william lewis

“Aristotle’s Communism: Paolo Virno on the Political Animal”

During and immediately after the Cold War, Western scholars tended to conscript Aristotle in the forces of capitalism. His criticism of Plato’s Republic in Book B of the Politics was commonly treated as a criticism of Soviet communism avant le lettre, and anticommunism was the common ground uniting respected scholars (Miller) and embarrassing autodidacts (Rand). The presupposition was that Platonism, being a radical rationalism and idealism, amounts to a utopian totalitarianism in practice, whereas Aristotle’s realism and “empiricism” are supposed to translate into practical pluralism and meliorism. The recent work of Paolo Virno cuts against the grain by repeatedly invoking Aristotle as the original thinker of transindividuality, the necessary – that is, fundamental even when unacknowledged – communism of both bodily experience and politics. In contrast to the Platonist communism of the Cold War imagination, which focused readers’ attentions on institutions of property and family, Virno’s Aristotelian communism is concerned with the modalities in which human beings become and persist as human beings through being in common, and the ways in which logos both disrupts and repairs this being in common. This essay analyzes and assesses Virno’s Aristotle, focusing in particular on a) how best to understand the naturalism of his position and b) the motivations for and consequences of his identification of politics with the use of language.