Having being. For a metaphysics of the talkative animal. Advertisements to Paolo Virno

Abstract

In his last work, Virno proposes a material anthropology “of detachment”: man is not his essence, his faculties (body, consciousness, upright posture, neoteny, faculty of language...), but he has them, taking them continuously within an inexhaustible dualism that constitutes his subjectivity. This having is a Platonic participating revisited in terms of praxis: man uses his essential (and non) prerogatives. I would like to overturn Virno’s discourse and lay the groundwork for a complementary approach. First by presenting Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysics of participation as an authentic metaphysics “of detachment”. Then by focusing on a central theoretical point of such a metaphysics, the esse ut actus connoted as ‘intense’ and ‘intimate’, which displaces Virno’s cleavages and praxis within the subject. There is a metaphysical, logical, ontological, and practical priority of being over having.