Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Abelard and Eloise. An abstract sensuality. A game which is more real than reality. A bureaucratic ritual reversed. A bureaucracy of charisma? Max Weber would spin in his grave. Go ahead and suffer, prophet of misfortune. Here something else is being played out: in prison, a prime example of a leadership group, capable of struggle, capable of antagonism, in the period of the real subsumption of the society of the state. In the cellar of the Palace we have perhaps invented, all by ourselves, the way to be free, enterprising and rationally inventive. But in the Palace quand même. This is the basis for our possibility of liberty – in the overturning of cynicism, in an overturning which has all the disenchantment of cynicism but functions in positive mode. Formidable desires for justice, equality and liberty. Gemisthius Pletho between Mistra and Florence. Erasmus victor. An ancient moment which prefigures and constructs the ontology of the present. Renaissance. This community of comrades has prepared, in poverty, what awaits it in the richness of victory, in the joy of liberation, in the enthusiasm of winning once again and of transformation. How I love my comrades! (G12 Rebibbia – 24 March)

  Folio 15

  I am ill. A bit of a fever. I spend the day studying. I am reading Leopardi. I have been working on him for a while now and he fascinates me. There are curious analogies between our personal situations – imprisonment in Recanati and the omnipresent wretchedness of the Italian provinces; also between our historical situations – the defeat of the revolution, the disaggregation and the lack in Italy of any centre of cultural production; and at the level of our metaphysical crisis – in solitude only the poetic voice makes it possible to live an ethical tragedy that is so fully under way; and all this constitutes itself into a desire for flight – this is the continuous dimension of Leopardi’s poetry. I too would like to flee, and on the ashes of Jacobinism live the heroism of a new positive proposition of liberty, building a weapon against the inertia of the system that oppresses me. I read left-wing interpretations – Luporini, Binni – no, he is not really a progressive but a libertarian in flight. Leopardi builds on disenchantment with progress and on the joy of liberation. These poor Leopardian progressives!

  Those interpretations collapse into an inability to grasp the materialistic dimension of the flight – neither in aestheticism nor in utopia, then, but towards an infinity of possible worlds. In Leopardi, time dominates the poetic discourse and configures itself into this inex-haustible spiralling between the infiniteness of voice and of hope, and the return of a life bounded by sterility and historic defeat. A dialectical tension, a breaking of the useless indefinite rebounding of imagination and reality one against the other, impotently. This Leopardian voice builds alterity – a new possibility of existence. In catastrophe, thinking becomes bifurcated and the originary possibility of being proposes itself.

  In crisis, the will to flee represents a reconstruction of the world. In prison I have worked a lot: I have written Il comunismo e la guerra, Macchina-tempo, L’anomalia selvaggia and Pipeline. All this has been a continuous meditation on dualism and on the end of dialectics – in short, on the possibility of twisting the separate human and proletarian condition into a constitution of liberty – of an ‘other’ liberty. Leopardi comes towards me at this extreme edge of the tragedy of the ethical and of the desire to overcome it. He comes towards me rendering the voice corporeal, materialist, constitutive – poetics, praxis, destroying the ontology of thought and working instead on that of practical being, playing it out on the temporal margin of the world – to return to the terms of Agamben’s very fine book. I think about the trial again, about the extreme tension of the theoretical model it represents – an inert machine of repression, powerful inasmuch as it is deadly, and against it a heroism which can only constitute itself in flight, in alterity, in the proud independence of disenchanted reason and hope. Yes, Leopardi. (G12 Rebibbia – 26 March)

  Folio 16

  I am reading a photographic documentation of the struggles of young people in Germany against the building of the Startbahn-West. In the old nature, facing ranks of police transformed into angels of evil, a new nature – strong and generous – is moving, capable of bringing together resistance to the destruction of old values and construction of new values in the community. I enjoy looking at these photographs. Particularly when I take account of the fact that these struggles have been able to produce mediations and political force within and against the institutions. In Italy, that generation, which in Germany led the struggles, has been destroyed by repression and by terrorism. Here there is a void, a deep void – chilling. But for how long can this political condition stop the rebuilding of a revolutionary movement here too? I am not able to make forecasts – nevertheless I project onto this terrain of analysis a few of the ontological hypotheses that are dear to me. That urgency which I feel in people’s consciousnesses, that urgency for an ‘other’ life, full of possibilities, that new ethics – it seems to me that these things cannot be built other than collectively. I am not able to make forecasts – I can’t say how this will happen – for sure the rebuilding dynamic will be transversal, and it will insist essentially on the singularities of the movements – and the contents will be those of a distribution of wealth which refuses the logic and fetishism of commodity exchange. But who can add other elements of forecasting which will not function as forces of disaggregation and of impoverishment towards this subject, which is in the process of formation? Towards this rebuilding, which is innovation? Every now and then I receive letters from comrades on the outside, or from comrades who have been released from prison and are rebuilding a rapport with reality – and I note, albeit in the lack of concrete indications of struggle, the reappearance of a great enthusiasm to know and understand. Not yet committed in practical terms. In Italy, struggles like those against Startbahn-West have not yet been seen. Here the nascent movements, and most particularly the peace movement, have to be on their guard against the vultures – whose long shadows take life wherever they are reflected. Vultures, bureaucrats and parasites. They have shattered and buried the continuity of the movement and they have insulted and repressed its separateness. Now, in parasitic and hypocritical ways, they try to rebuild it, as a movement for peace, as a council movement [movimento dei consigli], in order to dominate it. Of this at least I am sure: they will not succeed. But what a huge waste of energies – thrown into passivity, while in the rest of Europe the new subjects of liberation are going through their apprenticeship. In our trial we need to succeed in arguing for this separateness. But perhaps this way of being is so internal to ourselves, so much our own, that anyway the adversary senses it – takes it as a characteristic sign of our existence. Nevertheless I would like to be in the woodlands of the Startbahn-West and I would like to be with my comrades – in the fullness of a political relationship of revolutionary reconstruction. Today more than ever I experience as an affront the bars, the prison, the never-ending cages of this mutilated existence. (G12 Rebibbia – 27 March)

  Folio 17

  Borromeo – the first pentito in the trial. Day eleven. We’re plucking daisy petals – will he sing, won’t he sing, will he, won’t he … An absurd encounter/clash with the president of the court. Santiapichi asks for freedom as the price – meanwhile, just to give him a reminder, they had arrested him again. Nothing is explained. Borromeo tries to be clever, with that stupid air of his. Like [the buffoon] Bertoldo. He simply repeats the text of his interrogation. With obstinate, pedantic, bookkeeping attention. Word for word. He makes the court angry, and everyone else too. In this respect of not going beyond the initial ambiguity of the first interrogations, of sticking instead with that ambiguity, he drives everyone crazy. He remains cold, dumb, speaking in a monotone. It seems to me that, in his not particularly athletic consciousness, something approaching a drama may be unfolding – does he want perhaps to redeem himself morally? It is amusing to see someone who has sold out making an effort to regain human and social dignity. Certainly, with respect to the days of 1979, som
ething must have changed on the outside too – in public opinion, infamy is once again being seen as infamy. However, for the moment not much seems to have changed. Apart from the shouting of the president, the scene in court is silent. The other prosecutors also dig around, but they can’t get the spider out of his hole. The whole thing is ridiculous. Santiapichi is ridiculous, egged on by the unspeakable Abbate, trying to get to people’s secrets and promising favours in return. As for the civil parties, they are extremely timid and nervous about getting their fingers burned. It is obvious that they don’t trust each other. Not to mention the stupid yapping Public Prosecutor. The whole stage setting is ridiculous too. It’s like a fortress in some Tartar desert. Now the court as such no longer exists – the public is no longer admitted, so the scenario consists solely of the mass media. Excited TV journalists, quantities of newspaper journalists, endless numbers of politicians, swarms of lawyers – the pentito has arrived – and all of them crowding into the courtroom. A great illusion. And, behind it all, an empty void. The court management system and the security checks have the effect of preventing the attendance of the public. Now, however, as often happens, the court’s stage management is spinning in a vacuum. Borromeo continues to build on this vacuum. He admits very vaguely the existence of secret groupings in Milan. But he resists provocations and denies the existence of other levels of organization, unknown to him. Over and over again, to the point of becoming boring, he says he knows nothing about specifics. I intervene myself, denouncing the flattening logic of the proceedings (ten years conflated into a single breath), and the atemporal and theoremic form of the accusation and of the questions put to the defendants.

  Major brouhaha. Court suspended. Franco comments: when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong. I prefer the ‘soft’ approach. Then Borromeo finishes. A pitiful end. Boring and bitter. He has maintained a level of reticence throughout, tirelessly sticking to his guns. A reticence that is stupid and useless. Why not say the truth – why not tell what the movement really was? Opocher comes to mind, my good old teacher. The time of truth in a trial, the time of the crime, and the time of its trial-based ascertainment, he used to say, become one – the historical time of the fact can and must be subsumed within the time of judgement, to immobility and fixity, to abstract contemplation.

  But is this really possible, my good old teacher? Here we have lived five years, ten years of struggles, of transformation of the real. How is one to verify this transformation? Inside that cage, faced with this infamy, I am like a caged animal. Ten years – my life, and the lives of others, the change. Here the machine is functioning like a forced rewind of the imaginary. The present imaginary is back-projected onto a past that is passed and gone. These translations of values not only betray/modify that reality, they actually reinvent it. What we have here is a reduction of the facts to the image of a crime – it is, precisely, only the image which creates the criminal fact, and which furthermore deprives it of all historicity. Certainly the image could lift the fact out of the brutality of the event; but, on the other hand, in our case it requalifies the event as brutal. No – no possibility remains of translating the event into image – the image of the present. Rather, one could examine and unfold the history of the present, cruel and stupid as it is: the imaginary of the judges. So, then, this so-called trial is simply a con trick. The contemplation and reconstruction of the fact have already been decided, in advance, and against the fact. Borromeo does not know this, but he suspects it. He senses the enormity of the thing. An emotional pentito, a good pentito. He is scared that the evil he is doing is going to rebound on him. He is scared that his falsity is definitively going to destroy him. A good pentito = the ghost of a man. (G12 Rebibbia – 28 March)

  Folio 18

  Day twelve. Nothing worth talking about. The tedious Borromeo continues. Personalities involved in this trial – that would be something worth talking about. Giuliano, my lawyer. I love him dearly. What does a lawyer represent for a political prisoner? He is more than just a human point of reference – he is the only person who arrives continuously from the outside world, like some kind of wise extraterrestrial, with whom you can discuss politics, with whom you can compare past and present. The world of prison and that of the trial produce this simplification of the picture: if the lawyer is intelligent, he understands and performs this role. So the defence comes to be a critical evaluation of the relationship between past and present. With Giuliano there are no problems of trial technique – only problems of reality. And these are pursued by him with analytic intelligence and total participation at the level of ideas. For Giuliano, the fact of representing a political client is not a fiction – it is an identification with the client, a transformation. But here it is not a question of ‘clients’ – rather it is a relationship which becomes a common creation! For Giuliano, the 7 April trial is an act of moral fidelity and intellectual honesty. He is tired and he is working like a lunatic. My confidence in him is all the greater when his attitude is critical. Giuliano is good. Today Giuliano has been cross-examining, hitting at the core of the matter, uncovering the untruths and the omissions in the pentito’s account of things … There’s shouting from the back of the courtroom – in the Tartar desert of the court a young DIGOS officer intimated to Paola Negri that she needs to behave more respectfully in court. I think Paola had her feet up on the bench in front of her. Poor little DIGOS, trying to give a disciplinary ticking-off to such a power of nature! Paola, you sweetest of creatures, why do you still rebel so noisily against this normative idiocy of power? For years and years you have known the humiliations and cruelties of prison guards – you have seen a lot worse than this – so just ignore the stupidity of the DIGOS – indignation does not pay in this society of slaves. But I know that you don’t care about that donkey – what irritated you was just the rude interruption of your concentration. Concentration on me, and on the comrades, and on the trial proceedings. A love which has become an attentiveness, an attentiveness that is organized around a whirlpool of generosity, around a poetics of justice. Without Paola, without her smile filled with light and without her extraordinary strength I don’t know how I would have survived all these years. She has travelled like a nomad, for days and days, for nights and nights … She came to find me wherever I was, without a pretence of serenity but with a powerful passion, with sincerity, wherever the prison authorities sent me – in that southern panorama of prisons which is a thousand kilometres from our northern cities. Every week, for four years. We have discussed politics, we have argued, she has given me advice, she has comforted me – and at the same time she has raised our children and she has gone out to work. But an enormous emotional feeling about the unacceptable injustice suffered has kept her close to me during these long years – and at the same time a passion that activates her intelligence – indeed a unique key to her seductiveness and to our relationship. An intelligence which never rests, which gets fired up in seeking and tracking down every possibility, every patch of blue sky. A sensibility which is sometimes fractious – because a proud intelligence accepts only a relationship of equality. Then, alternatingly, enthusiasms, depressions, reflections, normality in performing extraordinary duties. In short, have you ever wished for a perfect creature who is woman–lover, intellectual and mother? We have become adept, during the absurdity of prison visits, at saying many things to each other in few words – almost ciphers, which only a profound discipline succeeds in turning into discourses, indications of signals. A chronometric coincidence of pulsings. This is what it must be like in the world of nature.

  In the courtroom today I know that she is there at the back, feeling, like me, the brutality of this whole affair – like me, she is irreligiously intolerant of the emptiness of ritual. And she sends the hapless DIGOS to take a running jump. Then Paola comes to visit me in prison, for forty minutes, like always, to discuss things that need to be done and problems that need to be solved. Difficulties, hopes.
What is a wife? What is love? (G12 Rebibbia – 29 March)

  Folio 19

  In Il Manifesto today there’s an article about the trial, written by Rossana. Basically she says: raise your sights, otherwise this trial is not going to lift off. Impose the political content that the court is trying to conceal, otherwise the trial is good for nothing. And she is right. She is right in her analysis of the tiredness, of the low profile of the trial as it has proceeded thus far, with its procedural quibbles and so on: small ridiculous stories of disorganized squabbling groupuscules, little stories which not even the pharaonic projections of the prosecution manage to render as anything other than banal. But she is also right from another point of view. Only by giving politics a central role in the trial, only by producing a strong political subjectivity, can the prosecution’s game-plan be broken. We have to be capable of producing a mechanism opposed to that which has been set in motion by the prosecution. In the first place, it has captured, whether really or falsely it doesn’t matter, a subversive movement – that of the 1970s and, by that act of enforcement which institutes power, it has made it into a show trial designed to exhibit the crime and to restore law and order. However, this aspect has to be concealed. The arbitrary nature of the operation must be veiled, and this is the second moment of the operation. And it is for this reason that the court, with such abiding hypocrisy, keeps separate the moment of ascertaining the truth and that of applying the law – it cannot afford to let it be seen that the repressive and normative dimension weighs so heavily on the formation and unfolding of this trial. This hypocrisy then rebounds on the defendants, who are obliged to engage in the ascertainment of the truth as if it were an operation of logic. (The cynicism of reducing to logic the ascertainment of the truth is the religion of judges – the habitual bastard rationalism which fancies itself as a modern behaviour! My God, just look at the harm that has been done by the formalist schools – the likes of Kelsen and Bobbio! See how they have polished up cynicism! Barbaric judgement would be preferable.) Then, in the third place, there is penal judgement – nothing scientific here – the science of penology is a kind of philosophy of universal analogy, or rather a kind of statistics – the nature of the judgement is based after all on the free synthesis which the conviction of the judge operates on the result of ascertaining the truth, in the face of a normative structure which he pre-selects with equal freedom … The subjective and political element of the trial is so very central and exhaustive that, were it not for the dramatic nature of the sentencing function, one could almost reduce the penal judgement to a ludic structure. Instead it is a lurid structure, performing dishonestly, always being so subjective as to constitute a tragedy in itself – a tragedy of abandonment to arbitrariness and of destructuration of the subject and of events. So what might it mean to produce an operation opposed to that which is conducted by power? It means unmasking the political redundancy of the moment of formation, or of the moment of ascertainment, or of the function of judgement – and counterposing to them another set of standards. Restructuring the real, where the judgement tries to destructure it. Destructuring the political judgement of the adversary and structuring the truth of the struggle. The trial becomes political – and not only on the side of the prosecution – when the political nature of the subjects transforms itself into the production of an alternative set of normative standards – when the synthesis involved in the trial can no longer develop on the vertical axis of one single set of standards, but is compelled to come to terms with a different set of standards. The so-called ‘dialectics of the trial’ [dialettica processuale] has to be transformed into antagonism. Antagonism of values, of stories, of life. Social self-valorization against juridical cynicism. So: does this bring us back to the guerrilla trial? Absolutely not. That has been defeated, and correctly defeated, because it was unintelligent, because it did not counter with alternative sets of standards, but simply tried to oppose different and counterposed powers. The lack of intelligence stemmed from utopianism, sectarianism and illusion. Here, on the contrary, we have to unmask the repressive dimension in the formation of the trial and reconstruct, in an alternative and politically pregnant way, the truth of our history and of our movement. And finally we have to counterpose a project of open and alternative justice, capable of destroying the political freedom of the judge and of his own arbitrary subjectivity, and strong and explicit in its declaration of the justice of our struggle. It is here and only here that we shall be able to establish another profile for the trial, from our own point of view. However, that said, I should also add a note: we have to criticize the civil liberties [garantismo] approach, which we have adopted thus far. This approach does not view the trial as a political terrain in which two separate sets of standards measure up against each other – rather it distinguishes authority from law and asks authority to use the law correctly. But is not this trial of ours (and probably all trials, whether political or not) characterized by an initial determined political intermixing of authority and law? So what sense does the civil rights argument make? (G12 Rebibbia – 1–2 April)