Rebibbia, 3 November 1981
Cher David,
What would you call it today, this topos, the admiratio that, in Descartes, lays the basis for the genealogy of the passions? I would call it ‘dialectic’ – that is, an uncritical adherence to the logic of the existent in the form in which it is given to us, in the splendour of objectivity – a repose of reason in the totality. That the genealogy of the passions always ran the risk of becoming a catalogue of the passions, that much I knew – but that the more mature expressions of the dialectical Aufhebung [sublation] effectively represented this, that I did not realise. So it happened – in those decisive years, between 1956 and 1958 – that I fell prey to the confusion of the totality and I deluded myself that the dialectic was capable of containing and developing a utopian matrix. And at the same time I thought it was possible to mediate empirical and pedestrian instances of transformation – as was wished by the so-called ‘culture of the left’, then dominant. This theoretical situation was imposed on me: the attraction to a middle point, to a fetishism of reality, was in some sense inevitable in that culture, and it was certainly internal to its conditions. Hence the utopian framework on which the research had landed – a beach like that of the mythical Phaeacians in their confused and difficult wandering1 – underwent a shift: the admiratio became self-complacent, a totality satisfied – and now it called for adequate nourishment. (To feed on what? We were not capable of making love – brutality, cynicism, a pedestrian ars amatoria – the sweetness of the concrete was missing.) Was there deception in all this?
(Intermission: it’s a difficult thing, the evaluation of the past – sometimes stupid. Disenchantment is missing. My apologies, David, for the judgements that I hand out and the memories that I distribute: given material. Rough stuff, I’ll readily admit; and so is the labour, too. Don’t want to justify myself. This return to the past is an insidious thing: I have very little faith in it because in writing big differences are smoothed over, perspectives are wrong, and dimensions are flattened. Everything’s running by. Stop the picture!)
And anyway there was something misleading here. Something surreptitiously paid off by the fact that this new presentation of the world was informed by the refinement and sublimation of the elementary theoretical perceptions from which I was moving, and that – consequently – a considerable degree of understanding of cultural relations had been introduced, and that this understanding would serve as a means of reading the generic Umwelt [environment]; I was caught within this totality. But in any event there was here a betrayal of the restless and innovative motive forces of the utopian tension. Why did I fall into sin? What was the snake in my Eden? It’s good to talk about it, cher David, because we are often tickled by temptation, today no less than yesterday. So what I remember is that my theoretical ambition was perfectly compatible with – indeed was on a par with – the philosophy that was current in the labour movement. And in the meantime I was getting to know this philosophy better and better, in its Italic specificity. So what I shall give you in this letter, David, is, first and foremost, the story of a real deceit, one that was hard to resist: the admiratio for the Italic province, the Fellini of revolutionary theory. Then, secondly, we shall try to see how the one-sidedness and the illusory dimension of the humanistic context were broken – and what pathways opened afterwards.
So my approach to the philosophy of the labour movement was the situation in which I moved. Historicism was a comprehensive philosophical perspective, a privileged terrain for alliances, a framework for the forms of tactics and strategy. A philosophy of the Resistance. I accepted it. A setting aside of the utopia, a philosophy of restoration. I did not realise this. I am forever trying to explain to you the reason why I fell for this deception – it does not seem difficult to me. More difficult is to explain how this happened precisely at the point when the ideology of historicism had reached a critical phase: 1956 and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union introduced frenetic elements of restlessness even before the upheaval of the congress itself. But the inertia was more powerful and had you in its grip: a kind of ‘tankism’ in philosophy. The dialectic of historicism, whether you took it in its Italic version, smooth and Crocean, or in the more jagged, more nervy German version – that of Ranke, Meinecke, Troeltsch, and the like – was suffering the first decisive attacks. It was not for me. I reacted by being annoyed. I was more of a realista2 than the king. As far as I was concerned, that historicism was a reassurance. From comparisons with the past I drew the illusion of a genealogy of the critical function. In addition, according to a singular heteronomy of ends, the dialectic, in the objective form of its historical unfolding, seemed to satisfy pluralistic and eclectic needs: a totality that was stable and inexhaustible, but also a whole that was multidirectional, a mixture of coherent layers. A multiplicity. And then this totality was something that one could pass through – historicism was also – and especially – a practice of historiography, and the contact with Chabod (whose lectures I had attended at the Istituto Croce during my Naples years) was clarifying for me the infinite and exciting pathways of hermeneutics. Thus the totality of the historical horizon served as a solid foundation (especially since in those days the analytical objections were presented in the pretentious utterances of the likes of Talcott Parsons and Pietro Rossi). Nor did the decidedly reactionary elements of the historicist tradition offend me – although I punctiliously fought them. The fact is that historicism presented itself as a projection of traditional humanism – in its democratic and optimistic version. The whole framework elicited admiration, and upon it, upon the complexity of the functions it held (an objective totality and a sort of subjective unanimism), it was even possible for my desire for utopia to be laid, a figure that was cut out and manageable. This is probably the reason why I persevered. A Cartesian, reasoning enchantment. But there was more. There was the question of the dialectic. Curiously, rather than presenting itself as a struggle of historical subjects, in that context it appeared more as the logical shell of a world of communicating vessels – it was a sort of historical Neoplatonism, a Neoplatonism without mystical excesses and without irreducible physical or theological elements. The gnostic protest, the restlessness of the young Fichte or Schelling against the sweet taste of this reductionism, against the manoeuvre of undervaluing the irrational or the utopia, did not touch me. Yet, paradoxically, how much more realistic was their Je méprise Locke! [I despise Locke]. The systematic elasticity of objective idealism and historicism allowed them to be used in ways that were ambiguous, versatile and astute: by all those who had made it their trade, both in the Catholic movement – where the great tradition of the history of the two cities, of heaven and hell, was manoeuvred within the hybrid framework of the hegemony of the church, from Cardinal Newman to the Dominican Sertillanges – and in the area of the labour movement – especially there, where the historical necessity of a succession of modes of production meant that revolution (and the human articulations of exploitation) became an ontological platitude when it was not merely an agitational argument. The splendours of the Stalinist theory of the stages of development. (They were all inebriated with them.) It was in this context that Gramscianism operated: its lessons were further vulgarised by charlatanism – self-justifying historical interpretations, pseudocontinuities, Masonic stories. For what it was worth, a philosophy of history: pacified, organic, evolutionist, reformist – a quietistic usage of the category of ‘hegemony’. A truly vulgar maquillage [makeup] for that fine Leninist face of Gramsci.
(And then I found out – I justify myself with the horrified good faith of a German after Auschwitz – I found out that in those years there were the exile departments in FIAT, and so many communists in jail, and yellow unions in the factories and in society at large, and shit pensions, and people going to work with the boss’s union card – how fine to talk about historicism! Is it possible, after Auschwitz, to be objective?)
The sea was full of oil – and the sand of tar. But we still believed in humanism. We dug below the tar. And this (confused) digging, we took it for a promise of liberation. Was it? In some ways it worked as if it was. It is for this reason, cher David, that I would still insist on the humanistic ambiguity of historicism, because the force of deception and its effectiveness depended on ambiguity. Humanistic historicism in a historiographic sense – as another of the teachers of those years, Eugenio Garin, explained very attractively; humanistic historicism in a political sense – because what there was of a politically progressive element expressed itself in those terms. So I have some supporting evidence to justify the tangle in which I found myself and to recognise that I was not wholly responsible for it. Pitiful justifications: from the point of view of the class struggle, this philosophy produced in effect only a single slogan, vague and repeated: let us pick up the banners that the bourgeoisie has dropped – let us go deeper and re-create the accumulation of capital inside socialism. In myself, at that time, the dislike for such stereotypes had not yet become a rejection. I endured that philosophy of castration. The fact that, at that moment, compassion for the world, hatred and love for the way things were, and a commitment to communist knowledge ended up resting impotently in a state of admiratio can only be explained as fascination and surrender.
However, they are correct – the suspicion and reproach that I see on your face. I can only reiterate: remember that historicism at that time presented itself as an effective cultural mediation, it was the philosophy of the people who had played their part in the Resistance, against fascism. It was a civil and political fact. This was the fundamental fact about the imbroglio, and I was a newcomer to politics. (The imbroglio was in fact far more tragic than that – and now we’re all paying a high price for it. A political class was overturned by it – precisely the political class of the Resistance. Historicism in fact soon became the philosophy of administrators and its ideological flexibility was a justification for their surrender, a corruption disguised as wisdom, a cover for cynicism, a restoration. And, in this dynamic, humanistic tensions were put second to the urgencies of Realpolitik – and became faded, reduced to a witnessing of the past and to impotent nostalgia. Today we recognise them immediately, more for their weariness than for their hypocrisy, more for their rhetoric than for their falsehood – these mediocre representatives of the mediocre mediation that followed on the Resistance, these vulgar symbols of a huge – and ultimately fraudulent – historical failure.)
But the mystifying calm did not last long. Consider a few factors: the ambiguity of this patriotic humanism contained in itself elements of rupture. After the Twentieth Congress the political landscape began to change very rapidly. Personally I followed these changes in the collective cultural sensitivity with a great deal of work and worry. So let us now start again from the last point, because it is easier, cher David – and certainly not to erect my personal experience into moral allegory. Having finished my thesis on contemporary German historicism and its re-elaboration, I began working on Hegel. I translated some of his youthful writings into Italian – I spent a number of years working on this, as well as on the culture of the period and on the Hegelian project. Did this bring me to the end of the first (corrupt and opportunistic) fascination with historicism? Did it open a really new perspective? I don’t think so. I ran into more trouble. It was no longer provincialism, however. The debate was spreading like wildfire. New bacteria were beginning to ferment. Hegel was like a funnel: he brought together in himself, more or less tumultuously – or so it seemed to me – everything that the history of thought had produced after him. Hegel was as big as a pyramid of Egypt, everyone had put a brick in, slaves and masters alike, no chance of being able to shift him. Now everybody was climbing him. The young Hegel was giving rise to neohumanist readings, which put the young Marx together with Hegel – the themes of alienation, community, and the liberation/realisation of Menschenwesen. Was it possible that, with the young Hegel, an alternative to historicist humanism was opening? No. It was just a dynamic variant within that horizon. But the game was complex and potentially innovative, not reductionist and historicist. I adopted a tactic: not to jump beyond the horizon of humanism, but simply to grasp the dialectic in terms that were more properly conflictual and subjectively relevant, even if not exhaustive of the thematic of subjectivity. The general picture remained as it was, solid; but the admiratio was subjected to a more refined fusion, and thus its elements began to split apart – the philosophical work was shaking off the ecstasy. The first ferments of the post-Twentieth Congress situation were experienced by myself through the optic of this problematic. And there is no doubt that it was a life event. In the same way in which the magnet attracts iron filings and makes patterns with them, aggressive and diffuse tendencies and tensions clustered magnetically around this new excavation of Hegelianism. In particular around a Hegel who was nostalgic for the polis, who denounced bourgeois alienation, and who saw in labour the laborious key to a recomposition of humanity. In those luxuriant and violent analyses of the passions that were born in Jena and culminated in The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Recalling the masterly acuteness of Hyppolite, I recomposed many suggestive aspects of postwar French philosophy, with which I was familiar. The systematic figure of the mature Hegel had been torn apart – and this meant that the connections – obscure and ambiguous, but certainly pacificatory – that had formed in academic historicism and in the labour movement’s philosophy of alliances had been broken too: the breaking of the system made it possible to identify its components, led back to practice, revealed the material dynamics. Once again I ask myself whether all this was decisive and broke the fascination of the totality that was admiranda [to be admired]. And again I answer in the negative. Nevertheless it is true that, in the new authors that I was beginning to read – be they Sartre and Merleau-Ponty or Enzo Paci and Preti in Italy – I saw the analytic of that admiranda totality developing into a constitutive function rather than as a harmonious definition.
As we know, in Spinoza – when he takes up the Cartesian genealogy of morality – admiratio is not presented as the founder, the first among the passions, but as the fourth in the catalogue, paired with contemptus [contempt] and (this is the important thing) preceded by cupiditas, amor et odium [desire, love and hate]. So, from the point of view of the passions (and this was the dimension on which my mind was defining itself at that time: besides, is it not a reactionary fable that simple contemplatio could constitute philosophy, as an alternative to the study of passion? that philosophy could exist without a practical foundation?), the totality is not the foundation but only a medium – ideology filtered by desire. Probably my thoughts, which were in tune with a very European line of thinking, did undergo an initial Spinozan conversion. In fact I began to ask myself: is it possible to have a dialectic that does not move to, or that does not lead back to, a total foundation? With this, the bacillus of the negative finally began to infect my culture – which still remained, however, frankly dialectical. The conquest of the materialistic sense of the determination was a long way away – but I suppose I was making progress. Humanism was no longer, beyond any doubt, historicism, and the justificationist function of that great machine was misfiring. (Another self-criticism: would this mélange of utopia and the negative have ever been capable of breaking the iron mask of dialectic? In short, we – or I – were only deluding ourselves.)
Cher David, they will certainly have filled your head with the generation of postwar French philosophy, which grew up on the ‘three Hs’: Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. But the real journey takes place, logically and historically, on an opposite path: from the assumption of the Heideggerian existent to a methodical renewal of the constitutive function of Husserl, to the determined reappropriation of the dialectical schema proper to progressive humanism. Personally, I was tying myself to that determination with ever greater conviction. And I had made my own the presuppositions of this disposition of the spirit: to paraphrase Hegel’s exclamation about Spinoza, I could say here that, unless you knew and loved Hegel, you were not a philosopher. The curious thing was that this reaffirmation of philosophy was aimed at its destruction: the primacy of the dialectic was not directed at reconstruction, but at the dissolution of the abstract and the absolute. And, whether or not it was aware of it, at the consequent foundation of a concrete practice, a material rooting of thought. It is now clear that here, on this form of Hegelianism, was where the young Marx came in, and that here, on this radical humanism, the hope of formulating politically the theory of transformation was renewed – inside and after the crisis of the Soviet vulgate in the years immediately following the Twentieth Congress. At that time it was not obvious to me – but this does not mean that the research did not push very hard. The climate of the period was leading to radical humanism. Hegel was the master, reinterpreted and renovated, and standing centre-stage. As I have said and continue to repeat, cher David, the dialectic had become new. Because the exercise was to take Hegel to pieces and then put him together again – dismantle his systematics with a view to finding the anthropological basis of each concept, reassemble the concepts in hypothetical and imaginative functions, which would make possible new and more adventurous practices. It was really an orgy of subjectivity, what we were witnessing. Given this state of things, it is easy to understand the irritation and reaction of the structuralists – the claim for a ‘transcendental field without a subject’, which the Hegelian Hyppolite himself was to propose for analysis a few years later – and the frenetic anxiety of ‘deconstruction’ that followed this proposal.
In Italy these currents were felt much less. The resistances were infinite. It was only later that these themes made their entry – I remember, for example, Franco Fortini’s Argomenti – but here they were more centred on the re-creation of the (still Hegelian) subversivism of the communist left of the 1920s than on the French experience. On a strictly philosophical terrain, the academic and the official world tended rather to relegitimate, through exchange, both the historicist culture and the socialist reformism. And, if you leave aside that extraordinary freelance, Enzo Paci, little was discussed, destroyed, or invented in cultural circles. But there was a lot of discussion among the younger generations, who were cut out from the channels of official culture after the Twentieth Congress and were now definitively hostile to all variants of the Croce–Gramsci hybrid and nauseated by Soviet scholasticism.
What I’m trying to say, as I look at myself and the world in which I was living, is basically that this neohumanism, which was so widespread in literary circles, was a focal point of renovation and the true cultural birthright of a whole generation. Post-existentialist ideology provided a positive, albeit vague foundation for a theoretical and political initiative, reproposing the centrality of man, of dialectical anthropology, of a sense of the destruction of systems, and of the practical renovation of project and horizon. Much irony was expended on this transition in subsequent years. The subjectivism it contained was so strong that – as was rightly noted at the time – the humanisation of the world often became a personification of nothingness. Empty figures, theatrical ghosts. This strange Hegelianism, which knew only Hegel’s Darstellung and not the Logos, they said, was an itch, not philosophy. Yet it seems to me that this progressive religion of the human being was a frontier – or, if you prefer, a trench – essential if you wanted to defend the communist hope as you faced the U turn of Soviet ideology and the elements of radical discontinuity with the labour movement’s traditions that the Twentieth Congress presented. The year 1968 cannot be understood without this theoretical passage: in its genesis, the three Hs counted for much more than the three Ms. A generic proposition, an indistinctness of the project – and yet this aggressive humanism made possible the secular proposal of an absolute Pascalian wager. L’existentialisme est un humanisme. The liberation of Algeria was a universal sign. (In those days philosophers did not baulk at carrying weapons to the rebels; they considered freedom to be a right for all and torture to be disgrace for all. Is it possible that the days in which the simplicity of rebellion and the firmness of solidarity had value are past and gone? Must ethical revolt now be timidly handed over to Amnesty International?)
There was a strange frenzy around, and it was gradually spreading. The insistence on the problem and the urgency of a renewal were therefore not only my own – indeed there was a worldwide reevaluation of the pre-reflexive elements of the revolt in philosophy and politics. I remember that in those years I was attending the classes of Eugenio Garin. I recall the famous statement by Kojève, in his Introduzione alla fenomenologia, which runs more or less like this: ‘if the real totality implies man, and man is dialectical, then man is totality.’ The Italian historicists took this on their own, well aware of the foundational and ontological centrality that human operation thereby assumed. And, through an identical epic transformation, the ‘the rational is real’ became a mode of the anthropological node: a verum ipsum factum [truth itself is made]. The sense of crisis, the abandonment of the old horizon became, for all of us, a bedrock for new initiatives. Pure subjectivist hysteria? Individuelle Kompensationskunst [individual art of compensation]? Maybe. But, for me and for many of us, it was a further support for, and a profound corroboration of, our commitment to revolutionary discourse; a twisting path, perhaps even folkloric and provincial, but it brought us closer to materialist analysis. More of this, cher David, in another letter.
(But why have you forced me into this very tough game? I can sense your being ironical as you read these letters. That’s not fair. Did I laugh when you were getting all agitated because you wanted the seashores of Brittany to be free of oil and tar? Everything is contradictory in the fables of lived experience: ingenuousness and reflection change roles. Utopianism and realism are two faces of one practice – and only this justifies us. It is only by throwing ourselves in the sea of philosophy that we learn to swim in it.)
In any case, in what I’ve written thus far there are empty spaces, which you of course, educated as you are in the rigorous outcomes of structuralism and in the potenza of Deleuzian difference, will not let pass. But, setting aside irony and with a little goodwill, I persist in asking: How was it possible to turn all those ghosts of totality and all that sublime ethical void of the subject into the key to a transition to a revolutionary undertaking? They were gadgets, not concepts. The answer can only recall the misery of those times – across all its coordinates: we were attempting to bring together a religious rooting and a desire for revolutionary transformation, a metaphysical sense of being, and a desire for a communist reconstruction of nature! Put the sea in a bucket! Yes, this was a life experience. Often in the history of culture we have, as stereotypes or as problems, incredible intercrossings of paradigms, ideologies and meanings. But all this only shows that the history of culture in no sense constitutes a logic; in it are combined, under different names, problems that have their origin in practice. And at that time the practical problem was the caesura effected in the history of the revolutionary movement. Certainly, most of its militants chose – in the face of disillusion – ways of retreat, opting instead for choices between an acritical continuity, a new resistance movement, or technological reformism. But that was not the case with the younger generation – indeed it reinforced its break with the past, and thus its autonomous quest for a practical restitching of the break in revolutionary continuity. Cupiditates [desires] were being expressed – but revolutionary needs, in order to express themselves, needed to find mediation and theoretical expression. Thus Hegel functioned as a catalysing pole. Eros was the son of Penia:3 theoretical gropings, confusion, bogus alternatives – our poverty was great, but so too was the great love and freedom that all those fantastic abstract Hegelian totalities could feed. Pages such as those of the Phenomenology of the Spirit on ‘the slave and the master’ were used in order to imagine the first processes of collective liberation from alienation – and it was as if a philosophical epic was being configured in those adventurous experiments. A philosophical epic that, initially, I felt to be all my own – but then gradually I realised that it was widespread – perhaps marginal in the sense that it was still extraneous and did not affect the terrible tedium of the dominant culture, yet it could be seen circulating in the discourse between young researchers and academics of the most famous circuits of interacademic communication, between Pisa and Padua, between Rome, Milan and Naples. (Turin was out of this circuit – shortly we shall see why. But this did not concern me particularly at the time. The fact that the city of industry and the labour movement, and its problems, still did not enter into my frame of thinking can only be understood if you bear in mind the long journey of my emigration from the peasant majority to the centrality of industry: when one looks at those years, it is like saying that the working class was on a long journey towards becoming a social majority.)
In short, what sustained me was a fine humanism, much admired; it enabled me to make a first synthesis of my journey, which in part mystified the utopian passion but at the same time presented relations that were critical and articulated on many elements of transformation. With this conquest – of a humanism that was radical, liberal and critical – I had begun to live the metaphor – it was just a metaphor, but that was no small thing – of a process of liberation that, beyond all the difficulties, I sensed as having real legs. I had a vague awareness of this. To be able to stand up, after having played at allowing yourself to be knocked over and kept head down, is a long and complex operation. Do you remember, David, when we did that exercise in Brittany, riding the big rollers from the Atlantic? When shall we return to play on the waves of the sea, and on the waves of philosophy and politics? Ciao. A hug . . .
PS: I’m adding a note that I wrote – as a memo to myself – after I sent you my last letter. ‘This writing about myself, about the prehistory – it’s hard – but more particularly it scares me. What explodes and comes to the surface is a pre-reflexive reality. Pre-memory. Finding myself outside of the control of reason almost paralyses me. Petty bourgeois decorum? When we had arguments in the family, my mother always used to say: “Children, there’s no need to shout.” And then: “One can be poor and still be clean.” I, on the other hand, I quarrel with myself, and I put my poverty out in public. That seems to me somehow ugly, unseemly. The flow needs to be dominated by reason. On the other hand: involuntary memory: Deleuze on Proust . . . reason and the body. There is energy in what I am expressing. But is my writing up to it? Energy – flow – a gas pipeline – an oil pipeline – a pipeline – it is moving forward, but it’s filthy. A tunnel of mud. Is poverty dirty? Is my writing filthy? Everything is so shorthand in my description. I’ll try to be more lucid from now on. Lucid – but does not reason itself have thickness and body? Is poverty unsayable? No – the pipeline is fed by the earth, it has to run, it brings energy. One time I saw small flames flickering and flaring from control points on the gas pipeline: releases of pressure. These reflections of mine must also serve a purpose – a small fire – to relaunch from afar.’