Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Folio 126

  What we are constructing in our life is a system of values, concepts and relations. Sometimes it happens to us that the forward shifting of a value drags the whole ensemble with it to a higher level. Sometimes this does not happen. In that case we suffer the system of life as a pathology. At this moment I am experiencing the strongest ascesis that I have ever experienced – as a result of these months of huge passions and of very sincere imagination. Perhaps it is precisely the accumulation of the imaginative dimension, so repressed in prison and so suddenly liberated, which today permits me so much strength and hope. Maybe I succeed in bringing reason up to the level of the body which has been set free. There must no longer be a dilemma in living reason and body. I was thinking that I had become old, but I find that I have formidable energies. And I find that the delirium is sweetly conjoined with a capacity for balance and a strength of decision. I am working like crazy. I reiterate – in the long and subtle manner of letter-writing – an action of pressure on friends and enemies. I focus basically on the politicians. I defend my cause and my escape. This is underground work. I used to do it from prison too, and it was very fruitful. Before long, those who are denouncing me for the act of liberty which I undertook will be definitively isolated through the counterpoint of my untiring defence. There is nothing else that can be done. The comrades in prison are reproaching me for not conducting a campaign on their behalf – but it is not possible, because these foreign governments will not permit me, and because the links with Italy have collapsed after the campaign organized by the Guru and by the usual band of enemies. So the only possible solution is to find a line on which I can establish an initial relationship of power with foreign governments and re-establish links with Italy. But this means being capable of reconquering an internal equilibrium, matched to the highest level of the project, and being capable of setting in motion a maximum of animal spirits. And of bringing all our friends to this understanding of the project and to the strength of its realization. I know the technique of these radical shifts forward of the spirit. Everyone has to understand that it is only on this terrain that it is possible to achieve liberation. It is pointless to delay, and both useless and stupid to sit counting the column-inches and minutes devoted to you in the media. It is in the depths of relations of power that the situation resolves itself. How is it possible that the comrades – those in the prison community, those whose previous history and whose struggles have always been developed within this dialectic – how is it possible that they do not understand this? They will understand. I ask myself: ‘Why don’t you write to them, Toni?’ Because it is useless. Here I make no appeal to anything other than my ability to understand, in all my uncertainties, their suffering, and to know how to resolve it into an operation for freedom. This, and only this, is what we have agreed. If I do not succeed in this operation, the responsibility will be mine and mine alone. For this reason, the whole schema of values, concepts and relations which constitutes my being must be brought to a very high tension: that of liberation. Of their liberation, which is also mine. Which means the possibility of resuming political work and reconquering the political space we need – these things which have been attributed to us by the history of the struggles. With how much pride and how much commitment I feel this task! The body can be free only if all the comrades are free. The struggle will be long. I must be capable of sustaining it. Here the supports are minimal, if compared to the ends; but they are not nonexistent. We have to nurture the dimension of the struggle for liberation and fill it with a new programme. There are no alternatives to this plan. And there is no alternative to the fact that I myself assume – directly, in the first person – the weight of the work. But in order to keep it up I have to continue to rebuild myself too, and see to my wounds, and get them out of my system. Now, entering at last into a phase in which I feel my liberty to be balancing out, I can recognize the fearsome weight of the suffering of these past years. This weight has to be transformed into strength. I have to impose the imperative of liberation onto the whole system of my life. (Paris – 6 November)

  Folio 127

  The infamy of the characters in the courtroom is only a symbol of the infamy of public life in Italy as a whole. As I read the Italian newspapers, I am increasingly traumatized by what I read. It scares me how the degradation of everyday life and the barbarities of the judicial system go hand in hand. Having been educated en bon marxiste, I think sometimes that I should be more cynical in my reactions to this spectacle. But I cannot. Civil degradation and penal barbarism interweave to such an extent that you cannot get them out of your mind. It makes me want to laugh when I read moralistic journalists or high-minded judges declaring, with Protestant rigour, that our civil society and the state are shot through with Mafia and terrorism. And why not their own newspapers and their own courtrooms? In the business of ophthalmology, removing the beam is more important than seeing the mote – as someone once said who knew about these things. People often accuse me of having replaced humour with sarcasm, and they remind me that humour has an educative value – but how can one avoid falling into invective in situations such as these? A state which is founded on infamy. Law – their law – no longer has a place. I read and re-read the fierce outpourings of Leopardi on the ways of his Italy – I would like to do an edition of his writings. Ferocity is the least you can use against these clandestine gangs, which infect our society. Enough. Until large numbers of people are capable of saying ‘No’, there is no progress to be made. There is a place for moralism. Down with cynical reason and with the infamy of its articulations. Enough – in my spirit, I exit from Italy. Yesterday Patrick was telling me his theory about the suffix ‘-ship’, which expresses the idea of ‘community’ in English, or community on board. A Viking theme: government within a framework of solidarity and discipline within a framework of needs, in the physical dimension of necessity. And, on the other hand, community as the original determination of big abstract themes such as peace, liberty and wealth. This etymological theory is fascinating – community against infamy, against the perversion of the final stage (unfortunately not of capitalism, but) of this imperfect and blocked democracy, mediating and corrupt – which operates so much as a straitjacket even on capitalism itself. With Félix and with Jean-Paul I talk a lot about politics. We are essentially in agreement over the fact that the broad themes of revolutionary reconstruction – of peace and Europe, of the breaking of Yalta and of commitment to a north–south axis – are today impinging on the edges of the European social democratic movement. It is therefore towards those forces, collaborating with their project of mobilizing participation and democratic decentralization, that we might direct ourselves, with a view to a campaign for the destabilization of the existing regimes and against their perversion. The insertion of these broad political themes as an explicit force implies an accumulation of contradictions which otherwise are unsolvable. The project of ‘Lenin in England’ can still be pursued. ‘Yes to the Centre Left, No to Reformism’ was the title we gave to an issue of Classe Operaia twenty years ago, in ’63 I think. I am certainly not rediscovering the autonomy of the political here – at that time its dialectic appeared to us as an element which could permit a certain linearity of the project. Today all this has revealed itself to have been an illusion; only a radical overturning [catastrofe] can destroy the perversion of regimes that render us slaves. But the fact that dialectics is exhausted as a form of thought does not deny the allusion to an antagonistic thread of action. One can live innocently in a world of perversion. A ‘mutant’ is marked by the irreversibility, the irreducibility of the mutation which has taken place. The community is a republic of ‘mutants’. So why should we fear a relationship with the great European social democracies? They are no better off than we are, and radical overturning is looming over them in the same way it has hit us. It will not be impossible to shift the debate from ideological trifles to the level of great denunciations, of great choices – the proble
m is posed only at the point where the possibility of this shift becomes actual. Community against perversion. I feel the political project to be growing. I am looking forward to meeting many friends, and the German comrades. It needs to be destroyed, it needs to be blown up, and then the terrain needs to be purged … it needs to be annihilated, that horrible Italian sewer, the antique symbol of a power which eternally renews the same old stereotypes. Damned Italy – the Italy of the judges, the sullenly filthy Italy of the prisons, perfidy and perversion. I would like to throttle you all with my own hands. But it is better to have the long work of reason and the torture that history and its radical changes impose on these people of infamy. The political line is disputed, over the radical overturning [catastrofe], between the capitalist reformism of the social democracies and the proletarian pressure against any law of so-called equilibrium at world level. It is played out on radical change, on the limit between reformism–restructuring and the new force of abstract labour power, on the reversal of the major axes of world development. The political line is played out on an overthrowing of you, you heinous and perverse torturers, and of your demented bestiality. (Paris – 10 November)

  Folio 128

  There is one thing in this whole business I am going through, something not fundamental, but for which (to put it mildly) I find it hard to forgive many comrades. This is the fact of their not considering – or of isolating, not mentioning and devaluing – the enormous investment that Paola has put into the 7 April case, both politically and personally. The trial, indeed our whole situation, would not have been what they are without her presence and commitment. A woman, a wife, a mother and an intellectual who, with enormous effort, has become an exceptional political figure. To the extent that she has become utterly political, people might say that she has been recognized as such – the political terrain does not offer gratitude, and each of us is repaid by the work they have done. To this I reply: true, were it not for the fact that in our case the political has been the human – Paola’s political investment, her personal power, was the charge of humanity and hope that managed to pass through the prison gates and gave us life inside. Nobody, after my decision to escape, has been willing to recognize this extraordinary human wealth in the huge work done by Paola. For everyone, she has become purely and simply a wife – the wife of the fugitive. I don’t want to accuse anyone in particular. I just want to accuse the political syndrome of cynicism, politics as such, including that of our friends and comrades; its temptation and its capacity to annul the human and to disaggregate every true ethical investment. Apart from anything else it is stupid … I saw Paola today. Her conversation oscillated between ethical commitment to the continuation of the struggle and disappointment, extreme tiredness and feeling of the weight of our separation. But there is enough energy left in her to make her raise the question of my return to Italy. She tells me: ‘As far as the media are concerned you are now seen as an exile, for ever. The court will sanction your defeat, both political and personal. But this is not true. Negri will return to Italy. The battle is not over, neither at the political level nor in the courtroom.’ She makes this point extremely passionately. She is right. I have the impression that she sees me as a child, to be protected and loved independently of myself – her maternal instinct has become a great political force. So maybe from now on our relationship is a bit incestuous, Paola? It won’t be, if we both entrust ourselves to the inspiration of love – to the freedom which comes from desire, to this rebirth of feelings of love and to its passion – newly invented by the long purgatory of prison. No holding on. No possessiveness. But a love, a great love that extends over the whole of our life and opens itself to the comrades, and is able to nourish itself with the abstraction of politics and the dream of revolution. Our children, Paola, are all of this. Our life, Paola, is the sweetness of a project, of an intellectual and abstract project that has succeeded … Today Anna, my daughter, arrived. She is pure Lombard sweetness – our origins, re-found – along with an intelligence and an amazing desire for life. With touches of egotism. She should not. She knows that. The game is entirely within these tensions, which we have to understand before quitting it. I experience a certain world-weariness when I see Anna – she is too beautiful for my mediocre desire of living to be up to the task of handling the provocation of her force of life. But it is in this that I renew my nostalgia for struggle and my need to pull myself up – up to their highest limits. We have the possibility of giving back to the world that youth which, in the struggle and in prison, we rediscovered as a heritage in all of us, as revolutionaries. The revolution has already happened, and I rediscover it fully and actually in the smiles of my children … Yes, Paola, I shall return to Italy … we shall return … and soon. (Paris – 13 November)

  Folio 129

  The tragedy of the 7 April trial in Rome continues, with cowardly behaviour on all sides. The president of the court does what he likes. Even the worm Tarsitano has found new courage. At least under Nazism there was the advantage that the trials were shorter. The traditional defenders, those of the ‘lobby’, say that they are overcome with a serious sense of guilt over my flight. Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will: they want good solid objects over which they can emote, these gentlemen! A sadism of pity, Petroniuses of penal judgement! What a disgrace! Such a court should be rejected out of hand. They are allowed to accuse me and my comrades of horrible crimes, and to launch infamies against comrades who have displayed a determined moral consistency in the courtroom of the Fascist Forum! No. The court’s rejection of the proposal for house arrest (which the comrades have been calling for, for the past five years of their imprisonment) was inevitable. I have a huge bitterness about this. How is it that they are able to renew this monstrous strategy of insults and unwillingness to hear us, this juridical policy of ‘everything as normal’ within a mechanism which continuously overloads us with injustice and prejudice? Why this naïvety? If it is deliberately created it is even worse than pure stupidity. Today Rossana is taking a solid position in favour of a political solution to the Years of Lead, against the hypocritical and impossible proposal of an amnesty. A political solution for the restoration of a state based on right. But what forces does she have behind her? What possibility of really having an effect? I don’t see how the problem can be solved. All the signs are pointing the other way. The Historic Compromise is again belching out its old stuff and trying to pass it for new. Firmness and the hard line are not only an ideology but a vice. Any political solution requires a force behind it – where is it? And will there ever be a force without a denunciation of the perversions of this trial and this regime? We have traversed it, this regime, from left to right, and viceversa. We have recognized all its contradictions, and we have gone into all the holes of this particular cheese – really like worms. But why theorize this traversing as the exclusion of the construction of a new force? As Ginzburg’s miller teaches us, both worms and angels can dig into the cheese. Why does the pessimism of the intellect always want us as worms? Certainly this trial was born badly – it was constructed in the national unanimity of the Historic Compromise; and, for the best part of two out of the four years of the initial phase, we, from prison, saw no friends who were willing to lift their heads above the parapet and into the line of fire. Now our friends are murmuring that we have to be careful. Again. All right, we are cautious in practical terms; but why, for what reason, should we be cowardly in intellectual terms? How can we think, even minimally, that it will be possible to free the comrades outside of a political and civil movement that destroys the elements of structural perversion of Italian justice and of the Italian regime? I propose an outright onslaught on the court. I find myself facing a thousand articulations of prudence. But why so much cowardice? Why so much pessimism of the intellect? I see them here in France, the social democratic friends of our civil rights lobby, ruining the fruits of a tremendous victory and an exceptional state of grace through their absolute lack of liberat
ing and political imagination. On our side the level is lower, but precisely for that reason it should permit a somewhat higher excitation of the will. And instead we have ruin. The trial is ploughing ahead and the execution squad is getting prepared. The court is a manipulated process and a guaranteed outcome. We have to fight back against this fearsome ferocity. At mass level, and in terms of hope. May this regime of torturers end its days in ruin and dishonour. But what is astonishing is the fact that people who are aware of all this, and who should be looking for new lines of attack, take refuge instead in alibis and despair. Why are the voices of freedom among us so few and so timid? Why is it that hope does not succeed in crying aloud? We find ourselves with oppositions that are simply oppositions of, and not against, the regime. The cruelty of the emergency laws is experienced as a necessity to be nibbled at, not denounced in its entirety. The tragedy of the Rome chapter of the 7 April trial, the horrible farce of injustice, is continuing. It makes me sick to think of it. It fills me with disgust when I see those faces. Not even sarcasm is possible any longer. I nurture a political dream of the destruction of these butchers and of the pleasure of bringing about this reality in practical terms. (Paris – 16 November)