And all the time you find them inventing alibis and disguises. I ask people if there is any hope that out of this sequence of traumas they might still be able to re-emerge with some kind of life energy. And they tell me: look, you were in prison for four years, you don’t understand … What has happened now cannot be compared with the big crises of the past. The intellectuals saw those crises on a screen, projected onto the big dimensions of universal history. The crises of recent years have been different. The dramas ran through whole families. Criticism and self-criticism became our daily bread. Intelligence should have reacted. But, instead, it did nothing. This is not failing in functions and historical responsibilities – this is pure and simple betrayal. It is weariness and cowardice. We no longer want to understand anything, we are hurt and affronted. Then, when my friends go, I spend the rest of the day thinking over our discussions. On the one hand I see many things growing, and it really does not seem to me that this Italian proletariat has abandoned its desire to change, to transform itself and the world in which it lives; but on the other it seems to me obvious that we have to rebuild a scenario of thought and a dimension of communication through which this desire can reinvent itself in effective ways. However, what is certain is that we cannot rely on that circuit of traditional Milanese intellectuals. Their desire to live has mouldered away, and they have betrayed the mission which alone justifies the existence of the function of intellectual. (Milan – 5 September)
Folio 88
Is it a betrayal, to escape? That’s how I experience it. But rationally it seems to me absurd to think like that. There is an infinite number of things you can do when you are free, for the comrades in prison, and above all for the rebuilding of the movement. It is obvious that the radicals are not a means for doing this; and, while Democrazia Proletaria is an important historical nucleus, its traditionalist limitations mean that it is not up to the task of rebuilding. It is obvious that we have to build a European dimension, as a basis on which … and so on.
Nor does it seem to me misguided or wrong to escape when I look at it from an emotional point of view. When Lauso and Paolo Virno went back to prison after they had already been released, I told them with profound conviction that I would not have done that. I don’t think that the desire for freedom, which you feel with such force from behind the prison walls, can be cancelled out. I live it in its entirety, and I find that I’m always living that desire when I’m out walking and my imagination runs riot, representing every possible route of escape. So is it wrong in political terms to make my escape? Here too, I don’t think so. Escaping is a political declaration of dissociation which, for me, has good practical effects – removing oneself from the state of emergency – and which also leaves the comrades in prison the possibility to act. My politician friends are of the opinion that the battle of the trial can be won. I think so too. The pentiti can be destroyed.
But the 7 April case is not a just a courtroom battle, and it would be idiotic to reduce it to that. It is a political battle, and we have some prospect of winning it. People are starting to tell me: a few more years in prison, and then the European elections, and then I don’t know what … But the cost of this gamble would be the acceptance of their rules of the game – and this is exactly what I do not accept, because those rules are irrational and therefore cannot be counted upon; furthermore, they do not promise a rebuilding of the movement and a project of revolution. It is I who will choose my limits, within an analysis of the rational possibilities. So why is it that, having said all this, escaping still strikes me as something of a betrayal?
Why is it that, even though there is only a week to go before the resolution of the matter, I cannot yet decide to give the go-ahead for my escape to be prepared? Between the abstract of truth and the concrete of community there is an infinite distance. And it is difficult, this inhuman acceptance of abstract truth as the only rule for action. It is not only difficult, but also desperate. We have to gamble on the truth – but is it possible? I am not a gambler – in fact I detest gambling. On the brink of making the choice to escape, I find that I am paralysed.
I talk about it, over and over. There are many indisputable reasons in favour of my escape. Reservations are useless, objections are stupid and tied to petty electoral interests or concerns about public opinion. And yet I still cannot decide. This evening my escort suddenly popped up again, unexpectedly. I was coming out of Pier Giorgio’s house, and they followed me to Mauro’s house. I immediately called the Ministry of the Interior, but they claimed they knew nothing about it. Anyway, the escort disappeared during the night. I am expecting subtle systems of surveillance. All this raises the problem of how exactly I’m going to make the break, as and when I decide to get away, in case I want to get away. I am resistant to thinking about it, but I have to. Between the abstract of truth and the concrete of community the gap is enormous. It does not seem to me that my escape will have disastrous consequences, either on the comrades or on the trial, even though some imbeciles claim that it will. I reply that it is rather my presence that is having a disastrous effect, and this I truly believe to be the case. But the problem is different. It is the problem of loyalty to a habitual way of thinking; of community and loyalty to this family, which is our life together in prison. It is the problem of breaking this with an anticipated and unilateral choice of timings and themes of political struggle which are not those of the community – or at least not immediately so. The choice of a different timescale, in the community and for the community, but outside of its immediacy. The tearing of a fabric. I don’t know how to resolve the problem. I am going almost crazy with this. I hear the voices of thousands of comrades who have told me to get out of here and not to fall into the pernicious trap of institutions and of perverted politicians. I am aware of the silence of the Rebibbia comrades on this question. I am aware of the desperate desire for my freedom on the part of all those people who love me. I think and think again and I cannot see a single rational, emotional or political reason that even faintly suggests that putting myself back into prison would be a good idea. And yet I am unable either to decide or to clarify for myself the reasons for this desperate perplexity. Between the abstract and the concrete I have always allowed the abstract to win. But is it correct to do so at this time? After the experience of prison, and after the struggle? Is it correct? What kind of frightful gamble am I committing to if I make my escape? And yet I must win this fight. It will be difficult. (Rome – 6 September)
Folio 89
Last night Marco P. called me in urgently. He talked to me about his own crisis, and that of his party – in a way which seemed to me to be sincere. Then he suggested a possible scenario for my escape: to leave just for the period of the vote. Stay in France for three months. Then, at some point around Christmas, to present myself at the Strasbourg Parliament and at the Court of Human Rights. The idea is that I would get myself extradited to Italy. For his part, he says that he will support me during my escape and would get me elected in the European parliamentary elections of June ’84. Honestly speaking, the scheme strikes me as crazy. I do not share this way of working – so tied to the media, to calculated illegality. I tell him that today the problem is to guarantee the passing of the communists’ proposal for a further postponement – and at the same time to do nothing that might obstruct its final stages or impede its approval. As for his suggestion, I shall give it some thought. But, already this morning, Marco was trying to be clever with the foreign press in the press conference. While I was blandly reassuring everyone that the matter of an escape was not on my agenda, he was openly encouraging me to escape. I am beginning to think that he sees me as some kind of puppet that he can stake in a risky game of hazard. The man is obviously a gambler, but this is a strange sensation for me, to find myself being used as money in this kind of gamble. Money and symbol at the same time. All hell has broken loose over my presence in Parliament and what it represents symbolically. On the one hand those in power and the journalists
are trying at all costs to destroy me as symbol. (Today we have the latest vile stunt [vigliaccata]: Biagi ran my TV interview alongside an interview with Captain Genova, the torturer of Padova, thereby invalidating it through recontextualization. And today there was another cheap operation of taking my words out of context, by Bonsanti (who, not accidentally, is a close pal of a communist boss in the Palace). This journalistic operation makes a pair with the total falsification of the facts published in Der Spiegel earlier this summer. And yet another article today, an interview with a wretched little hired pentito, Coniglio of Milan. Once again I am accused of being an ‘evil teacher’, on the grounds that, about ten years ago, I drank a toast to a mass appropriation which had taken place in a supermarket. Cretin! Tell us why you killed. Did I teach you to do that, you runt?) On the other hand, Marco P. wants to maximize, for his own party, the symbolic value I represent in party-political terms. In particular, it is becoming increasingly obvious that he has no intention of allowing my figure to become a symbol for even a temporary unification of the Left. He will continue with provocations designed to prevent the formation of a majority – just as he did this morning (in a first simple preparatory essais, by telling me ‘Escape’ and quoting Salvemini and his opinions about preventive imprisonment and the judicial corpor-ation). But, I ask myself, if I do make my escape, would I be extracting myself from the area of significations that the symbol represents? No, for sure. Escape is part and parcel of the symbolic content of me as a figure. So, if I do escape, how is Marco P. going to react? If I withdraw from Pannella’s party-oriented agenda the objective content of my escape – a content of getting out of prison, of liberty: a content voted for as such by my electorate – how will he react? Presumably by teaming up with the journalists and with those in power to destroy me as a symbol and to muddy my image. Or would he be more intelligent and wait for things to become clearer? I don’t really know – but I do know that I have to be very careful. Money-symbol: that is certainly not the way that Rossana sees things. I had a sharp meeting with her today. Jaro must have told her of my uncertainties. She came on heavy, reminding me of Socrates and various other fine things. She sees the problem as being two-fold: on the one hand, the push for a unification of the Left around the issue of civil liberties; on the other hand, winning the 7 April case … I agree about these two threads. But there is a third one, which is missing. Namely my freedom and my possibilities for continuing the struggle. There is nothing egoistic about this – only my natural right. Socrates doesn’t come into it, because he was saying that the just laws of Athens should be obeyed even when they are badly applied, and if necessary even through one’s own death. But here we do not have just laws. We have laws that are ferociously unjust, and nobody is obliged to accept their consequences. Nor does the democracy which we enjoy offer any hope of rapid modifications of the picture, or any prospect that the law will ever operate fairly. Nevertheless, my uncertainty remains. And I explain to Rossana that, if I decide against escaping, it will certainly not be because I have been persuaded by her arguments. If I decide not to escape it will be because I have understood the silence of the comrades in Rebibbia as a tacit lack of agreement. A disagreement tied to a culture and a sense of right which have nothing to do with the money (other people’s money) with which the wretched Marco P. is so spendthrift, and have nothing to do with the immediacy and the importance of a political battle over rights, here and now, which Rossana is proposing to me. Rossana, the basics of life are powerful in another way, when they break servitude and build community. Only that could keep me here. Deciding to stay as a revolutionary act. Who knows! (Rome – 7–8 September)
Folio 90
A really fine demonstration in Brescia yesterday. A thousand people – so many people have not been seen together for a long time. A tense, focused discussion – the people, together, are beginning to see freedom. I am very tired – today I arrived in Milan from Rome, by air, and then we were stuck in a traffic jam for hours. Then, here in Brescia, together with the comrades of Democrazia Proletaria, in a working-class environment where I feel very much at home, the people in Val Camonica started telling me: ‘Don’t let them put you back in prison again.’ And the sister of Stefanino, a comrade from Rebibbia, said the same, and this moved me hugely. And so did many, many others – it went on and on. I am a symbol of liberation, not something tied to the vile dialectics of infamous laws and of this equally infamous state. Set them free! Free all the comrades who are in prison! The people, as a whole, give you this impression of strength.
I think of the techniques that power uses to divide people and remove the strength of their unity – like a reverse path, a musical fugue turned on its head, moving from ensemble to separation, to the point of destroying that sense of ethics which only the collective can construct. The people, as a whole, give you a potenza. Here talk of freedom is common currency among people of all ages and generations. I lay down a strong attack against the magistracy – in fact I am increasingly convinced that these constitutional ruptures, this coercive, separated and non-accountable power, are among the most bestial instruments of the reaction. The magistracy represents the triumph of consolidated political relations over all forms of social mobility that might develop potential [potenze] and be political transformation. My speech was warmly received. Today, in Milan, I see Alberto again. A comrade since forever. He is being destroyed by his sickness. It is beyond me why nature has to take this terrible revenge on the intelligence and lucidity of its project. The other evening I met Bifo – another comrade forever and since forever. We talked about war. And about Lebanon – and the sparks fly – they stink of death, of pain, of rottenness. Only Spadolini feels comfortable in all this. Bifo says a lot of trivial things, but they are true: war has become the inescapable horizon of our being; and in California they have taught us that there is no escape from this situation, but that at least you can save yourself through an ecological discipline of the mind … and so on. But he takes the discussion onto another tack, trying to be intellectually detached when in fact he is only defensive – with that implicit recognition of his, of weakness and of the insuperable disproportion between the potency of war and sickness on the one hand, the weakness of mind and life on the other. And yet, if we could only stand together, we could reverse the relationship between life and death, between war and liberation! And Alberto and Bifo know this.
This evening in Brescia I was completely convinced of all this. What is capitalism, if not the power to divide the masses and then to destroy, in a negative dialectics permanently poised between sickness and death, consciousness and freedom? What is communist potential, if not the possibility of producing an opposite path to that? Increasingly and with increasing intensity, I grasp the abyssal difference between the institutional world of bourgeois and capitalist democracy and this desire of ours for a free and collective life. The tensions which I feel in society and in people with this head of mine, which has been once again rendered virgin by the experience of prison, continually confirm me in this. Revolution is possible. The transformation will happen, in Aristotelian style, around a formal cause which embraces entirely, like a reality already lived, the material cause and its efficiency. I have to start over again. I protest against the timid and wearied ghosts of my consciousness!
That’s what I’m saying to everyone – we have to start over again. This evening in Brescia, like a man in deep water, I found something to cling to. I am beginning to entertain a hope of extracting myself from the shipwreck; I see a collective consciousness that is capable, again and anew, of mobilizing itself. Maybe only to live. During the evening I see Alberto again. How I understand his sickness! And how I shall live it if I decide to escape. But both of us need to free ourselves from it. With the collective, with the masses. The desperation of having suffered oppression, of bearing in our flesh the scars of the enemy’s violence … we can only get over that through an operation of revolutionizing life! It is possible. Until and unless they
kill us. (Milano/Brescia – 9–10 September)
Folio 91
They came right up to the front of the platform. I looked them in the eye and saw the same violence I had seen in the eyes of those who wanted to kill me in the special prisons. They hurled coins and bottles onto the platform. Today, in Piazza Navona. This is a meeting I shall not forget. But why all this hatred and all this violence? In my speech I tried to explain what is both necessary and possible to do in order to get at least some of the comrades out of prison – but they came up and said that this was not an option, because all the comrades have to be freed. They may well be right, but at least let’s discuss it. What I can’t stand is this homology, in terms of hatred and violence, with the police and the state killers, with the judges and their prefabricated sentences – at least let people speak, and maybe we’ll all gain something from it. This evening, at the start of the meeting, I felt that same emotion and that same solid, sure sense of justice and of an alternative society which I had encountered elsewhere. I addressed myself to that. So why, instead, this hatred and this ritual of destruction? I know well this kind of street action: I invented it. But in those days it was life and potenza. I do not experience what is happening today as a repetition – and not as nemesis either. When, for the first time, we attacked and took over the trade union platform in San Giovanni, in 1969 if I am not mistaken, we were a majority of struggles. We brought working-class Turin, Marghera and Milan into that people’s square, and against that bureaucratic platform. But today the hatred is fed by a memory that is static, vengeful, full of bad feeling and not of life. Nor of struggles either. Whereas I was talking of struggles. Of struggles in prison, of struggles for freedom. And all they could answer was ‘grunf grunf’. However, as usual, my thinking in this regard is too rational. What needed to be answered here was a stupid action, which was only provocation. Pannella prevented my comrades from intervening (there were lots of them, and they were experienced in the best stewarding situations … vintage, DOC bodyguards). He was wrong. We could have given a lesson to those arrogant idiots, filled as they were with resentment against the fact that I was a free man. This was nothing more than a masochistic revenge for their own defeat. A good kick in the pants would have done them good. But Pannella is totally non-violence. Except when it comes to making political use of situations that are not clear to me. Here we are not administering a vaccine, à la Martin Luther King, to the current mass violence in order to turn it into a political and organizational force – here we are being subjected to an idiotic violence, which comes from a few people drugged on ideology and ritual. There is no project for organization here, not even a promotion of consciousness being put into effect. Pannella is engaged in an operation that is purely symbolic. It is of no interest to me. Piazza Navona: there you have it, the fruits of terrorist irreducibilism and of the ‘no compromise’ stance of the partitocracy – really there could not be a more fitting image of a modern hell! They were slavering. At a certain point somebody told me: ‘Be careful – they’re passing round plastic bags with guns.’ Careful of what? Of guns? Sure, they can shoot, but I am both too close and too far – too close in understanding their madness and in reacting to it with a contempt of equal intensity – and too far for them to be able to burn up, in stolid immediacy, the time of revolution which I want and live with intelligence. My contempt for these imbeciles is as great as the desire for revolution that I feel in my body. Enormous. These idiotic, fanatical manifestations of extremism!
Diary of an Escape Page 24