Story of a Communist E-Book

Antonio Negri

• Herausgeber: ERIS
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1284

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The philosopher Antonio Negri was one of the preeminent thinkers of our time: his writings on class, socialism, and empire have had an enormous influence on contemporary political theory. His political activism and outspoken advocacy for the downtrodden also placed him at the centre of some of the most dramatic developments in recent Italian history. Story of a Communist (the first volume of Negri's three-part autobiography) gives a riveting account of his intellectual development and of the price he paid for living out his ideals. Negri paints a vivid portrait of the ferment in which some of his most important arguments and ideas took shape, and he provides crucial context for an understanding of the operaismo movement and of the influence that it continues to exert. Story of a Communist is also a very personal work, however: it is a compelling and often moving narrative of a childhood overshadowed by fascism, and of the ways in which Negri's later political interventions were shaped by his profoundly important relationships with comrades and collaborators. This first volume traces the author's involvement with left-wing politics in the post-war period, recounting in fascinating detail his efforts to marry together his early intellectual work with his commitment to militant labour activism. It also provides an indispensable ground-level perspective on the increasingly repressive measures taken by the Italian government in response to the social movements 1960s and '70s, with the narrative culminating in a gripping description of Negri's own arrest in 1979 for alleged involvement in terrorist activities. This is, in short, a powerful record of an extraordinary life, and of the historical forces that shaped it.

Leseprobe

Story of a Communist

ERIS

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Copyright © ERIS 2024

English language translation © Ed Emery 2024

Storia di un communista by Antonio Negri © 2015 Ponte alle Grazie, marchio di Adriano Salani Editore S.u.r.l. | Gruppo Editoriale Mauri Spagnol

This work has been translated with the contribution of the Centre for Books and Reading of the Italian Ministry of Culture

Internal images courtesy of Judith Revel Negri.

Copyright ©️ Judith Revel Negri, all rights reserved.

Cover: detail from Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Atessa, Rosso (1965)

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New York, NY, and London, England

Edited by Angus Ledingham

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ISBN

978-1912475-37-7 (paperback)

978-1-916809-91-8 (hardback)

978-1-912475-67-4 (ebook)

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Contents

Note on the English Translation

Author’s Note

Part One: Making the Break

1State of Nature

2Paths of Flight

3Alternatives and Excesses

4Conversion

5Socialism

6Point Break

Part Two: The Veneto as Laboratory

7July 1960

8Wildcat

9Working Class

10The Professor and the Militant

11’68

Part Three: The Ten Years of ’68

12Turin—FIAT

13PotOp 1969–71

14PotOp 1971–73

15The Building of the Autonomia, and the ‘Social’ Worker The Building of the Autonomia, and the ‘Social’ Worker

16Political Action and Communist Critique

17The Movement of ’77

18(Not) to Conclude…

Notes

Glossary of Acronyms

Note on the English Translation

In the original Italian edition of this work, each chapter is divided into numbered sections. This convention has been retained here for ease of reference, but the English edition departs from the Italian by numbering the chapters continuously (from 1 to 18).

At certain points it has been necessary for the purposes of clarity to add words or phrases to this translation that do not have direct counterparts in the author’s Italian text. While it would have been needlessly burdensome to the reader to place each and every one of these additions inside square brackets, square brackets have been used on occasions where the addition involved a significant interpretative decision regarding the meaning of the original text.

On occasions when an English term appears in the original Italian text, that term has been italicised in this edition and followed by a dagger mark: †.

The names of periodicals have been given throughout in their original language, with an English-language translation provided in square brackets following each title’s first appearance. In the case of full-length books published in Italian,, however, titles have been given in English (with the original title supplied in square brackets following the first reference in the text), since several of the works referred to have already been translated into English and are widely known by their English titles.

At various points in the text the author quotes in Italian from works originally published in languages other than Italian or English. I have quoted from published English translations of the works in question whenever it has been possible to trace the relevant quotations. Bibliographical references to these translations can be found in the “Notes”, along with a small number of explanatory notes regarding references to historical persons and events that it was felt might be unfamiliar to an English-speaking readership and which would not necessarily be elucidated by a straightforward internet search. Quotations from Italian sources have been translated directly from the text of Storia di un comunista, apart from in two instances (in Chapter 10) where I have opted to quote from existing English renderings.

The original of this autobiographical text was edited by Girolamo De Michele, and we are grateful to him for his help with particularly difficult translational problems.

E. E.

Cambridge

August 2024

For Pancio, Coz and Gianni

with a light heart

and with joyous

memories of Andrea

Author’s Note

When, on 7 April 1979, the day of my arrest, my life reached a turning point—because the repression was trying to erase a whole history of struggles and was branding an entire generation as criminals—I asked myself whether I should perhaps put into practice an ‘absence of memory’ in order to survive. I was not making a big point here, and my purpose was not to gloss over events that could have had penal consequences. Something very different was at stake in that ‘refusal of memory’ [rifiuto di memoria]: the desire to preserve, beyond the defeat that we had suffered, a truth that would otherwise have disappeared, and a reading of my generation’s political destiny that would otherwise have been falsified by the repression. We had always had a strong sense of our history, a sense of a line that we had to defend, one that had cost us so much effort to build—a whole generation of us, women and men alike. So much power [potenza] that our passion had produced, and that it was still capable of producing.

Today I want to try to tell that story.

Part One

Making the Break

Tonino with his father and mother, and his siblings Anna and Enrico, in 1934

CHAPTER ONE

State of Nature

1

My daughter once asked me “Daddy, what does it mean to die?”

Death does not exist, I lied. The idea that our limbs get cold when we leave is just an illusion. Instead they become again a spark and a movement of the flame and the chaotic desire that generated us. Dying doesn’t hurt; it’s not real. What hurts is fantasising about death. There is no need to be afraid: when we live, there is no death…

Was I really lying? Maybe not. When it is claimed that death is present in life, when life is belittled by being read always in terms of death, when non-life—a kind of ‘being-nothing’—infuses, interprets, and engulfs the singularity and desire of each instant of life, then life becomes impotent. An impulse towards transcendence is the only thing that can emerge from such a situation, and there is no reason for thinking that transcendence means divinity rather than subjection and humiliation, anguish and servitude.

“So is it not true, Daddy, that bodies turn to dust?”

Of course, I answered, not lying this time. But our intelligence is more powerful than death. We love our bodies not as dust, but as a beautiful and irreducible supporting structure of the force of living—of the power to be happy.

Life is a fierce and relentless battle against death.

2

But can you put pain to one side?

The whole of my childhood was lived under the sign of pain. I tried to suspend the pain by living its memory. That was naive.

My father died when I was two years old—the last in a series of bereavements that my mother Aldina bore in the black of her dress. Her two sisters had died in short succession before she was widowed: Teresa from tuberculosis, and Jolanda in childbirth. A very close cousin committed suicide, as did Dimer, the brother who would never again be spoken of at home. Then two children died, one during childbirth and the other with pneumonia when only a few months old. And then, within the course of a few weeks, Grandpa Amedeo and, finally, Aldina’s husband, my father.

The shadow of death extended over the whole of my childhood. A portrait of a time that today seems light years away.

This was in the early 1940s. I was six or seven years old. Should I be surprised at the dullness, the shyness, and the agoraphobia that formed the regime of my sociality and affectivity even before adolescence? I had tried to lift the weight of death from my own shoulders. But how effective could this elimination of mourning—this embodiment of an unconscious resistance in behaviours that were borderline autistic—be for such a child as I was?

Before the war that interrupted my child’s perception of life, little Toni did not see dead people or dying people with the same gloomy anger that I recall from later on.

But when I heard people talking about the dead, fond remembrance was always accompanied by a kind of horror—an abstract feeling that made me even more inclined to submerge my mourning by way of a kind of psychological regression. I don’t remember crying over death in my childhood. And even later in life I have seldom wept over the coffins of my loved ones. For reasons beyond my control I have not participated in funeral rites, not even those of my mother. I was in prison when she died, and they denied me the possibility of saying goodbye to her. Instead I have the strange memory of the disappearance of her grave. When I returned from exile after many years of being away, I could not find it. The contract for the use of the plot in which she was buried had expired without my knowing it.

Another time, newly married, I carried in my arms the little box containing the foetus that my wife had just lost and that, according to Catholic superstition, was human. An arrogant authority forced me to bury it. It was a freezing Venetian November morning. The surgical pain and exhaustion had come and gone in the hospital. I took that fragile relic to the cemetery—to San Michele, just opposite—by gondola. The oar split the icy green mirror of the lagoon and the beauty of the scene froze my tears. Even then I did not see the body of that dead child who had not known life.

3

Then came the war, and with it came dead bodies. The first time was in Padova in 1943, after a bombing raid. No one had expected it. The ground shook, the air was sucked into the explosions, your mouth dried up, something tore in your belly.

On the radio, the Nazi-fascist propaganda said that the bombings, which had been driven off by heroic anti-aircraft defences, were nothing more than the barbarity of the enemy, but for us they were a desperate reality. When everything started to shake—it seemed like an earthquake—my sister Annamaria protected me with her body from the bombs that were falling around our house.

At the first blast Anna dragged me headlong down the stairs. We lay on the grass in the meadow by our house. Only before the second wave did the sirens start to wail. Then the bombing ended. I slipped away from my sister and walked towards the bombed houses a few hundred metres away. A small crowd was forming; they were pulling the injured out of the rubble. There they found Franchino, the leader of the Mellette gang with which we, the Via Montello gang, had exchanged hurled stones on so many occasions. His legs had been cut off. He looked at me with doglike eyes, asking for compassion. Then a fierce cry. I covered my face with my arm, to protect myself from this last stoning. I stepped back. Ambulances arrived, firemen, the civil militia—there was a dead horse nearby. It had a chicken’s head sticking out of its neck, like the emblem of some surreal butcher’s shop.

The bombing of Padova continued. Five or six times again in January. We went to the air-raid shelter every other night. The good women recited the rosary; some fascist in a black uniform urged us to show national dignity and pride. The earth shook and the walls creaked. Returning home, we could see them digging in the dark. The searchlights were turned on only when a voice was heard or a body was spotted. After the massive nightly bombings in February we evacuated to a small village about twenty kilometres from the city, where my mother was a primary school teacher.

Following the railway line, a young German was mine-sweeping through a field littered with small butterfly bombs that had been dropped from planes the night before. He was blown up. Two peasants heard the explosion and carried the wounded man to the threshing floor of the farmhouse next door. Other Germans arrived. The boy died. I was there, among the few old peasants who showed themselves. I saw his silent death. Was it so easy to die? There was not much blood; the soldiers moved without noise or invective; the telephone operator communicated in a low voice. They were in a hurry, or perhaps they were afraid. That death seemed to isolate them even further. Those villages had already gone over to the resistance. At night—listening to Radio London in a neighbour’s stable—an old man, whom the locals considered to be an anti-fascist, perhaps a partisan, asked me about the German. I told him. As a sign of contempt he spat on the ground. Does not even death render us equal? After all, we all have to die!

But totality is not equality, as I was to learn later.

In the very last days of the war we were at home. From the nearby county road came the roar of military vehicles, then rifle shots and bursts of machine gun fire. In the silence that followed we heard a long cry of pain. It was one of the young men who had fired on the retreating German convoys. From the window you could see him lying in the road; he was wounded. My mother grabbed my hand and rushed to help him. We stood next to him. He moaned. My mother lifted his head. He said a name and his eyes were wide open, but then he lost consciousness. A motorcycle with a sidecar arrived. A German officer got out, waving his pistol: “Partigiano…bandito!” [“Partisan…bandit!”]. Mother told him that he was dying. It was a moment of extreme intensity; the looks of that beautiful woman intertwined with the rage of the German—I remained absent and watched this moment of confrontation over death from the outside, as if I were at the movies. What was I supposed to do there? My mother searched the partisan’s pockets and pulled out several cards. There was one for the fascist social club. “Non è un ribelle!” He isn’t a rebel! The officer got back on the motorcycle. The partisan was dying. My mother leaned over and kissed him.

Why was death still there? What was it?

4

Enrico, my brother, was seventeen when I was nine. He was a handsome boy. In the autumn of 1943 he had started high school at the Liceo Tito Livio in Padova, where all of us went to school. At the beginning of December Enrico ran away from home and signed up with the bersaglieri corps. We were already in the period of the Salò Republic. He was sent to the front to fight the Yugoslav partisans, beyond Gorizia, in Tolmin, a town in Slovenia that the Italians had annexed.

My mother was desperate. Her son was a minor. Only in mid-December did she find out where her boy was, and she went on a bicycle to get him back. A journey of 150 kilometres. He’s a minor, the Motherland cannot take him away! When she arrived it was 19 December: they told her that Enrico was considered missing following a military operation that had been undertaken two days previously. My mother came home. She wasn’t just desperate; she was out of her mind. A few days later the Repubblichini newspapers reported the news of an infantryman who, having been wounded in an armed confrontation, had committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the ‘Reds’. That hero was my brother.

We went to Bologna, to my father’s family, to spend Christmas in the old country house where my grandfather had been a day labourer and then a tenant farmer. Those were very tense days. My mother kept saying that Enrico hadn’t died, and that his fellow soldiers had told her that he had been wounded and might have been taken prisoner. She seemed to believe it. She was expressionless. She did not cry; it was as if she had come a long way to relate something that was, in the context of the current tragedy, highly improbable. I didn’t understand what was going on. The whole family reproached my mother: why didn’t you stop him from leaving, why didn’t you go after him earlier? But the discussions went no further than that; there was a shared pain that imposed unity.

Grandma Teresa kept me close and hugged me. I have a weird memory of the two or three days we spent there, as if we were sitting imprisoned—locked up—around the kitchen table. My grandfather, an old communist, calmed the reproaches of the uncles. They had gone through fascism with irony and detachment; now their only fear was a war that was descending upon them from the Appenines. They were bourgeois, how could they understand? But that boy, what an absurd thing, why had he died?

I didn’t say anything. It was at that moment that I began to stay silent.

5

Death, war, misery…how to speak of any of them? I was still a boy, a child silenced by the violence of irrational circumstances. My whole perception of the world was drowned in mourning. Could my story be an educational novel? More like a resistance, I would say…

The logics of life cannot be ‘discovered’, even after a long journey. It was simply a matter of constructing a meaning, any meaning, within this life that was presented as a mass of events. Joyce’s Ulysses and Zabriskie Point come to mind. Fragments.

Now that the oneness of the real and the symbolic had been exploded, the individual and the spirit of the world no longer slept under the same blanket (Geistphilosophie was in tatters, Hegel would say). But that animal, that body that I had been since I was a child, wanted to find a language in solitude, outside of the immense internal silence. The one who speaks is not the one who writes, and the one who writes is not the one who is. I knew that. But later, in the middle period of my life, I would nonetheless realise that, for me, the search for a language had been a real ‘turn’—an escape from the world in which I had suffered as a kid. It was an acknowledgment of existence, a break with the death that prevented the world from generating itself anew and that thereby foreclosed a new beginning: it was the search for a new possibility of saying. Escape from the disaster of Atlantis, from the ruins of a continent that was sunk in terror. How could this thing be told? Language needed to be reinvented, through signs and words that corresponded to something other, that led to something different from what they kept telling me in my childhood.

6

How did my brother become a fascist—to the point of being willing to get killed for it?

Enrico had two friends, Giovanni and Alberto. He had been in the same class as Giovanni until Giovanni dropped out of school to work as a mechanic. Giovanni saw himself as a communist. From time to time I happened in on them while they were talking about politics. He died a few years ago. He remained a true communist, and he kept happy memories of my brother. The other friend was Alberto. He was Jewish; he had had to leave high school and was studying at a private school. But he came every afternoon to do his homework with Enrico. At five o’clock my mother, back from school, would make tea for everyone and would prepare bread and butter. Shortly after Enrico’s death, Alberto was deported and never returned.

As he was leaving, Enrico told me: “I’m not staying here to make civil war and fight it out with Giovanni and Alberto!”

After 25 July people momentarily believed that the war was over. In August we were in Ortisei, in Val Gardena, on holiday. Every two or three days Enrico would go down to Chiusa, in the Adige Valley. German convoys had been coming down from Brenner since before 8 September. He used to come back looking moody. From time to time, to calm things down, we would make big fires in the riverbed, and my brother and his friends would get into heated discussions about what was happening. I heard talk of treason, cowardice, resistance to the enemy. Fierce discussions. I was in charge of keeping the fire going—we needed to warm up after our swim in the icy waters. I listened, and meanwhile I fed the fire, thinking that the noisy discussions would calm down, right there, after the immersion in the big deep basin that the torrent had created between the shore and our little island. Thanks to me, calm would return.

But I was too young a boy, one to whom death had already brought too many misfortunes. The conversion of the experience of war into family mourning, and immediately afterwards the convergence of poverty, evacuation, disorientation, and, again, death—these translations were so linear, and they were for that reason both vivid and horrible. Your mind was paralysed by fear. What you had to bow to was not the image but the reality of violence. If you didn’t, it was because you felt that the sadness and malaise could end up dragging you down into a kind of dumb laissez-faire produced by the despair that was sculpting the faces of those dearest to you. That was the terrain on which you were forced to press ahead, always fearful of unforeseen setbacks.

7

My real experience of the war began during the summer in Ortisei, while we were staying at a cousin’s house. When Mussolini declared war, my mother, who was listening on the radio, had told me with a worried look: “They have declared war”. I replied: “That’s great!” and received a slap in the face, of which I still have a painful memory. In the summer of 1943 I began to understand that war was not a game but something horrible: invasive, all-consuming, very similar to what death is. A realisation that had already been confirmed by that slap from my mother.

For the whole of my life I have studied the reasons behind war and reciprocal killings, but I have never been able to understand them. War, even in the best organised of conflicts, is always a condition in which what dominates is not just the law of the strongest, but also the bare fact of violence—a ‘state of nature’. The same thing happens when women and men are afflicted by hunger or bad weather, by earthquakes or by poverty: the desperate will to live expresses itself in a drive to violence. During the Thirty Years’ War, Simplicissimus wondered what the difference was between the desire to survive the destruction that results from a natural calamity, on the one hand, and the looting that victorious armies engage in, on the other. The will to live, he answered, was not the same as the will to dominate others. But although the history of human beings should be capable of being explained in terms of harmony, in reality no one has ever managed to produce such an explanation. The path continues on its way, its thread twists and breaks—and then once again there is war, waiting for us. The thread is interrupted or recomposed by the exercise of violence—violence wrought by one against the other. It was said by way of justification that this was all for the sake of survival, but really it was just about domination. The thing became truly horrendous when it was claimed that humanity’s forms of associative life can only take shape by means of the legal institutions that are built by whoever wins the war—in such a way that the state and law become no more than a continuation of war. “By other means”, as they said. How many times have I heard that slogan—even from the mouths of people who said that they were disgusted by its brutality. Politics was nothing more than a war waged in order to ensure command, to build authority and institutions, and to create sovereignty so as to maintain peace! What nonsense… It is by this means that death finds its way to the heart of politics: it establishes itself there as a guarantee of power.

8

And then came the backlash. In September, back from the mountain, my sister took me with her to Mantova province, to the house of my mother’s family, for the grape harvest. There I had my first attack of asthma—something that would not leave me for the next thirty years. A pernicious, exhausting illness that can leave you paralysed for days on end. You go to bed with the fear that soon it will grip you, and you get up hoping that your morning wash will help you recover from the exhaustion of the night before. When the attack comes, you feel as if you have accumulated the unhappiness of the world inside your chest: you tremble, your body shakes, your breathing gets faster and faster until, inside you, a little monster strangles you… Sometimes, but only rarely, there is an onset of calm. But this kind of relief from the crisis is a mere illusion and brings no rest; your body and your brain continue to tremble. Then the sickness returns, and only with difficulty do you manage to breathe and think. That can go on for weeks. I would sleep propped up on a pile of cushions that raised my chest whenever exhaustion caused me to feel faint. That was the end of the nonchalance that I had shown in the face of my family’s misfortunes, of the general weariness of living, and, most recently, of the onset of war. My lungs and nerves were now ready to consummate the pain. To save me from madness, my body gave itself over to the sickness. I was increasingly cutting myself off, and I was having more and more difficulty in expressing myself. It was an opportunity to defend myself by all means possible from the pain of life.

It would take a good ten years before I found the drugs that would lessen the crises.

9

That September, Annamaria was being courted by two equally good-looking boys: Rino, a university student and the son of a family of landowners, and Vasco, a ship’s telegrapher from an artisan family who was convalescing after having being wounded. They both seemed set for a happy life, and I wanted to be like them. Then Rino joined the X MAS battalion, and Vasco set up a partisan radio station that the Germans tracked down. The subsequent story was a terrible one, but it was also typical of those times: Vasco was tortured and then given to dogs to be eaten. When the Liberation came, the revenge of the villagers was equally horrible. The torturers were not handed over to the CLN; instead they were locked in a farmhouse—days and days screaming in pain and helplessness in the face of death. Rino was also killed, as Anna would tell me later.

The arrival of September, and the sadness of the softening sky, gripped my chest. Would that it had only been in my throat. No, the feeling of premature death that I experienced during that month—I could never shake it off. And it hit me even when I was no longer going to the countryside. For me the year began in September and with my suffering more than other human being—and more than anyone who was close to me. What hit me was the arrival of the cold. Not even in high-security prisons after my arrest would I feel such an intense cold. It felt as though a knife had been stuck in my bones. Both Rino and Vasco came to mind.

Still today I wonder how it was that fascism was able to attract honest and intelligent young people to that tragic edge of European culture. There has been talk of a fascismo-movimento [fascism-movement]—the phenomenon that was reborn in the Salò Republic, recovering the spirit that the fascismo-regime [fascism-regime] of the Ventennio had lost. A movement that shaped itself along the lines of the national Risorgimento, and which expressed the desire of broad strata of the petty bourgeoisie for economic emancipation and for participation in the governance of the city.

Enrico, the beardless seventeen-year-old, may have interpreted these logics and made them his own. Certainly he was driven by patriotism: he wanted to defend the nation’s borders and to avoid a slide into civil war. Enrico also shared the social demands of the Salò propaganda; although he did not trust the repubblichetta, he extended to them the hope of socialist liberation tout court, about which he argued so ingenuously with his closest friends.

Having recognised this, I once again ask myself: why? Historical revisionism has proposed the model of fascismo-movimento as the return of a strong fascist ideology after the bourgeois and conformist capitulation of the 1920s. These revisionist insinuations may accord with a description of Enrico’s behaviour, but fascism was above all the barbaric will to power of a corrupt and non-productive elite. Its aim was to crush working-class socialism in order to impose rent as the key to wealth, and also the reproduction of both the private rentier and the bureaucratic and authoritarian parasitism of the state. The dictatorship had led to war, so why go and get yourself killed for that fascism, for that Italy? I watched the events that were exploding around me. Uncertainty, doubt, and an angry mental reservation paralysed me as, along with my mother’s tears, I recalled what I had always heard whispered at home: that my father had been an anti-fascist, and that under fascism he had suffered unspeakably, to the point—as my grandfather insisted—of its causing his death.

So my father against my brother? But if they were both dead, what was the point of asking the question?

10

My father was still alive when they took me to see him on his deathbed. He smiled at me, and called me Tonino. That is all that I remember.

Every year we would get up early on the anniversary of his death. We would cross the city in the dark with my brothers in order to go to mass. Then Aldina would go to catch the train that took her to work, and Annamaria and Enrico would haul me home. When the bombing started, Aldina started taking me to school in Piazzola sul Brenta, where she taught. That meant getting up at five o’clock in the morning. In those months Aldina was still saying that she didn’t know if Enrico was dead or not. I can still feel my mother’s quick pace, the rhythm of her walk amid the absolute silence of the city at that time of the morning. Maybe I’m wrong when I tell myself that I suffered from autistic pathologies for a long time—but of course my mother was like a crazy woman then, and held my hand tight, and not just so that she could pull me along. It would never have occurred to me to run away from her, so why was she holding me prisoner like that?

On several occasions I asked psychiatrist friends about this—Félix Guattari, David Cooper. They laughed and said that Aldina’s behaviour was completely normal, and that it would have been worrying if she had not been like that. I have never been able to talk with psychiatrists about their science: I prefer them as philosophers or simply as friends, chatting about politics or going out together. Why are they incapable of explaining the sufferings of the child that I was?

11

What does survival mean in such conditions? What is that desire to escape that explodes inside you? And where to run to? And what do you find when you get there? There were people around me who offered answers to these questions. Was I a lucky boy then?

Aunt Elsa, my father’s sister, was first and foremost among those who were offering me answers. She lived in Bologna, where I spent long periods at my grandparents’ house but even more time at hers. She played cards: poker with her friends, and also bridge to conceal her poker vice, but she played with such skill that she ended up playing in the national championships. She was fun-loving. She took me to the movies and also to variety shows: dance numbers featuring bare thighs, and jokes that seemed to excite the public but that actually neutralised people’s desires and converted them into sadness. Aunt Elsa reserved for herself another means of escape—that of mystical meditation. After the war she was one of the thousands of possessed who breathed the fragrance of Padre Pio’s stigmata1. Elsa was a force of nature. Never a sigh of unhappiness; mystical but never superstitious; a player but never a loser (and when she was, she just smiled and planned her revenge). She took me out of myself. Laughingly, in the search of pleasure, she indicated for me a pleasurable escape route.

I never had an asthma attack in Bologna.

Even more effective was Luciano, my sister’s fiancé. He was a partisan fighter, and he arrived at our house in the early autumn of 1944, coming down from the mountain after a series of raids had destroyed his brigade’s supplies and hideouts. We slept together in the loft, Luciano always ready to flee at the slightest noise. He told me that he had become a partisan because he was a deserter, and that deserting, fleeing, and rejecting heroism of all kinds was the first and greatest dignity of a human being. And he explained to me that the rebel gangs were fighting against the war and for democracy (which was a system of government where freedom took the place of violence), and for socialism (which was an economic system where equality took the place of exploitation). Anti-militarism and rebellion against the bosses were one and the same thing: one had to take to flight, reject discipline, and form bands of free men who were without flags of coloured rags but who had ideas in their heads. There was a lot of hunger at that time. I began to understand that I too would have to find a way of getting out. I was not fully aware of this at the time: at ten years old one cannot choose which side to be on, but I had before me a clear choice between different ways of life. One of them was flight, and the constructive contents that needed to be contained within that flight.

And what is that desire to flee that explodes inside you?

Later, in a passage from Spinoza’s Ethics, I found something that reminded me of that desire to flee and transform myself, of that other way of life that I had become aware of during the war years:

Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly have said he was the same man. I have heard stories, for example, of a spanish poet who suffered an illness; though he recovered, he was left so oblivious to his past life that he did not believe the tales and tragedies he had written were his own. He could surely have been taken for a grown-up infant if he had also forgotten his native language.

If this seems incredible, what shall we say of infants? A man of advanced years believes their nature to be so different from his own that he could not be persuaded that he was ever an infant, if he did not make this conjecture concerning himself from [NS: the example of] others.2

12

Vicolo dell’Orto. As evacuees we had as our new home two rented rooms heated by a cheap stove, with dirt floors and shutters that didn’t close properly. Fields of maize stretched out in front of the house. On the other side of the barn was the house of Amelia, the owner. We often spent our evenings there: the women chatting, and the little boys and girls watching the sparks flying up from the fire. Everyone huddled together for warmth.

Behind Vicolo dell’Orto ran the railway. About a kilometre away there was a bridge over the Brenta, and from late spring onwards this area too was bombed. They would arrive at around noon: twelve or eighteen bright points that then took the shape of airplanes and dropped silvery clouds of bombs on our heads. When they came close, it was a case of ‘every man for himself’. I threw myself into a ditch full of prickly acacia branches and felt the shaking of the earth beneath me.

The bridge was hit, but the bombing did not stop. The Todt, the Third Reich’s auxiliary engineering and military infrastructure service, began to instal boat bridges. To the daytime bombings were added night visits by a solitary plane—which people used to call ‘Pippo’—that dropped small explosive devices as well as actual bombs. It was a horrible experience: Pippo over our heads at night, and the lieutenant from the Todt—who brought with him the ever-present danger of house raids [rastrellamenti]—appearing very early in the morning, right through to the last days of the war, when the man from the Todt (and there were not a few who said that it was an undeserved punishment) was arrested, tied up, and abandoned to his fate inside a meat refrigerator. That cruel and peasant revenge struck me profoundly, in a way that was clearly at odds with the joy of the days of the liberation. Camped near our alley were what we called the ‘Mongols’, who were in the service of the Reich. When word spread that the Americans had reached Padova, they disappeared, leaving the camp as it was. We kids swooped down to loot it—I think that was on the morning of 24 April 1945. I came home with a bicycle, a gas mask, and a fine Mauser rifle that I strapped to the bicycle; I was followed by a huge brown and white horse. My mother made the rifle disappear, and Luciano took the horse to the mountains, where—I think—it lived a quiet and semi-wild life. The bicycle was passed on to Amelia. I only had the gas mask left. It was still in the attic of the house in Padova when the police searched it in 1979. Oh, I’m forgetting—in my library there is also an Urfaust. On that morning Annamaria had, with great delicacy, taken only that book. Perhaps it belonged to the German officer in command of the ‘Mongols’—my sister’s sole item of loot, as compared with my infantile warrior bulimia. Years later I wondered how such a poetic officer could have exercised command over those Cossacks who were traitors to their sovereign and who were accompanied by a horrible reputation for murdering friends and enemies alike.

13

When I was about thirteen and finishing junior school, Elsa’s husband asked my mother to send me to work with him, with the idea that I could take over the business. Mother didn’t take it well. She replied that, like his brothers, Tonino had to complete the classical high school [liceo classico].

Aldina was extremely restless in her widowhood. In pushing me to study she was actually pushing me to leave home—because that was what she had wanted to do herself. She did it by telling me escape stories that had the tone of an educational novel. By going away we make ourselves; we become human beings. For her, fleeing was not just about leaving; it was also about getting away from ignorance, poverty, and superstition. The family stories she told were a didactics of escape. So it had been for my Negri grandparents, who had escaped from the countryside to live in Bologna. They were socialists, and with a huge effort they had managed to set up a cooperative and had ended up getting themselves a decent house. All of them had been very hard-working, with my father studying at night while he worked as a clerk during the day, until he got a job as an accountant.

“Is being an accountant ‘leaving’?” I asked my mother. How could you define that formidable character who was your husband as a mere accountant? “To continue our escape, we have to build a new way of life out of poverty and ignorance”. In Aldina’s response, that saga was transformed into poetry.

In short, the Negri family began as agricultural labourers and became working-class, and from there, from that source of pride, they were able to progress. The path of the Malvezzi—my maternal grandfather’s family, also day labourers in the Oltrepò—had been the same. And the same for the Mantovani family of my grandmother. Six daughters were born therein: my grandmother Gentile and then the rest of them, all ‘adjectivised’: they were Rosina, Seria, Nerina, Onesta [Pink; Serious; Dark; Honest]. The last one (I’m not joking) they called Nulla [Nothing]. Then came the male child, the heir: Oprando [Working]. In that family the work ethic was far from lacking. With huge efforts, the entire generation of our grandparents had managed to buy, to work, and to start to profit from a few acres of land. Now their grandchildren could study and feel free.

How non-formal and non-judgemental was my mother’s idea of freedom! Freedom from want, freedom to live and work. A free way of life. As when—this is what we were told—our Protestant artisan ancestors had fled from Ferrara to escape the Inquisition; or when our Jewish merchant ancestors had fled Mantova in order to take refuge in the Oltrepò, in the triangle between Revere, Mirandola, and Suzzara, where they revived local agriculture through intelligent land reclamations and reinvented life in freedom and prosperity. Inside that triangle, in one and the same area, side by side, there were Catholic churches, Protestant churches, and synagogues—the only such place in Italy! Who ever would have thought that precisely there was born the right to be free? And not only that. The first Chambers of Labour [Camere del lavoro] were set up there too, as Aldina used to recall. She forgot to add that the first Chamber of Labour set on fire by the fascists was that of Poggio Rusco, right in the middle of the triangle. The story continually blended the flight from misery with a further flight—with the flight towards freedom. It was history, it was myth; it was above all an ethical exhortation to persevere.

I was little when I heard those words of Aldina, but I had already perceived that there was something rhetorical in that celebration of a muscular individual heroism that was linked to a collective praxis, in that pride in economic and professional success, and, at the same time, in the desire to escape. It was a celebration of a past that did not correspond to the present. Now, coming out of the war, the state and the Church—the only institutions I knew—were emerging from the ruins, and it seemed that solidity and stability were what was needed. Aldina seemed open to this new reality. But I also had Luciano at hand, who helped me to perceive that there was a certain romanticism (which he considered false) in Aldina’s vision. Luciano wasn’t a person who was inclined to take orders or who had a yearning for institutions. Instead he impertinently rejected all disciplining of autonomy and freedom. In his own way, he represented the courage of the weak against the cowardice of the strong. The Good Soldier Schweik. In that never-ending winter I sided (with a touch of ironic humour) with Luciano-Schweik, although it used to irritate me when—because I had become skinny and studious—he used to call me ‘Recanati’3. For her part, my mother answered Luciano by recalling the deserters of the First World War who hid in the marshes and among the reclamation areas of the Po: “They ran away, but they didn’t build anything; that was their damnation”.

14

1914–45: The second Thirty Years’ War. The first was against Protestantism and the peasants; the second against socialism and the working class. I was born in the middle of that horrendous history. But although it was a misfortune to be a child of that war, I was lucky not to have been a protagonist—unlike my father and my mother. We could have considered ourselves even more lucky if we had realised that this second war had been won by socialists: by social democrats (of the likes of Roosevelt) or by communists (those of the Soviets and the International). After 1929 and the crisis that had made capitalism seem archaic, and even more so after the Soviets destroyed the Third Reich, there came together the various forces that established the UN Universal Declaration of Rights. But henceforth every Constitution would, paradoxically, become a Yalta—a compromise between the bosses and the working class.

We did not know this in 1945.

And then came so many other things. They still give me the shivers now, when I see them from that kid’s point of view.

What joy there was in the city when we came back to Padova in the spring of 1945! Every night there would be parties in the houses of the neighbourhood. Dance halls were often set up in the squares. The young people who had returned from the war and those who had returned from evacuation all danced together. If you wanted to live you had to forget.

But back at school darkness returned. A darkness that was to continue for almost five years, until I entered high school in 1949. Already in 1947 I had entered the Tito Livio, the classical school of the Padovan bourgeoisie where students went to do Years 5 and 6. This was a kind of continual imprisonment and torture that I endured doggedly. I have no memories of that period—only lights that flicker on and off to indicate more or less difficult moments. In the meantime I was changing. My intellectual curiosity was becoming enormous. I was a little robot at school, and I did well. And as for what was going on around me? Nothing. I remember some moments on vacation, or in the mountains, or of sightseeing (Florence, Rome) with my mother—nothing that interested me. Have you ever spent hours in absolute silence with people who are doing everything they can to make you react, to make you talk? I was a little mule: quiet on the outside and full of uncertainty on the inside. Friends and relatives realised how different I was from my siblings, who were brash and bright at my age.

On the other hand I performed well in the selection-on-merit system, which was practised and honoured within the disciplinary model of Wei-mar and Oxford to which I was subjected at high school. Indeed, I was among the best. That was the moment when I started waking up at six in the morning to do my revision. That was the time of day when my mother went to work, prepared my coffee with milk, and opened the windows. I think that the young Spartans enjoyed a less austere upbringing than I did. In the afternoon I did my homework, and by nine o’clock I would be in bed. Apart from on Saturdays and Sundays I abstained from reading novels, so as not to disturb the rhythm of my studies. But every weekend I would devour a Hemingway or a Faulkner, or a few hundred pages of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Balzac or Stendhal, and so on. “Hic Rhodus, hic salta” [“Here is Rhodes—jump here”4]. “The hours of the morning have gold in their mouth”: I began to appreciate the truth of that saying. It was not so much a pedagogical maxim; it rather expressed a kind of painstaking poetic vocation: what you have studied the previous day is in your head the following morning, like a piece of music. I did translations, making new versions of Latin and Greek poets with relative ease, as if I were taking dictation; I immersed myself in history and geography, giving them a materiality for myself and living it, travelling in new territories and getting excited about the events and actors of history. I was particularly keen on theorems and logarithms.

Today, as I grow old, I have regained the fruitfulness of the morning hours. Waking up early, without getting out of bed, I programme my days so as to live them with such intensity that, afterwards, almost everything appears to have been planned. When you prepare like that, even unexpected events can’t hurt you. The true nature of those events becomes apparent to you early next morning.

15

1948–9. Those were hard years. My mother, Annamaria, and Luciano earned little. I was fifteen years old. I studied attentively and intensely. School had expropriated all other interests and enthusiasms on my part. Looking back later I wondered if there was anything other than school. I began to live both in a working-class environment—that of the boys on the edge of town who grew up with me and who went on to become artisans or workers—and in the milieu of my schoolmates, who were the sons of university academics or industrialists, of professionals or landowners. I didn’t talk much, but I listened a lot. I observed. I did not judge or take sides. I would not have known what to say about the customs of either the rich or the poor. The abyss that I detected on either side could not be measured. It was only then that I began to perceive social distinctions, and, for the first time, I felt that I was more on the side of the poor than of the rich. If being in this position did not afford me a great deal in the way of entertainment, it did accentuate my curiosity about the world of the rich. I realised that, if you were diligent in school, you could enter that world.

I felt myself to be completely apolitical. In 1948, half of my family voted for the Christian Democrats and the other half for the Garibaldi movement. The same thing happened when it came to the choice between the King and the Republic. When an attempt was made on Togliatti’s life5 I was too busy celebrating Bartali’s victory [in the Tour de France] to pay attention (and if Togliatti had not been injured then I would have been just as happy). One time during those days I was coming out of a cinema in town, in the middle of the afternoon. I found myself trapped in a melée. Tear gas everywhere. I tried to get away, without understanding what was happening. I had found myself in the middle of a demonstration. All of a sudden a blow from a police club knocked me down: a crack of rubber and iron between my head and shoulder, delivered from the back of a van. One of our neighbours picked me up: “They’re going to pay for this”. And they did. The next day my friend told me that they had broken the windows of the bars where the Christian Democrats hung out. My indifference did not bother him.

So the world had been broken in two, at least in the outskirts of my city. I didn’t take anyone’s side, and no one really cared which side I was on: I was the brother of a fascist hero, and no one wanted to mess with me.

16

The past now seemed hidden inside me: an untouchable package that should never be opened. A boy who was cheerful but on autopilot. I only responded to stimuli that had to do with school. Aside from that, I was a child closed in on himself. There was no Mozart either inside me or around me during those years. I preferred to know everything and say nothing. I was running from what I had inside me.

It was certainly not the political choices of the majority, nor the social situation of my peers, that excluded me from the city. If anything it was the fact that my suffering had not yet connected to an ability to react to the world, and that I lacked the capacity to remove the block that I had placed over myself.

Anyway, things were changing: I entered a kind of sleeping wakefulness characterised by states of excitement that helped me make small changes in my life and my daily routine. Adventures with girls began, as well as walks along the Bacchiglione and bike rides in the hills. There was a profane love, a state of erotic excitement separate from any particular choice of partner, an arousal that matched my general state of mind—a synthesis between a body that was becoming adult and a soul that was hard and somewhat twisted. The profane love came into its own during the holidays, and then also after a brilliant first year of high school (with a grade average of eight, very rare at Tito Livio), with shy and eager girls. Sacred love, on the other hand, was reduced to the writing of poetry in a Pascalian vein, to a dip into the Dantean “sweet new style” [dolce stil novo], and to a kind of Ungarettian hermeticism that fitted with the tastes of the time. I seem to recall having written a couple of stories. Both ended with the suicide of the protagonist—in the first as a result of an economic disaster, in the second because of disappointment in love. Thanks to this sentimental education I was now beginning to take shape. I was not precocious in my development; among so many other dramas, I had at least avoided that one.

17

My mother was a kind of Lombard Niobe. I have described elsewhere the love and devotion (sometimes lively, sometimes bitter, but never bloodless) that bonded me to her. She had enclosed her grief inside herself, as if she were made of stone. Pietrazzurra, green sapphire: in my teenage dreams I saw myself crossing the Aegean or the Tyrrhenian Sea—my love for my mother was the bow of a boat that passed through and cut through that stone. Love goes through stone; the pain of Aldina was a stone. There was something sublime in this: tragic, fabulous, and yet solid and hard. How to escape from this prison, how to break the chain that held all of us prisoner? The idea of flight took on a different meaning every time the hybrid love-pain took on a new form. Just as living can in some cases be abstracted into the sphere of pain and at other times into the sphere of love.

In the future my idea of life would always present itself somewhere between those alternatives—between the hard life of work and the joyous life of love. My mother was now simultaneously offering me the mourning of the past and the path of escape.

18

In my jotted notes from those years I find that I expressed great pleasure in contact with nature. I did a lot of sport, especially in the mountains. I learned to climb, with great satisfaction. In the Dolomites I climbed rocky routes—the ones that the guides call ‘classic’—climbing a little bit higher than alpine prudence advised. At ground level I was doing a lot of walking. I won the ten kilometres youth championship in the Veneto. Also noticeable in my jottings is the need to earn money. I gave remedial Latin and Greek classes to rich and rather stupid kids. I bought a bicycle and I subscribed to Lo sport illustrato, which had beautiful graphs of the current soccer championships. I don’t really know why I subscribed to that, because as a boy I had never been a fan, nor was I a good player on the parish football field. But I did get to see the Grande Torino—the day before the Superga tragedy—at the Appiani Stadium, where they were held to a 4-4 draw with Padova, as well as an 8-0 Padova win on the Venetians’ home pitch, which was a source of great pride for the city.

I really liked the mountains, but I loved the effort more than the result, the sport more than the emotion that came with reaching the summit. In my reflections and in my behaviours, the discovery of hard work in life became central. Traversing nature in ways that involved effort was a sign that I could get out of the wretchedness that I saw around me and the poverty of my possibilities. The effort represented a kind of struggle to find a happy way out of the state of nature. Was I succeeding? It was too early to tell. But at that time that space of sport and nature was also a terrain on which I could fight my illness. I didn’t have asthma attacks when I was doing sport. I left the symptoms behind me as I walked with an athletic rhythm, and my sweat took on the taste of the red earth of the track.

There has actually always been a certain within/against nature agonism inside me—more worthy of a savage than of someone who has absorbed the spirit of competition. In nature there is always something dead that I recognise with a specific realisation: that nature can rot quickly. But the noble savage nonetheless knows that nature is a necessary passageway: not a Romantic sublime, but something that has use value—something vital and instrumental. Be that as it may, the relationship with nature actually revealed a sleepful wakefulness in my spirit, as opposed to an opening to something else. I was still numbed by the pain of childhood. When the effort of sporting events became extreme, I felt a true and decisive move forward in my life, as if I were getting off a drug, breaking from the misery of death, from the pain of past experience. That is how I would describe the change that was taking place at that point in my life. But how did I manage to get out of all that? What was the key to the story? It was not just a sporting exploit†.

The blockage had been deposited inside me and had accumulated. It was useless to try to sidestep its internal effects. It was inside me that the escape route would have to be established, according to a game of additions and subtractions. The positive virtuality consisted in the fact that the urgency of overcoming the obstacle didn’t mean that one ended up making destructive decisions: one engaged in the fight in order to stay alive. I began to understand that it was the will to live that made the difference.

In the long impasse that was my childhood, the thought of suicide never presented itself as an immediate possibility, as an actual live option. One wanted to live, but how hard it can be to go from virtuality to the power [potenza] of being! Today I think again of Nietzsche as interpreted by Deleuze:

There is cruelty, even monstrosity, on both sides of this [double] struggle against an elusive adversary, in which the distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish itself from it but continues to espouse that which divorces it. Difference is this state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction. We must therefore say that difference is made, or makes itself, as in the expression “make the difference”. This difference or determination as such is also cruelty.6

Untangling activity from the indeterminate, from the knotty tissue that imprisons it, was terribly difficult.

Would I succeed? What was the supplement of being that I would have to add?

19

Grandfather Enea died on 17 February 1951. He was born in 1870. How many times had he already been killed, despite the courage of his long life!

The first time was when my father, his favourite son, died: he always told me that it had been the fascists’ castor oil—my father had been forced to drink it three times—that had killed him. It destroyed his liver, which had already been damaged by the malaria that he had contracted during war. Then another of his sons, Guido, went with D’Annunzio to Fiume. He disappeared shortly after and was forgotten at home. This time Enea really died. But he also seemed eternal—more than eighty years old in an Italy where life expectancy was still below sixty, and proud of his dark hair! He had been born into the poverty of Padano-Romagnolo day labourers, in Ozzano dell’Emilia. “You can’t imagine how hard it was to spend a day hauling one-hundredweight sacks”, he often told me. Grandfather had fled from that slavery during the great crisis of the 1890s. He was a militant socialist, then an anti-fascist, and then, after the war, a frontist and unitary socialist within the PCI. He introduced me to the importance of collective action—to communism not as ideology, nor as a mere fighting dispositif, but as a way of life. My grandfather had a natural inclination to interpret politics as a relationship and a conflict between those who resist and those who rule: between consensus and authority. “Politics”, he would tell me, “is a two times table”. Slave and master, one against the other. Blessed man, I wish I had understood you from the start! He was the one who taught me what a strike [sciopero] was, and also about the rapid response police [celere] and the black brigades [brigate nere] and the royal guards [guardie regie]—in short, he taught me what ‘police’ meant (always against the workers). Class hatred and class struggle was something that he used to spell out to me when he met with his friends: “Do you see that old gentleman? He was one of those who were sent into exile”. And then he would make the gentleman tell me the whys and hows of communist anti-fascism. “Did you ever meet Giorgio, your father’s best friend? Well, look, he was working in the Chamber of Labour when the fascists burned it down. Instead of saving himself, he went to look for the caretaker’s son among the flames. The fascists waited for him to come out with the child in his arms, and they stabbed him to death”.