Folio 102
Two days of discussions with the Guru. Very tiring. In his relations with me he seems like an agent provocateur. I am trying to explain to myself the development of events. He turned up yesterday, as if nothing had happened. Or rather he told me immediately that it was only thanks to his deep knowledge of the parliamentary mechanisms that things had gone as well as they did. He is an idiot pure and simple. The sympathy he enjoys here is minimal: people who know him tell me to beware of him, because he is an actor in the style of the Grand Guignol. He makes me furious. Then he uses moral blackmail by telling me that I have to think of the comrades in prison. Vile man. But of course he is right – I do have to think of the comrades in prison. He offers me a rendezvous this morning, to do an interview for the Radical Party TV. I go to the appointment. He arrives. He brings the police in his wake. He denies it, but the house is surrounded, and I have definitive confirmation of this when they photograph us at the window. I become completely hysterical. I understand; and he, with cynicism all wrapped up in smiles (today he was smiling, yesterday he was not), tells me that I have to accept his plan. In other words he thinks that I should give myself up to the police in a very few days. Or indeed, he urges, I could do it straight away. Whatever happens (I say crazy things during the interview) I have to get out of this apartment, and that is definitively the last time I go to Rue Rambuteau. As for him, I see that he has not lived forty years of partitocracy in vain. Like a reactionary, I find myself hoping that one of these days he will die in one of his hunger strikes. He lards his triumphant cult of the institution with a tawdry moralism, simple-minded and eighteenth-century style. Like Indian gurus, he is able to talk only to those who want to listen to him, uttering banalities that only he thinks are anything other than banal. He lives on inquisitiveness. He is closely related to all those who, hypocritically, do wrong while denying that they are doing so. He is an individualist Jacobin from his feet to his head – I say feet first because there’s no point talking about his head, it comes in a poor second. The only advantage to be had from discussing with him is that he is so emphatic and obviously insincere that you see immediately where he is heading. Fortunately, in his psyche circumvolutions do not exist. He organizes his illusory game, however, in the tones of a revolutionary Jacobin. Poor man, he is the perfect product of Italic non-culture, lay and bureaucratic – a mixture of books not read and resentment towards those who have read them. He is only bad in individual relations – he has never known collective and disciplined levels of working. However, despite my compassion, he really should not have played the joke of bringing police around the house. Enough, he can go to hell! With incredible fear, helped by Emma, I finally manage to get out of that house in Rue Rambuteau. I can’t take any more of this! Furet says: the Jacobin knows how to be dumb. When we talk about this, Jean Pierre F. adds: Sade is the only hero for Jacobins. Enough! This evening I see a fine bunch of old friends, and I do an interview for Ramsay, for Les Nouvelles. Socialist journal, first issue. We have to liberate the power that exists in society and give it organization. We have to break with that fetid separation which, in the crisis, the organs of the state bring between themselves and society as a whole. Corporate interests and power. I talk at length about all these things with the comrades. They agree, and we shall work together to develop these themes. They tell me that there are people in the government who are open to grasping their centrality and full implications. I doubt it, but let us try anyway. I am very tired this evening. I try to phone Rossana – I can’t get hold of her. Is her institutional story btry to eginning once again to separate itself from ours, from the class struggle? Escape is an act of class struggle, nothing more and nothing less. But there are too many people these days who see class struggle and insubordination as the projection of an undefined subject. Not at all – here we have person and flesh. It seems that in Italy certain old comrades are angry about the fact that I have made my escape. I wonder whether this is a general attitude. I don’t think so. But if it is, so much the worse for them. It would not be the first time that so many comrades have fallen on the accident-ridden road of re-founding the movement. Escape is a powerful symbol of it. And, as always, only the analysis of the tendency is capable of winning. (Paris – 23–24 September)
Folio 103
The discussion with the comrades here has been frank and hard-hitting. They are all French. I have neither the desire nor the interest to see the Italian refugees. The comrades are insistent in what they tell me: first, it is absolutely necessary that you put an end to your remaining doubts about whether or not to return to Italy – it would be madness, and we have no intention of following you. This position is put most forcefully by people who have followed the trial. Second, if you do stay in France, you have to get it into your head that you are in a foreign country. You have two possibilities, but your choice has to be clear: either you move as an intellectual or you move politically. Third, if you decide to move politically, you need to realize that, as things stand, your possibilities of doing anything around Italy are minimal, and it is only by working through political forces at the European level that you will have any chance of effective intervention in the medium term. In short, dear Toni, you are going to have to recycle yourself and to set aside thoughts of immediate interventions. I protest loudly. Today the trial is resuming in Rome. I imagine the terrible tension among the comrades, the arrogance of the court, the provocations related to me coming from the press and the media in general. From Italy they tell me that the lawyers are being timid in the face of such an unfavourable climate. I protest at the positions advanced by the French comrades. What am I supposed to do? Must I be the lone crusader? If I go ahead, will it be with no support whatsoever, either from here or from there? The contacts I was hoping for not only do not exist between France and Italy, but will be very hard to set up, given the position of the French government. I also have to take into account one very basic fact, namely that our Italian defence ‘lobby’ has fallen apart. This has happened because of the vile behaviour of Marco P., the (over-imaginative) freedom of judgement of Rossana, and the justifiable anger of the Left at the betrayal which has been perpetrated. In Italy, my only remaining points of reference are the lawyers and a group of friends. Even my comrades in prison will shortly be swept away by the immediate concerns of the trial. No political battle that I may envisage can take for granted their involvement. And yet I protest – how can I abandon the comrades, even for a short period? Today, as I say, the trial started again, with Paolo Pozzi on the stand. The radio is very short on details. In my mind’s eye I can hear, see and share the chill of the situation in that damned courtroom. Go for it, Paolo! How are we to get out of this imbroglio? Only if the lawyers and the comrades immediately raise their sights and maintain an aggressive profile in the daily confrontations in court. This is the only way we shall get a good result. But it seems impossible, now that our defence ‘lobby’ on the outside is so weak – and in fact has more or less dissolved. At the same time I should not underestimate the strength of the enemy. In the two months since my parliamentary release from prison, our call for a political solution managed to get a vote of 293 for and 300 against, and that fact is going to generate a ferocious and determined reaction. How will the court react? What will be their strategies for effecting a political restoration and for cancelling out that fact? The political forces – except of course those of the far Left, and maybe the socialists – have not yet succeeded in creating a stable policy for a potential political solution. The PCI, in particular, is flailing about incoherently between a nostalgia for a hard line and for the Historic Compromise and a desire for the unity of the Left, understood as a project for hegemony in which perhaps they will be prepared to pay some kind of price to find a way out of the state of emergency. This means that their policy moves are being dictated by strategic choices – and the outcomes could therefore be unreliable, or even monstrous. So what is to be done? I feel an incarceration of my spiri
t hanging over me. My opting for freedom, as a symbolic act which is full of life and hope, is at odds with the future. We have to build it, this future. But the comrades are caught up in the immediate demands of the trial. Freedom and future. It is a terribly wearying task, but a passion that is nonetheless untameable. We can’t afford to set our sights low by going for medium-level solutions and an artisanal approach. No, the French comrades and our friends here are right. Once again the project has to be large-scale and capable of sustaining the tendency. I know this both from my own experience and from the history of the movement: each time, we have re-started at a higher level, without turning back. But this does not mean that we should not look back. And, as I see the comrades and review their faces one by one, imagining them walking and mixing in the cells during their recreation time, imagining their very strong desire to live and their righteous and dearly held desire for freedom – well, I begin to feel the tragedy of this next step. But it is the only way. (Paris – 25–26 September)
Folio 104
From what I read in the newspapers and from what friends have confirmed, the 7 April trial is falling out of the news. The whole focus of interest has shifted to me and to whether or not I am going to return to Italy. The comrades have attempted a strong push on the question of freeing the prisoners – calling for imprisonment to be replaced with house arrest. The court is taking its time – it will reply when the cross-examination of the defendants has been completed. At this moment they are cross-examining Francone – from what I hear it has been a very heavy examination, but from the little that I find in the newspapers it seems that he is defending himself well. What is certain is that the situation of the comrades is difficult. The court’s reply as regards house arrest will almost certainly be no. So we need to proceed to a direct challenging of the court. We need to denounce the prejudicial attitude of the judges and the way in which they have conducted the trial thus far – taking apart its heavy accusatory mechanism. What we have here is not a courtroom which is trying to arrive at the truth of the charges, but a new accusatory horizon. They will try to give me a life sentence, of that I am sure. And what about Pannella? I saw him again yesterday evening (this time I protected myself in case of eventual provocations – a couple of comrades took him all around the houses first, to make sure that he had not been followed). He refuses to see the disastrous implications of the parliamentary stunt which he set up. With that operation not only did he push me right to the brink of re-imprisonment, but he destroyed that miraculous unity of forces for a political solution which we had built with such effort. A miracle which was having results even at the institutional level. Now, when he calls for me to hand myself over, he is trying to get himself out of a difficult spot. He wants to restore his ‘good daddy’ reputation. He is cynically playing power politics; but it won’t wash in my case. I think he is starting to realize this. His problem is not our defence ‘lobby’, which he set out to destroy, but how to restore his image in the eyes of those thousands of people who voted for me – and who could have been hundreds of thousands. If I do not hand myself over he will become my worst enemy, because he will have to help in the destruction of my image – in fact he will have to do it directly himself, in order to regain the confidence which my voters very definitely removed from him. But is he really such a fool? He cannot superimpose himself on the symbol that I represented! Anyway, at this point Pannella has become extremely dangerous. I have to stop meeting with him. He suggested that I do an interview with Biagi – a good chunk of money, about a hundred million lire. For that reason I accepted, on the understanding that I shall give the money to the comrades in prison. I am very tired. And I have been very ill. Today I collapsed in the course of the day. (Paris – 27–28 September)
Folio 105
I see Enzo Biagi again today, with Gregoretti and the Guru, for an interview. We have to wait for a few hours for the camera team to arrive. During that time the three of them indulge in every kind of mischievous gossip about the current political situation. Apparently in the past few days Carboni has stated that Andreotti was the head of the P2. That provides enough material for a good hour of jokes and insinuations. I sit there listening to them, shocked not so much by what they are saying as by the fact that they see me as one of the family. The family. For Pannella and Biagi there is always this sentimental invocation of the family. Personal stories. All very affectionate – like those good capitalists who exploit people but say that they’re only doing it for their children. Gregoretti intervenes only to talk about a particularly nasty incident involving his son. He is very reserved. But Biagi goes over the top. He seems to feel the need to talk about his mother. She pops up everywhere in his conversation. Mothers are a great stereotype in communication. I wonder what percentage she gets of his contract. Indeed, I wonder, did Biagi even every have a mother …? We start the interview and complete it in short order. Biagi and Pannella make a big deal of me as a person – they are totally uninterested in issues of pentitismo or the emergency legislation. For both of them the interview serves as a way of accusing me. Given the conditions, I think I did well. Today was perhaps the last time I shall meet with the Guru. He seems to realize that he’s come out of this adventure with a bloody nose. Today’s interview has been important for me. It opens a new phase, marking my definitive abandonment of the parliamentary adventure. I am restarting from the bottom, rebuilding a serious political discourse. I am beginning to get a sense of its dimensions and subjects. I shall write about this shortly. The most important thing today has been that the irrational and rancorous element, present in my departure from Italy, is beginning to pass. And at the same time the elements of rationality in my choice seem to me increasingly obvious and clear. How could anyone ever willingly involve themselves in those worlds that I have traversed? The world of the law courts, politicians and the media, with all their perversion. Certainly it was not tiredness that exhausted my desire for any of this; and it was not frustration, either. Indeed I think that I have behaved well. It is a fact: beyond the malevolence, slanders and provocations of the media, I managed to pull in a majority in my favour. If it had not been for the cowardice of the Guru and his political stunt … But when all is said and done, it is the vulgarity, the cheapness, the provincialism, the small-mindedness of those worlds that makes me so angry. What saves me is the fact that I can rise above it all. I shall never be able to respect Biagi’s posturings and his cheap emotionality. I find myself thinking that I would like to live in a world which accords with his sentiments. In Japan, in fact. Then, with the Bolognese bonhomie that is customary in those parts, I could send him a noose to strangle himself with, or a sword for him to commit hara-kiri. I cannot stand parasites. I have traversed a world in which not only pity is dead, but imagination too. What would a man like Pannella be without the endless repetition of these rites, which are accountable to nobody? What would Biagi be if he could not shed tears for his mother and transform tawdry emotionality into fat cheques? (Orsay – 29 September)
Folio 106
The discussions with friends and comrades here are getting heavy. They are trying to force me into drastic choices. They lead me to understand that my chances of staying in France depend on my deciding not to do politics any more. ‘You’ll be an intellectual,’ they say, ‘you’re capable of it.’ Meantime operations have begun to get me nominated to the council of the Collège International de Philosophie. That will provide a cover, and also a possibility of work. But no more politics. I reply jokingly that the ‘either–or’ [aut–aut] is a level of metaphysics, whereas for my part – as always – I prefer the ‘and–and’ [et–et]. I don’t think that it will be possible to impose very general criteria on my experience of life. Let us leave open the question of possible reconstructions of political discourse. They are pressing me, and giving me a sense of the dangers in store. This evening I received a dramatic proposal from the French government – to go to Algeria, where I would be protected. I said no. It seems that the It
alians are applying massive pressure, supported by that old para-Berlinguerian Martinet, the French ambassador in Rome. Negri is on his own – that is the message from Biagi, as repeated by Pannella, and then by Gilles Martinet too – and by Marcelle Padovani as spokesperson for the former. So this is the moment of attack. But I am not on my own. I think I have succeeded in making this clear to the comrades here, who are too jaded to want to believe it. I am indeed defended here. I am not alone. I am defended by a tradition of asylum and by a practice which is part of the material constitution of this state and of the libertarian beliefs of certain important socialists in the government. But, above all, I am not alone because I am moving in the context of a political and social situation in Italy of which I am completely a part. It is true that I have to succeed in changing my life, but this must mean transforming my removal of myself from Italy into a long-term victory. Certainly the situation is hard. But it will not be that way for ever. The suspended state in which I live today is the suspension of political struggle in the current political, social and economic structures of this Europe of ours. But behind this suspension there is the growth of the communist community. The solitude of this genesis and of this perception does not negate the reality of it. I am within that solitude. All their machines, their justice, their politics, have hit the buffers. The ugly irrationality of their violence is met with silence. But for how long? This blockage of reason and expression will inevitably bring about a radical change, an innovative break. Never has there been such a blatant need for a new politics and a new system of justice. I have very little to say about anything else, almost nothing in fact. I think only that the reason of the masses, the intelligence of the community, will express newness. Radical newness. That which is currently mute will express itself by rising up. It has to happen. There is an ethics which I feel to be growing beyond the conditions of oppression in which this world organizes itself. The crisis of the crisis-state has no possibility of finding a resolution, except through an enormous revolution of the means of mass participation in power. We have an experience of this desire: the crisis of all the nomenclatures of the state and of its very form – the state cannot be confronted and transcended other than through the recomposition of the will for revolution. This revolution which is silent, but which nonetheless constitutes the ethical grounding of the singularities. The only obstacle to participating in the development of the new ontology lies in the fact that I am old. During the past few days I have felt old age creeping up like a marshy tide – my body tried, once, twice, many times, to get out. But each time it just fell in deeper. It was difficult to move. I licked the surface of the marsh, thinking that it was human skin. I allowed myself to be carried on my back by the water, hoping that a wave would not overturn me. My wonderment, my amazement at the new vital expressions of being, my passion at its renewal – I find these things lacking in me. But old age can be serenity – and it is not to be confused with death. No, Rossana, no – I too fear a tumour growing inside me, but this ageing, this exhaustion of the animal spirits, I cannot say that this is death and, with that, say that it is the justification of the sickness organically existing in our current institutions. No, I do not think that the idea of death is rational. When we used to say (as the comrades continue to say in court) that we are for life and not for death, we believed, naïvely, that the phrase was acceptable. Correctly, from their point of view, the judges replied by saying that we are extremists. So: is it the case that the only realist is the person who sees death as being indissolubly connected with life? And therefore the stink of death that stagnates in our courthouses is a sign of reality? No, I don’t want to believe in, I can’t believe in, this dreary funereal ceremonial of the institutions. Here I understand the revolutionary value of Epicurean and Spinozan thought – not to think of death because when there is death there is not life, and when there is life there is not death. Even in old age I reject death. So for that reason people should not expect from me an institutional loyalty that I cannot give. There cannot be loyalty in the face of death. I claim my habeas corpus, my liberty, my life. With this I realize how much I am, and remain, a revolutionary. Down with death – this is the slogan of revolution. During the past few days, among comrades, while we await the government’s decision, we talk and talk – about this and other things. Meanwhile someone has been shuttling to and fro to the ministry. They return bringing various proposals which offer expatriation. I always refuse. Finally the word arrives that I have been granted asylum. I take the opportunity to confirm, with caution, that shortly we shall start doing politics again. To return to Italy. Emerging victorious – and sweeping away the filth of the politicians – down there. (Paris – 30 September–1 October)
Diary of an Escape Page 28