Rebibbia, 23 October 1981
Cher David,
It’s a bit odd looking back over history in this schematising fashion. An oversimplification? Maybe. But what does it matter? Midwifery is never easy. So the confusion between love and hate, the immersion into a historical world characterised by the weary regularity of a nature that was overworked – and then the break with all that, but in a way that was harsh and abrupt, so that the hatred did not succeed in becoming productive – all this had reduced me to solitude. My language is also a little comical. But what does that matter? That suffering was real. A solitude fed by the delirium of abstract intellectual work – a pleasure bordering on addiction. Unhappiness was washing over me, like clouds driven by sudden gusts of wind. Being on my own was driving me towards a utopia, but it also brought on me, rather uncomfortably, a nostalgia for the world from which I had excluded myself. The collective comes before my imagination, I told myself repeatedly; it is its precondition, whether positive or negative. For the moment it was only a negative condition, because it was from a lack that I was suffering. I was at a limit. Here’s Hegel:
The nostalgia towards life of those who have developed in themselves nature as an idea . . . Such people cannot live alone, and human beings are always alone, even if they set up their own nature before them, have made themselves a companion of this representation, and take joy from it; but they must also find the represented as a living being.1
So imagination could either become corrupted into fantasy or reconnect to the real and become vigorous. Growing with me. I knew what I wanted: the collective, recognition as an active participant in a community – and the power to produce change. But I was alone. Luck, however, may be a logical outcome of solitude: perhaps solitary individuals have no vocation to connect themselves to the historical movement, and yet they do so. It is not a gift; it is luck or chance.
Between 1954 and 1955 I found myself in Israel, following a nice girl with whom I’d fallen in love – in Kibbutz Nachsonim, near Petah-Tikva. I worked long hours on the plantations. I slept in a comfortable wooden cabin. The kibbutz was Mapam [United Workers’ Party] – left-wing socialists, rigorous kibbutzniks. The languages were English and French – they were immigrants mainly from the shores of the Mediterranean – so they understood each other. That was my base, but on festive days I set off happily travelling round Israel. For a while I worked as a labourer in Eilat, earning money, which you could not do in the kibbutz. Then I left, but without the girl who had drawn me there – we parted company in the foothills of Lake Galilee, because she had fallen for Shlomo . . . Goodbye Israel. I have never been back, and the deep bond that unites me to that land of the fathers has often been subjected to (and has fed) a fierce criticism. (When, dear David, will the ancestral flight come to an end, and when will the Torah no longer be newly foretold? Never – and this is a reason for pride. But sometimes the prophecy is false and treacherous. When pride becomes devastation and hatred, cry your Kaddish then – Jerusalem is Babylon. ‘And when thou hast made an end of reading this book, thou shalt tie a stone to it and cast it into the midst of Euphrates: and thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise again’: Jeremiah 51: 63.)
Anyway, back to us. So, Israel was my luck, my chance – and my symbol. When you are looking for a practical foundation of reason, even if it is utopian reason, chance becomes a rich resource. There is no astute foresight in this, nor is there blind happenstance – we move continually within an ensemble of possibilities (which is of course preconstituted), and chance is the condition that slows or accelerates the effects of our liberty. A chance or a miracle of freedom in the midst of the world of phenomena. Like a young man at a dance: after long waiting and much looking, under the sign of desire, he suddenly has the feeling that the ‘time has come’. I was ready, from within my solitude, to recompose love and hate into a game of reality.
(Empedocles: magician, man and divine bird. Do the old thinkers provide us with the means to describe the hard and solid elements that remain after the collapse of the bourgeois-philosophical ambition of the past centuries: so many have tried to deal with this mystery, from Hölderlin’s anticipation up until Heidegger’s reading of it, which was all in terms of death. Love and hate – and their synthesis – and the excavation of the communist way of being: this is what liberates us from the mystery, what dissolves the mystifying attractions of all irrationalist ontologies. The collective can be conjugated with the destruction of the existent, and within this destruction a rebirth of the collective genius of love and of communism is possible.)
There, in Israel, I was living practices of communism that were as radical as they were elementary. This utopia was real; its reality had bite. It was concrete. Souzy, an Egyptian and a former maths teacher, gave me my political grounding. He was a carpenter in the kibbutz, and since he was both a Jew and a communist he had spent many years in the concentration camps of Muhammad Naguib. We maintained an amicable correspondence right up until his death. Souzy talked to me about communism as a necessary development of the human community. He spoke fast and excitedly, like somebody debating fiercely with himself, presumably from his being a former detainee. Then he would stop, he would smile with his extraordinary blue eyes (a comic tic would twitch his grizzled brown moustache), his Sephardic belly would wobble – and his exposition would become simple and lucid, his argumentation fraternal and marked by solidarity. His features were as sharp as his hopes: an Arab communism for which Israel had been the crucible. His story was that of all the Jewish communists, namely the desire to destroy, in an extreme act of collective love, all the hereditary handed-down participations in nature and history, to build a world that was free, such as can only be constructed by imagination and separation, by the collective and productive strength of the reason of the masses.
Ernst Bloch again. Differently and yet not differently, Franz Rosenzweig. With this one there is division inside a hope for the future. ‘Benediction divides the world into two, to reunite it again in the future. This division runs through the whole life in the form of the sacred and the common, the Sabbath and the working day, the Torah and the “way of the earth”.’2 The sacred does not exclude the profane; the opposition is entirely contained within the collective consciousness of the chosen people – it chooses itself in advance and of its own free will; production and creative work are right here, in this division, through this division. Empedocles again? Nowadays one or two of my comrades, a little too hastily inclined to criticism, might say that my views are naive in two respects: that of love and the collective consciousness of a freedom that might have the power to separate itself; and that of the Enlightenment-inspired hope for a practical transformation of nature. This is utopia. So be it! I remain attached to the force of this utopia and I consider it the concluding point of my teenage regeneration. Souzy, thank you, thank you!
At night, from time to time, with our Sten guns, we would go close to the border, partly to take food to the guard, but mostly to check that there was enough food for the pigs, which we hid from the eyes of the Orthodox – making sure that they were also well hidden from Arab snipers. On the hillside we would often stop to watch the sky, chatting and counting the stars. Souzy was a great one for analytical games and philosophical paradoxes. He had studied in England and had attended the lectures of Bertrand Russell. Then, when I inevitably fell into talking about my amorous hardships (which were very unhappy – all because of Shlomo . . .), he would make fun of me. This was our little ritual. Next, having completed these preliminaries, we would start talking about communism. And, as we lay in the grass, the stars were above us and a great intellectual openness between us. Souzy had the same cultural sensibility that, much later, I recognised in other Mediterranean communists, such as Henry Curiel and Samir Amin . . . If it had been possible to translate politically the flexibility and imaginativeness of the ghetto of Cephalonia and of Albert Cohen’s heroes, we would have physically configured it in them! In Souzy’s view, the central pole in building a revolution is not so much the (albeit essential) relationship between the party and the programme of socialist transition, as the participation of the masses and the immediate efficacy of the transitional programme. From this point of view, the work of the dictatorship of the proletariat was bound to be insufficient: but what was fundamental was the destruction that the proletarian movement carried within the masses – the destruction of the reactionary elements, of ignorance, of poverty – and the simultaneous valorisation of elements of community. In the former colonies this programme was bound to be terribly difficult, because the subjective modification had to work within the realities of primitive accumulation; but it was nevertheless possible. This Jewish carpenter was anticipating Mao. In the developed capitalist countries the programme was possible and immediately doable – but was this the project of the western communist parties? Souzy’s doubts on this question were coupled with increasingly strong suspicions about the Soviets – even though the USSR had all his sympathies as a militant – albeit very quietly (given the controversy that was raging in the Mapam at that time). (In my memory now, as I write this letter, the words of Souzy mingle in their character with other discourses, which I used to hear some years before, chez nous, coming from various former partisans, comrades of one of our relatives, when they held meetings at our house. At a certain point the noise of the discussion would stop, and in a general muttering they would break with the hopes and loyalties they had until then proclaimed vis-à-vis the USSR. Then, after a while, these former combatants would take their leave. Alone, one after the other, like sad shooting stars.) In Souzy the Enlightenment inspiration of the project was accompanied by an attentiveness to the formation of the programme and to the articulations of the transition. He was a true communist, a class democrat in a proletarian sense, opposed to Jacobinism. One of the many deep variants of the proletarian versus the variants of the bourgeois.
But all through that story that I was living and the moral and intellectual growth that came from it, there was also something else. In fact, as if unbeknownst to myself, I was harmoniously conjoining in my mind the peasant origins of my ideology – my Po valley identity – with the hopes of communist transformation. The tearing of the transformation had to be measured in the mass movement, from within it, in its density. It was by a return to the origins that we would invent the future. Because it was on those rhythms of internal rupture and internal recompacting that communism was possible. Does the future have an ancient heart? Certainly not, if this motto hankers after ancient virtues – but certainly yes, if communism seeks to build itself on the compact rhythm of mass consciousness, with its breaks and recompositions. Can there can be a harmony of breakings? A solidity of the discontinuous? I did not know the answer to this, but I felt it as part of the character of the utopia that I was living. I was later to learn that only an overturning constructs the world – but already in Padua I’d caught a whiff of Concetto Marchesi’s readings of Lucretius, in the tales told of him by his students – the taste for a creative overturning. Democritus–Epicurus–Marx is a long line of descent but it is direct, renewed by the inversion of the concept of clinamen [the swerve] – in the ancients, this was the random production of innovation of the cosmic story, whereas in Marx it was a collective capacity for building, a catastrophic and innovative rationality of history, proletarian dominion and communist community. Die Formen. Now Souzy had led me by the hand to that point where, for me (as previously for him), began the possibility of a practical synthesis that placed itself on the human root, both individual and collective, the one in cordial exchange with the other. Nature, just by itself, was insufficient to bring about this synthesis, but collective human action could do it – by building in history a second nature, a new nature. By recreating the world. The kibbutzniks lived on crops and produce that were plucked from the desert and from the rocky hills. They dug and irrigated continuously. This new way of doing agriculture reminded me of the ancient, refined and perfect ways of my homeland in the Po valley. The hand of man had remade nature. (Is it banal, today, to restate this? After Foucault has taught us to make a history of nature, our nature? For me at that time, it was a visceral and hungry discovery.) Why not remake ourselves? It was possible, and it was necessary. Nothing Promethean in all this – for all that Prometheanism contains of the individualistic. The Jewish culture of the colonisation of Israel was rather animated by that other major component – which was Russian, collectivist and Soviet. When I came to read Sereni on the Italian countryside, I found again this emancipated style of the relationship between revolution and nature. For a revolutionary return to the origins – for a radical transformation of our nature: these were the real paradoxes that were expressed in the words of Souzy.
Then, in our discussions, inevitably the question of 1917 came up. When Souzy spoke of revolution, he meant the October Revolution. What was 1917? It was a point of no return – not only in history but also in human nature; the point of a radical transformation in social structure – and only in that transformation was it possible today to speak of humanity. To measure oneself against that reality and to understand that after it nothing was any longer the same in the world and in the individual, that nothing had repeated itself, and that a new human community had become possible, completing the dream and going beyond the malaise of modernity – this was the characteristic line of Souzy’s discourse. And he soon brought me into agreement with him. We would leave at first light, coming down the side of the hill that was sheltered from the shooting of the snipers. ‘The rosy-fingered Dawn, daughter of the morning.’3 So, cher David, in that summer all the scattered elements that I had been collecting were coming together in me. Into my second nature? Certainly not completed, not yet. But certainly into my dream of it – a project.
Back in Italy I threw myself back into my usual solitary way of life. I did a summing-up of my circumstances: a Christian background that gave me a strong orientation towards human beings and their redemption in poverty, and a critique of my background that made me need to overcome the constraints of an organisational terrain that was by now barren, but to preserve and enhance the sense of being that lived there and only there – a sense of being that was real and collective, powerful and strong. At my first contact with the official labour movement I saw grudging resentfulness and crudeness as the dominant organisational characteristics – and also an extraordinary poverty of ethics. And yet it was here – it could not have been anywhere else – that the principle that had found its first dramatic incarnation in 1917 would become a reality. Thus, in this maze of uncertainties and doubts, I was wavering; attracted and repelled by these real referents, incapable of making decisions. I had to shun abstractness, I thought – nun-einmal-so-sein – to be here and not otherwise. Both in the Catholic world that saw the mystical as the stuff of the devil and in that Stalinist world that exalted politics to the point of becoming coprophiliac, utopia was seen as pure and simple madness. But how to escape the snares of a love that had become such an intense emotion, and the dangers of a hatred that had become crude administration? How to retrieve the potency of poverty and the force of a global transformation? And, I wondered, what if the desire for utopia was more real and historically more active than the ugly realism of the proposals that I was hearing? The first synthesis of the consciousness that seeks to free itself is always utopian.
I found myself moving in small communities of young people who, like me, were experiencing this tension that was simultaneously religious and political. Something was moving around us – we could barely see it but we were sure that it was there, precisely, as a movement and as a real transformation. In fact we were witnessing the onset of the first transformations and contradictions, perceptible and complex, of our world in terms of mature capitalism. But we shall return to a longer discussion of this later, cher David. For the time being we lived this experience of development at a level that was symmetrical but not homologous with it. We carried on in a dream of old-time community that verged on utopianism, while around us new collective subjects were forming and the dialectic of capital was developing its enormous strength. There are people who always live development in this symmetrical position, without interfering with reality: sensitive, intelligent, nonactive. Perhaps the aesthetic theory of modernity, which is also a kind of ethics, is directly prescriptive in this respect: it requires this detachment. As for myself, given my situation, I was (so to speak) ringed in by this contradiction. Caught up not in search of beauty but in search of a true abstract. So: an aesthetic experience, when all’s said and done? Maybe – to the extent that it may have been the fulfilment of a metaphysics of youth. But does that remove the truth from it?
I involved myself, it’s true, in small essais in transformative practice – useful but artisanal. I continued with my sociological fieldwork; I was involved in the student newspaper of the University of Padua; I followed the arguments between those semi-serious organisations known as UNURI (Unione nazionale universitaria rappresentativa italiana), UGI (Unione goliardica italiana) and Intesa; and I had more or less sporadic contacts with the official sections of the labour movement. What boredom, what weariness! We needed to invent the future. I studied; and I travelled a fair bit. In 1956 I was involved in a study commission on the constitution of the workers’ councils in Yugoslavia – and from it I concluded that, at least in that phase, these councils were no more than a new form of organising consensus and labour exploitation. ‘Thus far constitutions have only perfected the state machine instead of destroying it.’ At this point my readings of the history of the labour movement – because that is what I was mostly doing, while for me the classics remained somewhat indigestible (Brecht, ‘the intimidatory effect of the classics’) – those historical readings, as I say, fitted appropriately into my critical apprenticeship. The October Revolution, fascism and Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, antifascism – in short, a fine encyclopaedia. I began to pick my way through this enormous and formidable ontological spectacle of life and death, of desire and repression. Then the history of the United States, and of Germany. And so on.
Reading, reading – day and night – my distant friend, your inconclusiveness is tiring: even then I experienced this distance between practical consciousness and theoretical knowledge as something of a drama. Books are no use before experience – I was building a latency; but I suffered especially from this latency. Knowledge was not yet making happiness for me. In fact, the heart and mind were driving towards the desire for a politics that was, in immediate terms, construction and liberation. Souzy had taught me this. Utopia is legitimate when it extends towards the concrete, when it is articulated with action – when it is a utopia going towards possibility. The October Revolution and Israel combined pleasingly in my desire. Utopia is a rational construction of the possible – it has nothing to do with the impossible, except for its posing as an impossibility for the enemy, a total alternative against the enemy’s plans – utopia is the collective desire to go beyond the limit set up by enemies in order to guarantee their power. Would we ever have succeeded in that, here in Italy? Utopia was the practice of a subject, of a subject who was exploited, of the poor. So it was necessary to work on desire and to attempt small speculations from the starting point of the concept in order to give hope legs on which it could walk. It was necessary to study, to break all the continuities that experience offered, to gain a project that was universal – in order to reintegrate, within being, the surface on which we were moving. The utopia was – and is – a quest for being. It implies the tension of procreating in true love. It is a hypothesis matched to the future, spurred by the critique of the present and by the love of being. Max Scheler and not Karl Mannheim.
Today, when we talk among comrades, utopia has that same good taste. Pathways, once you get beyond the precipices, want to go upwards from the bottom of the valley. Utopia is good because our gaze has already enjoyed – from heights, in the previous journey – the broad landscapes of the border. But in those days, as a kid, I was without experience and alone. I seemed like a crazy person. I have a photograph from that time: hair short and straight, looking like I came from West Point – and my tie crooked. A strange face and laughing eyes, a little wild. Perhaps I understood that the utopia had reached some kind of end point – for me, an outer limit, as I have already said, cher David. There’s always an edge to the world as we know it: when we find ourselves standing there, it can be a bit dizzying. I was not armed, but I was ready to fly. It was hard. Often I suffered from asthma at night, and my mother would wipe the sweat from my forehead. It’s getting late. I think it’s time to say goodnight, David. Till tomorrow.
PS: It’s now morning, and I have just reread this letter, which I finished last night. I find it narcissistic, egotistical and manipulative. Yes, there was also something else in Israel – even then. There was the racism of the fair-skinned Jews against those who came from Yemen or Morocco – and the fair-skinned ones disinfected them like you do with pigs, and the fact that the white bird of Isaiah had led them to Tel Aviv did not give them higher wages. Because it remained a wage, and a wretched one at that, even when the paymaster was the kibbutz – a communist boss. All the stigmata of a class society were present in the country and ready to explode outwards. And there was the sense of guilt of the expropriator, who always gives a vulgar colouring to the figure of the coloniser, both in the West and in Palestine. Nor did the epic tale of the motherland regained cancel out the hysterical travail of the diaspora. Today, when the dream of freedom is soiled – that Prussia reborn, which Souzy would have hated – the contradiction seems to annul that hope. But the rebelliousness, the cosmopolitanism and the communism were nevertheless real. And we planted so many, many trees of liberty down there. But then, Souzy, why did we not ask the Arab sniper to come down the mountain and share some of the pork, in a spirit of progressive secularism, solidarity and rebelliousness?