Cuando el verbo se hace carne : lenguaje y naturaleza humana

by Paolo Virno

Originally published in Italian in 2002, When the Word Becomes Flesh provides a compelling contribution to the understanding of language and its relation to human nature and social relationships. Adopting Aristotle's definition of the human being as a linguistic and political animal, Paolo Virno frames the act of speech as a foundational philosophical issue -- an act that in its purely performative essence ultimately determines our ability to pass from the state of possibility to one of that is, from the power to act to action itself. As the ultimate public act, speech reveals itself to be an intrinsically political practice mediating between biological invariants and changing historical determinations. In his most complete reflection on the topic to date, Virno shows how language directly expresses the conditions of possibility for our experience, from both a transcendental and a biological point of view.Drawing on the work of such twentieth-century giants as Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and Gottlob Frege, Virno constructs a powerful linguistic meditation on the political challenges faced by the human species in the twenty-first century. It is in language that human nature and our historical potentialities are fully revealed, and it is language that can guide us toward a more aware and purposeful realization of them.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics

Paperback

First published May 1, 2015

About the author

Paolo Virno (1952–2025) was an Italian philosopher, semiologist and a figurehead for the Italian Marxist movement. Implicated in belonging to illegal social movements during the 1960s and 1970s, Virno was arrested and jailed in 1979, accused of belonging to the Red Brigades. He spent several years in prison before finally being acquitted, after which he organized the publication Luogo Comune (Italian for "commonplace") in order to vocalize the political ideas he developed during his imprisonment. At the time of his death, Virno was teaching philosophy at the University of Rome.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Among the closing remarks of Paolo Virno’s A Grammar For the Multitude was the following, intriguing suggestion: "To understand fully the rules of post-Fordist labor, it is necessary to turn more and more to Saussure and Wittgenstein” - a linguist and a philosopher of language respectively. An odd proposal, made even odder perhaps by the insistence that "since they reflected so deeply on linguistic experience, they have more to teach us about the 'loquacious factory' than do the professional economists”. Not just language, but language in place of economics as the key to understanding our contemporary situation - and this from a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist! Left only as a lingering provocation in that already-rich text, it’s here, in When the Word Becomes Flesh, that Virno cashes out in detail the project announced therein.

So why language then? And in what way does it illuminate the ‘rules of post-Fordist labour’? Well, it has to do with the way in which nothing less than 'human nature' is at stake in the workings of language: this insofar as for Virno, our linguistic capacities (our very ability to speak) participate in the ongoing effort of our species to ‘become human’; that is, far from having simply attainted the status of ‘human’ at some remote point in our evolutionary history, the process of ‘anthropogenesis’ remains an ongoing task that, every time we speak, begins anew. In fact, for Virno, it’s possible to say that the very fact of our ‘being human’ is defined by nothing other than the ongoing process of our becoming so: "There is no anthropos [man] outside the repetition of anthropogenesis”; or more succinctly still: “anthropogenesis is always occurring”.

Still, our question remains unanswered - why language? Well, the idea is that language is key to understanding this on-going anthropogenesis: it is our use of language that secures, however provisionally and however fleetingly, our status as human subjects. Borrowing and modifying Descartes’ well-known thesis according to which the ‘I think’ functions as the ground of our existence (the famous "I think therefore I am”), Virno instead posits that it’s not 'I think', but instead “I speak" that serves to crystallise the human subject. Key to Virno’s renovation of Descartes (and crucial to understanding the link between language and anthropogenesis) is the unstable status of the "I speak": far from securing subjectivity once and for all, the subject of language (of the "I speak") is always ephemeral and transitory: the enunciation of the "I speak" always disappears with the breath that carries it.

Precarious in its enunciation and yet at the heart of our being-human, the fragility of language thus similarly reflects the fragility of our humanity. A last piece of the puzzle: having established all this, Virno finally notes that at no other time in history has the experience of language - and consequently, our very humanity - come under such stress: having pressed, more than ever, our linguistic capacities directly into the circuits of capitalist accumulation, the very process of anthropogenesis which underlies our humanity has itself been placed into an ongoing state of never-ending emergency. And so threads the bow which ties together language, human nature, and post-Fordist labour. And yes, I’ve left entire swathes of argument and nuance maddeningly aside here, but if this sounds even in the neighbourhood of interesting to anyone - well, consider reading this book in the flesh.