Folio 25
This is not a trial, it is an execution. Days of cross-examination. I’m losing track of the days – seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Lucio has been subjected to a string of charges which came from the new pentiti. The trial unfolds, against him, a truth which is already formed, established and fixed. But that truth – the truth of the prosecution – does not hold up. And so the preliminary hearing [istruttoria] is being reopened, according to the Public Prosecutor Marini, to show that these people are guilty anyway. We are caught in a vicious circle. Arrigo has been on the stand and has now concluded his cross-examination. He puts forward a full account of the movements and political development of ’68. They don’t understand what he is saying. The judges are prisoners to one history and to one language: the history of the pentiti and the language of the Red Brigades. The outcome is a terrible confusion, which only the stereotypes such as those of ‘Red Brigaders’ can simplify. When Arrigo admits to a robbery, the court goes crazy: they want him to ‘confess’ [be a ‘repenter’, ‘pentito’]. Arrigo may be a repenter, but he refuses to put quotation marks around it. He refuses to speak in Red Brigades language – a language which, in its limited instrumental rationality, seems to suit the judges very well; and he also refuses to tell anything other than the truth. Furthermore, he has no inclination to colour the movement’s events in dark colours; he prefers to emphasize the real tragedies of opportunism (for himself) and of infamy (for the others). The pentito is a liar even when he is telling the truth. His story is always instrumental and overdetermined by the pardon he is going to receive from the bosses. When they become prisoners of pentitismo, the judges degrade the function they should fulfil. And they are fully caught up in this degradation. In fact, when you look at judges in this trial and you consider the mediocrity of their relationship with the truth, their crude functionalism and the hypocrisy of their approach to reality, you are forced to come to the conclusion that, if they were on the other side, they would be Red Brigaders. There really is an abyss between them and us, the comrades. On our side there is intelligence and doubt, passion and playfulness, hope and pain, and above all there is the attempt, continuous and tireless, to rebuild that history, that situation, with humility and enthusiasm, and always with truth. But when will the judges ever be able to understand that our mistakes belong in the context of changes taking place in generations and generations of political militants – and in the context of a hope for communism, of which we represented the renewal? (G12 Rebibbia – 11/12/13/14 April)
Folio 26
Days twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three of the trial. The situation is now as follows: after four years of trial, they are about to open new pre-trial proceedings [istruttoria] against us. The structure is still the one created by Calogero; but this particular goatskin is not filled with good old wine but with the depositions of the pentiti, which are now turning up after four years. The Milan trial has entirely spilled over here. All that one can say is that the madness of Calogero finds here its long-distance executors. Building the schema in a void, using the media to create a false national consensus, convincing people of our guilt, and then getting other people to find the evidence for you. Incredible but true. This is not a trial, it is purely and simply the construction of an intrigue. At this stage any defence becomes impossible. What is the point of trying to contest the structure of the accusation when this structure is de facto incontestable and the evidence is supplied not only a posteriori, but after a time lapse of four, five, ten years? I am writing this after the cross-examinations of Lucio and during that of Marione. With strength and with generosity, albeit from within a state of terrible tiredness, Marione succeeds in reconstructing an ‘alternative’ view of our history. He presents the historical truth against which the prosecution has built its case – a history of diffuse struggles and spontaneous acts of constructing the movement, a picture of great openness, of joy of living and of need to struggle. Marione speaks of the ‘party of Mirafiori’; the Public Prosecutor replies by accusing him of the fact that, out of that movement, there emerged terroristic forces and organizations. And then follows list after list of pentiti. For him, the link is causal and we are the devil. I admire my comrades, and also myself, for the strength that we put in resisting this unequal battle. (G12 Rebibbia – 21 April)
Folio 27
There are going to be parliamentary elections. Long discussions among the comrades about the possibility of me standing as a candidate. I see Rossana, who tells me her doubts about it. We discuss at length – I am beginning to know her better. Seeing her again, after so many years, the old polemics came to mind – in reality all of us have lost out a bit, but it remains the case that those who lost most were those who believed in a linear operation of transformation of the working-class movement in Italy. Now, the claim for the values of liberty which Rossana and her people are carrying forward – this really does seem to be a new moment of convergence of forces. Reconstruction and transformation of the working-class and communist movement? I don’t know. Perhaps – the first emergence of something absolutely original. I don’t believe in transfigurations. Or, rather, I believe in them only when they are a result of death. Dialectical negation, with its infinite interweavings of continuity, is only an imbroglio. That’s how we talk. Rossana takes pleasure in liberty, in liberation, and hates prisons and fraudulent trials; all this brings out the old communist in her. I recognize myself in this discourse and I know that it is what has made me what I am. But alongside that I also have other feelings – which are, I think, those of the new proletarians and new social subjects: a radicalism in my love of liberty which is deeper, more desperate and more bodily. In Rossana, the notion of civil liberties and respect for a state based on law is articulated together with the communist revolution. For me, this articulation is only negative – and the history of liberty is a history of counter-powers. Rossana places more hope in this trial than I could ever place. It is curious to see how positively utopian she can be and how many very generous illusions she can carry within her. Rossana’s pessimism of the intellect. Today, at the moment when the tragedy of the trial begins to come close to (and perhaps even interweaves with) the proposal of travelling through the desert of the political, I ask myself, in a state of perplexity, what on earth I have to do with all this. I sense a big distance. Rossana is a most beautiful woman. She has a smile that comforts me. Rossana has many doubts about the forms in which my electoral candidacy should be presented – and she also has many suggestions. By the end of the discussion, she is more or less in agreement with the idea that I should do it anyway – but she has many suspicions about the people and the forces who are putting me forward. Little by little I begin to feel myself trapped in a discourse which is not my own. But it is also the case that this candidacy is the only ‘chance’ I have of getting out of prison. And perhaps it offers the only possibility to pluck this trial out of its destructive inertia. (G12 Rebibbia – 23 April)
Folio 28
Chicco has the capacity to show the court what it means to have a movement which is ‘other’ and a political awareness which is ‘other’. Days twenty-four and twenty-five of the trial. He does so with great intelligence and with a remarkable capacity for putting concrete flesh on historical and conceptual data, even those which are completely external to the matter in hand. His argumentation is brilliant, and his delivery reaches heights of polemical vigour. As he speaks, he brings to life all the demonstrations, struggles, alternatives, contradictions. He talks about the movement of ’77 in the streets of Milan and explains how, far from arming the youth, we were creating political proposals and the organization of a political project. He shows how hopes and expectations were flowing in our circles and how the education of political sentiments and our political discourse were strong. And then the anger of the working-class neighbourhoods, and the young unemployed, and the feminist movement, and the poor intellectuals. He explains how all this appeared on the stage of struggles and
was articulated into a thousand different rivulets of organization. He carries on like this at length, for two, three days of hearings. Overriding the provocations of the judges and of the prosecution, he manages to expand the picture he is describing. Chicco is a great comrade. His imagination really does address, and in human terms, a reality which is ‘other’, which power cannot imagine as being anything but criminal. The history of the ’70s, of a dream and practice of assailing the heavens, is here presented as a moment of life and hope. The recent days have shown the enormous gap that exists between our capacity to produce truth and the court’s inert expression of its unbelievable desire to repress it. There is a wall between our two languages. A wall of horror. (G12 Rebibbia – 27–28 April)
Folio 29
It becomes increasingly obvious that the only way we can get anything out of this trial is by overturning the logic which has made the whole set-up possible – a logic of persecution, the attempt to make an example of us, and the construction of a show trial in order to put a repressive closure on fifteen years of struggles. This is what 7 April symbolizes. This logic has to be overturned. We have to show that the defeat of the movement of those years was only made possible through the denaturation of the formal constitution and through a blatant use of illegality – together with the attempt to found a new material constitution: a rigid relationship between the already existing party forces. The new could not be allowed to appear on the scene, because the new was subversive. In our trial we have to show that this operation has run onto the rocks, that the irreversible has happened and cannot be undone (factum infectum fieri nequit), that the new has rights of citizenship in Italian democracy. Hence the solution to our trial is a political solution to a problem which is unavoidable in terms of the constitution. For this reason, in the next phase of the trial we must opt for a high profile which is entirely political – and at the same time we must open a more articulated dialogue with the institutional forces which understand the centrality of the problem we represent. We also have to build a growing relationship between the 7 April trial and the forces – both those in prison and those in the movement – who are beginning to think seriously how to change the present political situation and how to emerge from the Years of Lead. All this is difficult, damnably difficult. But that is no reason for abandoning hope. When I think what we have been able to achieve in these years, in the worst situations – the inner depths of the special prisons, or the squalid basement of this Palazzo – I think I can be allowed moments of optimism. We are moving inside contradictions that cannot be broken apart. Too many things in the Italian situation suggest that the liberticidal bloc of forces which wanted to promote itself as the new material constitution cannot hold up. The rise of the Socialist Party is supported not so much by the strength of the party itself as by its constitutional positioning, by its need to break the advance of the new material constitution (through the Historic Compromise and partitocracy). The 7 April trial needs to be used in this direction. In juridical terms we can get nothing out of it, but politically we can get a lot. And we should pay attention to what is happening in Europe; to the resumption of struggles in Poland; and to the actions of the German Greens. There is news today of clashes involving Solidarnosc in Warsaw. Today two German friends came to see me, and our discussion kept returning to these themes over and over again. In our struggle against this trial, the key point for regaining a historical breathing space will be a redeployment of the programmatic contents of the communist autonomy movement within the newly developing struggles in Europe. I am very hopeful – the elements of the current political conjuncture are pushing in this direction. (G12 Rebibbia – 1 May)
Folio 30
Luciano has been fantastic in court – analytic, discursive, concise and optimistic, but also bitter – he is completely caught up in it, with his lucid intelligence, his proud sense of ethics and his juridical presence of mind. We are at the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth days of proceedings. Faced with a prosecution machine which shows the highest levels of arrogance towards him – in the complete absence of any evidence – he resists, and does so with a touch of irony. The symbolic meaning of this trial consists in our throwing off the alleged moral responsibility for terrorism. Luciano is able to demonstrate that the central moments in the development of terrorism – the killing of Moro and the killing of Tobagi – were organized against the movement – against that continuity of struggles which we protest. Luciano is pursuing an abstract line of defence, without allowing himself to be distracted from the wicked concreteness of the charges. The inconsistencies in the documentation, the whole pettifogging process in action. Oh God, how I despise them! Luciano, so incapable of bad feelings, so incapable of intrigue, is a really positive figure in this revolting scenario. A limpid retaliation. The powerful lights of the courtroom seem to pass right through his slender figure. You judges, how can you not be frightened by the transparency of his commitment? In the course of the past four years Luciano has lived the worst that the prison system had to offer – including Favignana with its revolting dungeons, before the judicial authorities became so ashamed that they decided to close it. Then the revolt at Trani. Then he had to endure the hysterical and restless meddling of the justice department, which was sending him to different prisons up and down the length of Italy. With lucidity and contemptuous silences he defends his injured humanity before these raging dogs. He is a shining example of moral resistance to the abuses of power, transformed into a knowing alterity. This game, this digging out of an alternative truth, this irreducible desire for life (even to the extent of creating imaginary representations of community in the most desperate of situations) … Luciano has pursued all this with rigour. And always with a smile. He has become strong – physically strong and morally invincible. The ponderous inertia of this trial and of the prison system has not affected him. His heroism smiles out. Disarmingly. He always tries to make himself understood. And to make them change discourse. His innocence shines out like a living spark from the searing hatreds of this trial. He is a Papageno of our times – it is not from ingenuousness that truth is born; only reason knows how to create nature. Luciano, how are you able to maintain your coolness and to nourish your sense of humour? How much suffering has your soul had to endure for it to have become so full of virtue? I am tired this evening, and as I think of you I find no rest. Thinking of your proud stance. And yet it is incredible to see your innocence banged up there, after four long years, against these machine men! They are prisoners of the injustice they have committed, and this in turn is what keeps us in prison. All that is left is imagination. The good imagining of finding ourselves in a movement which is rebuilding the values of liberty and community. There remains a restless spirit which will never lie down, and a new life which will spring up with fresh vigour from under the lucid control of suffering. The ferocity of these machineries of injustice will be destroyed again – I am certain of it – by our imagination, or by the renewed spiritual Luddism of our children. (G12 Rebibbia – 3/4/5 May)
Folio 31
The electoral campaign is under way. Marco P. comes to see me.
He is organizing the conference and tells me that he plans to suggest that the radicals should not field candidates for the election. I sign up. I’ve known Marco since forever. From the days of the UNURI student union. Then, one time, I met him by chance in the street, in Saint Germain, under the statue of Diderot, and passed him a suitcase from the Algerian réseau. He certainly wasn’t non-violent in those days!
There’s a kind of generational brotherhood between us. I admire some aspects of his politics; I am, epidermically but no less strongly, fascinated. Negatively attracted by the superficiality of his approach to problems. Big projects backed by tiny forces generate, if not the comical, then certainly an irreverent paradox. Gulliver and the Lilliputians. I enjoy listening to him. It’s almost impossible to get a word in edgeways. He is very alert and tries to achieve a kind of interlocutory ‘fee
ling’ in conversation (so-called; yet it is true that, miraculously, it really is always a discussion, even when he’s the only one talking). His is a Humean personality – he does not believe in the objectivity of physical and political relations except on the basis of the construction of a dialogic ‘belief’; on the basis of a kind of trusting self-abandonment of his interlocutor to the power of his own imagination. He continually creates soft scenarios, making his interlocutor feel comfortably at home, and then he uses that relative ease of feelings to get his own way. Is this seduction? Sometimes he becomes a cat, in the sense that he exercises an extreme tactility of approach, of initiative, moving forward cautiously, but being ready to react instantaneously. His weak point is culture: he ventures there readily, but with an uncharacteristic timidity.
It is the only point on which he seems to seek indulgence. Otherwise he asks for commitment. He is only completely frank when he is analysing networks of political relations – then he becomes lucid and downright cynical. And you still have the sense of a very violent ambivalence. Not subtle but hard. Necessary in that environment of wolves where he has decided to conduct his battles – but this is an environment to which he also belongs, with a reformism that is structurally homogeneous with the constitutional conditions he accepts. This scares me. I can’t see clearly how our political relationship can be organized. The only way I can resist his style of constructing ethics of sentiment is by applying humour and thinking of their philosophical destiny – between Hume and Berkeley: between faith in appearance as effectuality and the demystification of appearance as illusion – a real stereotype of critical thinking. I strongly reject his hard way of living the system, though. I talk about this with the comrades. They give me strength, they tell me to press on. However, Marco P. is plainly determined to push the line of electoral abstentionism. What does that mean for me? A glimmer of freedom all of a sudden extinguished? There is ambiguity here. (G12 Rebibbia – 8 May)
Diary of an Escape Page 9
