Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Folio 117

  I see Gabriel A. He brings me news of the machinations of the Italian embassy against my presence – as keynote speaker – at the Marx conference in Madrid. First they tried applying pressure in university circles. Then, given the short shrift they got from the various university rectors, they started pressurizing the government. The result of this is that Negri’s presence in Madrid is deemed to constitute ‘an element of destabilization of Spain’s democratic government’. Incredible. I have a long conversation with Gabriel about the situation in Spain, about the repeated coups, both threatened and attempted, about the seriousness of the situation in the Basque country – and about the terrible social conditions which are beginning to appear in Andalusia, as well as in the factory-city. Poverty, unemployment, disorganization, hunger … I think to myself that these terms have been of no importance for us in recent years, but now they are starting to explode. Not only in the south, but here in Europe. Gabriel insists strongly on the originality of many of the local cultural and political phenomena – in particular as regards the Basque country; and he tables a theory of the autonomy of the social movements, which is extremely concrete in the relation it makes between politics, culture and history. It provides a terrain for future work. But behind these problems of method I have another question: once again, what is the reason for this extreme distancing between power and potenza, between state command and the knowledge and liberty of the common people, of the workers? The total disproportion of the relation is patently obvious. The thing has exploded everywhere, all over Europe, and the victory of the social democracies has not been able to close this massive hysteresis. Why is it that reformism has not only been incapable of intervening actively around the class relation, but has also been unable to understand what it actually is.

  Why do we have this – definitive – degradation of political language – this caprice that a non-signifying political language introduces into command and into administrative and political organization? With Albiac I discuss how we have to see self-valorization as a moment that is absolutely innovative – as a supporting element not only in the scientific study of rebellion, but above all in the analysis of the conditions and articulations of the new constitution. The problem is not only how to recover the power of subversive knowledge (which was that of the mass worker) within society as a whole, but also how to rearticulate it at the social level. This is the task that awaits us. We have a science which is up to the job, even if it is temporarily somewhat latent: the science of rupture and refusal.

  We need to find ways to express the full constitutional positivity of the refusal. But the major problem is how to rebuild the subjects of transformation. When I think of the people whom I have seen to be active in recent years – and the new ones that Gabriel has indicated to me – there is no doubt: the south is within the north. The person in prison stands in relation to the social proletarian in the same way as people hit by unemployment and hunger stand in relation to the new workers and technicians, possessors of invention power. It is within this complex subjectivity that the new constitution of liberty and communism can be built. Gabriel tells me about the weight of the blackmail which the reaction continues to exercise on Spain’s democracy, through the presence of the army. I ask myself, what difference is there (apart from the more elegant form) with what the magistracy is doing in the Italian situation? The full disarticulation of these perverse dialectical determinations of the material constitution is a job that cannot wait.

  It seems to me that we absolutely have to move in this direction what remains of European political and social autonomy: towards taking apart the perversion of the institution. This strikes me as a necessary precondition. In short, for the obstacle to be reduced to transparency, it has to be disaggregated and subverted. The epistemological value of subversion has to be entirely reinstated. Now, as I write, I get sudden flashes: Judge Francesco Amato and his stolid provocative manner as he interrogated me on this, on the theoretical value of subversion. What difference is there between his behaviour and that of the officer of the Guardia Civil who went into the Cortes? I was carefully considerate in contesting that ideological agent of repression, just as the Spanish parliamentarians were cowardly in not standing up to his challenge. No. Even the word on its own has a power of subversion. So let us go forward, to reconstruct new horizons within subversion. Constitutional innovation, a new regime of liberties for the new proletariat. This shit world can be subverted from the bottom upwards. The network of class relations is huge, and its contents are ineradicable. The irreversibility of the revolution that has passed – and is already embedded in people’s spirits – has to be affirmed, expressed and shown. I am not tired, not any longer. I just wish I were among many. Soon. (Paris – 21 October)

  Folio 118

  This morning I took a car ride round Paris with a friend who wanted to show me the crazy underground topography of the new organization of this city. One tunnel after another – will this not result in a dark state of consciousness, lived by a subterranean humanity? It is all different, and infinitely more inhuman than the Metro. It seems that a popular sport among the youth of Paris is to go down into the catacombs, sewers and underground passages of the metropolis. I have a sudden flashback of the journey from Bastia to Île Rousse last September: an insane race, with cows lying in the middle of the road and tiny roads that were more or less impassable. The driver told me that he was a Formula One driver, and I could well believe it. What incredible blues and greens, and what a joy, as I held on tight. But here it is entirely different. Now I am living in the subterranean spaces of this city and in the darkness of a semi-clandestinity that offends my hope. But this is the world I am going to have to traverse. In its depth. And on the other hand I have the world of Italy. I read the back numbers of the last few weeks of Il Manifesto. As can be expected, every kind of thing is happening chez nous. Martinazzoli, the ‘good’ minister, has presented a project on preventive de-imprisonment which is absolutely disgusting. Meanwhile the comrades of the UCC have started a hunger strike. As for me, Biagi says that I give him a pain – good for him – the feeling is mutual. The pentiti of Milan are attacking me. Their lawyers and their families likewise. This makes me happy – no danger of confusion here. This Babylon amuses me, but at the same time it disgusts me. Trumpets braying out of tune. Long live liberty – I shout it with the simplicity of a René Clair. Then I think again of this absurd play between sunlight and the subterranean – and of the fact that the Italian scene generates only contempt and a sense of shame. Martinazzoli presents a law that is contemptible, Valiani supports it, and the final outcome is simply that the comrades do not get out. These people are butchers, and that is all. On the other hand, what should one expect, in the face of the kind of politics embraced by the likes of Craxi? A politics which maintains the corporative groups, both at the social level and at the political level, within their enclosed space. Refusing either to put them together, because it is impossible, or to create new forms of dialectic by pitting them, as they merit, one against the other. A politics in tatters. What happened to the much vaunted capacity for government? A swamp, more than a government. But we have to shatter this squalid image of power. It is possible. It is possible to emerge into the sunlight. The refounding of a politics of the Left, in Italy, will have to take the risk of driving hard – the adventure of that Mercedes racing between the two coasts of Corsica, among mountains that are no longer inhabited. A shifting of the political problematics, this is the central point. The political generations of the Resistance and post-Resistance have to be completely eliminated from the scene – they are not our teachers, they are the ones who have erected the ambiguous art of institutional compromise and corruption, both administrative and political, into a method. The 7 April case is a phenomenon of corruption no less important than the cases of Sindona and Calvi. Corruption, in the Italian context, has become so much second-nature to power that it has corrupted it. I do not think that hones
ty is an absolute virtue in politics – but dishonesty, if it wants to have margins to stand up, at least has to come to recognize the new vices of the new subjects. Dishonesty cannot be archaic. This is the reason why everything is so wide of the mark chez nous. A revolution, a revolution that is simply conservative (on the basis of an effectuality that has already occurred – as Tocqueville said of the great French Revolution) is the minimum that we have to impose. We really cannot tolerate these Romans any longer! We need light, sun and clarity. Once again, a presupposition which permits us to follow the level of shifting which takes place in the situation, and gives us the strength to attack the obstacle with subversive intelligence. (Paris – 22 October)

  Folio 119

  I changed houses this evening, and I expect that I shall be staying in this new place for a long time. It’s costing me an arm and a leg. The money from my interviews is about to run out, and my member of Parliament’s salary is being eaten up by lawyers’ expenses. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. The view from up here is superb. I see the outline [of the city] like from the top of a skyscraper. Down below, the world goes past like so many ants. They flow. Slowly. And yet, what a potency there is in that flow! I have a telescope, which came free with the apartment. Food for thought arising from that – near and far, present and future – unique sensations and strange perceptions. How great and splendid the world is, down there. How much richness and how much intelligence flowing past. The only way I have of imagining the future is as political struggle and as time organized for the multitude. I am re-reading Spinoza, from among the few books that I own and haul around in my baggage. In the coming days, from this apartment, I shall be better able to reorganize my life. As a machine of work and war. War for hope and liberation. I am very grateful to you, you my friends who have helped me! And how many comrades there are, close to me, and hoping with me, both in their happiness and in their desperation! Certainly, sometimes you look at me as a person would look at a wild animal – a man of surprising vitality. Surprising when compared with the overly pallid nature of intellectuals in France. However, here there is an incredible nostalgia for politics, communism and revolution – and also for everything which buries it or submerges it or postpones it. Why? Why is it that all these forces are not capable of being present on the terrain of constitutive practice? Sometimes this great race of intellectuals risks ending up as a kind of waxworks – wax dummies, horrors, superficial recollections. No, this cannot be. Sometimes they are prisoners of the various traditional taboos of French culture (hatred of Germans and of the idea of German unity, a pallid nationalism, a certain tiredness when it comes to challenging political stereotypes, etc.), but this cannot permit the extinction of a transformative intelligence, which is the only thing that nourishes reason. In all these comrades I feel that there is a blockage – between an analytical intelligence which uncovers the unbearability of this world and a will that pursues only general solutions to the problems. A kind of frustrated athleticism of the spirit. I think of the problems and of the people, one by one. I don’t think that the blockage of the spirit can be allowed to translate into an exhaustion of hope. Here we have the finest brains in the whole of Europe. What is needed is that this intelligence, so sleepily sunk in desperation, finds a way of expressing itself again. We have to set in motion a series of European links and connections, so as to develop our hopes in common. I do not know how it is best to proceed – but this has to be done, and until it is done we shall not be able to produce very much. I talked with Félix at length about this project. He is completely convinced of it – but equally incapable of involving himself in it. This is implicit in his Mille Plateaux: I have myself tied up, like Odysseus, in order not to hear and be taken over by the formidable effect of that siren song. And yet he will have to make a move and take the responsibility for a new political initiative – for himself, and for all those who believe, correctly, that the sirens are right. His Mille Plateaux is a formidable European book. The finest thing that has been produced in the past ten years. On the basis of this ensemble of ideas and projects which traverse the real we can undoubtedly construct a network of connections and transformation. As for the antagonism – that is growing, and it is our task to identify its constitutive parameters on the basis of the developing subjectivity. Europe – shattered internally in its institutions, and, externally, cracked by Yalta into East and West – is the greatest country in the world. Its intelligentsia has to rebuild itself. This determination seems to me absolutely fundamental. Today we are battling to construct the theoretical conditions necessary for understanding, development and struggle within the general dislocation that has taken place. Breaking with East–West, and destroying even the memory of Yalta. Who would be better at doing it than these intellectuals, who are of the same race as those who destroyed Westfalia and the peace of the ancien régime? Enough of the profound masochism of our experience of Europe. Europe no longer has a metaphysics – we need to rebuild it. We no longer have the secular religion of communist militancy. On the European terrain we can rebuild it. I have been talking in these terms continually over the past few days, and launching these hypotheses. My associates are in agreement. The European perspectives of our work need to be organized – and soon! (Paris – 23 October)

  Folio 120

  On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people marched for peace, in Germany (particularly in Germany), and also in Britain, Italy and Belgium. Willy Brandt has taken up a position against the missiles. Poor Europe, capable of this last big dream. Peace! Meanwhile the dirty war in Lebanon is moving ahead. Suicide trucks against the French and the Americans – hundreds and hundreds of dead. Reagan has occupied the island of Grenada – a strategy of transversal response, they tell me. That’s Bishop’s island – poor comrade, I remember you from the Potere Operaio conference in Florence! Europe, confined between East and West, is sucked into the conflict in the Middle East. An irresistible dynamics of destruction. Here, in our own situation, the problem of peace is completely enclosed within that of urgency, the urgency of a crisis that is no longer controllable, and within that of having to defend ourselves from too many enemies – often terrorist enemies, invisible and suicidal. Responses of reprisal. Moving in a vicious circle, which is absolutely rigid. The problem of peace is felt as a problem of defence of life. We cannot go on like this. In this urgency, the debate about peace is castrated, crushed on the boundaries of estrangement. The urgency removes from peace its particular shadings. It is a Hobbesian operation: one is disposed to sacrifice everything to peace. This is a reactionary and suicidal ideology. In this way peace becomes a formal negative, which provides the basis for a right of exploitation. If I were an African, I would care nothing for this peace. Here in Europe only a few forces are moving decently on a radical discourse of peace. A European peace capable of both breaking the blocs and extending towards the south – on a north–south axis – an action of resolutive political and economic construction. Is this only a dream? I talk about this with many friends and comrades. For all of them, particularly here in France, there is a preoccupation with rebuilding a political content of the peace movement – political and democratic. Peace as a terroristic ‘no future’ thematic is rejected – this thematic, like that of war, should be denied. The blackmail has to be overturned. If there is no alternative to peace, at the same time there is an alternative within peace. Alain says that, for the maintenance of peace, the only effective means consists of transversal war – this little world has to be considered for what it is: an ensemble of strategic borders. So, he concludes, we have to move realistically on the segments and to abandon the dream of peace and liberation from the power blocs. I reply that this will not do. Our realism disarms us. I prefer utopia, the great utopia which gives hope, rather than this way of proceeding through short-sighted perspectives and the acceptance of blackmail. Europe has the possibility of imposing a major project – European unity versus Yalta, and the opening of debate with the countries of th
e south, to recover a prospect of real peace. Only such a terrain can offer a chance to emerge from the blackmail of war, which the crisis poses as its fundamental bulwark and which functions in defence of the existing power and against all transformation. We need to link together, even if only within a single frame of analysis, the three great themes of peace (namely the breaking of the East–West axis; European unity; and a new north– south relationship). Only in this way will it be possible to break the hangman’s knot, which was made at Yalta and which now strangles us. The discussion needs to open out. What is the so-called French power of dissuasion? Maybe it really is an illusion – but it offers possibilities of international debate to the powers hereabouts. Chauvinist leftovers complicate the question. In reality this ‘dissuasion power’ is simply a diplomatic tool. The debate has to be sharpened up, it has to go into things more deeply, and it needs to push the terrain of analysis forward. War hangs over us like a spectre and paralyses the spirit. The pages of Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Nature and Phenomenology, where he deals with terror: re-read them. Tragedy is born on the margins of uncontrollability – but the tragedy could be avoided by a radical change in subjectivity, huge, the kind of thing which is possible within these dimensions of the conflict. Therefore we have to come out of a purely strategic debate and insert the perspective of the great change which is under way: a change which has already happened in people’s consciousnesses, and now has to make its appearance in an organized form. Now more than ever, the watchword of the autonomous reappropriation of politics – of the decision over life and death – are completely of the present. The spirit can extend itself in constructiveness only if we entirely pick apart the political contents of peace. Being against war cannot produce the result of desperation and terror. The ecological movement and the anti-nuclear movement have been almost swept away by the hysteria of peace. We need to reconquer the theme of peace as the thematic of a project. I undertake to work on these problems with seriousness, humility and determination, as ever. I feel, for all the confusion of the situation, a certain solidarity with my determination. (Paris – 24/25/26 October)