Convention and Materialism

The first English translation of the book that established Paolo Virno as one of the most influential Italian thinkers of his generation.

With the 1986 publication of this book in Italy, Paolo Virno established himself as one of the most influential Italian thinkers of his generation. Astonishingly, this crucial work has never before been published in an English translation. This MIT Press edition, translated by Italian philosopher and Insubordinations series editor Lorenzo Chiesa, is its first English-language version. Virno here engages, in an innovative and iconoclastic way, with some classical issues of philosophy involving experience, singularity, and the relation between ethics and language, while also offering a profoundly transformative political perspective that revolves around the Marxian notion of the "general intellect."

Virno reconsiders Walter Benjamin''s idea of a "loss of the aura" (brought on, Benjamin argued, by technical reproducibility), and po