Diary of an Escape E-Book

Antonio Negri

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 597

Beschreibung

n Many people across the world know Antonio Negri as an internationally renowned political thinker whose book, Empire, co-authored with Michael Hardt, is an international bestseller. Much less well known is the fact that, up until 1979, Negri was a university professor teaching in Paris and Padova. On April 7th, 1979 he was arrested, charged with the murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro, accused of 17 other murders, of being the head of the Red Brigades and of fomenting insurrection against the state. He has since been absolved of all these accusations, but thanks to the emergency laws in Italy at the time, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Then, in July 1983, he was elected as a member of parliament, which meant that he was released from prison after four and a half years of preventive detention. After months of debate, the Lower House decided to strip him of his parliamentary immunity D by 300 votes in favour and 293 against. At that point he left Italy for exile in France where he remained until 1997 and continued to maintain his innocence of all the crimes of which he was accused. This book is Negri's diary in which he tells of his imprisonment, trial, the elections, and his escape to and exile in France. Both personal and political, it recounts a little known aspect of Negri's life and will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the work of this enormously influential political thinker.

Leseprobe

Diary of an Escape

For Paola

Diary of an Escape

Antonio Negri

Translated by Ed Emery

polity

Published in French as L’Italie rouge et noire, 1985 and in Italian as Diario di un’evasione, 1986. Copyright © Antonio Negri, 1985. This translation copyright © Polity Press, 2010.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2010

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-8179-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Index by Ed Emery

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Abbreviations

Author’s Introduction

1   The Trial (24 February to 24 May 1983)

2   Self-Defence in Court (25 May to 8 July 1983)

3   In Parliament (9 July to 18 September 1983)

4   Freedom (19 September to 30 November 1983)

Appendix: quotations and translated phrases

Index

Abbreviations

API

The ‘beer’ – Red Brigaders in Trané prison

BR

Brigate Rosse/The Red Brigades (Marxist–Leninist militant group founded in 1970 and broken up in 1980)

CSM

Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura/The Superior Council of Magistracy (self-governing constitutional body in civil and criminal matters)

DIGOS

Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali/ The Division of General Investigations and Special Operations (law enforcement agency charged with the investigation of organized crime and terrorism)

FLM

Federazione Lavoratori Metalmeccanici/Metalworkers’ Union (trade union federation formed in 1973)

GAP

Gruppi di Azione Partigiana/Partisan Action Groups (Italian terrorist group founded by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1970)

OCC

organizzazioni comuniste combattenti/communist combatant organizations

OS

ouvrier spécialisé

OVRA

Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo/The Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Antifascism (Mussolini’s secret police, founded in 1927)

PCI

Partito Comunista Italiano/The Italian Communist Party (founded in 1921, outlawed during the Fascist regime and re-founded in 1943)

PdUP

Partito di Unità Proletaria/The Proletarian Unity Party (party of the extreme Left, founded in 1972)

UCC

Unione dei Comunisti Combattenti/The Union of Combatant Communists, or Red Brigades–UCC (one of the two factions into which the Red Brigades split in 1984)

UNURI

Unione Nazionale Universitaria Rappresentativa Italiana/ The Italian National Representative Union of Universities (organ representing Italian students, 1948–68)

Author’s Introduction

As the dates show, this diary was finished about two years ago. Immediately, a major Italian publishing house asked me if they could publish it. The publishing house was in receivership at the time, which meant that an independent editor had space to distance himself from the cowardliness of the majority. However, the publisher had hardly emerged from receivership when the new owners cancelled my contract. And, as if that was not enough, they also began attacking me and slandering me through the publisher’s own daily and weekly newspapers. Since then things have gone from bad to worse, to the point where I had the pleasure of reading in Corriere della Sera a few weeks ago that, in the name of freedom of the press, my books should not be published at all! It does not surprise me to see journalists rallying to the cause of censorship, given that, in the name of defending the institutions, they are already prepared to be the servants of new fascist entities, lodges and corporations. I am proud of having obliged them to censor me, these same people who not so many years ago thought that they had succeeded in burying me beneath kilometres of lead, and who had accused me of being the assassin of the Republic – and then, when I was found to be innocent, reported the fact in a couple of column inches and forgot about it. Like hypocritical dogs who shit on the pavement and then make to bury it with a couple of paw strokes. At that point a major French publisher broke this united front of silence and dishonour and went ahead and published the volume. I thank him, and here I would also like to thank the people who, amid extraordinary difficulties and with great generosity, are now publishing this diary in Italian. They are showing once again that chez nous, that liberty which is detested and crushed by the state and by the big institutions, is nurtured and defended and given a high social value by ever-new figures and ever more intelligent subjects.

I wrote this diary to tell the truth about what was happening to me. Four years of preventive imprisonment, followed by election to Parliament and then by the experience, made in corpore vili [‘on a body of no value’] – my own, in this instance – of the cruelty of the special laws and of the ‘truth’ of the pentiti [members of armed organizations who ‘recant’, collaborate with the authorities and receive state protection and/or a reduced sentence in return. Gradually two themes became central: my lack of any kind of confidence in the magistracy and the political class; and my declaration of innocence, hence my right to escape. I was (and am) literally pursued by a group of magistrates (supported by a compact set of political ‘lobbies’) who have interpreted in reactionary forms the struggle of the institutions against terrorism. This interpretation has removed the right to justice, has very seriously poisoned the democratic political system, and has constructed brothels of corporative infamy within the state. So much for the general picture. As regards my own personal position, a few basic facts will suffice to show the extent to which I have fallen prey to the system’s madness. I have been accused, and must defend myself, in six separate trials, which have since become eighteen, bearing in mind the three levels involved in each trial; and now, six years after my arrest, only one and a half have been carried through. That leaves me (for the next twenty years, I imagine) with sixteen and a half trials in which I have to defend myself, find the money to pay lawyers, mobilize journalists and so on.

As for the political class: from Right to Left without exception, including what remains of the far Left – which had been backtracking politically to the point of indecency – it has accepted this degradation of the law without batting an eyelid. At least this has been the case for a long time. Now, in the course of the past two years – and particularly in recent months – there has been something of a reawakening, so that many of the accusations which I, as an innocent man and as an elected member of Parliament, bring here against these magistrates, political cliques and journalistic mafias have acquired resonance today through statements made by certain authoritative representatives of the state. Obviously this fact gives me a degree of pleasure – and it prompts me to confess (comforted by those declarations) that, if I had many doubts when I made my escape from Italy (as my diary confirms), today, when I think back, I can only thank the heavens for having inspired me to do so. If at that time I was in doubt, today I consider myself the subject of a miracle for not having let those doubts stand in the way of my escape.

An escape which has been a symbol of truth and liberty. No, ‘our only claim to eternity will not be the contents of our police files’, nor the ravings of Calogero and his like, nor the malevolence and cynical determination of the lodges! It will not be possible for the ruling class to cancel out the memory of our revolution, as they did on other occasions in Italy – for instance when, after 1870, they resorted to ferocious repression against the social movement of the revolutionary peasantry to destroy the movement for radical transformation which had traversed the Risorgimento; when they dissolved, through wars and fascism, the practice of working-class counter-power, which had accompanied the industrial revolution; or when they used restructuring, state massacres and emergency laws to crush the struggles which the exploited had opposed to the new and fierce rules of mature capitalism. No, you will not manage to cancel the memory of the 1960s and 1970s by applying the label ‘terrorism’. We are not ‘terrorists’, just as our fathers were not ‘deserters’ or our grandfathers ‘bandits’. We are stubborn people – who want, and who continue to want, from generation to generation, a radical transformation of society and a thoroughgoing political revolution. This is the reason why I published, and am now republishing, this diary – then in French, now in Italian. Because on this basis my feeling of innocence and the demand for justice which have jointly guided my action (and which are continually renewed and fed by the memory of the heroic and very sweet period of development of communist autonomy) now drive me to propose, with coherence, that I should return to Italy. Returning so as to confirm my freedom, just as they drove me to escape in order to preserve that freedom. Returning to Italy so as to resume the communist political struggle. Directly, immediately.

Because, in the first place, the precarious political equilibrium which was established in Italy around the defeat of terrorism has shown its limits: the ability to defeat terrorism was not accompanied by the intelligence needed to dissolve the reasons for it, or to recover its radical albeit ingenuous motivations. Because, secondly, not only have we seen a complete paralysis in the transformation and political modernization of the country, but we have also seen a barbarizing of its civil structures – a barbarizing paradoxically brought about by the extension of emergency laws and by the ways in which the parties have made use of these laws against each other. I do not criticize only the emergency laws; what I criticize also is their extraordinary extension, and the fact that they have become a huge disfigurement of law and of the rules of simple human cohabitation. All these uglinesses can only be cancelled by a programme of renewal which, in a democracy, sees the social subjects who were formed in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s becoming protagonists again. Returning to protagonism. The hope of a return is thus articulated with the claim which, for all the mistakes made, my generation can broadly make: that of being the only ones who tried to give body to the reform of culture, to the modification of the democratic institutions and to the development of liberty. The only generation in the forty years since the end of the Second World War. Today we are in a position to talk about a return. A return of the exiles to their country, a return of the prisoners to their families, a return of the generation of social struggles to democratic political life. We have to talk about this return, because the country needs us and needs our will and capacity for transformation. It needs our culture, the fact of our differentness.

As for us, it does us no good to be scornful of the generation of the Resistance and of the period of antifascism which preceded us. Gradually, over the course of time, that generation has completely abdicated all commitment to transformation. It rebuilt the country after the war – rebuilt it so well that it gave us a country which was almost the same as it was during the years of fascism. No dynamic response was given to the enormous modification of the economic and cultural base that the struggle of the world proletariat had brought about. We have a political constitution which, contradictorily, combines both feebleness and rigidity. We have a political class which is clinging onto power – a rotting ivy on structures that are disintegrating. So a return is not only a desire for us; it is also a necessity for the country. Our struggle has in fact been the genealogy – certainly not of the present, but – of the possible future of our country. We have no intention of ending up in a situation where, in Milan Kundera’s words, our only claim to posterity will be the contents of our police files. Our defeat has been only one episode, and not even among the most important ones, in the struggle which, in the world and in Italy, has been developing for a century for the appropriation of the enormous productive forces that development has created. Our generation is the only one to have a political culture which is matched to the enormity of this technological revolution, and one with a productivity and an invention-power to match. Thus the notion of return derives its political strength from the ontological force of a radical change that has already taken place in people’s consciousnesses. We do not need memory in order to be able to declare it. We do not need anything other than the fact of our existing, of our being present – of our return.

I feel that all this is near. And I feel that in the whole of Europe – and maybe even a bit further afield – many things are changing. Finally, it should be said that ours is a return which bears the scars of transformation. How much time have we spent working on this, how much suffering have we undergone – and yet this return appears so bright that I have no pain at the thought of that past; the only pain which I have now is the restlessness of a wait which, as of today, I hope will be very brief.

1

The Trial

24 February to 24 May 1983: Folios 1–37

Folio 1

24 February. Thursday. Morning wake-up call at 6.30. I am very tense. For four years I have been waiting for this fateful – is that the word? – day. I am already tired as I come to wakefulness. The sky is dark, but you can see that it is a cold crystalline blue, as often happens in Rome at this time of year. We come down to the disgusting narrow little cells. We wait. I read the graffiti on the walls. The body searches begin. Then we’re chained together, four at a time, and we’re loaded into the vans. The helicopter arrives. Buzzing overhead. A barking of military-style orders. Swarms of motorcycle police. We wait in the trucks. A joke or two among the comrades. Then our very noisy convoy moves off. Roads blocked off, guns pointing everywhere, one truck with a soldier in a kind of armoured turret, ready to shoot. Continuous stream of radio babble, the kind of thing you hear in the movies: ‘Panther calling Eagle … Swan replying …’ We’ve left the quiet of prison behind us. Now we’re caught in the trappings of war. We stretch to peer out of the windows of our van. People look alarmed as we pass. Green grass along the outlying roads where they’re taking us. Then, finally, the bunker, the infamous Foro Italico. Again we wait. By 10.30 a.m. we are in court. It’s taken four hours to get here. Is it going to be like this every time? I’m done for. We enter the specially built cages in the courtroom, with the cameras and TV crews homing in on us. ‘Cheese, cheese.’ Do you know what it’s like to have spent a year, a month, even a day, in prison? ‘Cheese, cheese.’

Enter the judges. The repressive machine seems to thrive on this concocted routine. The stage-setting is antiquated, and the spectacle of force does nothing to remove the sense of anachronism. The machine, however, enjoys its airs and graces. Silence – apart from the continuing click, click of the cameras. ‘Cheese, cheese.’ No, this court is a useless add-on. This trial is already a foregone conclusion for the institutions. Why carry on the pretence? How can there be any hope of finding justice in this trial, prejudiced as it is by four years of preventive detention? The cameras click and the film cameras whir. ‘Cheese, cheese.’ It’s hard to take in everything that’s going on. Right at the back of this huge armed encampment we can see friends, relations and comrades. I’m terribly short-sighted, so the comrades point people out to me: ‘Look, there’s X, and there’s Y …’. An equation with too many unknowns. However, in this feverish excitement I pretend that I too can see. Greetings, emotion. Santiapichi, the judge, starts. Giuliano, my lawyer, also starts. They exchange formalities, which seem like mafia signals. The problem this morning is how we are going to get out of a particularly absurd situation: today, apart from being on trial in Rome, I am also supposed to be on trial in Milan. The formality of their exchanges does nothing to conceal the fierce irrationality of the whole proceedings.

The court adjourns. We go down to the cells. We wait there for hours and hours. The machine grinds away, the handcuffs cut into your wrists, the court decides …

You might wonder how the court can make a decision in a situation like this. But it will decide, that’s for sure. It has to decide. And thus the decision will conclude this imbalanced – I would say incoherent and ferocious – trial dialectics. So we won’t go to Milan – we’ll stay in Rome? We’ll see tomorrow. Ah, mysterious decisionism [decisionismo], what a vulgar situation you have fallen into! We return to prison, physically exhausted. I experience a strange and horrible happiness at being back in my cell. I throw myself onto my bed. I want to sleep. The other comrades ask how it went. Finally I take a book, in the hope of getting off to sleep. Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction. I can’t sleep. My mind is caught up in the plot of the story. Rousseau as a Hölderlinian hero – but this trial of ours, is it not in reality a persecution of the ‘beautiful soul’ of the movement? Enough! Thought cannot stoop to concern itself with this trial. Reaching out, I pick up another book from the floor, the first that comes to hand. It is an issue of the German journal Alternative, the latest to arrive and also the last of the series. The comrades are saying ‘1968 is finished’. Alternative ran for more than ten years as a sourcebook within the movement. Now the story has come to an end, gentlemen, and another story is starting.

This picking up of a book from the pile is somehow symbolic. I laugh. It’s like Erasmus picking out a page of the Bible at random, or myself as a child opening random pages of Leopardi. So the party is starting over, says the casual soothsayer. Maybe that is the case in Germany. But here everything’s carrying on just the same. Including this infamous trial. I read, distractedly. The caricatural machine of justice is writ large before me, and I see how it is shored up by the daily torment of prison and the ferocious stage-setting of the trial. Four long years. And then, all of a sudden, I see the faces of Paola and Rossana, of those faithful old witnesses to truth. A sudden doubt rises in me. Maybe in this trial truth cannot win. This enlightenment of ours, this communist hope of ours, which does not surrender. Tell the truth, shout the truth. But what is truth in a political trial? On the one side – the stage-setting, the machinery, the dramatization. On the other – this wounded humanity of ours. Four years of preventive imprisonment. A great heap of memories, passions and suffering. And, first and foremost, a revolutionary passion lived to the limit, the joy of transformation. Two worlds. This trial is pitting two worlds against each other. It is recomposing life in the form of legality. No, this cannot be done … ‘Cheese, cheese.’ They, too, know that it’s not possible. That’s the reason why nothing surrounding this trial has any rationality to it. The courtroom cages, the handcuffs, the hours and hours of waiting in the cells. No, they don’t want the truth. They want the ritual. They want a sacrifice. Legality is restored in the symbolic, not in the rational. Paola, Rossana, why are you there, loyal, full of reason and beautiful? Go away! This is Aztec justice. Giuliano, why do you continue playing the lawyer, you who know about these things? At last I drop off to sleep. Just for a while. I dream that I am sleeping on a mattress full of knives and spears. The density of the institutions? How many times have you recalled me to that? ‘Merde. Cheese.’ And yet I am serene. I smile. Pietro wakes me with a kiss. I sit down to write. (G12 Rebibbia – 24 February)

Folio 2

Second day of the trial. It’s going to be postponed until 7 March. In other words, until Milan decides to release me from the trial that I am supposed to be undergoing up north. What looked at first like a great procedural mess has been sorted out and becomes insignificant. But the fact remains that I still have to undergo two trials – one here in Rome, for insurrection and for having supposedly set up an armed band, and the other in Milan, for crimes (demonstrations, robberies and so on) which, according to the prosecution, substantiate and demonstrate both the ‘armed band’ charge and the charge of insurrection. First the sentencing in Rome, and then the proofs in Milan. There’s always something new to learn – absurdity is never sufficiently appreciated in our life. To arrive at this crazy result, which presumably he thinks is a neat operation, the president of the court is playing for time. He wants to wind up today’s proceedings without having the charges read out, so as to delay the formal opening of our trial; he wants to avoid a situation in which we end up being judged ‘simultaneously’ in both Rome and Milan. The likelihood is that this would make one of the two trials collapse: most probably the one in Rome, under his jurisdiction. In short, two trials on the same evidence is fine, but those two trials taking place simultaneously is not fine. The contradiction within the system has to be controlled and contained, so that ‘systemic circulation’ is maintained. The contradictory fact is put out of the way. However, this operation of systemic logic is happening in the most banal fashion. Sometimes the spectacle is downright comical. For Santiapichi, it is a question of ownership: he has a property to be defended. For Abbate, the assistant judge, the problem is how to get into a position where he can pass the sentence he already has in his pocket, ready-made. Great confusion in court, a fluttering of robes and continuous sharp interchanges on all sides: between the court president and the lawyers, between the lawyers and the aggrieved parties, between the lawyers and the prosecuting counsel, and between the latter and the president. Our friends – Massimo, Giacomo, Marco – watch the scene in a state of consternation. Myself much less so. In fact (and I see and feel it more and more) there is a reversal in my way of seeing things, a complete reversal of perspective. They – the friends, the comrades on the outside – look at me in the cage and see me as if suspended in another reality, in another time. But I have the same sensation when I look at them – and I appreciate how much this happens in the continuity of my reversed perception. I see them in suspension. They come into the courtroom and, albeit with a degree of scepticism, they do believe in the idea of justice. They hope to tear down these damned bars and to win me back into the real-time of life. I know that this hope is irremediably lost, here, in this trial – the trial is purely and simply a continuation of prison. I look at them and I look at their hopes, as if I see everything projected onto a screen, far in the distance. Whereas my own ‘real’ is constituted by my ability to live the continuity between prison and trial. Certainly it is an absurd continuity, a constrained world, a substitution of the world – but it is nonetheless real for that. Thus there are different identities, counterposed. In this instance, my refusal to identify myself in the law and in the trial permits me to construct for myself, in prison, a way of surviving which is a force of resistance, an intellectual and ethical concentration. Thus the suspension of time, which the friends on the outside are denouncing, is for me a substitution of time: being-for-prison is the only form of resistance possible. It is, on the one hand, existence as an appendage. They do everything they can to remind you of it – a day of trial is ten or twelve hours of work. I find a desire insinuating its way into my head – that they should stage the trial directly in prison, lock, stock and barrel. But there is also a continued sense of internal freedom, of irreducible resistance. Freedom! That’s certainly not something that the trial will give me. Here inside, and through those mechanisms, the word appears to have no meaning. No, freedom has nothing to do with the dimension of time involved in the trial. So don’t look at me as if this trial is going to win me back into life. The trial is only dragging me into the abyss of an injustice that has turned itself into institution and machine. How can a monster generate freedom? By now my freedom is already stronger than any illusion, than any trial. It will make me something other. Inglan’ is a bitch (LKJ) [Linton Kwesi Johnson]. (G12 Rebibbia – 25 February)

Folio 3

Much nervousness in prison. Enea and Pietro have suddenly been transferred, one to Volterra and the other to Fossombrone. For the moment they are in the isolation cells in those prisons. We hear that the authorities are possibly planning to clear out Rebibbia. A general state of hysteria. I spend these days of the suspended hearing going over the trial in my mind. I ask myself continually, what exactly is a political trial? Certainly not a process designed to arrive at a truth. Rather it is one of the forms which exhibit the ongoing restructuring of the equilibrium of constitutional powers. The life of the law is the law of the jungle. What is happening here is that justice is advancing and organizing, within the totality of constitutional powers, its powers of political exclusion. A political trial is thus the pivotal point around which, through the medium of the magistracy, all the powers of the state re-consolidate their mutual loyalty and exclude the forces of difference. They formalize the exclusion of the forces of renewal. Thus a political trial becomes very much an act of state. It is here that law is formed – constitutional law of exclusion, of banning from the polis. I am frightened by the compactness of this power which, in judging me, rediscovers and reformulates its own identity. I am blinded by the strength of its presence. It seems to me impossible to resist it. I begin to think about the past. Was it not against precisely this overbearing presence that we were struggling – against this continuous, latent and efficacious overdetermination of the constitution? Against this perversion of democracy? Against the narrow-minded and closed character of its institution? Here instead we have power in the final instance. Juridical exclusion. I have been re-reading my Pipeline, which has just been published: in my view the concept of exclusion relates to that of poverty. The person who is excluded is like the person who is poor. In the great ceremony of repression I experience myself as a poor person [unpovero]. In my mind’s eye I see again images of our struggles and conquest of a revolutionary consciousness. A delirium? No, I am simply reconfirming a passion for justice – in the social, in reality, and in poverty. A chasseur noir, as Vidal-Naquet says. (G12 Rebibbia – 26–27 February)

Folio 4

How is it possible for an ethical totality – like the one represented by us, the defendants in this trial – to constitute itself in the presence of another figure, which also presents itself as a totality? Logic excludes the co-presence of two totalities. Such a relationship can exist only if one of the two totalities is a nothing, is unreal. But I cannot accept this – I claim the ethical totality of our project, of our existence. Our adversary is power. But power cannot accept to be stripped of its value either. In this clash there is no possibility of transcendence. So how can there be any meeting point here, how is any dialectics possible in a trial? Aristotle sees this clash of absolutes as the essence of tragedy. Paul Ricoeur in his latest book, which I am reading, relates the polarity of the dramatic plot to the absolutization of the time of consciousness as Augustine describes it in his Confessions. In the unfolding of the plot, every actor lives the absoluteness of consciousness. However, recognizing this and saying it is not the same as overcoming the irreducible split. Here dialectics is not possible. Particularly not in the postmodern scenario we inhabit. All the contradictions have lost any hierarchical dimension. Conflict takes place on the surface – a surface that is flat. The trial is therefore not a hierarchical function – it is simply a terrain on which absolutes rebound off each other. One against the other. The impermeability is complete. And yet consciousness does not remain content with the plot. Sometimes, on the basis of my studies and my beliefs, I think that our ethicity is Spinozan potenza [potentiality] and imagination, and that the ethicity claimed by the adversary is a tendency to nullification – to the unitary and nullifying appropriation of being. I fear my metaphysical presumption, but I don’t know how to lessen its fascination and its grip. I understand that hard objectivity of relationship, by virtue of which every character is affected by the irresoluteness of the plot and every form of awareness is relative. But, having said that, I am not able to convince myself that our witnessing the real has been, and is, less than absolute. I think of the trial; of how this ethical content of ours has rendered our language – within the trial – entirely specific and untranslatable; and of how, in consequence, no dialogue will be possible. Thus our trial will be a rolling-out of life and of its truths, one against the other, but with an impossibility of finding a middle way, a mode of confrontation. The passages become invisible – mine to them, and theirs to me. The determinations become impossible to define – mine to them and theirs to me. Perhaps this tragedy of ethics that we are living is no longer resolvable: neither in ourselves nor in the globality of the drama. I regard with extreme bitterness this obligation of mine to move within the ethical. In its extreme hardness. I do not understand how this trial can be resolved. Or rather, there is only one way: that of frontal clash, that of the affirmation of our humanity. In postmodernity, in a world which roots values singularly in a horizon with a flat surface, how would a trial, a judgement, a restoration of power be possible? The only thing possible is my, or our, capacity to assert the truth – without illusions, without any claim to reconquer any dialectic of recomposition. And yet this ethical affirmation of ours is, in essence, radical and given. Without presumption I live this irresolvable paradox of separation. (G12 Rebibbia – 28 February)

Folio 5

Everyone is saying that Negri is not to be forgiven. I am the unpardonable one. Strange rumours are reaching me from Milan, where the trial has begun in my absence. In Milan the situation is dominated by the ideology of the ‘evil teacher’ [‘cattivo maestro’]. This was constructed by the chroniclers of the Historic Compromise – and pliable judges, armed with that horrible Machiavellianism which makes their thinking so antiquated, have happily taken it on board. The lawyers, from what I understand, are having a hard time getting to grips with the reality of the trial in its twisted complexity, in its dis-levels and in the articulation of its various layers, in the ruinous direction it has taken – that of attributing moral responsibility for everything that has happened to me and my comrades. They employ ferocious murderers as ideological accusers, and with this they attempt, almost furiously, to cancel out the history of the class struggles – and also the empirical history of the party struggles that produced the killing of Tobagi. This horrific crime must be covered by an ideological smokescreen. The restorative function that the political trial fulfils in the composure of domination has to run its full course. So I am the unpardonable one. I read Girard, on sacrifice, on the scapegoat: among so many vague points, the only truly restorative function of this sacral act is that of enabling the ensemble of power to regain its composure. And in the present-day repetition of this drama, in the Milan trial, I feel the heavy inertia of a power which is incapable of liberating itself from similar expiatory and recompositional [ricompositiva] imaginings – materially incapable of anything other than a mystifying and falsifying identity, as if it were a force of gravity, a black hole. (I have written to the socialists, urging them not to accept in Milan this fundamental mystification and providing evidence to unmask the operation under way. I hope they will have the courage to act.) It seems, however, that I am to all intents and purposes unpardonable. I believed, and I still believe, that only a great mass awakening can lead us out of a situation in which justice is restoration rather than truth – not an allocation of responsibility but a repetition of power. This dialectical fetish: what you have removed you must give back, what you have taken you must restore. No, life is not this. I am not an evil teacher – and I am not the evil teacher by antonomasia, as the press would have me appear. I have lived, and I still live, a process of liberation that is exhausting, continuous, non-linear, but fairly oriented. There is no doubt that it breaks with consolidated being, both as ethics and as a relation of power – but that it is capable of blowing it apart is more difficult to say. You run through the internal fissures of this being; others want to find the cell into which to lay the mine. I have taught how to follow the deep veins of being, not how to place bombs. There is no place from which this world can be made to explode. It has to be extinguished. Just as there is no justice, there is no juridical place on which articulations of a new life, which are liberated, can be recomposed.

‘We’re di forces af vict’ry / an’ wi’ comin’ rite through / we’re di forces af vict’ry / now wat yu gonna do’ (LKJ). So do what you like … Don’t pardon me – I am guilty of having put myself in unison with being. For that, and only for that, am I responsible. And happy. And my hands are clean of blood. Facing me I have insane killers who have now become ‘repentants’ – and, on the other side, the heroes of the restoration, men whose hands are red with the blood of the scapegoat. Who knows why the analysis of the ritual maintains itself always so high and rarefied, so theoretical, and does not reconstruct instead Foucauldian small histories and genealogical life stories of the executioners … (G12 Rebibbia – 1–3 March)

Folio 6

In Milan they have cut me out of the Rosso–Tobagi trial. A temporary suspension. What does this mean concretely? It means that they will try me first in Rome and then in Milan. I assume they are thinking – or rather making the insane supposition – that, if by some chance I am found not guilty or set free for any reason, they will be able to keep me in prison anyway, awaiting the trial in Milan. In fact the preventive detention coming from Milan starts later than the Rome version. Two trials, two preventive detentions, two sentences, two punishments: and I’m going to have to go through all this, this tortuous Calvary, before I can even begin to think about living again. What barbarism! This is how this Milanese decision avoids a situation of having two trials going on at the same time. It solves problems of etiquette – but the net result is a jail sentence for me, just like that, out of the blue, without the case even being argued. This system really does stink. This little Milanese manoeuvre reveals its whole deeper nature. No use in summoning you to higher principles – this is another world. Sometimes even I find myself protesting: all this is completely Kafkaesque! But it’s not true; all this is only vulgar, clapped-out, caricatural. It is not that the suffering and torment are distributed by processes of bizarre and irrational logic: what we have here is just dirty dealing and the sniggering of those who are in power. In Italy the penal legislator and the magistrate observe the old rules of agrarian power, which lies somewhere between despotism and the mafia. The undoubted repressive functionality of penalties and, above all, of procedures smacks of hatred for the adversary, the enemy, the subversive and the marginal, a hatred which has the dry transparency of the midday sun. Nothing is tortuous and tormented here: the intrigue of the legal system is played out with cruel and devious cunning. There is brutality and brutality: the wooden, mechanical brutality of the Anglo-Saxon sovereign, the perverse brutality of the regimes of realized socialism, and then this Mediterranean brutality, which is both a bit Levantine and a bit Islamic. When I think of the magistrate who uses these standards of doubling the number of imprisonments and penalties, I cannot imagine him other than as a cat sitting and picking his teeth after having eaten the mouse. A ferocity which is entirely natural. They say that legality and enlightenment were supposed to soften and rationalize this kind of Sultan’s justice. But in Italy they have perfected – and now in this state of emergency they exalt – the liminary characteristics, the combination of class hatred, cunning and force. (G12 Rebibbia – 4 March)

Folio 7

The first review of Pipeline, in Montanelli’s Giornale, written by Arpino. An avalanche of libel and insult. Against the ‘Babel of jargon’ which I allegedly represent, the purist calls for a ‘restoration of language’. Restoration – that magic word. So now poor Santiapichi is asked to take on another task – which anyway is entirely at one with his institutional task – that of restoration. Bringing back order to things that have become disordered. Does language have the sacral function of preserving, reproducing and transmitting the fetishism of culture? Arpino’s opinion on this is entirely clear. I avoid the sarcasm of a possible reply, considering the pathetic nature of the criticism – no point in using sarcasm against a culture that is terminally sick and isolated, incapable of passion and clinging to banalities. On the other hand it is true that I have a soft spot for Babel – but language, and our pursuit of it in what it produces, is indeed what introduces us into the phenomenology of this divided and plural world. They, on the other hand, would like language to be, like norms and command, in the form of a narrow and wretched unity – whereas in fact there are many languages and norms and commands. And yet here in Italy this is not expressed. Dull tradition is rather conjugated with a timid realism, which is ideological and from the start impoverished. As for the literary avantgarde, it has been fascinated more by technologies than by the struggles and the riotous realities of the ghettos and factories. Even the revolt of music has been kept within the realm of polite decency – Dalla as Arpino, Battisti as Montale. The fact is that the marriage between culture and power is indissoluble in this country of happy slaves, which calls itself Italy. (G12 Rebibbia – 5 March)

PS An additional page about other reviews. Probably a good idea to keep all this material together.

16 March In La Stampa Vattimo deals intelligently with the controversial polemic about a Babel of languages. The metropolitan dissolution of life cannot be lived except in the form of a disaggregation of language. There are analogies between Pipeline and what Negri most abhors – the rosy disaggregation which someone like Arbasino exercises over the real of culture. Heliogabalus as a representation of expression, of imagining today. But (and here is my first objection to the self-satisfied mysticism of Vattimo) the problem is that of poetry – in other words, of arriving at, and not of mystifying; of putting into red, and not into pink, the material determinations of the disaggregration of the world and of language. Today, even in destructive ways, poetry, desire and love can and must penetrate the dynamic of this disaggregation. A truly Leopardian function.

27 March Zucconi, writing in Il Giorno, sets out to do a political critique of Pipeline. A splendid book, he says, when it talks about prison, but the book’s philosophy – a philosophy of searching for absolutes – is unacceptable when Negri talks about anything else. Beware of searching for truth – cave canem! It is paradoxical that the politician Zucconi understands the Babel of languages as a search for absolutes. The politician is intelligent – more so than the rosy litterateur – and almost as intelligent as the nihilist. I am reading Heidegger these days, where he writes about Hölderlin. This poetry, which ploughs being in order to reproduce its desperate meaning – what thing is capable of living outside of absoluteness? But how could anyone think that the crisis we are living is not absolute, in the whole array of its causes and effects? It is hypocritical to deny it. And then, why overload the term ‘absolute’? – it expresses being in the reference, in the tendency, in the given onticity; this is not metaphysics but materialist rigour in the recognition of things.

4 April It is Ruggero Guarini’s turn to express an opinion about Pipeline – in today’s Espresso. The communist refoulé moves on the same terrain as the catholic Zucconi. Once again, it is the absolute that worries him. But not, as in the case of the Catholic, because the absolute is a backdrop for relativity (and thus, in short, I am lacking a sense of sin – which is unforgivable!) – but because the great culture of modernity, from Hobbes to Spinoza, from Max Weber to Simone Weil, has reconstructed only a relative horizon of values for man. Pipeline = bricolage = extraneity to the course of negative thought. I could explain to him – in the manner of the good Guarini – many things about these writers, who have been my bedside reading for the past thirty years. But what’s the point? There is also a pavement of culture, and there are street corners where dogs piss. Here, in the face of communists refoulés and of nouveaux philosophes of all disciplines, what is being brought into question is materialism – in other words the absoluteness of the given fact, the absoluteness of struggle. To avoid this relationship, to elude it, means putting on priestly clothing and conceiving of the function of criticism as the disciplinary mediation of an unknown transcendental. It is ridiculous. No, no – not the unknown, but the truth of this struggle of ours, of this certain absolute: this is what we should prove ourselves on. Pipeline has gone some way in experimenting with this. Others, however, convinced themselves that communism has betrayed them, which means that they view any attempt to concern oneself with the torments of humanity as being indecent, and the preservation of their own skins as being sacred.

17 April Forcella, in Il Messaggero – against the removal, in Italy, of the 1970s, in culture and in everyday thinking. This brings me back to my topic. Because it is precisely the theme of the behaviour of culture in the face of struggles, of repression, of 7 April, that is fundamental here. A trahison des clercs. A betrayal that has been corporeal, heavy and hypocritical – when (at one and the same time) reality had presented itself as a Babel, ideology had collapsed, and the search for revolutionary transformation had become, for substantial layers of the movement, an immediate passion. This was the big problem. So why renegue on this immediacy of the desire for the absolute, this passage through chaos which alone could have produced renewal? And then why suddenly forget the need and – often – the memory of having taken part in all of this? Why reject a body of which one had asked – and from which one had received – contact and caress? Why isolate oneself? Why accept the state of emergency, the state of exception, the repentance of prisoners, and the whole disgrace of the thing? Why not seek and declare the truth in the face of this provocation? Why not recompose, in poetry, that split which everyone lived in their being? A large part of the Italian intellectuals spent the 1970s as if they were desiring – timid and excited, in struggles, in the new movements – a woman whom they could not touch. When she went off about her own business they started calling her a whore. Thus they projected onto their conscience the poverty of their relationship with the world – and out of that chaos and disquiet, which poetry should have traversed and dominated, they made instead the dough for their own impotence.

24 April Ceronetti – raging – in Corriere della Sera, against Braudel and all those who see Marxism as a sound foundation of science. Amusing! And he ends by exclaiming: ‘And then they write so badly, all these Marxists!’ Probably it is precisely in the arid pretentiousness of the likes of Ceronetti that we find the reason for the trahison des clercs – for this refusal of being, for this stretching outside the limits of the relativity of values, which lies in their opportunism. A pure and simple love of death, a nostalgia for the nul state. But the mummy will answer him politely, just as it replied to Federico Ruysih: ‘We too were once alive.’ (G12 Rebibbia – Written at various times)

Folio 8

Back in court again. The same wearisome ritual – getting up very early, and then the wrist-irons, and then from the cells into the courtroom cage, where we sit for hours and hours. The third day of trial activity. The real trial is now beginning. I sit and watch, with a genuine curiosity to see how the machine operates. Today is taken up with hearings of the major presentations: the civil parties at the debutantes’ ball. But this is not what interests me most. The central element is the intervention by the Public Prosecutor. Finally I understand fully what is meant by the phrase ‘accusatory trial’. The absolute pre-eminence of the prosecution, of accusation, as the driving force of the trial. A kind of structural straitjacket, a rigid predetermination. The accusation is already a fact, irreversible – as represented in that pile of papers, which the prosecution has accumulated and which the Public Prosecutor has been waving around from the start, like an avenging angel. There is no search for truth, and therefore no debate among equals in order to arrive at it. There is an accusation, which has full freedom in the expression of its force, and there is your right to defend yourself from it. The one who does the accusing is a public power; the one who defends represents a subjective right. The court stands in the middle between the two – it would be more appropriate to say at mid-height, because it is not there to resolve the problem in terms of truth, on the horizon of what is true and going behind the surface of the conflict, but rather it mediates the overbearing nature of the accusation in relation to the low height of the defendant. The court has to guarantee that the game between the cat and the mouse plays out fairly. The Public Prosecutor stands on a step which is higher than the defendants, on a raised bench that is on the same level as the court and markedly separate from the lawyers. The stage-setting well expresses the relations of power. But that is not all. We are tired, we are not used to all this, and in some senses we are infuriated by all the ceremonial (the cage – we want to be together, but there’s no space to move – there’s an enormous tension between freedom and brotherly love, which only increases the lump in the throat); in this situation, in the reverential game that the contending parties imagine, we are forced to sit and listen as the accusation unfolds in its bizarre extremity. Arrogant, offensive, prejudiced: this is the way the law wants it. I had almost forgotten that I was being accused of armed insurrection against the powers of the state, because the thing seemed so ridiculous to me. But I am called out of my illusion, summoned back to this sordid reality, by the voice of the assistant public prosecutor – a voice that is carefully modulated, sometimes cracked, sometimes thundering, like that of a fairground barker, in no sense worthy of this supposed sophisticated fiction of justice, but a good match for the strident tone of the accusation. A high-level accusation, sustained by lies, and one which cannot be criticized once it has been consecrated by justice. Mama, don’t cry. The genetic processes of the sacred, which anthropologists display in the continuous process of their formation over long centuries, are here repeated in the insubstantiality of a mise en forme which moves so fast as to make them objects of consumption. Subordination of justice to the temporal rhythms of fashion, of superficial communication, of low-grade information? Almost. Certainly, subordination to the timescales of the mass media. But it becomes evident that this is immediately false and almost scurrile when differing forms of awareness, people and forces intersect. Hence the accusation has to heighten even more – in the face of this slight durability and relative inertia of the mass media – its own position of institutional overdetermination. The result is an uncertain equilibrium – between pre-constituted and inertial authority on the one hand and, on the other, the abyss of ridiculousness and implausibility to which the media are constrained at the end of their arc of efficacy. I am living the preeminence of the accusation with this intellectual suspicion. I wait for it to burn down like a match, until it burns the fingers of the person holding it. I have the impression that, were it not for the servility of the journalists, we would very soon see the efficacity of this machine reduced to nothingness. But it is amazing to see how it works, this dirty intermeshing between institutional pre-eminence and the owners of the media. Now I am in prison. I am writing – I have drunk a bit of wine, and one of the Bach cello concertos is restoring calm to the evening – a very strong wind is blowing outside and the prison is extremely silent. I feel an urge to scream. I am hungry and thirsty for truth. I wish the trial were capable of expressing a possibility – just one possibility – of life. I would be prepared to gamble everything on such a margin of hope. But this is not possible. It is difficult and terrible to recognize the effectuality of an event of whose necessity you have always been theoretically aware. It is impossible, quite impossible, to alter anything here; the trial is the extension of prison, just as prison is the extension of society at large. This is the structure of the state. Of justice. A declaration of truth cannot destroy it. How solid is the inertia of power. How poor is truth. (G12 Rebibbia – 7 March)

Folio 9

The fourth, fifth and sixth days of the trial. I am tired beyond measure. But it’s worth writing a word or two – on the unfairness of the rules of combat. The lawyers have been good for once. Giuliano has been on the attack, arguing that the tribunal in Rome has no competence to judge us. A lucid and passionate speech. He dismantled and deconstructed a trial logic which, in bringing us to Rome, has stitched us into the uniforms of prisoners for life. For a moment I am breathing better, a lot better. Tommaso, with sharp intelligence and his experience in civil law, homed in on the problem of the extraditions and showed how some of the pentiti will not even be able to appear in court, and how the charges against us are based on cheap horsetrading. Then Beniamino, Pino and the others. The overall process of the trial has been attacked, the charges have been taken apart, and the whole set-up can be seen for the unbelievable ludicrous thing it is. What good will it do us? None. But at least we are showing the unfairness of the trial proceedings – the arrests based on mere pretexts, the insane logic of the pentiti, the overriding of proper territorial jurisdictions, the illegality of the procedures, etc.

And behind all that: the special prisons, the isolation, the brutal interrogations, the never-ending preventive imprisonment. What will we get out of it? Nothing. But the iniquity of Italy’s trial processes does not apply only to us – it is an intrinsic part of the whole legal system. As in Aesop’s fable, there is no point in the lamb bleating its innocence before the wolf. Increasingly we are discovering that, from our side, the only possible course of action is to fight this hopeless situation to the bitter end, not with any expectation of obtaining justice, because that is impossible, but in order to contribute what we can to breaking and transforming this machine of oppression. This is not a question of justice but of politics pure and simple. For the moment the main difficulty is being able to handle it physically. An enormous tiredness has come over me. The machinery of the trial, at this level of political abstraction and bellicose crudeness, crushes you. During four years of imprisonment I have found ways of building a personal physiological rhythm, a kind of intellectual and physical microclimate. My prison years have accentuated, almost like a defence instinct in a wild animal, the inner presence of a sense of intelligence, of a force of love. But now I am hurled into the storm, and sometimes I find myself losing my bearings. A kind of physical enervation gets the upper hand. I only hope that within this different, changing rhythm of life the bodily dimension of intelligence will help me to survive and will increase, in spite of tiredness, my intuition of the movements of the enemy machine. (G12 Rebibbia – 8/9/10 March)

Folio 10

On the outside (in prison ‘outside’ means ‘the world’). On the outside, then, the crisis is raging. This week’s elections in France and Germany have seen a consolidation of the forces of the Right. Monetary chaos. The European Monetary System is wobbling. American pressures – the dollar continues its headlong rush – capitalism command shows the same irrational arrogance as our judges – I imagine them wishing that they could be paid in dollars at least! The big capitalists seem to have entirely recovered from the blowback of last year (1982, the fateful date, the closing of the cycle initiated with the unlinking of the dollar from gold in 1971, and the oil crisis of 1973 … remember all that), when the refusal by Mexico and Brazil to pay their international debts revealed the irreversibility of the level of struggles in the countries of the third world. Then everyone was trembling. And they are still trembling. Entirely possible that Reagan will become a Keynesian. We need to study and pay attention … Europe is the one who risks paying a heavy price. The movement seems to have disappeared – if it existed now, in its movement towards transformation, it would have come and surrounded our prison. I look at things with alarm. Erkenntnistheorie: praise of the absence of memory. But, that said, one still has to count on deep strata of composition. On ontology. Everyone pretends not to know what the term means, but everyone knows the meaning of this solid resistance, which configures structures and possibilities of regulation. However, there is no sign of a politics, a new politics, entering the arena. What will be produced by these new, irreducible and irreversible layers of awareness of one’s social class? The only serious new force appears to be the German ‘greens’. On our side, the fact that we have to live our hopes of getting out of prison in the absence of a movement is difficult to handle – it suggests that the situation outside is dramatic and very heavy. It was from that point – from the moment when terror extinguished the movement and the state internalized its barbarities – that the ‘Years of Lead’ began. Not just for us, but for everyone. Chaos has penetrated into the structure of the state. Who could have foreseen such a massive turnaround even just a few years ago?

Clashes between the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratera [Upper Council of the Magistracy] (supported by the President of the Republic) and the Procura di Roma [Prosecutor’s Office in Rome]. Our good Gallucci is at last in the eye of the cyclone – I remember him, wily, vulgar, damp with sweat, in the days when he was accusing me of being the killer of Aldo Moro. I wish him a visitation by the good old punitive Olympian gods of classical theology. Maybe Luciano is right when he says that one day we shall see the bodies of our enemies floating past on the great river of history. Our days pass in a state of hysteria. Rossana is writing an apocalyptic letter: the timings of a solution to the institutional problem are speeding up, new constitutional equilibria of forces are in the making. I don’t think so: it will always be the same old Italian shit. They’ve shouted too much about an Italian coup d’état which never came, but which in fact is happening all the time. Paola keeps me informed about the business of my standing as a candidate for the Radical Party – this was offered to me a year ago. It’s not clear what prospects such a project might offer. I don’t expect much to come of it – but I am not giving up hope either. This transit across institutions as a way of gaining freedom and of continuing the fight feels very much like Lenin’s train journey to Finland. I have always been a firm believer in these kinds of tactical transitions.

Now, these transit possibilities are gathering with decisive intensity, they are punching holes in the fabric of this deep-seated crisis: ‘For all that I find myself in “financial distress”, not since 1849 have I felt so cosy as in this “outbreak”.’ I wouldn’t go along with Marx in defining our present crisis as ‘marvellous’ – but what is certain is that, things being as they are, and given the Years of Lead that we are living, this degeneration of the political forms of the mediation of power, together with the revelation of the decisive contradictions within the system, constitute my – our – only possibility of gaining our freedom. I am tired, but I am heartened by the crisis into which these honourable gentlemen are falling. In the trial we are achieving nothing: all we can hope to obtain – and that may turn out to be precious little – will be won by coming out and attacking at the political level.