Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Now, these transit possibilities are gathering with decisive intensity, they are punching holes in the fabric of this deep-seated crisis: ‘For all that I find myself in “financial distress”, not since 1849 have I felt so cosy as in this “outbreak”.’ I wouldn’t go along with Marx in defining our present crisis as ‘marvellous’ – but what is certain is that, things being as they are, and given the Years of Lead that we are living, this degeneration of the political forms of the mediation of power, together with the revelation of the decisive contradictions within the system, constitute my – our – only possibility of gaining our freedom. I am tired, but I am heartened by the crisis into which these honourable gentlemen are falling. In the trial we are achieving nothing: all we can hope to obtain – and that may turn out to be precious little – will be won by coming out and attacking at the political level.

  Important to stress the crisis – the emptiness of the capitalist response, its inability to touch on the substance of the crisis, and finally the fact that both the inability to pose the problem of a political solution to the Years of Lead and the possibility that someone will begin to confront the problem – both are based in this degradation.

  This ambiguity is very deep and insoluble. For them. All that we need to do is make intelligent use of their dirty crisis. Outside, outside the prison, in the world – that’s where the solution lies, the only possible solution. If not a solution brought by our movement, it will at least be woven by our healthy political realism. Finland’s train needs to get under way. For all the difficulties. Go on … on your way … (G12 Rebibbia – 13 March)

  Folio 11

  The seventh and eighth day of the trial: now they are rolling out in a rhythm which becomes evermore ritualistic. The disproportion between the contending parties and the unfairness of the game are becoming ever more obvious. Alberto is very good at putting forward procedural objections and points of order – in volleys, one after the other. Hearing him speak, it really does not seem possible that the trial can stand up on such foundations – but that is what will happen, and we all know it. The machine grinds and crunches. Then Giangi and the others raised their own procedural objections. Finally, in the last couple of days, the state lawyers and the civil parties have also had their say. A real Brechtian lesson in the workings of the law – a few technical–formal quibbles, the odd reference to articles of law, and insistent reference to decisions by the Supreme Court – and then the fundamental argument: the law is our law, the procedures are our procedures, just as we are the only ones able to draw their conclusions. An enormous arrogance, combined with a mafiotic sense of power and of how it works. Law reveals itself to be what Benedetto Croce, phenomenologist and unashamed apologist of his class, claimed that it should be: on the one hand, a technical instrument of command; on the other, an ethical means of social ordering geared to the requirements of the parties in society who exercise command. The function defines the organ. It is certain that the administration chez nous has become somehow reconciled to this general conception and to a practice that derives from it. The crudeness of its ways of proceeding is ethically legitimated, and the method can even endow itself with a certain finesse in sustaining the violence of its rulings. The shortcomings of my ability to understand the enemy have never been as great as they are in this case. I have underestimated power’s capacity to adapt its force and its inertia to the vulgarity of the actors – I have underestimated the cunning agility which governs the tactics of the big institutions. I have never grasped very well the movements of the python. It would take a sensuous, feminine logic, to rearticulate the violence of the antagonism – if one is to understand these crossings of power. An acid logic, capable of dissolving, like the oily violence of the family, this bitumen of the juridical institution. I try and try again. I do not succeed – I cannot bring myself to accept that the truth of our protest is not going to be recognized and that the hard and damnable violence of the court procedures is going to package all the injustices committed into one bundle, preparing them for a tacit reabsorption within the trial. A certain intellectual extremism is in play in my protest – but instead I should be more sensitive, more astute, more sensuous. More feminine. Sylvie comes to mind – the way she makes use of intelligence, of a powerful critique based in women’s liberation, of a subtle understanding of both fact and concept – first she takes it on board, accepts it, understands it, almost caressingly, and then, having taken it in, she dismembers it and dissolves it – in order to destroy the appearance of any consolidated figure of power. Using these parameters of understanding, one could construct a critique of cynical reason – after all, what else is it, if not cynicism, this instrumental conception of the law, a conception articulated to the arrogance of power? (at the moment I am reading Peter Sloterdijk on the subject). I wish you were here with us, Sylvie, in these days of the trial, helping me to resolve my anger into a critical understanding. I wish you could be here to understand how irony and disillusionment can feed a great passion for justice. And to destroy this baleful situation – of a tacit and normative subjection, and of a domination which is so strong as to express itself as logic. To learn how feminine wisdom might free us from all homology with what has started to happen in that courtroom of injustice: the building, or rather the rebuilding, of an instrumental apparatus in relation to truth, a claim to knowledge which develops by assuming power as its criterion – this is truly masculine, even before being juridical, despotic, capitalist! I wish you could be here, as you have been during many of the days of my imprisonment, to explain to me how I should not accept their plan of conflict and of destruction – but that only an independence founded on love and on intelligent sensibility can enable us to survive, to seek liberty, to reconquer freedom. To exclude the knowledge which is based on power, together with any other cognitive or institutional function that makes of power the reason of its own legitimacy. To seek knowledge, in feminine manner, in love and in the practice of a critical dissolving of the ties of dependence. But, really, what is there left for me to do in this trial? (G12 Rebibbia – 17–18 March)

  Folio 12

  Power for them is a thing – their thing. They have a taste for practising it, sharing it, imposing it – a physical taste. This manipulability is for them corporeal. Like with a woman. And for that reason every woman becomes a whore in their hands. Today Montanelli has published in Giornale nuovo – which is exemplary as a medium for the communication of power, as an alcove where things are manipulated – he has published an interview with me. It is accompanied by a commentary just as boorish and cynical as it is good-natured – against preventive detention. Thus my protest was banalized on this last margin: that of the territory of the polemic about civil liberties. This is what is bound to happen in the coming months – one can see this clearly by now. Given the impossibility of upholding this monstrous disgrace which is known as the 7 April case, they will try to save form by feeding the polemic against the enormity of preventive detention. For them this represents a weak point – and we ourselves have too easily accepted to be used, and to use this terrain. In this way we have become a kind of appendage to other concerns. In this Gomorrah of the law, with the refined manners of a ladykiller [donnaiolo], Montanelli knows that a little present has to be given to the prostitute every once in a while. What continues to amaze me, in this reality I am living, is his vulgarity. Men in power feel the thing in which they participate as if it were their own. Solidly so. Sometimes power is given a metaphysical (albeit vague and malodorous) reading, but in this instance the commodity fetishism is never anything other than sordid.

  The intellectual, who is extraneous to power, is often brought to apply to it an imagination which, even in combating it, in some respects exalts it. No, what we are living is not a drama of metaphysics – but a very painful banality, a poverty of ideas and ethics. In the world of the thing. One time power might have meant slave hunts, or the piratical capturing of riches – drunkenness of war, or capitalist vora
city – but here, for us, in our trial and in its surroundings, it is only a corrupt representation of the thing. Buñuel. Law has lost all contradictoriness with the real – it preconstitutes it. It is not a repressive force, but the function of a reality that is repressed – a symptom of the thing. For this reason, when all is said and done, I can find even Montanelli likeable [simpatico] because, being aware of all this, he often plays out this vulgarity with a quizzical look. This is the sympathy that relieves you of the bare brutality of the executioner. How many brutes have I seen – sometimes policemen and prison guards – with the same sympathetic sensibility as our Indro … (G12 Rebibbia – 20 March)

  Folio 13

  Today, while listening to Tarsitano as he was raising points of order (today, the ninth day of the trial, late in the evening all our procedural points were rejected, and our requests for freedom – brought up again this morning by Luciano, in a fine and proud exposition – were completely ignored) … – today, as I say, I reviewed the entire political hinterland of this trial. The words of Tarsitano really did weigh like rocks. Rocks piled up against us, rocks which the history of the working-class movement is going to have to shift out of the way – because they obstruct the path of any possibility of critical thinking and renewal. Tarsitano, a small-time functionary of the Italian Communist Party, a modest lawyer, a great frequenter of courtrooms, and the prompter and mentor of the infamous Fioroni – an acid political religiosity, a resentful behaviour, a seeker of revenge. I knew him years ago, when, as a representative of the party, he was hanging around the movement. Now he has turned his back on all that, and has renegued. A cowardly breed! So, when did this whole affair begin? How many years have passed now? Four, five … Of imprisonment for me, and of political defeat for them. At the time, they – the PCI – imagined that they were on the brink of coming to power. We continued to hate power. So then they decided to embark on this big repressive operation which was represented by 7 April. And they betrayed every duty of bearing witness to the truth, every duty of defending liberty. The Calogero theorem, and the emergency laws between 7 April and 21 December 1979, which were its practical consequence, were the fruit of an intense hatred, of a Jacobinism turned upside down, towards defending reaction – of the illusion that it could put an end to it through an uncontainable history of Italian proletarian struggles and that it could use other means to penetrate into the Palace – which they imagined to be rich and at the disposal of their corresponding vices. Political stupidity went hand in hand with the betrayal of principles. The outcome was a lurid liberticidal ope ration. The path of the movement was blocked by thousands of arrests, and with this any political dialectic and any hope of transformation were closed. Today Tarsitano is here, and he holds forth in legalistic jargon about our imprisonment – in contraposition, precisely, to his defeat and that of his party in the general collapse of the conditions of freedom and struggle. Procedure is, in terms of the trial, an ambiguous material; in an event of such long duration and complexity as ours, it makes it possible – in fact it makes it necessary – to retrace the whole historical genesis of the thing. Especially when things begin to loosen up and the contradictions can be seen for what they are. So now we witness the disintegration of the character and of the climate of ideas in which he was created: Tarsitano has lost the security of the first years of the trial, when, with holy fury, he was feeding lies to the first pentiti and granting them freedom. Little is left now of that Stalinist pride. Only a dark resentment. He even resorts to the weapons of prudence every now and then – but the words fail him: a paranoiac delirium, immediately corrected as if it were some kind of mental lapse. In reality he is a man destroyed, a scoundrel who has repented, a former generosity that has been perverted and is now incapable of recycling itself rationally. Little by little, as the words fly around the tired courtroom, I too become tired, and I let myself drift off into imaginings. I recall the sectarian simple-mindedness with which these gentlemen thought that they had things in the bag and could manipulate power. And then the long sleep of reason in which they were caught up – incapable as they were of understanding how power, real power, making use of the spaces of juridical illegality and of the political stereotypes offered, transferred repression from the vanguards to the struggles – right into the heart of the working-class neighbourhoods and the factories. I remember the hatred that used to pour out of the so-called communist press. I remember the hired witnesses [testimoni prezzolati] in the Federation. But then I also warn that infamy does not pay and that bad politics, like bad paper money, drives out the good. I remember the number of people who tore up their party cards, the crisis of the party’s rank and file organisers, the landslide electoral defeat and the senility of the leadership. And how all this put an end to the incredible history of Italian-style communism – a singular and heroic phenomenon, destroyed by stupidity and betrayal. So here we have Tarsitano, standing in front of me, still talking – a pitiful symbol of a situation of which, when all is said and done, he too is a victim. Let us liberate ourselves from all this, from these utterly base representations of a tragedy that has run its course. It is not in the trial, but in political struggle that perhaps we have a possibility, maybe our last chance, to rebuild a terrain of renewal. In the tiredness of the evening I try to discuss this again with the comrades. (G12 Rebibbia – 21 March)

  Folio 14

  The comrades. Today the cross-examinations began. Cecco was the first to be examined – strong and dignified in standing by his experiences of 1968 and Potere Operaio. I see them go up one by one onto that damned stand, under the spotlights, after so many years lived in common. The comrades. This evening we had supper together – eight of us – the prison rules allow it – all of us from 7 April. I look at my comrades with the sweetness that these years of brotherhood permit me. Every evening we have a strong discussion – always the pleasure of life has the upper hand over the discomforts of prison – the pleasure of life, of discussion, of searching. They are all abstract, these comrades – not at all because they don’t have passions and a powerful humanity, but because they enjoy the abstraction of concepts. They are all intellectuals, in the best sense of the word and of the reality it expresses. Real figures of intelligence. If they were not that way in the beginning, they were obliged to become so – and they have enjoyed the discovery. As characters they are very strong – with a taste for polemic, for individual contradiction, even for exotericism, hysteria and strangeness – and all this builds a community. A community which succeeds in being efficacious, both internally and in relation to the rest of the world, to the extent that it is abstract, reasoning and conceptual. The paradox of our existence together as a community is extreme. The community becomes stronger the more abstract it becomes, the more it is political in the sense that this term defines a real mediation of vocations and potentialities. Politik als Beruf. What crazy happenstance created the situation which has brought about this communitarian possibility within the randomness of the myriad options of the prosecution? We are the fruits of this case. The ‘7 April’ case is a most fortuitous combination of possibilities, an improvised gathering together of individuals – but we have transformed the case, turning it into a potentiality. A Lucretian paradox, this – in the fall of the atoms we have determined the communitarian clinamen. With my mind I caress the minds of each of the comrades in front of me. A Platonic symposium. I know that I couldn’t lean over and stroke anyone’s belly even if I wanted to – the sexual discipline is rigid among us. But I love them more than physically.

  This transformation of the abstract into the more potent concrete is what characterizes our community. And this is what destroys prison. When I look at this community of men, and at that society, judgemental or delirious, which we have before us, then I laugh with joy. The abstraction of thought becomes a humorous distraction. I toy with the idea of swapping roles in the trial – of putting the defendants in the place of the prosecutors. Emilio as the president of the court – he woul
d have the ability – but through humanity, only humanity – to make Severino confess. Franco as the prosecuting counsel – he would put Marini to shame, he would show the bizarre irrationality of all the mechanisms of the prosecution. In my screenplay Luciano would be a state lawyer – but from a democratic state: he would argue for the right to opposition, and, with a fair share of irony, he would propose even the absolution of Abbate and Tarsitano. Paolo P. and Chicco would be journalists. They would take the trial for what it is – a farce; but if even so much as a moment of truth were to appear, they would argue that it is an element of sincerity. Security services would be furnished by Oreste and Arrigo: the whole business would become so sportive that the disciplinary origins of sport, or the sportive and ritual origins of justice, would come completely to the fore, and prison could consequently be replaced by a sports field. Paolo V. would have the role of a lawyer. He argues for the possible as a place of subversion. (He remains a dangerous individual, even in a communist regime, because he is so materialist that he risks becoming Leopardian – tell me, Paolo, where does the verification of the concrete stop?) And so on. But leaving aside games, tonight we actually did it, at table. Marione was drawing, and is still drawing. There’s something else in play. There is this incredible radicality of the reversal of values, of the separateness of our being. At this point an intelligent enemy, someone like Judge Sica, could protest: ‘The Mafia are like that too.’ It’s true – but it is not absolutely true. Maybe we have mafia ways of behaving, just as institutions do, and well done to anyone who is capable of making formal distinctions – Benedetto dixit. It is not true without qualification, because the joy of the abstract is what triumphs with us. What joy there is in the abstract!