.. i can imagine him, my friend, misbehaving pretty badly in front of an audience. Insulting them. You want his, philosopher’s, secrets, his tips & tricks unveiled? And you’re also eager to know his particular idiosyncrasies, his singular style?  - .. here you have with, would he, my friend, answer to himself not waiting anybody’s reply, delivering deconstruction onto them. Here you have with, Betriebsgeheimnis plus Eigentümlichkeiten of a Philosopher. Here you have it, yes – a Something, but definitively not philosophy, would he go further on. Then philosophy is not something about know-how, is not about a particular opinion – philosophy is only about just life. His friend, the genius, has taught him that much, says he, my friend, the bad-boy.

To do justice to a friend, a teacher passed away cannot mean paying tribute to his, teacher’s greatness, cannot mean denouncing his doxa post-mortem. If there is a way for justice to outlast this act of amical reminiscence, it has – as justice – to become a problem. A palpable one. This justice-problem will make a proper doing-justice impropable, but will in turn do justice to a problem itself. And, he, my friend, thinks that there is a problem of deconstruction. He even gets to put in a formula. If I would be you.. If I am you…

I cannot go here into the philosophical details, into all the intricacies of Garcia-Düttmann’s philosophizing of Derrida’s philosophy. But for a second, that does not matter. What does matter, however, is this dumb, necesseraly dumb idea of just life if we are to philosophize.

 ***

 Somewhere Nietzsche says that in contrast to ordinary professions you can’t make philology and philosophy a family-business. You have to think them stripped-off of a kinship, of a proper genealogy. And constructing a virtual community of peers, some Republik der Geister, will ultimately not offer any consolation. If you’re to think, to make and to do, to live philosophy you have to make this alone, without a safety net. You cannot be socialized, and if you could – the nearest thing resembling familial bringing-up would be, or actually is, the gigantomachia.

 ***

Doing justice to a philosopher-friend… An act of violence, out of love & friendship?  The masquerade set-up by Alex (starting already with the title, or the first motto), a mock-up of laudatory identification easily could deceive you in regards of his proper aim. And this aim – to be frank – insists on the problematic, polemic doing-justice to a friend, who once was a teacher. A teacher, whose insights were short-cuts to the outside, the more-of-life.

 ***

To think “the only”, to think “the best”. A proper task in deconstruction. He, my friend the bad-boy, has spent some considerable time in renegotiating the terms in which to think those two particular words – only, best. For those fairly acquainted with deconstruction there is a simple truth: only = best. Deconstruction is the best method and therefore the only one. Even if deconstruction in its insistence upon the heterodox, those fairly acquainted will say, should not subscribe to something unitary, this equation, if examined closely, will actually betray deconstruction, making it possible-impossible. And there you have this version of deconstruction for the petty-people: conditions of a possibility are at the very same time the conditions of impossibility.  Everything is, and is not.

But to think “the best” disentagled from “the only” and vice versa – this is nothing rewarding. Not even humiliating. This is the unlikely way of acknowledging that something best, something most valuable, has nothing necessary about itself – that this best is not the one-and-only option. And that the only, by necessity only, way or path chosen is not and will never become the best one – not now or ever. 

Yes, deconstruction as philosophy may be the best one, but is it really the only one? Yes, deconstruction as philosophy may the only effective way of thinking, but is it really the best possible?

 ***

He, my friend, has philosophized those quadrants: only, best, actualization, potentiality. He has not allowed to take those sectors apart, or to confuse them for each other. A task conferred by Heidegger upon his succesors  to think life based upon potentiality he, my friend the bad-boy, has not taken up light-hearted or disavowing. He realized that a category discredited, that of a actualization, has to be thought otherwise if to make any sense of its more prominent counter-part.

And, by chance, by a mere chance, his friend, who once was his teacher, has discovered domains to unearth those at value-face abstract philosophical notions. Friendship, literature. And maybe, but just maybe, love.

To think potentiality fully intensified where “nothing becomes impossible”  is to think of friendship and of literature and, maybe, of love. But again, not as something possibly best turning into something that only, necesserally, could be actualized – but as something (as friendship, love, literature) always reminiscent of just life. Which is never the best, neither the only-one.

 ***

No, madams and sirs, no, you should not mistake friendship and literature for the question whether the one, teacher, has taken up some of the names thrown in by the other, his former disciple (Benjamin, yes. Adorno, no). In those matters names don’t count much. 

 ***

To be reminiscent of gigantomachia, of life without kins and peers, this is a solitary life in provocation. A life in-flight. A life as literature, as friendship, and even maybe love. A life never best, never the only-one. Just life. Mere.

If this new volume by Virno, published in Italian in 2005, is to be put into a wider context I would suggest four authors and their books which could set-up a perspective from where on Virno is to approached. First and in regards of Virno’s own method in Jokes and Innovative Action probably the closest reference will be Jonathan Lear’s brilliant Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life. Lear’s concise deconstruction of Aristotle and Freud and of their respective usage of the notion of happiness and death(-drive) as those instances which stabilize the otherwise volatile psychic apparatus equals in great parts Virno’s attempt to reconstruct a nature, structure and logic of jokes as [equilibrium-disturbing] transformative action through Freud and Aristotle.

Another reference, sadly less-known in English-speaking world, is Barbara Cassin and her numerous volumes on Greek sophistry. It is Cassin’s great merit to have reconstructed in minute details not just the effect of sophistic heritage but also the tiresome philosophical refutation of the same. Virno’s readers expecting something similar in style to his Grammar of the Multitude will, I guess, be repulsed by his own (in length rather modest) dealing with the same topic of sophistry and Aristotle – but those dry and in some sense technical passages are crucial to Virno’s own intellectual enterprise, significant of his own broader systematic approach.

Third major reference and by chance also a volume published in English in 2008 is Alenka Zupancic’s The Odd One In: On Comedy. This volume which in ints Slovene original bears an endlessly more prominent and more witty title Poetics: Second Volume [Poetika, druga knjiga] is a volume – notwithstanding its theoretico-methodical distance to Virno – which not only shares a great deal of references with Virno but also some of the most important results regarding the innovative potential of the comic. To this volume I will come back later.

And, finally, if there is a Italian reference to be aligned to Virno’s recent reflection that would be two volumes by Giorgio Agamben. The one dealing with the experimentum linguae [Infancy and History] and the other – by far the most hermetic Agamben-volume – The End of the Poem where Agamben up to the most specific detail outlines the specific importance of poetics for the very human condition.

Those authors and books enumerated shall not be the exclusive horizon to discuss Virno; if one, for example, takes Virno’s understanding of Wittgenstein Laclau and Mouffe come very soon to mind and then there are some other Italian authors with whom Virno shares a great deal of interest [most prominently, Franco Lo Piparo]. My own intention in refering to this specific authors was somehow to drag Virno out of a niche where he was put after the publication of Grammar of the Multitude. Not to say that Virno is not (highly) relevant for activist or artistic circles but some of the more systematic strains of his enterprise get too easily overlooked if he has to be taken just from those perspectives.

***

If there is something which concisely characterizes Virno’s Jokes and Innovative Action then that are two prefixes: sub- and semi-. Prefixes which itself diagrammatize [metaphorize] Virno’s own proceeding – putting the very topic of the book to square since jokes itself are for Virno already diagrams of an innovative and transformative action. And it is exactly the oscillation between those two prefixes which makes up the decisive point of the book.

Sub- is there already at the beginning: Far from being situated above or outside of norms, human creativity is even sub-normative: it manifests itself uniquely in the lateral and improper paths that we happen to inaugurate when trying to keep to a determined norm. Paradoxical as it may seem, the state of exception originally resides in the only apparently obvious activity that Wittgenstein names ‘rule-following’. This entails that every humble application of a rule always contains in itself a fragment of a ‘state of exception’. Wit brings this fragment to light. 

Human creative action exemplified in jokes is sub-normative in Virno’s argument because jokes show best the fallacious nature of every particular application of a rule. In the sense that jokes are exactly those proper language-tools representing the incommunserable gap which divides the rule or the norm from its application or case, ie. a unbridgeable void which separates the grammar from its usage. Prefix sub- tells so much that the actual instantiation of a norm, if it has to follow the norm, has to betray the very norm – not in the name of some extra-normal domain – but of an application devoid of any normative prescription. Such a defect or fallacious normativity is fundamental for Virno’s
understanding of human praxis, but one aspect in that regard is essential. Namely, this paradoxical sub-normative applying of a norm is for Virno absolute. Which means that there is no remainder left (e.g. some unfulfilled normative content) after the norm has be actually applied. It is just through this sub- or fallacious form that a norm can be applied, in the sense of a paradoxical and absolute division of the norm and its non- or barely related instantiations.

(to be continued)

Dieses angesprochene Mehr, das bündig nur auf etwas mehr als hundert Seiten verhandelt wird, ist die Geschichte einer intellektuellen Rekupperation, einer widerständigen Wiederaneignung eines Begriffs und mit ihm zusammenhängender Praktiken. 

Maschine, soll sie heute, hier und jetzt, etwas bedeuten, muss mindenstens zwei Kriterien genügen. Erstens gilt es die Maschine jenseits der technizistischen Verengung (wieder-) zu denken, denn – wie Raunig zeigt – ist das Verstehen des Maschinischen als eines nur Werkzeughaften, dem eine bestimmte Teleologie beiligt, neueren Datums, und als solches ist dieses Verstehen eine Engführung der wesentlich breiter und anderweitig konzipierter antiker mechane und machina. Mit Marxens Maschinenfragment aus den Grundrissen, aber eigentlich erst mit dem Denken und künstlerischen Praxen des 20. Jahrhunderts wird das Maschinische dieser Einschliessung entrissen, um dann als ein heterodoxes Maschinische in dem Jahrzenten seit den 1960ern aufzutauchen. In Sinne dieser ganz bestimmten Aufgabe ist Raunigs Band auch eine Rekapitulation der besagten intellektuellen Bewegung, ein kreatives und transversales Zusammenführen verschiedenartiger Motive.

Und, zweitens, und in unserem Kontext, werde ich behaupten, die wichtigere Aufgabe, die sich und uns Raunig stellt, ist es, die so neu, heterodox gedachte Maschine als eine soziale zu fassen. Denn, obwohl bei Raunig so nirgends gesagt, ist gerade das Soziale jene glatte Oberfläche, jene Ebene der Verkettungen und Einschnitte der Ströme. Im Sinne der phänomenologischen Denktradition, der sie sich verweigert, ist das Soziale als Maschinisches weder die Welt, noch die Umwelt, und noch weniger deren Kombination  [Welt : Schaffung aus dem Nichts, Umwelt : infinite Anschliessbarkeit]. Das Maschinische  muss, soll es nicht als ein Stop-and-Go Verkehrsfluss der Menschen, Tiere und der noch dazugerechneten technischen Apparaturen gedacht werden, also als ein permanentes Oszillieren zwischen zwei Extremen, dieses Maschinische muss als disjunktive, anarchische [chaotische] und gesellschaftliche Bewegung verstanden werden. Das heisst, als eine Maschinerie, die nicht auf die zwei Stellungen reduzierbar ist [Pause : Arbeit, Subjekt : Objekt, Innen : Aussen, Welt : Umwelt, Bewusstsein : Kommunikation]. Schwierig zu denken, möglich aber zu erzählen und zu zeigen und zu spielen.

***

… wenn es darauf ankommt, wenn es auf die Fahrräder und Geschichten bei Raunig ankommt, wenn die Fahrräder-Geschichten [das ist wohl die korrekte Übersetzung für general intellect, oder?] matters-of-fact sind: ja, dann kenn ich nur zwei Sachen zu Odysseus. Aus zweiter Hand, zugegeben, aber tut nichts zur Sache. Kenne sein Paradoxon, kenne seine Antwort. Zu Fahrrädern kenn ich sogar weniger, möge der Autor mir verzeihen, wenn ich also – aus zweiter Hand, wohlbemerkt – von Geschichten erzähle. 

Denn Odysseus, der Vielbeschlagene, ist gerade jene Figur, die das (Proto-) Maschinische in seiner irreduziblen Zweiheit verköpert, die Kriegs- und die Theatermaschine zusammenführend. Listig und vereinnahmend, umtriebig. 

Antwort: Keiner. Dem Zyklopen gegenüber tarnt er sich in Worten, das Wer mit dem Was vertauschend. Somit den Eigennamen streichend, und damit vielleicht, im selben Zuge, alle Namen aller Geschichten verunmöglichend. Was so viel heissen soll, dass Geschichten keine Namen tragen können, oder dies wenigstens nicht von Bedeutung ist, dass sie aber als Geschichten wohl etwas sind. Maschinen, nämlich.

Paradoxon: Am Hof des Phaiakenkönigs hört Odysseus, unerkannt, die Geschichte seiner Heldentaten. Bricht zusammen, weinend. Für Adriana Cavarero Anlass genug, um die, ihrer Meinung nach, Gegenbenheit  herauszustreichen, dass wir überhaupt erst werden, wenn die anderen uns erzählen. Dass wir, sozusagen, erst werden, indem die anderen von uns betrogen, vereinnahmend betrogen werden, um dann uns so etwas wie unsere eigene Lebensgeschichte vor-zu-erzählen.  Die Machination dieses Durch-die-Anderen-erzählt-werden wäre in diesem Zusammenhang als die intensivste Maschine zu bezeichnen. Lektion darüber, dass obwohl in den Geschichten Namen nichts zur Sache tun, es wohl nicht-vereinnahmbare Überreste gibt, die die ganzen Differenzen ausmachen.  

(to be continued)