Folio 7
The first review of Pipeline, in Montanelli’s Giornale, written by Arpino. An avalanche of libel and insult. Against the ‘Babel of jargon’ which I allegedly represent, the purist calls for a ‘restoration of language’. Restoration – that magic word. So now poor Santiapichi is asked to take on another task – which anyway is entirely at one with his institutional task – that of restoration. Bringing back order to things that have become disordered. Does language have the sacral function of preserving, reproducing and transmitting the fetishism of culture? Arpino’s opinion on this is entirely clear. I avoid the sarcasm of a possible reply, considering the pathetic nature of the criticism – no point in using sarcasm against a culture that is terminally sick and isolated, incapable of passion and clinging to banalities. On the other hand it is true that I have a soft spot for Babel – but language, and our pursuit of it in what it produces, is indeed what introduces us into the phenomenology of this divided and plural world. They, on the other hand, would like language to be, like norms and command, in the form of a narrow and wretched unity – whereas in fact there are many languages and norms and commands. And yet here in Italy this is not expressed. Dull tradition is rather conjugated with a timid realism, which is ideological and from the start impoverished. As for the literary avantgarde, it has been fascinated more by technologies than by the struggles and the riotous realities of the ghettos and factories. Even the revolt of music has been kept within the realm of polite decency – Dalla as Arpino, Battisti as Montale. The fact is that the marriage between culture and power is indissoluble in this country of happy slaves, which calls itself Italy. (G12 Rebibbia – 5 March)
PS An additional page about other reviews. Probably a good idea to keep all this material together.
16 March In La Stampa Vattimo deals intelligently with the controversial polemic about a Babel of languages. The metropolitan dissolution of life cannot be lived except in the form of a disaggregation of language. There are analogies between Pipeline and what Negri most abhors – the rosy disaggregation which someone like Arbasino exercises over the real of culture. Heliogabalus as a representation of expression, of imagining today. But (and here is my first objection to the self-satisfied mysticism of Vattimo) the problem is that of poetry – in other words, of arriving at, and not of mystifying; of putting into red, and not into pink, the material determinations of the disaggregration of the world and of language. Today, even in destructive ways, poetry, desire and love can and must penetrate the dynamic of this disaggregation. A truly Leopardian function.
27 March Zucconi, writing in Il Giorno, sets out to do a political critique of Pipeline. A splendid book, he says, when it talks about prison, but the book’s philosophy – a philosophy of searching for absolutes – is unacceptable when Negri talks about anything else. Beware of searching for truth – cave canem! It is paradoxical that the politician Zucconi understands the Babel of languages as a search for absolutes. The politician is intelligent – more so than the rosy litterateur – and almost as intelligent as the nihilist. I am reading Heidegger these days, where he writes about Hölderlin. This poetry, which ploughs being in order to reproduce its desperate meaning – what thing is capable of living outside of absoluteness? But how could anyone think that the crisis we are living is not absolute, in the whole array of its causes and effects? It is hypocritical to deny it. And then, why overload the term ‘absolute’? – it expresses being in the reference, in the tendency, in the given onticity; this is not metaphysics but materialist rigour in the recognition of things.
4 April It is Ruggero Guarini’s turn to express an opinion about Pipeline – in today’s Espresso. The communist refoulé moves on the same terrain as the catholic Zucconi. Once again, it is the absolute that worries him. But not, as in the case of the Catholic, because the absolute is a backdrop for relativity (and thus, in short, I am lacking a sense of sin – which is unforgivable!) – but because the great culture of modernity, from Hobbes to Spinoza, from Max Weber to Simone Weil, has reconstructed only a relative horizon of values for man. Pipeline = bricolage = extraneity to the course of negative thought. I could explain to him – in the manner of the good Guarini – many things about these writers, who have been my bedside reading for the past thirty years. But what’s the point? There is also a pavement of culture, and there are street corners where dogs piss. Here, in the face of communists refoulés and of nouveaux philosophes of all disciplines, what is being brought into question is materialism – in other words the absoluteness of the given fact, the absoluteness of struggle. To avoid this relationship, to elude it, means putting on priestly clothing and conceiving of the function of criticism as the disciplinary mediation of an unknown transcendental. It is ridiculous. No, no – not the unknown, but the truth of this struggle of ours, of this certain absolute: this is what we should prove ourselves on. Pipeline has gone some way in experimenting with this. Others, however, convinced themselves that communism has betrayed them, which means that they view any attempt to concern oneself with the torments of humanity as being indecent, and the preservation of their own skins as being sacred.
17 April Forcella, in Il Messaggero – against the removal, in Italy, of the 1970s, in culture and in everyday thinking. This brings me back to my topic. Because it is precisely the theme of the behaviour of culture in the face of struggles, of repression, of 7 April, that is fundamental here. A trahison des clercs. A betrayal that has been corporeal, heavy and hypocritical – when (at one and the same time) reality had presented itself as a Babel, ideology had collapsed, and the search for revolutionary transformation had become, for substantial layers of the movement, an immediate passion. This was the big problem. So why renegue on this immediacy of the desire for the absolute, this passage through chaos which alone could have produced renewal? And then why suddenly forget the need and – often – the memory of having taken part in all of this? Why reject a body of which one had asked – and from which one had received – contact and caress? Why isolate oneself? Why accept the state of emergency, the state of exception, the repentance of prisoners, and the whole disgrace of the thing? Why not seek and declare the truth in the face of this provocation? Why not recompose, in poetry, that split which everyone lived in their being? A large part of the Italian intellectuals spent the 1970s as if they were desiring – timid and excited, in struggles, in the new movements – a woman whom they could not touch. When she went off about her own business they started calling her a whore. Thus they projected onto their conscience the poverty of their relationship with the world – and out of that chaos and disquiet, which poetry should have traversed and dominated, they made instead the dough for their own impotence.
24 April Ceronetti – raging – in Corriere della Sera, against Braudel and all those who see Marxism as a sound foundation of science. Amusing! And he ends by exclaiming: ‘And then they write so badly, all these Marxists!’ Probably it is precisely in the arid pretentiousness of the likes of Ceronetti that we find the reason for the trahison des clercs – for this refusal of being, for this stretching outside the limits of the relativity of values, which lies in their opportunism. A pure and simple love of death, a nostalgia for the nul state. But the mummy will answer him politely, just as it replied to Federico Ruysih: ‘We too were once alive.’ (G12 Rebibbia – Written at various times)
Folio 8
Back in court again. The same wearisome ritual – getting up very early, and then the wrist-irons, and then from the cells into the courtroom cage, where we sit for hours and hours. The third day of trial activity. The real trial is now beginning. I sit and watch, with a genuine curiosity to see how the machine operates. Today is taken up with hearings of the major presentations: the civil parties at the debutantes’ ball. But this is not what interests me most. The central element is the intervention by the Public Prosecutor. Finally I understand fully what is meant by the phrase ‘accusatory trial’. The absolute pre-eminence of the prosecution, of accusation, as the dri
ving force of the trial. A kind of structural straitjacket, a rigid predetermination. The accusation is already a fact, irreversible – as represented in that pile of papers, which the prosecution has accumulated and which the Public Prosecutor has been waving around from the start, like an avenging angel. There is no search for truth, and therefore no debate among equals in order to arrive at it. There is an accusation, which has full freedom in the expression of its force, and there is your right to defend yourself from it. The one who does the accusing is a public power; the one who defends represents a subjective right. The court stands in the middle between the two – it would be more appropriate to say at mid-height, because it is not there to resolve the problem in terms of truth, on the horizon of what is true and going behind the surface of the conflict, but rather it mediates the overbearing nature of the accusation in relation to the low height of the defendant. The court has to guarantee that the game between the cat and the mouse plays out fairly. The Public Prosecutor stands on a step which is higher than the defendants, on a raised bench that is on the same level as the court and markedly separate from the lawyers. The stage-setting well expresses the relations of power. But that is not all. We are tired, we are not used to all this, and in some senses we are infuriated by all the ceremonial (the cage – we want to be together, but there’s no space to move – there’s an enormous tension between freedom and brotherly love, which only increases the lump in the throat); in this situation, in the reverential game that the contending parties imagine, we are forced to sit and listen as the accusation unfolds in its bizarre extremity. Arrogant, offensive, prejudiced: this is the way the law wants it. I had almost forgotten that I was being accused of armed insurrection against the powers of the state, because the thing seemed so ridiculous to me. But I am called out of my illusion, summoned back to this sordid reality, by the voice of the assistant public prosecutor – a voice that is carefully modulated, sometimes cracked, sometimes thundering, like that of a fairground barker, in no sense worthy of this supposed sophisticated fiction of justice, but a good match for the strident tone of the accusation. A high-level accusation, sustained by lies, and one which cannot be criticized once it has been consecrated by justice. Mama, don’t cry. The genetic processes of the sacred, which anthropologists display in the continuous process of their formation over long centuries, are here repeated in the insubstantiality of a mise en forme which moves so fast as to make them objects of consumption. Subordination of justice to the temporal rhythms of fashion, of superficial communication, of low-grade information? Almost. Certainly, subordination to the timescales of the mass media. But it becomes evident that this is immediately false and almost scurrile when differing forms of awareness, people and forces intersect. Hence the accusation has to heighten even more – in the face of this slight durability and relative inertia of the mass media – its own position of institutional overdetermination. The result is an uncertain equilibrium – between pre-constituted and inertial authority on the one hand and, on the other, the abyss of ridiculousness and implausibility to which the media are constrained at the end of their arc of efficacy. I am living the preeminence of the accusation with this intellectual suspicion. I wait for it to burn down like a match, until it burns the fingers of the person holding it. I have the impression that, were it not for the servility of the journalists, we would very soon see the efficacity of this machine reduced to nothingness. But it is amazing to see how it works, this dirty intermeshing between institutional pre-eminence and the owners of the media. Now I am in prison. I am writing – I have drunk a bit of wine, and one of the Bach cello concertos is restoring calm to the evening – a very strong wind is blowing outside and the prison is extremely silent. I feel an urge to scream. I am hungry and thirsty for truth. I wish the trial were capable of expressing a possibility – just one possibility – of life. I would be prepared to gamble everything on such a margin of hope. But this is not possible. It is difficult and terrible to recognize the effectuality of an event of whose necessity you have always been theoretically aware. It is impossible, quite impossible, to alter anything here; the trial is the extension of prison, just as prison is the extension of society at large. This is the structure of the state. Of justice. A declaration of truth cannot destroy it. How solid is the inertia of power. How poor is truth. (G12 Rebibbia – 7 March)
Folio 9
The fourth, fifth and sixth days of the trial. I am tired beyond measure. But it’s worth writing a word or two – on the unfairness of the rules of combat. The lawyers have been good for once. Giuliano has been on the attack, arguing that the tribunal in Rome has no competence to judge us. A lucid and passionate speech. He dismantled and deconstructed a trial logic which, in bringing us to Rome, has stitched us into the uniforms of prisoners for life. For a moment I am breathing better, a lot better. Tommaso, with sharp intelligence and his experience in civil law, homed in on the problem of the extraditions and showed how some of the pentiti will not even be able to appear in court, and how the charges against us are based on cheap horsetrading. Then Beniamino, Pino and the others. The overall process of the trial has been attacked, the charges have been taken apart, and the whole set-up can be seen for the unbelievable ludicrous thing it is. What good will it do us? None. But at least we are showing the unfairness of the trial proceedings – the arrests based on mere pretexts, the insane logic of the pentiti, the overriding of proper territorial jurisdictions, the illegality of the procedures, etc.
And behind all that: the special prisons, the isolation, the brutal interrogations, the never-ending preventive imprisonment. What will we get out of it? Nothing. But the iniquity of Italy’s trial processes does not apply only to us – it is an intrinsic part of the whole legal system. As in Aesop’s fable, there is no point in the lamb bleating its innocence before the wolf. Increasingly we are discovering that, from our side, the only possible course of action is to fight this hopeless situation to the bitter end, not with any expectation of obtaining justice, because that is impossible, but in order to contribute what we can to breaking and transforming this machine of oppression. This is not a question of justice but of politics pure and simple. For the moment the main difficulty is being able to handle it physically. An enormous tiredness has come over me. The machinery of the trial, at this level of political abstraction and bellicose crudeness, crushes you. During four years of imprisonment I have found ways of building a personal physiological rhythm, a kind of intellectual and physical microclimate. My prison years have accentuated, almost like a defence instinct in a wild animal, the inner presence of a sense of intelligence, of a force of love. But now I am hurled into the storm, and sometimes I find myself losing my bearings. A kind of physical enervation gets the upper hand. I only hope that within this different, changing rhythm of life the bodily dimension of intelligence will help me to survive and will increase, in spite of tiredness, my intuition of the movements of the enemy machine. (G12 Rebibbia – 8/9/10 March)
Folio 10
On the outside (in prison ‘outside’ means ‘the world’). On the outside, then, the crisis is raging. This week’s elections in France and Germany have seen a consolidation of the forces of the Right. Monetary chaos. The European Monetary System is wobbling. American pressures – the dollar continues its headlong rush – capitalism command shows the same irrational arrogance as our judges – I imagine them wishing that they could be paid in dollars at least! The big capitalists seem to have entirely recovered from the blowback of last year (1982, the fateful date, the closing of the cycle initiated with the unlinking of the dollar from gold in 1971, and the oil crisis of 1973 … remember all that), when the refusal by Mexico and Brazil to pay their international debts revealed the irreversibility of the level of struggles in the countries of the third world. Then everyone was trembling. And they are still trembling. Entirely possible that Reagan will become a Keynesian. We need to study and pay attention … Europe is the one who risks paying a heavy price. The movement seems to have dis
appeared – if it existed now, in its movement towards transformation, it would have come and surrounded our prison. I look at things with alarm. Erkenntnistheorie: praise of the absence of memory. But, that said, one still has to count on deep strata of composition. On ontology. Everyone pretends not to know what the term means, but everyone knows the meaning of this solid resistance, which configures structures and possibilities of regulation. However, there is no sign of a politics, a new politics, entering the arena. What will be produced by these new, irreducible and irreversible layers of awareness of one’s social class? The only serious new force appears to be the German ‘greens’. On our side, the fact that we have to live our hopes of getting out of prison in the absence of a movement is difficult to handle – it suggests that the situation outside is dramatic and very heavy. It was from that point – from the moment when terror extinguished the movement and the state internalized its barbarities – that the ‘Years of Lead’ began. Not just for us, but for everyone. Chaos has penetrated into the structure of the state. Who could have foreseen such a massive turnaround even just a few years ago?
Clashes between the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratera [Upper Council of the Magistracy] (supported by the President of the Republic) and the Procura di Roma [Prosecutor’s Office in Rome]. Our good Gallucci is at last in the eye of the cyclone – I remember him, wily, vulgar, damp with sweat, in the days when he was accusing me of being the killer of Aldo Moro. I wish him a visitation by the good old punitive Olympian gods of classical theology. Maybe Luciano is right when he says that one day we shall see the bodies of our enemies floating past on the great river of history. Our days pass in a state of hysteria. Rossana is writing an apocalyptic letter: the timings of a solution to the institutional problem are speeding up, new constitutional equilibria of forces are in the making. I don’t think so: it will always be the same old Italian shit. They’ve shouted too much about an Italian coup d’état which never came, but which in fact is happening all the time. Paola keeps me informed about the business of my standing as a candidate for the Radical Party – this was offered to me a year ago. It’s not clear what prospects such a project might offer. I don’t expect much to come of it – but I am not giving up hope either. This transit across institutions as a way of gaining freedom and of continuing the fight feels very much like Lenin’s train journey to Finland. I have always been a firm believer in these kinds of tactical transitions.
Diary of an Escape Page 3