I’m reading Bruno Gulli’s book Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor Between Economy and Culture. Two other things by Gulli are online, one thing which I think got incorporated into the book and another on Gramsci.
I’m 25 pages in. So far Gulli insists repeatedly that labor is univocal (1, 12, 23, 191). Being is univocal for Duns Scotus and Gulli, and it seems to be by analogy with being that Gulli aims to develop his argument about labor. Gulli quotes Duns Scotus: “I designate that concept univocal which supposes sufficient unity in itself, so that to affirm and deny it of one and the same thing would be a contradiction. It also has sufficient unity to serve as the middle term of a syllogism, so that wherever two extremes are united by a middle term that is one in this way, we may conclude to the union of the two extremes among themselves.” (193.)
The first sentence seems to essentially amount to the following:
“Univocal” is a term for something of which the following sentence is true. To make some assertion, A, and the negation of that assertion, not-A, of the same thing is a contradiction. For example, “I wrote this blog post” and “I did not write this blog post.” If there’s more to it than that, in this particular quote, I’d like to know, because this strikes me as a bit trivial.
I’m not sure what to do with the syllogism stuff. I can say at least that I think “extremes” is a bit of a poor term here, compared with “premises,” as the latter doesn’t freight in the same connotations.
Additional thought on the Gulli book must await the arrival of a time to-come, for in the time that remains I am a man in debt to an Other to whom I do not wish to do the violence of temporal deferral. (That is, I got to rush off to a meeting so I’m not late. I’ll write more on this book later.)