Destroying Empathy  AppendicesA. Negative ActionsB. Double Negation: A Resource for Praxis

"In spite of the wide spectrum of applications in which the term ‘not’ is being situated, the book of Virno maintains its unity of object,while the originality of its concept lies in its combinatory power of perspectives and abundance of details; fundamental as it may be in human conversation and thought, the‘negative’ definitely got the affirmative attention that it deserves!"