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Though Virno is at pains to say he will not rehearse discussions of memory that accompany figures like Proust, the reader is led toward a comfortable close of the first section centered on Nietzsche’s figures of historiography. Virno writes that déjà vu characterizes both an apathy typical of our contemporary moment, “ watching themselves live,” and a “public pathology” that arises “when human praxis stands closest to history’s condition of possibility.” 3 For Virno, “human praxis” meets the “condition of possibility” at the point of imagined kairotic action, or when a situation evokes a memory of conditions that led to particular actions.
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The first, “Déjà Vu and the End of History,” tackles the titular concept as grounds for theorizing the contemporary individual’s relationship to history. Within this capitalist model we find Virno’s biopolitics of déjà vu for him, time and potential are immanently inscribed on the body by the forces of capitalism, particularly when the bios, both life as action and as becoming, translates potential (labor power) into actuality (labor).ĭéjà Vu is divided into three sections. These figures allow Virno to make two specific moves: first, he explores the relationships among history, temporality, and individual perception later, he situates those relationships within the paradigms of post-Fordist capitalism and posits a space for forms of life to resist it. In the new translation of Déjà Vu and the End of History, Virno distinguishes himself by his intellectual fidelity to a set of figures rarely read so closely by autonomist thinkers: Aristotle and Freud, for example, who span Virno’s ouvre, and Nietzsche who, in the case of Déjà Vu, proves particularly useful. However, as more of Virno’s work is translated into the English, it is evident that he offers more than just a conceptual foil to his autonomist peers. 1 Marasco finds utility in the contrast between Virno’s and Hardt and Negri’s treatments of the “multitude.” 2 Specifically, she claims, Grammar distinguishes itself within the autonomist tradition by locating the multitude among a field of affect: anguish, dread, and so on. (Published in the original Italian as Il Ricordo Del Presente in 1999)Īs Robyn Marasco notes in her early review of Paolo Virno’s first translated work- A Grammar of the Multitude-Virno remains an important figure not only for contemporary Italian thought, but for all who wish to engage with central philosophical tenets of autonomía.