An Essay on Negation

A vital addition to Seagull¿s growing Italian List that focuses on leftist Italian thought, bringing famous as well as little-known yet crucial voices into the English language. As speaking animals, we continuously make use of an unassuming grammatical particle, without suspecting that what is at work in its inconspicuousness is a powerful apparatus, which orchestrates language, signification, and the world at large. What particle might this be? The word not. In Essay on Negation, Paolo Virno argues that the importance of the not¿is perhaps comparable only to that of money¿that is, the universality of exchange. Negation is what separates verbal thought from silent cognitive operations, such as feelings and mental images. Speaking about what is¿not¿happening here and now, or about properties that are¿not¿referable to a given object, the human animal deactivates its original neuronal empathy, which is prelinguistic; it distances itself from the prescriptions of its own instinctual endowm