An 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. Prologue
Mirror Neurons and the Faculty of Negation
1.1 Logic and Anthropology
1.2 In the Beginning Was the ‘We’: An Intersubjectivity without Subjects
1.3 This is Not a Man
1.4 The Public Sphere as Negation of a Negation
 
2. The Money of Language
2.1 Of a Peculiar Omission, and the Possibility of Remedying It
2.2 Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘Intimate Though’
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’
3.1 Beyond Saussure
3.2 Negation and Mental Pictures
3.3 Fractures 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
4.2 Drifting and Landing
4.3 Complementary Classes
4.4 Being What Is Different, Saying What Is Different
4.5 Metamorphosis of the Héteron
4.6 Non-Being According to Heidegger: The Centrality of Moods
 
5. Negation and Affects
5.1 Natural 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