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A Classical Biopolitics?: Virno’s Déjà Vu and the End of History

Patrick Danner

Virno, Paolo. Déjà Vu and the End of History. Trans. David Broder. New York: Verso. 2015. (Published in the original Italian as Il Ricordo Del Presente [“The Memory of the Present”] in 1999)

As 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.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. 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. 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. 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. 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).

Déjà Vu is divided into three sections. The first, “Déjà Vu and the End of History,” tackles the titular concept as grounds for theorizing the contemporary individual’s relationship to history. 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. 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 diagnoses the “modernariat” with a proclivity toward antiquarian history, the only difference being that we are collectors of a much more immediate past.⁴ Though it is tempting to read such engagement with Nietzsche as a misstep, a rehashing of the very grounds he vows not to, Virno deftly returns to this terrain on much more Marxist grounds later.

The second section of Déjà Vu constitutes the bulk of the text, where Virno builds bridges between classical philosophy and radical theories of the present. He takes up Aristotle’s distinction between temporality and chronology extensively, coming to one of the text’s main arguments: “potential has no name or definition unless there is a prior knowledge of the corresponding act.”⁵ Parallel to his classical influence, the reader sees Virno working through painstaking logic to cement a point that he later returns to with a discussion of history. He picks up the Nietzschean bent of part one, discussing the human relationship to potential, the “not-now,” as a “return,” or a “retrospective gaze.”⁶ And further, “This ‘before’, which does not correspond to anything real, is the red thread through and around the weft of becoming; it is the constant backdrop to the yesterday, today and tomorrow on the calendar; it delineates the horizon against which the succession of actualities stand out.”⁷ This becomes Virno’s working thesis on the function of history, temporality and perception, one which is then carried to more familiar autonomist ground: historical materialism.

Virno’s final section demonstrates how his formula for potential as atemporal yet concurrent with the act functions materially in contemporary capitalism. Here, Virno finds the place for life beyond simply perceiving; it is the “third term” that allows immaterial potential (labor power, bought before the act that gives it form) an actual value. In essence, This is Virno’s biopolitics meeting the conceptual ground of déjà vu. Under the consideration of capitalist time and potential, life itself is the unit of measurement at hand: biopolitical life is what translates potential (labor power) into actuality (labor).⁸

Déjà Vu’s avoidance of the “multitude” is neither a misstep nor a mark against Virno’s project. Readers should infer this absence as a warning for those who imagine his study of history and temporality as yet another entrance to the same biopolitical argument made elsewhere. Admittedly, some points read as extensions to components of Virno’s multitude, particularly that of the “score” in Grammar, which readers could recast in his read of déjà vu as a sense of historical potential that leads to specific actions.⁹ Yet Déjà Vu pushes the boundaries of that very conceptual terrain by envisioning temporal existence as imminently of the body, or of the lived life. As such, Virno’s text offers a mild yet important revision for biopolitical theory, one that takes the discussion of temporality beyond the rote phrasing of “fast” or “hyper-” capitalism. For him, the abstraction of temporality and historicity governs our lives in two separate ways: first, historical potential governs the actions available in moments of déjà vu; second, this potential, corresponding to perception of labor power, places the temporal existence of the body at the center of capitalistic exchange.

In short, the translation of Déjà Vu and the End of History provides a novel view of biopolitics that opens doors for discussion of temporality, historicity, and perception for English readers—ideas that Virno revives without rehashing trodden ground. Virno lays claim to a classically-inclined wing of autonomist biopolitics, usefully fleshing out the school’s intellectual lineage for those seeking a rich philosophical underpinning for a ranging theory of the self in our contemporary moment.

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1. Autonomía is a post-Marxist intellectual tradition most commonly known to the American academy through Negri and Hardt’s Empire trilogy, which subsequently organized a branch of post-Marxist terrain around the figure of the “multitude.”

2. Marasco, Robyn. “A Grammar of Hope in an Age of Empire?” Theory and Event 9 (4): 2006.

3. Déjà Vu 8, 47, 52.

4. 50-55.

5. 76.

6. 96.

7. 136-137.

8. 161-173.

9. See Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude. Trans. Bertoletti, Isabella, James Casciato and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 2004. 63-66.