An incisive and urgent book that explores the hidden roots of our contemporary powerlessness.

Contemporary life is marked by a paradoxical form of impotence. Whether in love, labor, or political struggle, we often find ourselves locked in a state of frenetic paralysis—unable to act as we wish or to endure what confronts us. This impotence is not born of lack, but of excess: an abundance of skills, capacities, and opportunities that, instead of taking form as coherent actions or speech, stagnate and turn in on themselves. In this thought-provoking meditation, philosopher Paolo Virno examines this strange impotence through the lens of classical thought, drawing especially on Aristotle and Marx.
 
To overcome this troubling state, Virno calls for a collective search for a shared spiritual and practical exercise aimed at reclaiming agency. He argues that only by learning to renounce renunciation can we cultivate deliberate words and timely decisions.

Paolo Virno is an Italian philosopher, semiologist, and activist. A prominent figure in the tradition of Italian workerist thought, he teaches at the University of Rome and is the author of An Essay on Negation, The Idea of World, and numerous other works. Arianna Bove is an independent philosophy researcher and translator, and cofounder of generation-online.org. She has translated works by Althusser, Foucault, Negri, Bifo, and Virno, among others.