Paolo Virno
| Paolo Virno | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1952 Naples |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Philosophy |
| School | Autonomist Marxism |
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Main interests
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Political philosophy, semiotics, post-Fordism, analysis of subjectivity, materialism |
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Influences
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Paolo Virno (born 1952) is 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 "") in order to vocalize the political ideas he developed during his imprisonment. Virno currently teaches philosophy at the University of Rome.
Virno was born in Naples, but spent his childhood and adolescence in Genoa. He had his first political experiences when joining the social movements of 1968—the association between personal fulfillment and anti-capitalism, typical of the critique artiste of the 1960s, which then constituted one of the key reasons for his political philosophy. He moved to Rome with his family at the beginning of the 1970s, where he studied philosophy in university.
Simultaneously, Virno was involved in the labour movement and campaigned in the organization Potere Operaio, a Marxist group involved in the recruitment and mobilization of industrial workers. Potere Operaio, unlike political communists of the Soviet Union and China who sought to combine the student bodies with the workers' unions, focused mainly on factory and industrial workers in a program stemming from Marx's theory criticising the organization of work. Virno participated in the movement, organizing protests and strikes in northern Italian factories, until its dissolution in 1973.
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