Review of A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno

Review of A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno

In A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno develops his political investigation of contemporary capital through a series of returns, arguing for the uncanny reemergence of what was once repressed as failed and forgotten. The book was published in 2004, a historical moment where massive “anti-capitalist” and “anti-globalization” demonstrations were on a rise, a time where books like Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s Empire (a work Slavoj Žižek praises as “nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time”) were being received as best-sellers. It might be read as less of a mere coincidence that Virno’s book came out around the same time Empire’s sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire appeared on the shelf. Virno and Negri both came from an earlier historical moment, one also filled with social and political fervor, namely the Italian Autonomia labor movement, a leftist radicalism that might be seen as failed and forgotten over time. While Negri—in a time where the American Left was siding with Eurocommunism and considering Autonomia with suspicion—chooses not to make explicit references back to this historical past, Virno does.