Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Folio 84

  Yesterday and today saw a continuation of the meeting of the Authorizations Committee, and it finished badly. Yesterday I made a very powerful speech, unlike my presentation at the first hearing. Calogero is mad and should be locked away; the power of the magistracy must be restored to a correct constitutional positioning. These were my basic points. Not that they understood much of what I was saying. They decided to send me back to court, with a request for my re-imprisonment. However, the clash was very strong over postponing discussion until the end of the 7 April trial and until a decision [was reached] that might take account of the sentencing. These months of parliamentary work have not been in vain. I don’t think in the slightest that the proposal for deferral will pass; it is nevertheless true that, unlike in the committee, in the Chamber there is an abstract possibility that it might be passed. This is a compromise that I can accept. The communists and socialists have fallen into line with this proposal. This strikes me as important. A great job has been done. I have many comrades to thank for this. I harbour no great expectations: I just hope that the debate in the Chamber will bring about further contradictions. It is clear that the Left is unifying around this proposal for compromise and postponement – for the first time we are seeing a breaking of the DC–PCI axis, which up until this point had been the ‘party of no compromise’. Albeit with extreme caution, the PCI is abandoning that position on questions of civil rights. This is the hypothesis entertained by those at Il Manifesto, and it is Rossana’s great hope. How solid is this hypothesis? Will it succeed in transforming itself into a tendency? Today Mellini, for the Radical Party, abstained from giving his vote. I begin to get a whiff that Pannella is not prepared to accept, under any circumstances, the formation of any such front on the Left. The thing terrifies him; he hates the unity of the Left, and in particular he fears for a unity of the Left that might rob him of his monopoly on the defence (painless, when he does it on his own) of civil and political rights. Pannella is an American – sometimes a progressive (I mean on civil rights), but above all an American (I mean he is dead-set against the communist point of view and against the unity of the Left). Mellini, who is only from Civitavecchia and is generous and intelligent, clearly suffers under this political stance of his boss. On the other hand, you certainly can’t say that things are particularly clear on the Left. Lula B., a member of Parliament for the independent Left, was taking issue today with Rossana for the passion with which she is committing herself to defending the 7 April people and myself. She is saying that we should be more cautious in order to achieve our ends – and she is sincere in this. I conclude from all this that I am stuck in a big imbroglio – I really do not think that any of this is immediately resolvable – in this I agree with Lula – but I do not believe that it is resolvable in the future either, through good tactics – in this I disagree with Lula. The situation is politically perverse, and good intentions and correct tactics are not sufficient. This perversion is structural, and there is always an ultimate institutional instance founded on repression. Even good will and daily work can bring about perverse effects. It is strange to have to spend time explaining this to the only people who, despite everything, sincerely passed through the experience of 1968 – Lula and her comrades of the independent Left. They have a naïve notion of the state.

  As for Rossana, it is clear now that her generosity and her optimism of the will have caused her completely to lose sight of the terms of the situation. She sublimates everything: the violence of the institutional relationship which is implicit in the 7 April trial and the dense contradictoriness of the political relationships involved. We probably have totally different evaluations of the inertia of the institutions (which for me can be blocked only through a radical change) and of the PCI – for her the Historic Compromise is now definitively behind us, but for me it still lingers.

  On the other hand, how could she fight this battle if she did not still nurture these illusions? In order to move in the world of parliamentary politics you need to get the realistic measure of it, take its measurements and dress in its stuff. And, anyway, there’s no saying that every once in a while illusion doesn’t win. Was it not perhaps on the basis of an illusion that I got out of prison – even though it was only to fall into this new parliamentary prison? The one who scares me more than Rossana is Pannella – this evening, after Mellini’s abstention and after strong insistence from Rossana (from what I understand, she has started counting the potential votes) – I asked Marco if he, too, intends to abstain on the vote in the house. With his usual clear-sightedness, Gianni F. today reminded me that even ten votes would be no small thing. Marco answered neither yes or no – he reminded me of the code of conduct of the Radicals (not to support laws that strengthen the partitocracy nor to involve themselves in theatricals), but he also added that nothing would be done to prevent the passing of a solution that would leave me free. This discourse in negatives gave me the shivers. Let’s keep hoping. I don’t have many options other than hope. Thinking back over things, I am anyway satisfied with the work that has been done. In these two months – less than two months, and with the holidays in the middle – we have succeeded in creating a possibility and defining a spiral. This is not tactics but strategy. This possibility is a knife plunged into the institutional inertia, which cuts away its ties to the ideology of the state of emergency. Modestly said, ‘Bravo, Toni, well done!’ They may fuck me, but I’ll leave them with a hot potato in their hands. (Rome – 1–2 September)

  Folio 85

  What a day today! I spent the afternoon in Pisa, a few hours on a phone-in on a local radio station. Then, in the evening, to Livorno, for the Avanti! Festival. A load of people. I am sitting in a hotel in Livorno, extremely tired, trying to sum up my complex and difficult perceptions of the situation. But first, within this tiredness, there is the continuously drumming repetition – I don’t know why it was so continuous today – of the phrase mai più in galera [never again in prison]. I had this from the autonomist comrades of Pontedera, and from the ex-Lotta Continua people of Pisa, and from the socialists in Livorno. Ten, fifteen people. Why? Why this very strong value attached of the symbol of escape? Because this escape is a claim to autonomy in relation to the institution, it is a freedom asserted in the face of a state that is perverted.

  But would my escape not be in contradiction with the declaration of dissociation, with the politics that follows from it, and with all the small steps we have taken towards a political solution? I ask this insistently of everyone close to me. This escape, if it is going to happen, is coming very close – we are well beyond the point of talking about it as an abstract principle. Now, if it is necessary, I have to do it, and all the consequences need to be weighed up. And yet in this mai più in galera there is a force, a solid feeling of autonomy and freedom, which grips me and moves me. Perhaps this is precisely the key to today’s events. Autonomy and freedom – put solidly, in the manner in which these Tuscan comrades know how to express themselves. Including the ex-Lotta Continua people (sometimes they express a past of which they accept the value, but from which they protect themselves; and sometimes they almost desire to repropose the dream of revolution but are incapable of carrying it through). A whole cocaine scene here. This is not to say that drugs necessarily eliminate the truth. However, the general scene seems to me anarchist more than political or communist. It is quite the opposite for the comrades of Pontedera – they contacted me when I was on holiday in Montescudaio. Then there are the autonomists from Lucca – all new working class: here libertarianism has lost the stamp of the artisanal, what we have here is abstract labour. It is good to be able to touch the abstract with your fingers and to kiss these comrades.

  It’s completely different in Livorno. Thousands of people. The taste of the sea is tangible, and the music is as solid as the air that carries it – salty. I do the meeting with Andò, from the executive of the Socialist Party. I proceed to attack – the emotion of the moment is very s
trong, in the chilly and vengeful silence of a big hall that is packed – these are the people who want me back in prison. In particular I attack the magistracy. Andò manages to get himself a hearing among the audience, which had not paid him much attention at the start. He is very good. He explains, through the emotionality aroused by my presence, how the special laws are evil, not only because they cause unjust suffering but also because they give the magistracy powers outside the constitution, and those powers end up being destructive of political representation. I have to applaud what he is saying. I talk about prison and the prison movement, and I say that the only way these problems can be resolved is through a profound renewal of the constitution. I speak of the material constitution, of what actually is, and not of the great principles which a degenerate political class likes to claim as its own. I am in tune with the meeting, there is an incredible emotionality to it all. Some people are crying – and people tell of the injustices that they themselves have suffered. There is soul in the whole thing. They come up to me, they embrace me. Ex-prisoners cry like babies. They break through the stewards who are there to protect me – big chunky stewards, local dockers – and what a sweet thing it is to hold these unknown comrades close. For god’s sake, leave me a bit of time for the political project of reorganization and liberation of the comrades! Leave me some time! Then, more calmly, I talk with the socialists. Here, in the port area, I discover in them a libertarian will which under the arches and tapestries of Parliament all too often disappears. Basically, throughout the 7 April affair, the socialists have never behaved badly – even if they did keep themselves at a distance, fearing that it was all going to fall on their heads. Anyway, I am completely wiped out with tiredness and now I’m going to bed. In Gualtieri, in Naples, in Padova, and now here in Livorno I have experienced those emotions which certify that another society, proletarian, is alive and reproduces itself in the face of the inertia and perversion of power! I should sleep soundly tonight. I see the light of dawn coming up – I like the analogy between the landscape and our political and revolutionary hopes. (Pisa/Livorno – 3 September)

  Folio 86

  My escape is necessary. I talk about it with all the comrades. Not one of them tells me no. Today, between Venice and Padova – the weather is crystal clear – I see not only comrades from the movement but also old friends. Feliciano B. is a great and old (now) bourgeois intellectual. He has the cynical lucidity of the reactionary. He doesn’t believe that the world can be much different from what it is – but, on the other hand, inasmuch as he is an intellectual, he is often seized by theoretical imaginings of transformation. However – precisely as a pure intellectual – he keeps his theoretical imaginings to himself, and in no sense applies them to the world. It is truly wonderful, this schizophrenia of his, which becomes frankly cynical when it has to deal with the real world and enlightened when he examines his own thoughts. He is rarely wrong in his views of what is likely to happen institutionally, and as a result he has a clear view of how things are unfolding. Theoretically, on the other hand, he would have a dialectics of liberty which does not exist, or which has been repressed – and he is confident of being able to handle it because, anyway, that’s the way the world goes.

  I really enjoy his sense of irony, his reactionary iconoclasticism, which is the lucid proof of a free intelligence. In historical terms, he reminds me of Paolo Sarpi and the crisis of the Venetian Republic. I wonder whether his defence of liberty is a hope, or whether it is nostalgia. It is the latter, for sure – and this is better. Nostalgia, only this gives value to thought. Set against this we have the fierce will for conservatism of others of his generation. Somehow it takes you aback – but the same thing can be said of so many others of my friends in the Veneto – the way in which they allowed the terroristic demonization of Padova and of the Veneto (not to mention of myself) to pass without lifting a finger to stop it, even though they knew that the basis of the charges was false, even though they were sickened by the madness of the media. In my view this was basically laziness. (Their view of the University of Padova was a bit like Voltaire’s comment on the University of Coimbra: ‘After the earthquake which destroyed three quarters of Lisbon the country’s wise men could find no better way of preventing total ruination than to give the people a fine autoda-fé. It was decided by the University of Coimbra that the spectacle of a few people being burned alive, in a big ceremony, was an infallible secret for preventing further earthquakes.’) A combination of caution and aloofness – from people who don’t want to get involved in dirty business. Those of the magistracy in particular. With their smoking-caps on their heads and their cats on their knees, they sat and waited for the institutional frenzy to pass. Always playing things in a low key, never explicitly defending what was happening. Living a disenchanted view of power, surviving in the crisis. Maybe they were right – but why accept to live such unhappy lives? Sometimes craziness consoles. Massimo C. is, basically, one of that kind. One time I used to be disturbed by his intelligence; now I am amused by his desperate desire to survive in the crisis. His disenchantment has taken on tones of asceticism. For the pure reactionary disenchantment can be also a way of not getting involved, and of allowing yourself to continue (with irony and detachment) in making money or a career. For him these things are derisory. For him, what counts is knowledge – but a knowledge that shuns horizons of hope and raises the possibility of a comeback only in an act of knowing, in a dimension of ethical or aesthetic transcendence. Here cynicism is not neutral multiformity in the use of the concrete, but a contempt for the whole of the concrete, in absolute terms, as a horizon, with a blind faith in the power of a destructive and liberating intelligence. Except for the generosity of intervening and of applying oneself to the particular case – a generosity which is undermined by sarcasm – but all the greater precisely on this account. Politics becomes application to concrete cases. The subtext here is a despairing judgement that there is nothing to be done – maybe a few small battles can be won – ‘We’re doing our best for you, Toni’ – but with no illusions, and let’s leave it at that. Really, only in asceticism can we decant unhappiness. I am probably strongly affected by this world, in a negative sense. When it comes to the transcendency of hope, that hard nucleus of values, I overturn it, I try to see it in its concrete aspect, in its totality. This quest is equally desperate, but inexhaustibly filled with hope. Is this my great fault? My escape is necessary. It offers the possibility of rendering my protest concrete, not only in relation to these infamous court proceedings, but also in relation to those people who think that hope is no longer on the agenda. There will be many difficulties, enormous in fact, but only in freedom will it be possible to resume that work of thinking and acting which, precisely here in the Veneto, enabled us to develop and innovate in relation to a tradition of cynicism and disenchantment. Here we have dug deep. Today has been a calm and beautiful day – the sky merges with the green of the earth. (Venezia/ Padova – 4 September)

  Folio 87

  Everyone was playing at war in ’76 and ’77. But among these Milanese intellectuals you would not find even one who would be prepared to admit to it, not even if you promised them that their books were going to be published chez Gallimard. They were all involved – and how they elbowed each other out of the way, in Nanni [Balestrini]’s ‘Area [Cooperativa Scrittori]’, and then in his Alfabeta. I understand the fear, and I also understand the disgust with what happened during the Years of Lead. But why has none of these intellectuals, not one of them, contributed to the collective self-criticism? Why did they hide away? It’s hardly the case that they were not right there in the thick of things, en masse. One more than the other, and all together, they toiled away to prove that transversality was more important than discussions about organization – and they informed us that such discussions could only end up in ideology and violence and Stalinism. Then it turned out that precisely this sprouting of groupuscules and sectionalism, and the dispersion of that small amount o
f political intelligence which was being formed at the centre, degenerated into blind violence; whereupon transversality turned into a killer. That led to a situation in which the repression started striking out blindly. And they all fell silent. Or rather they all met up again, very cosily, at the dinner table, to talk about other things. So why not set up a journal? La Gola – an ‘open journal’, naturally, because anybody can talk about gola [throat/gluttony] – materialists or idealists, traditionalists or postmodernists. But things had not hit bottom yet. When the final tragedy hit Milan, with the killing of Tobagi – and our trial has shown the extent of the degradation of the red and cultivated bourgeoisie and the perversion of the state, so that both sides made use of killers in order to solve problems of rank and to make sure that the socialist parvenus never made it through to the inner sanctum of power – both then and now, nothing happened, except a headlong race to justify pentitismo, or, for the more astute, to bundle up everything together – autonomists and terrorists, judges and police, Corriere della Sera and Mondadori. There was a crisis, and this was the magic word that pacified their consciousnesses. I am in Milan, talking about this with Primo M., with Sylvie, and with other friends. Everyone is at their wits’ end. What needs to be studied here is the axis of repression–perversion: and the transformation of fear into resentment, and that cancellation of memory and intelligence which is tantamount to a death wish. There is nothing tragic in this. There is only failure in intellectual and ethical duties. Every generation passes through some moment of crisis. But here we have seen too many crises, and now you can say that a certain slothfulness dominates the scene. This red generation of Milanese intellectuals has seen too many corpses. It watched impotently the passing of a whole parade of corpses, even before those which blind terrorism left in its wake. The corpse of the Resistance, the corpse of Stalinism, the corpse of the economic boom and the corpse of ’68 … so nothing surprises them any longer.