Paolo Virno's Deja Vu and the End of History, Mini-Reivew

I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I've read. I'm putting a couple up here as part of my end of year 'round up' of books for 2022. Here's one for Paolo Virno's Deja Vu and the End of History:

The concept of ‘potentiality’ has among the most ancient of philosophical pedigrees. Stretching back at least as far as Aristotle - and the Megarians before him - it’s one that’s been as much used as abused, and, in many cases, simply outright confused. It helps then, that Paolo Virno stands today as amongst the most preeminent philosophers of potentiality. And here, in this svelte little book of just under 200 pages, does he make clear, in ways that must be read to be admired, just how deep the stakes go in our need to come to grips with this much contested idea. And not just any abstract reflection on potentiality either, but quite specifically, the temporality of potentiality. For, as it turns out, it’s only from the point of view of time - that other, most intangible and arcane of philosophical concepts - does the full relief of potentiality come into proper view. 

Far from being an exposition obscurum per obscurius however, it’s Virno’s achievement to have shed light not only on potentiality, but precisely, on time itself. Departing from the seemingly prosaic experience of deja vu - the feeling of having lived the present moment once before - Virno’s book traces wider and wider circles around this concept before concluding with nothing less than an understanding of the overbearing time of our own contemporaneity: the time of capitalism. This is a Marxist text after all. But before we get there, we can retrace some steps. For what does the chronopathology of deja vu really tell us about time? To live a present as if in the mode of the past; to affix, on the content of the present, the form of the past, a form itself empty of any content, but appropriating to itself the present, lived as if a memory already played out once before. 

And this shows what? Precisely that ‘the past’ can, and in fact should, be understood not only as content - as an archive of already-achieved historical accomplishments or acts - but also as a form: a ‘pure past’, one that accompanies every moment in time like a lingering, unassailable shadow. A double past then, for every present: a chronological past, a past of acts in time, and a pure past, one that never falls 'in' time, but that coexists with every present as nothing other - and here we come back to our theme - than that present's potential. Distinguishing this Other past from the past of chronology is its status as a potential that never passes into act: a perpetual and ceaseless 'never-now' that nonetheless conditions the possibility of every now 'in' time. At every moment then is there a birth of time, in time, a chronogenesis contemporary with the unfolding of time itself.

Undoubtedly, this would all come across as academic - if not outright scholastic - if not for Virno's efforts to think about what this constellation of concepts can tell us about our own time and place. For as it turns out, what is distinctive about the temporal regime under capitalism is the way in which this potentiality is literally put to work. For Virno, labour-power, which corresponds to a particular capacity - read: potentiality - on the part of the human, is commodified and turned into nothing other than an object in time. And this, in turn, is exactly the structure of deja vu: the appearance of the past (qua potential) in the frame of the present. Similarly, just as deja vu leaves us as spectators to our own lives (as the repetition of history, deja vu is the experience of history no longer 'happening'), so too does the generalized regime of labour-power as commodity attest to historical repetition - the end of history - at the level of political economy.

Such, at any rate, are the broad strokes of the argument presented in this book. If it wasn't obvious already, it's a thesis both complex and dizzying, and nothing said here can even begin to substitute for the rich weave of writing that is Deja Vu and the End of History. Virno himself is an author of enormous patience, building his concepts piece by piece, and in many cases in conversation with the cardinal lights of philosophical history - Augustine, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kant all feature throughout. Moreover, anyone with an antenna for the work of Henri Bergson should have had bells ring at the mention of the coexistence of the past and present, and indeed, much of the first part of the book is a deep explication of just that idea (much loved by Deleuze, who, apart from a veiled dig, gets no mention here) - although given an Aristotelian and Marxist twist. A little book, then, brimming with ideas and potentials that overflow the small space of its careful execution.