Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Folio 50

  A new arrest warrant has arrived for me – from Padova, from Calogero. Likewise for other comrades in Rebibbia. And then it appears that Augusto, Achille and others have been re-arrested. It is unbelievable. After four and a half years, again and again. Four days before the elections. This story really is absurd – and irresistible. By now I have accumulated something like five trials. We’re ruined [rovinati], as they say in prison language. How is this unbelievable story ever going to come to an end? There is no way of getting out of this death-bearing machine. My body reacts by developing a raging toothache. Fortunately they haven’t locked us in the cells, or deprived us of visits, as usually happens when new warrants are issued. I feel a terrible rage inside me. This is a monstrosity of cruelty and violence. This is the kind of moment when your claiming of your revolutionary choices rises in your gorge with a huge force. Knowing your enemy, and feeling his blows as they fall on your bones, you verify the truth of the analysis which has led you – and which leads me once again – to say that the only option is to destroy him. It is shameful, this opacity, this obduracy, this inertia which kicks into operation once the initial persecutory impulse is out of the way. As of today, with this warrant, my preventive imprisonment begins all over again. A further eleven years. As of today, my personal future is back to being what it was on the first day of our imprisonment. All the battles, the hopes, the demands, the legal defences and the self-criticism – all this is simply swept away. The machine sniggers to itself. Its gruesome separateness from life triumphs over my life. And yet I have to resist, I have to know how to handle this. Freedom is close, I can feel it. Like the joy of a successful act of rebellion. Of an act of knowing the truth which arrives at its object. I throw myself into my bunk. I chat with Oreste Str. – friendly and good-humoured he reminds me of a few very obvious points about justice, prison and trials. His bonhomie puts me into a better mood. There’s nothing on TV. My toothache begins to wear off. I start to doze and my mind begins to wander. Desires and images of revenge, which I have not experienced for a long time, drift into my state of half wakefulness. Our capacities for self-control should not be overstated. I wake up and start to write. What an anger, and what an exhaustion! I feel as if I am falling, falling, falling – into a huge ravine. I experience the return of a childhood nightmare – a bomb that was dropping on me out of the sky, and getting closer and closer. I try to stop this movement, which is making me giddy. Into my mind comes Zeno’s paradox of the immobility of the arrow, the paradox of my body in its rushing, of the bomb in its falling. This is how I manage to conquer that insensibility to pain which I am describing here. Yes, it is no longer a matter of concern to me. Maybe the metaphysical miracle of having plucked myself out of this dreadful gravitational force, which is dragging me towards the ravine … What I am left with is my anger; a very powerful anger. I hold it up and project it forcefully against this cowardly justice. I cannot accept them destroying me in my inner being. I want freedom. (G12 Rebibbia – 23 June)

  Folio 51

  And it’s still not over! Today the judges from Ancona arrived, to interrogate me over the killing of Alceste Campanile. A terrible choc. I find it hard to bear the weight of these infamies which are being piled onto me, one after the other. It is clearly deliberate, the plan which these judges are running – this is the third warrant they have served on me in this pre-electoral week! Heinous charges, designed to have equally heinous fallout effects. No, enough! The vulgarity of the political use of the courts! An overbearing dynamic, intent on destruction. The comrades are standing by me. The evident iniquity of this persecution is beginning to get to everyone. The TV is on my back. They broadcast with gay abandon every bit of slanderous news. But, I ask myself, will these people never have enough of it? My situation has become a caricature of the injustice of the court system. Eternal preventive detention, which is nevertheless made additionally eternal by this continuous shower of warrants, which arrive in bunches. A hatred against me which has become a mechanism of enlarged reproduction of the injustice of the court system. An ongoing reproduction of the overweening power of the judges and of the repressive teleology of this regime. No, enough! I look around myself and I see the horror which this machine produces. This is its sole function – to spread horror in order to preserve a ruling class and a regime of injustice, and also to eliminate democracy. What scares me is the banality and the extreme stickiness of this mechanism. In the days when I was a professor of state doctrine I used to teach that, in the relationship between the state and its subjects, the former has the advantage – that of being able to survive even in the absence of consensus, on passivity, on negativity, whereas the subjects have only one possibility: that of activating themselves, whether in democracy or in revolution. What I did not imagine, even when I was teaching as a professor, was how powerful and brutal the mechanisms of passivity could be. Today I am experiencing them at first hand. This discovery, the outcome of my years in prison, is a small one, but even so it serves to repay me intellectually for much of the suffering. That said, the project is to destroy this passivity and to drain violently the swamp of power. ‘In the Swamp’ – that could be the title for many of the scientific and political discoveries made in these years. A swamp whose stench and corrosive nature I have experienced in person, but which also corresponds to a regime – to an internalized crisis, to a passivity of subjects that seems to be unresolvable. In this little swamp only homologous elements operate – it is an imploding ecological disaster. The judges are the maximal reproducers of putrefaction the maximal agents of the rot in this immobile state of nature. ‘Getting out of the Swamp’ – I think that’s the only slogan possible today. A word for my comrades: don’t make fun of me. I am not talking of means and forces, and I am not talking of politics in quotation marks. I am talking about moral resistance, which is the necessary basis of all political reconstruction. We’re talking ecology here. I hope that people’s sense of smell will develop, or rather will be restored, both in us and in our fellow citizens. So this is not a moralism; it is my own moral protest. The anger which grips me when I face the machine of repression is the same as the disgust I experience with the regime. Often tiredness undermines the protest. But the hope of overturning this state of things must never be allowed to fail. Our prison stands in the middle of a swamp of civilization – and not only as regards the justice system. It is growing and spreading. Today I refused to answer the judges from Ancona. I explained to them that my lawyer was not here (he is still on strike) and that I reserved my right to reply. They are obviously not aware of the vileness of their action. One of them, the procurator, was wearing a Rotary badge: a fish grown fat in the swamp. The instructing judge had a yellow face – malaria from the swamp. There was also one of the lawyers representing the civil parties, equally full of bile. No, gentlemen, I am not coming down with you into this swamp. I prefer my life in prison. I prefer the freedom I am waiting for, which has dropped from the skies so unexpectedly, and so catastrophically for you … this opportunity given to me by the elections, so that I can continue fighting. I have too much anger still in my body. And now, after these latest warrants, I also have a terrible bitterness. Sometimes I still have the reactions of a professor. I cannot believe – or only with bitterness can I accept – that your democracy really is such a stinking pit. (G12 Rebibbia – 24 June)

  Folio 52

  I voted in the early afternoon. It would have been bad luck to vote for myself, so I voted for Vincino as my preference. All the others voted for me, all the comrades, political and non-political prisoners alike. There’s a festive mood today. We had an excellent meal. The comrades keep calling to me from the other courtyards, or from the cells, wishing me good luck. The physicality of freedom is beyond question here in prison – and also the extent to which it is an inalienable good. This is the reason why they are voting for me – for my freedom, which in itself would be enough to repay their vote. In no sense are they expecting an elect
oral programme from me. They are voting for an escape. As for the programme, I am getting down to work, and what little I can do I shall do. They know that. Gradually, from the struggles in San Vittore to the Rebibbia delegation, and then increasingly – passing via the activities of the political prisoners and via the generalization of the contents of the document written by ‘the 51’ [autonomia prisoners] – a new movement of prisoners has developed over the last few years. I think about this, I think about the things that need to be done. The truth is that I really cannot concentrate at the moment – I am very tense and emotional. This waiting is horrible … such a wait … For how long? Just until tomorrow evening. Probably we’ll have the results of the exit polls by tomorrow afternoon. That’s good. Hope is young and strong. The movement in the prisons certainly has no relation to my election. I have been very careful not to superimpose the two questions – I have received many public political positions of support even from people inside the prisons, but it would have been better if they hadn’t. It was not good for the two levels to get mixed up. So today I am in waiting mode. Freedom does not scare me – I don’t feel myself to be so far away from the world. I don’t understand how all this is going to end, but the main thing is to get out, to stick my feet out, to break the asphalt, and to begin to walk on grass again. And supposing I fail to get elected? In that doubt I see an enormous danger. The Radicals have conducted an insane election campaign. It was in their style, but really it was a demented approach. Buffonery alla Bertoldo. It stirred people up, then it moved the proposal for abstention, and then it directed people to an alternative vote. Their game has been far too sophisticated. But we shall see. What is certain is that, if I fail, they will make me pay dearly for this escape attempt. They will never forgive me. They would never forgive themselves for having been scared that I might get away with it. Anyway, we shall see. I just have to wait. Until tomorrow afternoon. They tell me that the comrades on the outside have been pushing themselves to the limit on all this. I find that easy to believe. If it were possible to establish an ongoing relationship between prison and society, the problem of the prisons could be today an element in rekindling the struggle and in reawakening the consciousness of the whole of our society. This prison world is like a filter for the whole of society, and when I go out into society I should – briefly but efficaciously – represent its hopes. That will be the moment to take up the issue of struggles in prison by forming a relay [relais] of communication, of proposals, of initiatives. But we shall see, we shall see … A very nervous wait, between now and tomorrow. (G12 Rebibbia – 26 June)

  Folio 53

  Hard to find the words to describe today. I’ve hardly stopped crying. From joy. My election is guaranteed. I am practically free. I cry – for what I have lost, and for what I have gained. It feels like I have eaten up the whole of my humanity in these years of imprisonment – but it also feels like I have regained it. I’m crying for the whole affair, but at the same time I’m as happy as a kid. I kiss all the comrades whom I manage to see. From the spyholes in the cell doors people shout comments, shouts, screams of joy. The election is for sure. The Radicals have certainly got more than the number of votes needed – in fact the whole thing has been an electoral success. But a day like today deserves to be written out in detail, because it’s been so full of ups and downs – almost an example of everyday life in prison. And, what’s more, an example of the conflicts and the tensions, the whole stage-setting, of these past years. So let’s do that – let’s tell the story of today.

  The weather is dry this morning. All this waiting is beginning to get to me. I eat breakfast and I write letters. But they are letters that I shall not send – just exercises, to pass the time. I go down into the passageway. The usual good-humoured backchat, the usual well meant jokes. Then they summon me. A magistrate! Who is this magistrate, who wants to see me? It is exactly 3.00 p.m., and any minute now the big TV news programme is about to start, examining and commenting on the results of the election. In an hour at most, we’ll have the results of the first exit polls, from which it will be clear whether I’m a free man or not. A magistrate! I have to go down. No choice. Otherwise they come and take you down by force – this is prison, after all. They don’t tell me who it is – they never tell you – and the guards don’t know anyway. I go down, furious that they’re going to make me miss the TV results. I go down and into the examination room, and behind the desk I see a young man and a male secretary sitting at a typewriter. Suddenly, lo and behold, from the other side of the room, hidden as you first enter the room, out pops Calogero.

  He reaches out for me so that I shake his hand. I am turned to stone. It so happens that I am unable to shake his hand, but it is only for this reason – because I am completely thrown by the fact of seeing him there. My inability is entirely due to the fact that I’ve been thrown by the moment. So he gets upset and says: ‘So you won’t shake my hand?’ It’s like he’s whipping me. A flood of insults rises to my lips and I want to jump all over him. I manage to recover my cool. However, I look at him with eyes which, I think, are not dominated, and with a look of hatred. He avoids my gaze and sits himself on the other side of the desk. He has aged. Now he’s fat and sweaty. His eyes switch here and there, obviously embarrassed. A big difference from the Calogero whom I saw – just once – two or three days after my arrest – four years, four and a half years ago! In those days he was completely on the ball, smoking cigarettes one after the other, halfway between a front-line judge and a detective, plainly seeing himself in the role of some genius San Francisco cop. I watch him intensely. He is yellow, just as I remember him. But four years ago, he looked half Chinese; now a flabby Mongol look has taken over. His eyes dance in an irregular rhythm and seem to be out of his control. ‘Why should I shake your hand?’ I eventually reply. In actual fact, I realize it immediately, after having thought for long years about his contorted and weird half humanity, after having imagined it: the truth is that he needs me. Just as a parasite needs a body from which to suck its blood. Like a sadistic lover, rejected.

  And he is suffering from my rejection. ‘All right, if that’s the way it is …’ he says. At this point I can no longer keep my mouth under restraint. I can do it, now I am controlling myself internally. I’ve got over my surprise, and also my desire to throttle him. I can go over the top without going over the top. I come out with a flood of insults.

  He listens and does not know how to react. His colleague intervenes. He tells me to calm down, but he doesn’t even dare to threaten me with legal consequences for the insults which, by now, are flowing from my lips. Now it is Calogero’s turn to be turned to stone. Obviously, in the mystified projection of his dehumanized consciousness, he had seen our encounter as a historical moment – two protagonists meeting in the field – a kind of honourable accommodation between our two respective truths, in mutual respect. Honour under arms! He probably imagined this encounter as it might have been seen on TV, and for him it probably was as if we were actually on TV. Maybe he would have confessed this desire to some prostitute he was frequenting. ‘My lawyer is not here,’ I said. ‘Can we get this over quickly. I have to go back up to see the exit polls.’ ‘But I have come here to explain to you how I have reshaped the prosecution case,’ he stutters … ‘To show you how I have studied the thing,’ he hisses. I ask him, now icy-cold and furious – how dare he come here and say such things. I ask him if he thinks that his hypotheses are worth four and a half years in prison. I tell him to go and stick his theorem and his modifications … His colleague intervenes again – he is no longer a judge of the republic, poor thing, but a pacifier: ‘Keep calm,’ he begs.