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I am working on Leopardi again. I have written several letters to Italy. I have resumed contacts with the German comrades. I am beginning to draw on the affective relations that surround me. You get over the tiredness of separation and isolation also, and above all, by re-learning a real tiredness of the body, and by re-establishing a balance between affects and reason. The sweetness of life is not an extra, but a stimulus and a colouring of rational consciousness. Work and freedom can go hand in hand. I have to arrive at a criticism of myself, of the quantity of mechanical that there is in my existence and my thinking. Prison and the prison community have been an excellent propaedeutic in all this. But only in one respect; the necessities of preparing our defence, the fact of being in the basements of the Palace, the urgencies of material reproduction have instead boosted the inhuman characteristics of the spirit. These have to be eliminated. Every homology with power has to be removed from the spirit, and every residue scraped away. This is a fundamental presupposition in the methodology and epistemology of rational rebellion. I have to define at the earliest possible opportunity a form of analysis of myself. Freud would be a good place to start. (Paris – 11 October)
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Le Monde of 11 October carries a strange article, rather weird in fact. There is a Libyan whom the Italians accuse of being a murderer – do the Italians want him extradited or do they not? Le Monde claims that they don’t want him extradited because it would cause too many problems with Libya, and this leads them to expect that the extradition documents will not arrive. (NB Additional note of 13 October. The Italians did not send the necessary documents, and the Libyan has been released from detention by the French.) But then, Le Monde adds, why is it that this Italian justice system, which is so concerned with political relations – to the extent of dropping the extradition of a multi-murderer defended by Gaddafi– why is it that this same system has it in for Negri, who is certainly not an international killer? Obviously for internal reasons that cannot be stated publicly. Therefore, Le Monde concludes, necessary caution on the part of the state and the republican tradition of liberty would suggest that Negri should not be handed over. The article made rather an impression on me. While I am happy to know that an authoritative newspaper thinks that I should not be extradited, I am a bit surprised – unpleasantly so, very unpleasantly – to find myself being a commodity in these kinds of international bargainings. My friends, and various functionaries and lawyers whom I see, are all happy. They tell me that they had warned me about this internationalization of my case, since – given that I am a member of Parliament – I am a bit of Italian sovereignty transported abroad. I don’t recall the reference, nor do I appreciate it. I am extremely puzzled. Should I perhaps accustom myself to living with this kind of risk? A continuous, unknown and destructive gamble? No, my friends tell me. Given that the political nature of the case has been recognized (as indeed seems to have happened), it is obvious that you have been granted an informal right of asylum. All right, that may be so – but I am still puzzled. This is the least I can say. Meanwhile news arrives from Italy of a sixth charge having been raised against me – this time for the killing of Alceste Campanile (following the fifth one, for the revolt at Trani, and the other four already discussed and accepted). When will they finish coming? Will there also be a seventh set of charges, as seems to be promised in Barbone’s statements and in Spataro’s obscene persecutory mania, for the Custrà killing? The number seven seems to have an irresistible appeal for the judges in my trials. They have been seized by a will to destroy, a maniacal repetition of a deep political hatred, which is accompanied by resentment towards the fact that I have often demonstrated the falsity of their evidence. This maniacal persecution has become a structural element of the 7 April case. I remember the teachings of my old professor Opocher: justice as the ascertainment of truth, as judgement, as a process of trial. My dear teacher, much as I respect your utopia – and it saddens me to say so – this is really not the way things are. Instead we have justice as a machine, as a dehumanizing structure, as a process without a subject! Unless it is, as in my case, pure and simple vendetta. Without even that modicum of solidity and blood that there is in real vendettas. I am experiencing here the vendetta of a corporation. The only element of dignity that there is in my case, apart from my suffering and my rebellion, consists in this extreme and exemplary dehumanization of justice – this is perhaps the most specific characteristic of the Italian crisis, and its revelation and denunciation are therefore an expression of theoretical dignity. However, I derive no pleasure from putting on this medal of representation. Just as I am not amused to find myself treated as a commodity in international transactions. I wonder whether I might end up being exchanged on the European market for a few barrels of south Italian wine or a delivery of Danish butter. Bah! Anyway, during these days, less than a month after my arrival, I have a clear sense that progress has been made in my situation here. My presence here has been accepted as a political presence. This means that I have substantial, albeit limited, guarantees of freedom. So now to work. Rebuilding, rebuilding conditions of liberty and communism, with a maximum of strength and intelligence. It is time to begin. (Paris – 12–13 October)
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I see from the newspapers that Pertini too, the voice of the people, has said that Toni Negri has acted unworthily! I am sorry that our fine president did not take this splendid opportunity to remain silent – but then this was the man who signed the laws on preventive detention and pentitismo, even though he pretends to have forgotten this. And, for my part, I cannot forget his congratulatory telegram to Calogero on 7 April 1979. Nor do I thank him for having publicly admitted that the telegram was a mistake – after two years during which I had been desperately defending myself and affirming the truth of the matter. Anyway, the fact that Pertini expresses himself in these terms is a sign that the balance of forces has changed.
Institutional unanimity – because this is what we are talking about – is particularly dangerous when it is exhibited by policemen and judges. The law and its execution should never exhibit signs of unanimism. Today I saw Blade Runner, the first film I’ve seen since I came out of prison. The protagonist is a state killer, and, as he hunts down the ‘mutants’, he gathers and applies the unanimity of humanity’s interest in the preservation of the species. I feel myself to be a ‘mutant’ here – and in any event I fear this fierce and deadly struggle into which I am forced. I converse with my ghosts – why, despite everything, do I continue with the struggle? And what is this profound memory of rebellion and of refusal, which I feel that I interpret faithfully? Sometimes I fear madness in my pursuit of this ancient dream of transformation. Recently I have been re-reading Hölderlin. How enlightened humanism can be! An enormous difference from the thought of dialectics and of the ‘general class’, of the bureaucracy and the institution, which little brother Hegel achieves. Hegel understood and served unanimism. Hölderlin lives the ancient phantasm of freedom and revolution. Why do these ghosts always seem to be ancient? Why this enervation of the world? Only reason sustains me – but it is an optimistic reason. A delightful afternoon today – not even Pertini can spoil it for me. It is raining on and off, a typical Parisian autumn day. From the window of the apartment where I am now living I have a fine picture-postcard view of the Pantheon. At night its dome is a glowing presence in the orderly and jumbled accumulation of Parisian rooftops. I talk to the ghosts of freedom and revolution that have illuminated the nights of Paris. It all continues, and will always continue, until the liberation of all becomes a reality. Why is it that the ‘mutant’ carries within himself this most ancient dream, which humanity holds dear? Why is it that this business of ontological repetitions is always so amazingly new? Today I also meet with the band of economists. All excellent people – and in this period, in their attempts to trace the causes of the crisis, they too are involved in discussions with their historical ghosts. In the fever of liberty we fin
d common cause. (Paris – 14 October)
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How hard it is to return to life after these four years of imprisonment and two months of institutional bail. And particularly at this difficult moment, when I am pursued by the dogs of repression! But I know I’ll manage it and my work will gradually become productive and collective. Certainly, for now, the landscape is not like that – endless flight, weariness, conflict in my consciousness. I am studying Leopardi and re-reading Roth – in both of them flight becomes a source of knowledge. This has nothing to do with romanticism in its exoticist or ‘beat’ traditions – for me, in this act of fleeing there is imagination and contact with the future. I live and feel the future as something that I am beginning to possess. My hope is the only thing I own (plus, as of today, I have a good winter jacket). Revolution means conferring validity to hope. From tomorrow I’ll start to see the French comrades regularly, to discuss politics. Our central topic is the shifting of all the terms of the debate and political propositions of the past few years, a shift that has taken place on the ground and now has to be grasped by the political project. Here in France the victory of the Left in 1981 threw everyone slightly into disarray, closing the dialectic of the positions around the need to hold on to power at all costs. From what I understand, the interest has shifted away from playing dynamically with contradictions in order to excite reformism; it has moved to the problems of restructuring, as they relate to the preservation of the welfare system and to the maintenance of consensus. The modifications in the composition of the proletariat are huge, and this is where we need to do analytical work. A crisis of the methods and parameters of research.
The problem is how to give a dynamic representation of these contradictions within a political framework. We do not see clearly the possibility of a vertical rupture – rather, we have the possibility of many forward-moving, transversal ruptures. The Left’s critique of power is that it does not grasp in an open fashion this system of small break-points and has no desire to carry it forward. The Right is counterattacking – it is very strong. It plays very astutely the transformation of the general picture of things, inserting itself into every little fracture and heightening its corporative character. The Left in power seems entirely incapable of finding itself in this new framework, armed with a reformism of some vigour. The shadings of the situation are rather obscure. Reading the newspapers and comparing those of the Right with those of the Left, one has the impression of a civil war under way, because (particularly from the Right) the attack is ideologically hard and insistent. But in reality this is only smoke. Actually the whole political situation is folded back onto itself. And sometimes it seems that, through all the polemic, the Right is convinced that it will soon be back in power and it applies pressure on the government to get it to resolve the most important problems. Particularly the dirty business of the big restructuring and the creation of mass unemployment in the traditional factory and industrial sector. What a difference between today and 1978, the last big struggles in the steel industry of Lorraine! At that time there was a real hope of being able to create a coordination between different class sectors. Today the analysis is blocked – many comrades seem to believe that it is no longer possible to do analysis. But it is obvious that, without a deepening of analysis, there will be no political shift. Because such a shift can only take place through the identification of new subjects of political development. New social subjects. Who are they? The discussion is not moving very far in terms of identifying them; here too, as in Italy but in different forms, the vectors of the formation of wealth and those of exploitation pass increasingly through the levels of the tertiary sector, science, and informatic innovation of the social. Within the labour movement insufficient attention has been paid to all this. There is a complete lack of agitation on this question. Our discussions will go forward on this terrain. We shall see. The fundamental problem, however, is that of method.
PS News arrives that a young member of Prima Linea got himself killed during a ‘hold-up’ here in Paris. It is very sad to hear of the death and desperation and loneliness of this boy. And it is terribly bad news, this reappearance, wild and isolated, of terrorism! Here, apart from anything else, it could create a very, very dangerous situation – both for the absolutely peaceful colony of Italian political emigrés, and also for my own position. Furthermore, I do not see how these residues of terrorism all’italiana, now deprived of a base, are going to be able to reorganize themselves, except on an international, inter-state basis. And this makes things even more complicated. (Paris – 16 October)
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During the past few days I have seen various other old friends, social scientists and economists. I saw Benjamin – I continue to be fascinated by his narrative about the OS, the mass worker on the assembly line. He tells very fine stories of struggles. But the situation is certainly not such that you can construct a linear interpretation of reality on the basis of those struggles. I also saw Félix again, and he proposed that I start working for the Collège on the theme of the ‘production of subjectivity’. To see how the juridical–statal mechanisms have appropriated this production – to the extent of monopolizing it – and how the alternative spaces, ignored and repressed, find no way of expressing themselves except through war. I see Virilio, who further emphasizes this expropriation of the possibilities of struggle and of its multipliers of the speed of antagonisms and of war. How to emerge, scientifically, from this impasse of an objectivity that is too powerful? As for the pure economists, they defend themselves from this kind of propositional impotence by returning to the origins of their science, to try to find keys for a re-reading of the present – with a very advanced disciplinarization of their research.
The only openings are in the field of philosophy. Yes. And here there are both a limit and a hard thickness, traditional in some respects, but incremented by the crisis – the seeking after an epistemology which, since it is no longer able to transform, now tends to consolidate itself on the transcendental terrain. Even Thom comes to be translated in transcendental terms! I find many Kantian elements in the course of discussions, and increasingly I have a sense that this current is making headway. Critical Marxism seems to me to have been completely eaten up by this generation of researchers and social scientists. I see Jean-Paul. He tells me frankly that he is absolutely convinced of this fact – at the level of research. For that reason he has decided to become a grand commis of the state – he is working like crazy, in the universe of the possible, he tells me – having set to one side a passion for science which he felt was becoming sterile, in order to try to gain knowledge through practice. It is strange, but he communicates a lot of vitality to me. I think over and over about all the themes that have been transmitted to me. I think of my scientific production in prison – Il comunismo e la guerra, Spinoza, Macchinatempo – and at the boundaries of my work, which has traversed all the themes of the crisis, arriving nonetheless at a blockage with a conception of subjectivity which is increasingly corporeal and substantialistic. I feel the need to return to Il comunismo e la guerra – one of the finest things I have written, a thoroughly open work. The Finland train, in this phase of enforced political rest, needs to have its machinery and its theoretical instruments set in order. It is evident that war and peace are becoming the background of a revival in theory. The crisis has by now expanded so as to permit us to grasp, at its sophisticated height, the elementariness of fundamental human terms. A very long discussion with Cornelius on these problems. (Paris – 18 October)
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I meet Jean-Pierre Faye. I get to know Châtelet and Derrida. Very different people, both in personal terms and in terms of their cultural and political history. But they have a great generosity and a deep and intimate understanding of the need to defend my escape, to consolidate freedom as an essential precondition for work, to do philosophy and to conquer a new freedom for all. We talk at length. With Faye – a historian and a poet, an extraordinary
sensibility for the concrete and an incredibly gentleness in touching things. With Châtelet – an old and untamed philosophical lion, who never ever confuses potency of thought with the misery of reality, and always succeeds in being a man of the future and of hope. Derrida – very sharp analytical instruments in traversing and reconstructing an Umwelt of chaos. With all of them I raise the problem of the relationship between the objective production of subjectivity and the potenza productive of the subject – that knot which we no longer know how to resolve. My self-criticism goes deep. A subjectivity that is bodily and contingent, at the limit between the eventual and the possible, is what I have been able to grasp and heighten as a function of resistance and of escape. (Just one month ago. Among the islands of the Tuscan archipelago – the haziness of Montecristo, the looming island of Elba which, like a benevolent patron, shelters us from the winds and sometimes slips in a few little gusts for fun – and then the flat nightmare landscape of Pianosa, with its penitentiary and its motorboats at anchor, a nightmare which the evening, and sleep, love and tiredness have removed. The terrible contingency of that space of liberty. But how am I to resolve this condition of contingency, for myself, and for everyone …?) I communicate my uneasiness to the friends. The quest for a hard knot of ontological hope is what I feel to be open and living in this whole environment. For the first time in the general crisis of the human sciences, philosophy does not seem to be turning to superficials, as fashionable consumption. Uneasiness with the collapse of the traditional models of knowledge and epistemology seems to be affecting everyone, in various different ways. The obstacle does not succeed in becoming transparent. And it represses us. The dislocation of theoretical knowledge and of ethical action which is happening in the crisis does not happen without us noticing it, but without us being able to contain it in any way. No point in hiding from ourselves the difficulty of the situation and all the pain it carries with it. This can be immediately felt even in this cultural world, which succeeds nevertheless in keeping the terms of the debate clear. (How I hate the dirty ambiguous and priestly mush in which the Italian debate is suffocating, even though it deals with the same problems.) The philosophical problem is thus one of setting in motion an excavation of the crisis through which we are living – an excavation carried out in accordance with its own terms, iuxta sua principia. And of redefining transparency and subjectivity in traversing the obstacle and its blind objectivity. I am reading Deleuze’s book on cinema – the image–movement. I cannot be enthusiastic about his clear-cut and precise Bergsonianism. But what a lucidity in his way of constructing, through the problem of the image, the theme of imagination and movement in the conquest of time and space! All the themes of escape, of the libertas philosophandi, are thus linking up together – and transferring themselves operationally towards the problems of practice. Never so much as now, in the traversing of the philosophical, scientific and political circles of this country which is hosting me, and which I know and love, have I felt with such urgency the proposition of re-founding. From this point of view, my escape – this fact of being like Ulysses, naked and exhausted on a deserted beach – constructs a good opportunity. (Paris – 19–20 October)
Diary of an Escape Page 30