Rebibbia, 10 October 1981
Cher David,
So you have been in Padua. At last you have seen it – that city, which is a fount of every kind of extremist conspiracy and intrigue. Yet for me it has always seemed worthier of the pen of a Stendhal than of a Dostoevsky. Never mind . . . not only the cities, but above all the ways of the world have changed. So much so that dyspeptic small-time public prosecutors can go round inventing chilling tales to hit the headlines. For some reason it fell to me to be the pivotal point in this game, which was being played (and still is) around falsehood and provocation, because the truth was immediately clear and immediately recognised as unacceptable to the raison d’état. The story here is a heavy story and it’s already brought me a great many years of prison; besides, at this point I do not want to pull out of the game. So I understand your question, my young friend: tell me your name. A name that has been sullied by the brutality of the political courts and by the violence of the media. Tell me your name, claim what you are. Sure, David, I want to try. Because I like you. But also because this story has not been painless and, in living it – whether with irony or in despair – I’ve had more than one moment of doubt. Maybe, in explaining things to you, I’ll manage to deal with a few uncertainties about my identity. But where shall I begin? Should I call on memory for assistance? I fear memory. Too often it is empty vanity and replaces the real instead of getting immersed in it. It is ideology; it is self-complacency; and, in this prison I inhabit, it is also the torment of a past that is fixed, downcast, turned against life; it is the act of blackmail of solitude against collective desire. There must be something truer, which enabled me both to become a man and to offer you now this bodily thing that I am, declaring myself a collective being, beyond the sour taste of individuality. In the old days I used to attend Jean Bollack’s lectures: animus – not anima – is what Lucretius called that nucleus of very thin material in quo consilium vitae regimenque locatum est.1 Here we are: neither the pure, vital sensibility nor the memory of its illusions – rather it is the animus that should speak, against and beyond the triviality of memory. As for our names, we find them assigned to us – they come out slowly from a kind of great indifference in which we recognise ourselves to be immersed. Imagination, then and now, breaks this indifference – and it is a hard nucleus of rationality and passion. It constitutes us as what we are: signs of a relationship between past, future, and the many senses of time; and signs of a collective relationship. I find my name only in relation to a history that has been co-lived with me and in which my being has been formed. A good hermeneutics points to what is most internal with the help of what is most external. So it will be this cupiditas that will allow me to tell the story and to set in motion the machine of liberation.
You, David, like many comrades born in this last decade of struggles (and out of its passionate and ruthless critique), are nevertheless deeply puzzled about the ontological compactness to which I refer, and you wonder whether taking it as a starting assumption does not flatten history. That may even be so; for the moment I cannot offer much to counter this puzzlement. I entrust the thesis to history. The canvas is materialist: life is a sacrament, a blend of divinity and reality, and, on this surface, love and violence form social essences and collective identities. A real flow. Pipeline. It is in here that we carve ourselves out. Imagination shows us childhood as a transcendental structure without a subject; the untidiness of memory and the misery of individuality are tempered against this background. We generously seek ourselves within this controverted reality into which we are immersed; it is an astute generosity, à la Lévi-Strauss, that sets us on the hunt, and the ego is the savage. I do not know how to explain this better; it is in the fact of recognising ourselves in a community that we grasp ourselves. It’s a tough act. Did you not learn this in your native Brittany?
The people’s Veneto, where I grew up, is not a soft land – everything was dry. Dry, the frost that clung to the workers’ jackets in the morning, when long queues of bicycles – a huge procession of ants whitened by frost – arrived to assist in the dispersed and primitive accumulation of capital. Dry from the dust that collected on plane trees in the countryside, in the summer heat. That dust was full of pollen in both spring and autumn; it, too, was dry, and always gave me asthma. Dry, the sweet evening air of May – when, after the evening service, we caught fireflies and put them in glasses. Dry, the magnolia leaves – almost wooden by autumn; and when you walked on them they broke with a crack. Recently certain intellectuals have accredited an image of this strong landscape as moist and flaccid. They are bad witnesses. My mother tongue and that of the people were similarly dry and hard. You found Ruzante2 in the priest’s Sunday sermon, and his sing-song dialect did not diminish the power of the words. My Veneto, the popular and peasant Veneto that I knew in the 1940s and 1950s, had not seen the eighteenth-century bourgeois corruption of morals. It was not Venice, it was the mainland. No religious mysticism. The church was everything in this region, which had no metropolis and had not yet experienced the dispersals of the individual and the exaggerated violence of industrial concentration. The church was a mass organisation. Articulated, loving, omnipresent and powerful. A medieval knight. My relationship with it was physical – a relationship in which the exercise of Christian virtues was dry and natural. I didn’t know what torbid meant – neither the melancholy of Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge nor the emotional upheavals of Musil’s young Törless; in the Veneto of my adolescence there was more of Bavaria than of Mitteleuropa. So that’s where I grew up – and there, at about the age of eighteen, I learned the magic words that were to enable me to articulate the indistinctness into which I was immersed and to swim freely in that dry sea.
The first magic word that I learned at that time was ‘witnessing’. The Catholic movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s was experiencing its first crisis of orientation. Only later did I realise the seriousness of this crisis. My friends and I felt its effects: it was, against the pure and simple political restoration that had happened in Rome, an appeal to the notions of militancy and Christian witnessing in the world. I lived this appeal to witnessing not at the political level but at a human and religious level – this was the concluding phase of my adolescence. Rather than being grounded in history, my experience was psychologically and ethically defined. I lived an enveloping and indistinct horizon and that was where I built the beginnings of my desire to know – witnessing was, first and foremost, an act of vitality effected from within the conditions that you experienced, a break, a choice between what oppresses you and what liberates you. (Do you recall, cher David, the Saxon witnessing of Hans Jürgen Krahl? When I read it in the middle of the events of 1968 I recognised in that confession the genesis of my own desire for a breaking.) A witnessing – but of what? The community, its needs, its reality, the tension that we recognised in it, between poverty and the desire for happiness. Of course, it was a vicious circle (‘there is again a generation that wants to be at the crossroads’ – so says Benjamin in the Metaphysics of Youth – ‘but the crossroads is nowhere to be found’).3 And yet it was not a vicious circle when the circle was infused with charity – with a stripping bare of oneself in the love of others, which broke indifference and produced the first projects of solidarity. We filled this word with content and with hope, as an alternative to another word, which was also magic but in some ways frightening: ‘the priesthood’. It was nevertheless an alternative that we understood well – as a single act of free choice – since it was left to us to take one option or the other, in a world where the abundance of ecclesiastical vocations was accompanied by the urgent need for civil agents of clerical politics. But there was a contradiction – namely this: we were not interested in politics, or at least not in the Christian democrat politics that we saw before us – and we knew no other kind; and yet we wanted to make a stand in the world through radical choices of poverty and of charity. It was clear to us that these choices would not be possible for us as priests, in the world where we lived. In those years, five or six of my friends chose the priesthood, despite everything; but they are all far away now, very far away, as missionaries. We did not understand that the choice of poverty was also an immediately anticapitalist one – only in a distant future could that be argued, not here among us. Here we lived secularism like saints, leaving politics to the priests. What a crazy mix-up. In fact, the decision to opt for poverty and charity broke the indistinction of the world, placed determination as the first element of our ethics – without our knowing it, it was historicising our existence. And perhaps, even though we didn’t really understand it, we had, in the life of community, intuited communism before we came to understand and critique capitalism. With boundless generosity we lived as communists, and we were at the same time Christians, Catholics and people of the Veneto.
Often today apologists of the bosses’ world order accuse me of turning religious sentiment against their works: lack of irony, they tell me. But nothing is more ironic than capital’s failure to grasp any of that – religion, youth, and the world. They are bigger than capital. Here’s Benjamin: ‘The movement of awakening among the new youth shows the direction of that infinitely distant point at which we know religion. And movement in general is for us the deepest guarantee of its proper direction.’4 The irony lies entirely here: in the irreducibility of the movement to fixity, of the sacred to capital. However, what ensured that my emotions stayed alive and lasted for the whole of my life was the fact that I was to witness the very rapid maturing of capitalist development in the Veneto, which coincided with the years of my youth. Might one not say, then, that it’s been a lucky theoretical situation, the one in which I lived? When, ironically, I was able to amass, in the span of a single lifetime, material for reflection on the birth, the development, and now the crisis of a morceau of the Zivilisation of capital?
But let’s get back to my teenage years and to those magic words: ‘the social question’. This was a strange object, because it seemed not to involve us directly. There was no ‘social question’ in the Veneto, people said, except one that was reflected, experienced at second hand. The social question meant the South – a species of ‘third world’ that the sudden and rapacious thirst for accumulation (this was the Catholic critique of the Risorgimento) had dragged into our own world, further impoverishing it, plundering it, exploiting it. The social question came to me as a kind of third-worldism. My first real, politically determined intense emotion was for the conditions of the South. I’ll tell you in another letter about when I started to go to the South. For now you need only grasp the significance of these polar opposites: the Veneto and the South – on the one hand, a well-constructed community in which I felt myself to be a participant and a witness; on the other, a world of deprivation and poverty to which I was driven by generosity and a desire for love. Also by a desire to know? Not really. This was, in the first instance, a compassion, an inability to bear the weight of a picture of desperation that threw into crisis one’s solid illusion of living in a well-ordered world. Compassion is a negative passion – and, like any passion, a spontaneous activity of the soul, but one marked negatively by a suffering that is much stronger than one’s ability to react to it. It is a sense of imperfection that becomes a generic sense of responsibility. It also lacked determination, when in fact this is what had to be conquered. To recognise my own name was to be able to give names to things. However, the compassion helped to strengthen the act of witnessing and to disarticulate indistinct participation in the community. The cognitive imaginings that hovered around this emotional upheaval clustered the new image of the South on top of the recent memories of the war: of hunger, death, destruction, bombings, mournings, deaths – ah, what a lovely childhood! So the compassion and its imaginings were taking shape, concretising the image of the poor. The compassion was turning into indignation.
My readings of those years – when, on this crudely formed base, I was beginning to be a Catholic militant – were Mounier, Maritain, Simone Weil, Bernanos . . . A thinking of our time, but it was difficult material – rather esoteric for a young Catholic from the provinces. In Italian there was nothing or next to nothing, apart from a few peeks at Dorso and Gramsci. But what good are books before lived experience, or outside of it? My diffidence was a search for determinations. However, Simone Weil struck me: ‘Time always takes us where we do not want to go. To love time . . .’5 A transition was beckoning – charity wanted to reconnect itself to time, breaking anything that stood in its way. Thus a strongly lived passion prevents the indistinctness of the reference to an organic community from being translated into cognitive indifference and from abandoning itself to the customary practice of ethical and political representations. The fact that we were Christians certainly did not mean that we were Christian democrats! The charity and the history had to react immediately on each other. Many of the stimuli of Veneto culture, far from blocking impatience, pushed one into it. With hard work – and much more than one imagined! – but penetrating into the flesh of the matter and building a destiny. Later, when I tried to consider these things in terms of theory and the sociology of community, I reinforced my conviction that, compared with Tönnies and Max Weber and the rigidity of all dichotomous models, Simmel had best understood the true dynamic of Gemeinschaft [communitarian spirit]. The breaking of it, and also the expression of its wealth, which is otherwise greedily guarded, can only take place within an internal act of vital transcending. This, I felt, was needed in my spiritual development. And, while it is true that with this we are on the terrain of a thinking of separation and in the conceptual world of Judaism, it is no less true that my desire for knowledge was recognising this and was pressing its impatience beyond any limit of permissible restlessness, in the dry and Catholic homeland of my Veneto. Dry – and sometimes one noticed this – to the point of risking sterility – and a sterile mother is a contradictio in adiecto [contradiction between parts of an argument].
The poor, then. Looking for the poor. From now on, perhaps, cher David, we shall find nothing other than infinite transfigurations of the poor, the proletarian, the immigrant, the emigrant, the peasant of the South, the factory worker, the urban proletarian, the socialised worker [operaio sociale], the prisoner, and so on . . . Wanderjahre in search of this subject – years of vagabondage with this subject.
The first effect of the compassion was a new and ambiguous step in the recognition of my own poverty, and of the poverty of the world in which I lived: a multitude of poor people. Onto each of them, and onto me, there was unloaded, and there came to light, a universe of sufferings and a past history of misery and exploitation. But how could that ambiguous awareness be enough? It seemed to me to be an expression of a world of dead people whose desire for happiness had not been granted. What could it mean, to be the expression of that? Suffering it in religious terms, or seeking an active expression in political terms? The word ‘revenge’ was not in my vocabulary – and, while being moved by things in a religious sense gave the business of witnessing a long and collective thickness, it failed to show the way to solutions and plucked itself out of historical time. Religious action alone could not support the weight of witnessing! Hence ambiguity, uneasiness. Anyway you have to understand, and also to determine your understanding, bring passion into history. ‘Research’: now there’s another word. But could research ever be practised outside of a concrete and worldly practice? Life as research, life as knowledge: then and now they seem to me to be lifeless and idealistic stereotypes, generic words that have in them elements of softness, perhaps of triviality. But how can you clarify them and express your own self as a historical concreteness, if not through that desire to destroy the ambiguous and the uncertain, which is properly a praxis of transformation? So I began to do politics, without realising it – as a militant in Catholic Action, and not as a member of a political party – and in the end I came to knowledge. And yet it was politics. It was a way of approaching reality in order to penetrate it, to grasp it from the point of view of poverty, and to change it. I used to go on early-morning drives around the countryside and the outlying areas of this Veneto, in my dusty FIAT 1100, stopping off to enjoy hot chocolate for breakfast. I began to talk of transformation, of reform, of revolution. There was so much poverty, and so much impatience.
(In retrospect, it occurs to me that my ‘political career’ – if you want to call it that – has this difference from that of the institutional political classes: it has always been conducted between five and eight in the morning, first with Catholics of the Veneto, then with workers in big factories. Certainly not the kind of hours worked by bureaucrats and trade union officials. I remember good old Piovesan, the trade union official at the Petrolchimico plant: he would always arrive at about ten o’clock – not before 24 Ore arrived on the Venice news stands: you could see the newspaper sticking out of his pocket, together with L’Unità – he was very ‘new look’, a modern functionary, with his feet on the ground and his head in facts. Who could blame him, poor fellow? Previously he had done thirty years in the factory as a shift worker. Only in ’68 were they forced to get up early, and they never forgave us for that. The morning hours, the most productive time of the day. Even before the priests arrived! – Here was a completely different story. The priest could be a property owner and a drunkard, but the community was not corrupted by him. I remember Bortignon, the holy old-style Padovan bishop count. He too was caught up in the entrepreneurial mania of the 1950s, but that never diverted him from his mission.)
But what could it produce, in that strange and ambiguous world and among those unresolved potentials, to speak with so much ardour of transformation and renewal? They asked me, in their usual underhand fashion, if I didn’t think that I was doing too much politics. Rightly so. In fact I was arriving at the threshold of the great contradiction; and this could be resolved only at that level. Was it? Certainly not at that point. People were talking about an upcoming Vatican Council, but I didn’t really understand . . . So, while I, a little proletarian Wilhelm Meister, did not embark on bourgeois theatrical scenarios, I certainly touched on the grotesque. That of an enthusiastic adherence to a real that did not understand its poverty, of an innocence that did not recognise the degradations of habits and cultures, of an impatience that slipped on the hard times of a powerful tradition. How vague my teenage years were, between an intact idealism and a total compassion, within a tension that left no room for dissonances! But I felt uncomfortable in the presence of the clergy, which was close to the bourgeoisie. Adversary of a feared social revolution, representative of an uncompleted bourgeoisie – a slave of rent, first from land, then from real estate. Lumen siccum [dry light]. It was another race. There was a Jesuit who, in order to explain lasciviousness, showed the kids sweets when they hadn’t eaten before Communion: the act of swallowing them was followed – vile Pavlovian that he was – by a lecture about desires for women. The desire for wealth was, of course, just as sinful. No question of embroidering it poetically, like Joyce, or mischievously, like Chesterton: this smug frustration of the reference to sexuality anyway remained external, it was something for the rich – Luigi Gonzaga and the stench of his lilies; it was not something for us. Our sex education was something else, rural in its way. Remember always to unite pleasure with love, and vice versa. The first kisses were not sinful. This advice was much like that about combining work with pleasure, and vice versa. And, in consequence, we maintained that – as it says in the Book of Genesis, and contrary to what the priests were now claiming – work could not be seen as humanity’s punishment; quite the opposite – Adam worked happily in Eden. What a fascinating anticipation of a hypothesis of liberated labour! And then there were other priests, rich and feared, and creators of municipal entities and marriages – in fact nothing more than excess and corruption. They drained that solidity that the community provided. Ah, my Padova, somebody should write a poem about you. But maybe it would have to be sarcastic, because all this happened when you still had your canals, when rattling trams still ran to the surrounding hills, when the pavements were made of round stones with granite arabesques, when your arcades were still low and arched. But there is, there must be, someone who has survived your destruction: a devil, at least, like the ones drawn by Tono Zancanaro, coming down now from the pinnacles of the basilicas.
So then: with the same sulphurous, insinuating potentiality, little by little, the magic words ‘community’, ‘witnessing’ and ‘research’ became a lever for internal distinction in the world in which we were living. Listen to Simone Weil: ‘the concept of leverage applied to inner life (as a function of the notion of energy . . .)’.6 The dialectic of separation that I began to experience was born not from weakness but from energy, not from alienation but from desire. In this form, the vocation of poverty excluded resentment – an emotion characteristic of slaves – something that I have never known. (I leave this vice to the grunfs – how many of those I have met in my life! Malevolent geniuses? No; bad dogs, rabid, full of resentfulness, precisely. Grunf, grunf. You find them everywhere.) But how was it possible, not in the priesthood, but in rational and secular testimony, to pursue the liberation of this community? Modernisation, crisis and renewal: this was the pitiful proposal propagandised by many Catholics. In my experience, this sequence had no place. The process is internal. In Brittany as in Poland – and in the Veneto region: what determines the crisis in the Catholic social community is a religious motivation, is charity, is the quest for the poor. And then there was another ideological motivation that I experienced in my youth: the driving force of the October Revolution. Obviously there is a lot to say about that, cher David. Now they say that it has run its course. Boh! Why this collapse of pride? Grunf. On the other hand, what is certain is that the driving force of Christ is not spent. At least not in my country. And that dry world of negative passions, I see it traversed by feelings of emotional identification with poverty and by the desire for peace, today as yesterday. And I don’t know how to offer you, cher David, any other reason by way of explanation – other than the piety of my mother, the physical dryness of Bortignon,7 and the Eleusine intensity of my youthful community – to understand how there came to be born in me a need for the world to be transformed – and poverty liberated, and peace consolidated in the happiness of mankind. I hold tight to this heritage as the first inventor of productivity: when you discover that it was not hoarding but investment that made it true to its fortune. And, with the investment, the risk. Of course risk comes in many varieties: there is individual risk, the bourgeois exaltation of the genius, or the hero of the trapeze – the glory of the circus – but no, ça ne va pas. Only the choice that comes from within the collective, only this pays. Like when we all used to go on trips out of town on our bicycles – then, having chosen one of the infinitely many little roads in the Po valley landscape, so intensely farmed, so fertile, so shady, you look for a place where you might relax and flirt, a patch of grass or a bar somewhere – places of hospitality that desire sought out, the desire we had in our bodies. A long and engaging dialogue that involved all of us, sweaty, in this pleasant coolness that was at hand. A surface happiness – but where and what is depth? A collective joy. The choice was waiting to be taken: you could choose the combined possibility (certainly confused, but cheerful) of a rooting among the people, and of knowledge, and of an imagining of how they could be overturned and transformed. The path could not be individual, it had to be collective. The poor is the sign of the collective. This is the subject of transformation. Thus an initial perception of collective being is given: what quantity and quality of effort there was in the journey that lay ahead. But moving forward from a position of richness, as we know, is preferable to moving from poverty. For once it rained on the drowned man, and for me too: the poor person is a rich person. We are happy in this lucky fact of having been born poor.
It’s raining again today – on the cement yard of this damned prison. I feel fine, though. How was Padova these past few days? Still so drily sweet? Goodbye for now. A strong hug. Yours, Toni.