Summary
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.


Author Notes
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.

Other Titles: Saggio sulla negazione.
Towards a linguistic anthropology

Mirror Neurons and the Faculty of Negation

1.1 Logic and Anthropology
1.2In the Begining was the 'We':
An Intersubjectivity without Subjects
1.3This is Not a Man
1.4The Public Sphere as Negation of a Negation

2.The Money of Language
2.1 Of a Peculiar Omission
and the Possibility of Remedying It
2.2Ferdinand de Saussure's 'Intimate Thought'
2.3 Negative Facts
2.4 The Deduction of the 'Not'
2.5 A Janus-Faced sign
2.6 Negation as Linguistic Currency

3.The Meaning of 'Meaning'

3.1Beyond Saussure
3.2 Negation and Mental Pictures
3.3Fracture Internal to the Statement
3.4 The Neutrality of Sense
3.5 Of the Question Mark
3.6 The Not and the Possible
3.7 The Misery of Psychologism

4.On Plato's Sophist
4.1 The Discovery of Negation in Infancy
4.2Drifting and Landing
4.3Complementary Classes
4.4 Being What is Different
Saying What is Different
4.5 Metamorphosis of the Heteron
4.6 Non-Being According to Heidegger: The Centrality of Moods

5.Negation and Affects

5.1Natural History
5.2 A Twofold Interface
5.3 A New Experience of Pain
5.4 Freud as a Theorist of Negation
5.5 Containing Destruction
5.6 Destroying Empathy

Appendices

A.Negative Actions
B. Double Negation : A Resource for Praxis