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.

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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)

I will argue that this singular obsession is much more a result of the unresolved relationship biopolitical thought has entertained towards the so-called classical philosophical canon. This argument shall be specified, insofar it is the domain of the (classical) political philosophy which stand as the paradigmatical placeholder for biopolitical philosophy’s relating towards the philosophical tradition.

Again, even this specific and troublesome relationship with political philosophy could not be said to belong only to biopolitical philosophy. Take for example Badiou’s or Ranciere’s political writings and some very similar attitude props up. And if to extend the argument to the most extreme, it could be said that since Marx has made the discipline of political economy prominent political philosophy proper has become a kind of philosopher’s stone. A reference and institution whose refusal has in some sense become necessary if to think and act politically anew.

It is Roberto Esposito’s work which has shed most light into those intricacies of biopolitical theory and (classical) political philosophy. And I shall here discuss most often his argumentation, then I hold his perspective to be the most elucidating on that particular issue which – not exactly by the same, but a very similar – token has been put asside by Foucault, Negri, Agamben or Virno. And it is, perhaps, Esposito’s own enterprise which outlines best the basic problem of biopolitical philosophy. Namely, if – as Esposito argues – the proper biopolitical epoch (and for Esposito, this is modernity) has been broadly defined by classical corpus of political thought and if this very same modern epoch has come to an end, at least two important questions and consequences emerge. First, if modernity is over subsequently a new mode of political thinking is on the agenda. This, as is well known, has been a step taken by almost all philosophical schools and directions. But it is the second consequence which puts a call for an alternative or innovative political thinking on test. 

I will formulate it rather bluntly: if (modern/modernist) biopolitics was the background of (classical) political philosophy, and if that very (biopolitical) background or frame has been exhausted – there arises a fundamental difficulty for biopolitical reflection itself. How is it that biopolitical theory emerges in a period non-biopolitical? Or, what is the historical fundamentum (a history’s name) biopolitical philosophy exacly evokes – if biopolitical period proper is over?

A way out of this problem could be in stating that while political philosophy has evoked life in negative manner (by stressing the conservationist and immunizing aspect) biopolitical philosophy proposes, or at least tries so, a kind of affirmative, positive biopolitics. There are textual references that support this strategy in all of the abovementioned authors, and with some right it could be said that it is precisely this dichotomic way of arguing they in the final instance pursue. 

BUT … but, there is at least one caesura which stalls this easy-way-out. And this is the event of Nazism. To invoke “life” after it has been invoked and mobilized and misused absolutely becomes a sort of impossible. Agamben or Esposito are both rather clear on this issue, and only a rather one-sided reading could declare biopolitical philosophy triumphalist in its vitalistic naivite. 

SO … what, then, could be that name, that unique denominator, biopolitical philosophers are striving for? What is, better to say, the historical fundamentum on which this kind of philosophy has emerged? Answers or names authors in question offer are few. Be it multitude, love, a non-relational community-to-come, munus… And they are, for sure, some more technical names to be accounted for. But, again – those names seem to me rather vague and not less ambivalent than those political philosophy has famously cited.

The historical fundamentum I will like to set-up as the prime experience for biopolitical philosophy itself and its political consequences shall be something I will call the encounter of the those (people/persons or otherwise) landless with those stateless. I will discuss one such examplary encounter, taken from Aleksandar Petrović’s movie Biće skoro propast sveta, nek propadne nije šteta [Yugoslavia, 1968].  Revolting Yugoslav socialist peasants, land-workers meeting the stateless Czechoslovak tourists, stranded somewhere deep in Panonia after the Soviet intervention.

This will be a kick-off for a broader theoretical considerations mentioned above. In months to come, I hope to keep this posting going – in constant touch with some people or texts I consider crucial for the so briefly outlined research. Eyal Weizman, Gil Anidjar, Tom Keenan, Reza Negarestani and Ugo Vlaisavljević. And not to forget the people who actually have put pressure on me to write this down: Mislav, Marko, Stipe, Leonardo.