Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Folio 130

  I have been coopted as an overseas member onto the council of the Collège International de Philosophie. This decision, taken by my friends and colleagues, has made me very happy. I am well aware how little I deserve the honour. But I am young and capable of giving great commitment. I enjoy teaching. There are many things that I still have to say. Anyway, this opportunity to teach will involve me in the work, the hard work, of scientific rebuilding. The crisis of methods and models. And yet the disaster is not as deep as some people would describe it. There are too many positions hastily arrived at. As we know, time has a way of dealing with fashions. Time: this is now my philosophical theme, and I return to it often, continually. The antagonism of temporal values seems to me the only key for opening some of the doors which have been closed by the crisis of the theory of value and of Marxian ontology. In the Collège I sense a strong interest in the rebuilding of a philosophy of hope. It seems that, at last, the theories of disaster and epistemological nihilism are on the defensive – even in France, their land of choice. I do not know whether I shall manage this on the edges of being, on that terrain of pure and non-resolvable antagonism which I had constructed – to reopen a path of great ontological horizon. It is difficult. Nevertheless I want to make my contribution. Teaching is good. Memories come flooding back – the enthusiasm of my lessons in Padova, the seminars at the Institute, and then those meetings, either abroad or at other universities, where I was able to give bodily form to my thinking, speaking it aloud far more than writing it out. That profound emotion which, in discussions in class, pushes you into finding ways to be clear – almost an excavation you do into yourself, for others, driven by their need for understanding. And the spirit often trembles at the difficulties in store. Teaching is often, and can always be, a method of research. In communicating, you arrange in new ways the materials you have accumulated during your research. Darstellung, Hegel called it. But its high dignity is not accorded by the metaphysical thread which Hegel claims to unravel – rather, it is given by the intensity, by the corporality of communication. I have an incredible need to reconnect with this corporality of communication, to readjust the measures of the relationship with the real. In communicating you form concepts which criticism often does not register. Certainly, criticism is fundamental; but how can one exercise it if the concept is not constructed vividly within the complexities of communication? The years spent in prison have been a kind of intrusion, a raid into the void. Now I experience this void of communication as detritus and passivity. With a certain inertia. Teaching will force me to break the inertia and to locate myself in a living milieu. I have to have the courage to take the plunge and swim. For me, if I am to succeed in operating practically, at the political level and in life, restarting teaching is a precondition. How pleasurable is the tiredness you get from teaching! I remember the fear, the genuine tremors, which I faced during the period of my seminars on ‘Marx beyond Marx’ at Ulm. Before I went in I had to drink a Calvados. Today my uneasiness will be even greater. What I have to impose on myself is a new education of myself to begin with. Teaching demands great generosity – like a stripping bare of one’s own scientific knowledge in order to show it, and then only slowly to re-cover it with its clothing. This moment of nakedness is fundamental. It is fundamental because in teaching only a pure subjectivity can accept open dialogue and the free development of discussion. When, in 1968 and after, the professors refused this naked condition of liberty, they were not defending the substance of teaching – they were reneguing on it. Now, in the difficulties of the situation where I presently find myself, returning to teaching seems like an act of hope. (Paris – 22 November)

  Folio 131

  From the Ministry of the Interior I have been informed that it is likely that I shall be granted a residence permit in a couple of months. Really good … We shall see. Among the Parisian intellectuals whom I meet, I continue to encounter kindness and brotherly feelings. Châtelet tells me stories about the university and anecdotes about intellectuals. Old Kojève, a Hegelian ‘functionary of humanity’ – as is clear from his conversation, half musing and half sarcastic. Castoriadis colours his discussion of the problems of war with a love for humanity in revolt which reconciles you to sectarian philosophy. Humanity and liberty. With all of them I experience a rebirth of hope. Yes, here too the miseries of academic life are visible to the naked eye. But here you don’t have that courtier spirit which is the plague of Italian culture. The reference to the universal is never peaceably given; here it seems to be sought. I move with great pleasure in this world – I feel as if I have been plucked out of the destructive passions which have too often coloured my relations with academia. Memories of other friends come flooding back, in conversations that I would like to carry forward, in this anxious quest for the universal.

  Rebuilding a life in which we can demonstrate this constructive and creative tension. It should not be impossible. (Paris – 26 November)

  Folio 132

  They have bombed the restaurant run by the Milanese comrades on Boulevard Saint-Michel. That’s all we needed. I gather that they were accused of not having taken a position in favour of irreducibilism – and, on the contrary, of having distanced themselves from that position. The truth is that they had not even declared themselves in favour of dissociation. This is a really horrible thing to happen – the reminder of a horrible and persistent reality. I have broadly settled my accounts with the past – but how can I repropose the result of it in the face of this subterranean and cowardly reappearance of such ghosts? I think they may have been supported or covered by the secret services. Operations worthy of the OVRA fascist police. But saying this solves nothing – the problem remains. Ghosts from the past, flashes of violence. How to root them out of our existence and out of our history? I would like to succeed in this through a simple action of intellectual erasure. It is not possible. They keep coming back to you, like some of those ugly old songs you learned in your childhood. These kids who continue to plant bombs, they are certainly not members of any organization – they are splinters – but this is precisely what makes the whole spectacle so horrible. It is not possible to settle accounts with the past on this terrain. These ghosts can only be destroyed through a firm capacity to propose a future in political terms. Our accounts with the past cannot avoid a political debate about the future; they can be settled only through the opening of our accounts with the future. In the state of war that dominates this world there are always going to be uncontrollable breakaway elements. The scenario we face is one of war. But a forward-looking solution implies taking these dimensions into consideration. Every thought-out new constitution has to be a constitution of war. In other words, this is a recognition that the needs of transformation have to be imposed in a dynamic of constitution of war. The problem is not paradoxical, it is realistic. It is possible to resolve it in positive terms. Only on this condition – not avoiding the war, but organizing it and controlling it socially – only on this condition is peace possible. And, within these conditions, set up a debate and a political work which will also eliminate uncontrollable splinters. Soon we shall see a resumption of terrorism in Italy. Under two forms: one of revenge terrorism, oriented against the repression, and one of international terrorism, for instance state terrorism and overdetermination of the conflict. Here in France only the second type is present – I see no reason why it should not also reach Italy. Having said this, what will enable us to intervene will be a design that is no longer simply political but also constitutional. The only way to deal with the horrible persistence of these old ghosts is a deepening of the debate and a constitutional substantialization of the project – for all of us. We have to operate a major shift in our terrain of intervention. Only a struggle on the terrain of constitution (and against the old constitution) can validate our thinking and make it possible to eliminate the ghosts of the past. On the other hand, how are we to resolve the problem posed by the existing counter-powers –
that of the corporations and of the disaggregation of the state into separate bodies? How are we to destroy the compromising physi ology of the Italian state? Our accounts with the past will be settled in the future – in the project of a new constitutional charter for political struggle – in the organization and control of war. Here we have to understand the ontological backdrop, namely the degrees of irreversibility of the Italian situation. Within the framework of a resumption of revolutionary movement, the Left has to defend liberty and the counter-powers, and not the existing constitution. The existing material constitution in our country produces terrorism. Enough of ghosts – we want hope. (Paris – 25 November)

  Folio 133

  Farewell Italy! Goodbye, old witch. Today they set free Barbone, the killer. The law of that state and its judicial corporation are exultant. It is good to be proved right, to have understood that perversion was inevitably going to triumph – but still, what sadness and what anger! Injustice has an advantage over justice: the former is always absolute, the latter always relative. The murderer and his accomplices in killing, informing and provocation have been set free. That has been decided by a legal system which a great majority of the population rejects. I literally feel like vomiting when I think about all this. Then, in the next days, these vampires will be transferred to Rome, to spew their infamies over my comrades and myself. Barbone, Morandi, Ricciardi, the more the merrier … When this trial began, I wanted, whatever the cost, to attempt a strong negotiation of this difficult path of justice. It would have been a struggle, but I was committed to it. But now everything in me is in revolt against that – against our intention – and mine – to seek justice. What we have here is a festival of infamy! My anger is accompanied by feelings of nausea. We have a long road ahead of us before we can get out of the desert. Apart from anything else, it is inevitable that, in the conditions brought about by the Milan sentencing, the so-called armed struggle – in fact simply a series of killings and revenge crimes, now devoid of any strategic project – will resume. In the sentencing, the punishments are very heavy. It is inevitable that desperation will breed further acts of desperation. Justice no longer exists when it lives only in the last resort, as an ultimate refuge of constitutional illusion. I don’t want to make improper comparisons, I am only addressing the problem of the conditions of consciousness at the outer limits: on this last edge of the desperate reaffirmation of a social and constitutional action, what difference is there between a Spataro and the last volleys of Salò? Goodbye, Italy. Goodbye to any hope of justice that your land might ever produce. Only a very deep-rooted constitutional change will make it possible for liberty and hope to flower again chez nous. I don’t think that illusions are possible here. We have to destroy everything in order to be able to renew. People are calling for an end to all this. I watch in anger the delay in the comrades’ initiative – they should have been ready for the upsurge of contempt for low-life pentiti and murderers such as Barboni, and ready to construct, on the basis of these elements, the destruction of the whole system of emergency legislation. Instead, small delays in forward thinking have combined with big illusions, to prevent this much-needed response. Not only is Italy’s temple devoid of metaphysics, it is also full of shit. Tomorrow, I am sure, all the newspapers, as interpreters of public opinion, will protest against this incredible sentence; but, pharisaically, they will make a distinction between the law on the pentiti (which they will support) and the excesses occurring in its application! I am sure this is the way things will happen. And the intellectuals, now capable of swallowing everything, will protest – not too much … adelante con juicio – and that will be an end of it. The comrades placed in prison through the infamies of Barbone will remain there. An accommodation with injustice is part of the mindset of the petty bourgeois and of the sentimental and intellectual sphere of the Italic intellectual. And yet the falseness of the pentito, the dirty games played around him and around his family, the role of the PCI in this whole business, the dark manipulations of memory and mystification, the partiality, the stage management of the statements made by the pentiti – all this has been crystal clear in our trial. They have given him his freedom (and, before that, the licence to kill), in return for his denouncing Rosso and substituting for Fioroni in the accusations against us. Why can justice not be done? Because there is no justice outside of revolution. We want independent judges, judges who are free. Only a big transformation can produce them. Each movement of the Italian justice system is like the flowing of a giant sewer. How will it ever be possible to block its disastrous effects? This peaceful radical change that we have to set in motion in order to succeed in all this – I can imagine it, but we are not succeeding in programming it. I promise, however, that I shall devote myself to this with all my energies. Do not tremble, Italy, you old witch, we are all sure that nothing will change. Unless … but more of this another time. For the moment, may only shit fall upon you – shit to the point of suffocating you, my dear red-white-and-green Italy. But other than that – and forever – long live Paolo Rossi! (Paris – 28 November)

  Folio 134

  Anaximander: ‘The things that are perish into the things out of which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice, in accordance with the ordering of time.’ It is not true. The history of mankind is a history of liberation. It has been improper, criminal, to superimpose onto the history of liberation the business of progress. Liberation is progressive; progress is not in itself liberating. It is not true that the things born and produced bow before the revenge of time, which annuls everything. We inherit and produce liberation. The idea of the eternal return is a myth and a reactionary ideology. Death to the reactionaries and freedom for the peoples! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, les aristocrates à la lanterne! Time moves within injustice; ontology forms against injustice. Only that which is alive has continued life. Liberation is not antagonistic law – or it is not only that. It is a dimension, the only progressive dimension of being. The obstacle is reduced to transparency. No, it is not Fioroni, Peci, Barbone and Savasta who produce the history of this Italic people of ours – no, these are monstrous superfoetations, symbols of the current material constitution, just as the Savoy monarchy and the republic of Mussolini were. No, the history of consciousness and ontology in Italy are phases of a process of liberation. A history of struggles, of vital enthusiasms, of great theoretical and practical anticipations. I have lived this great experience – I have no regrets for it. Far from it. When I look at them from near or far, these experiences seem to me to be enormous. A liberation that has traversed people’s consciousnesses like a strong wind across the valleys.

  It is only a question of months or years. It is impossible that we shall not see an avalanche of destruction of the old and the construction of a new landscape. The horizon is already there for the new. Today several tens of thousands of people marched through Paris. They were headed by second-generation Arabs who were protesting against racism, and to that end had organized a march from Marseilles to Paris. Now, the triumph of the march. A new labour power, a new political composition, an allusion to the future. It’s hard to say exactly what I felt when I saw those people marching. A jumble of perceptions. But one overriding feeling – that the flowers of liberation are here, blossoming everywhere, mature and strong. They are still in their beginnings, but a mature force is preparing their explosion when the time comes. I live in restrained conditions of liberty – yet I have never felt so strongly the power of this clandestinity, so to speak. The clandestinity of the seedling sprouting beneath the snow, of the seed in its husk. Liberation is a state of the soul. We are discovering with horrible concreteness the channels of the new exploitation and of the restructured domination. Fear as humour, anger and sarcasm as rational denunciation, and a reproposition of hope: these mark us out as supermen. A collective superhumanity. A potentially realized degree of liberation. We really do not need to go back to Lenin’s ‘What I
s to Be Done?’ to point to ways of revolution. In those days, it was a little compact group of people who went hand in hand down the paths of revolt; here, instead, it is a whole world that can no longer abide its Time. This is the infinite, incredible force which we have to take from potential to action – to the action of radical change and hope. Today, following the march of the beurs, I was looking at the people’s faces: serious old communist skilled workers and young smiling Arabs, bearded ’68-ers and young whiter-than-white technicians, manual labour and intellectual labour – a new race, but really abstract and polyvalent, the only ones gifted with revolutionary imagination. The ‘mutant’. Papageno. And my thoughts went back to our own struggles from ’67 to ’77 and to the incredible substrate of hope that underpinned them. Let us break the frozen earth, let us complete our crossing of the desert. The obstacles are becoming ever more transparent. The perversion is madness and dispersion: we can fight this perverse power. We can oppose the Time of power with a Time of hope. There is the strength to do it. Today they were tens and tens of thousands. It was the entry of the chosen people into Palestine. This diaspora of ours, in the clutches of the Time of repression, is at an end. The Messiah has already appeared – all we need to do is to realize, realistically and potently, his prophetic potentiality. In ordinary terms, we have this already; in ordinary terms, let us unveil it. We are all Peters, and on this rock we shall build freedom. (Paris – 29 November)