Rebibbia, 15 March 1982
Do you remember, David? It was a cold day. Windy, with sudden glimpses of sky, as often happens in Paris in March. At our early afternoon rendezvous I saw you from a distance, as you came running and waving that day’s edition of Le Monde: Moro had been kidnapped. We sat in the café – perplexed. We read the news. We were supposed to be discussing the Rue d’Ulm seminar – but who was in the mood for that? You started off with a blast of questions and hypotheses. An international manoeuvre, a conspiracy, Parliament, counterinsurgency, terrorism, approval of the Historic Compromise, coincidences, counter-intelligence programmes …? You went painstakingly through all the possible readings, adding them to the pile or discarding them. ‘Why not the Russians?’ I added, irritated. The absurdity of the situation – the obviousness of other people’s attentive curiosity – I had no problem imagining ‘smoking typewriters’ everywhere, in press agencies and newsrooms – and also in the corridors of power: how repellent, the inevitable nod-and-wink complicity of the left intellectuals – my attention wandered away and I felt myself losing all motivation. I told myself that it would end up like in Mogadishu the year before, and like the Red Army Fraction after the Ponto and Schleyer affair.1 I was wrong. This lack of motivation, however, was to be the main characteristic of my behaviour also in the months to come. The tragedy came slithering in like a snake – you were aware of the danger, but you couldn’t measure the strength of the poison. Pictures at an Exhibition. The enormity of the event. He, Moro, with incredible skill and an intelligence born of despair, strove to make the whole story even more far-reaching and enriched it with true substance, through his letters during the two months of his captivity. The disclosure of a politician’s humanity, as we know, is a topos of classical tragedy. The pity elicited could be profound.
Anyway, let’s get back to us. When the brain can’t handle the object in question, the will does not engage. Certainly there were some banal truths that could be stated immediately: these lunatics have raised the stakes beyond all reason; in their lack of rootedness they are running wild with a stubborn arrogance; they are an out-of-control variable within the revolutionary movement. But these were, precisely, banal truths. It would have been easy for me to reconstruct the inner trajectory that had led to all this. Domestic stories. Italian and German. The ragings of ideology and the lack of intelligence in the movement. Übergang der ersten zur nächsten Etappe der Guerrilla [Transition from the first to the next step of the guerrilla war]. Paroxystic optimism of the will, and a void of strategic rationality. Between the human condition of the terrorist Chen2 and the nihilism of Nechayev there are infinite variations, but their efficacy is always imposed, whether passively or actively, by the movement. Now, in their isolation, the Red Brigades were hurtling towards Nechayev – and soon they would be entirely enmeshed in him. Banal truths. And on the other hand, as the days and weeks passed, you realised how far their madness had infected the people in power – now it was stuck to them like an old tin can tied to the tail of a cat. From that March to the Spanish-style ceremony in Santa Maria Maggiore, the story moved between the grotesque and the macabre – violence and irrationality, geometry and madness. Conjoined? No, simply mixed together. The tears of the politicians, the business at Lago della Duchessa, the hypocrisy, the cold wrath of the bureaucrats, Via Gradoli … And what was the result? That funeral mass in Santa Maria Maggiore became, unexpectedly in terms of liturgical practice, the baptismal moment of the emergency, and it contained all the fury that old hags might put into procuring an abortion and a resentment towards oneself that could be placated only by striking at others. There is no sight more obscene than the desire for revenge of an inept in André Malraux’s 1933 novel La Condition humaine. political class. Giovanni Montini [Pope Paul VI], tired and humble cleric that he was, did not deserve to be involved in that terrible ceremonial. In Hofmannsthal the great Almoner welcomes the beggar while at the same time he rejects the king – and he laughs at the king. Prophetically. Yet this was not what troubled us so deeply, mon cher David. The fact was that the frame of reference of political initiative had been completely and irrationally dislocated. We had no foothold anywhere. And here, in these conditions, analysis had to be radically renewed. It became increasingly apparent that the kidnapping had not been carried out against Power; this latter had not been soiled by even a drop of that blood, which might have been pumped by the hypothetical heart of the state – the kidnapping had been an expropriation conducted against the initiatives of the new social subjects. It was an expropriation of the movement. The listlessness, the disgust, as we watched and followed the journalistic and institutional progress of the negotiations – we knew that we had to go beyond that and turn our attention rather to analysing the nature of this wild variable and to identifying the position it now occupied in the political life of the country. The problem could not be ignored, just as we could not delude ourselves that the radical mystification of the political framework of the class struggle set in train by the fanatical undertaking in Via Fani could be swiftly moved aside.
You were asking me, David: But who are these Red Brigades, what do they want, by what heaven are they blessed, and what trip is their drug promising them? Everyone knows who they are – I answered. They are the old labour movement, the Carbonari of an impossible revolution – because their revolution is and always will be a revolution of labour – desperate advocates of an eternal 1917, hooked on an ideology that is faithful and reassuring. Terrorism is for them a form of productive labour. Their logistics is a little factory, their organisation is a small and rapacious capitalist firm, their ideology is a project of accumulation, and their clandestinity is a means to reduce business risks. Their consciousnesses are functions of a calculation of profit. At that time, of course, we had not seen the final product of this particular assembly line: the maximisation of murders and then the optimal output of repentance, the weary business of the thirty pieces of silver, the morality and consciousness that were as wasted as people’s lives. Nothing they did would have surprised us: what difference is there in fact between those who expropriate delegation rights and rights of control of the masses and those who sell lives to get an insurance bonus? The Red Brigader exists in the realm of production, the repentant terrorist in that of distribution – of death and distress. The state has only one foul act of intelligence to fulfil in their regard: to treat them as part of itself, to monetise them as equivalents. The Red Brigade recruiting took place in the folds and crevices of that imposing ruin that called itself the official labour movement, and it developed during a period of major uncertainty about that movement’s ability to hold on to its corporative power in the factories, in a pervasive and stubborn ignorance about the transformations that were taking place in society, in a nostalgia for an idealised past – the Resistance, the horny-handed sons of toil, and so on – and under the illusion of a possible future restoration. Does the future have roots in the past? Certainly, they tell you – half of them are Stalinists, and the other half are party-line trade unionists – and you see them shed a big tear. The hypocrisy of traditional noble sentiments includes the desire to kill. Just as the small capitalist entrepreneur is a good paterfamilias, so that his exploitation of others goes hand in hand with a concern for the welfare of his children – so the killing of Moro becomes the highest act of a revolutionary morality. It is probably true in this ethic of emotion, or rather in this aesthetics: the only thing that is missing is the sense of the productivity of life and of the responsibility of the masses – which, for a communist, are everything.
(But is there not, within the very culture of the Resistance, a basic defect, a kind of unresolved legacy, as a remote feud that reappears cyclically in different generations? Sometimes I thought this – but Peter Weiss and Peter Bruckner and very many other comrades came to my assistance and explained how the Resistance had been a renewal of life and a struggle against terror. No, what we have here has nothing to do with the Resistance. Here the terror develops not from a lived past, but on the immobile time of ideology – an extreme, physiological function of an ideology that has become absolutised and dead. The Calvinist king-killer is not reducible to the crazed Jesuit who kills King Henri IV de Navarre …)
From the Red Brigades’ point of view the Moro operation was brilliant. As mountain folks say, if you give a child grappa to drink, you make the child drunk. The outcome of the operation, in itself adventurist and illogical, was to unleash indiscriminately the violence in play, such as exists at the origins of every subject of transformation, in the internal confusion of the new movement, in the laborious business of its growth as an alternative. Cruelty of behaviour and crudeness of ideology were supposed to stand in for the work of communist education that the new proletariat, in its mass form, was pursuing for itself. Did our heroes succeed in this project? In part, yes – for two reasons. First, through the refined intuition – which, by chance, they had – of the crucial moment in the development of the movement; and, second, because Power, with a sudden and ferocious initiative of terror, welcomed this opportunity.
Here, at this conjuncture, we can understand entirely the so-called emergency. This word, by some strange lapsus of the system, still maintains its originary strength and purity: it is a noun conveying the idea of emergence, of the new, of innovation. Power appropriates and distorts its meaning and, out of hatred for the dynamism of transformation and for the sudden happiness of becoming, it blocks it into a concept of state: the state of emergency, the state of necessity. To destroy the emergence. Rechtsputsch. Emergency becomes exception, a Schmittian essence, for every advocate of the immobility of power and of its metaphysical nature. And then, blackout – the blackout of news and information – another magic watchword of those circumstances – power needs secrecy in order to gather the forces of antidemocratic repression – the dirty character of the state in its most basic essence cannot be allowed to be seen. Blackout – there’s another paradoxical lapsus, before it becomes a deliberate mystification – we recall the blackout in New York, the carnival of reappropriation that broke out the preceding year – do you remember the incredible beauty of the spectacle, cher David? And now the blood pact between cruelty and stolidity took ‘emergency’ and ‘blackout’ as its weapons, gave them (unjustifiably) finalities of constitutional order, and decided on a counterattack. To destroy the new movement. The time had come – the very moment at which the poor body of Moro was found. And the pity of the situation was great. When you can no longer distinguish the face of authority from the sneer of arrogance and revenge, then, as any good interpreter of Corneille knows, the passage to the horrid – to terror, torture and murder – is theatrically justified. Seventeenth-century tragedy is a great repository of these characters. Every aporia must be removed: and what is new is the aporia of the form in which power wishes to be, of its claim to an eternal return. The figure of power has to be restored at any cost. The identification between state and civil society must be coercively guaranteed. From that year of 1978 a new state massacre extended outwards, as a mystified claim over the common good – in heinous laws, in gratuitous and exemplary killings, in thousands of years of prison sentences, in juridical and administrative perversions, in torture, in vindictive propaganda – yes, admittedly in the face of many unspeakable crimes that represented the ever-renewing constancy of the terrorist variable – but above all against the emergence of any innovative behaviours in society and in the factories. With mutual satisfaction, terrorism was being played by the state as an essential moment of legitimation in its repressive action against the emerging social subject. With the addition, when red terrorism was not enough, of railway bombings and crimes against the masses. As for political–economic repression, inflation, unemployment and so on, they continued to operate with their customary efficacy. The reduction of complexity was achieved through the application of state terror. A corrupt and inept leadership accepted this without my evident reluctance, in stupid self-complacency.
How much shame has oozed out since that time! That freedom is indivisible is a sure given of critical intelligence – so the wounding of this indivisibility inevitably has consequences. So the powers of the state began working more and more in terms of emergency, making themselves clandestine, refusing to be open and public, and tending increasingly to merge among themselves and to turn these invisible dynamics into suitable weapons in the pursuit of feuds between one group and another. The dissolution of juridical guarantees for some set the conditions for a ferocious war of all against all. Those who came most exposed into this arena paid the highest price – those who live by the sword die by the sword. The misadventures of the sorcerer’s apprentices of the traditional left then went on to brighten our days – even if we were in prison. The policy of no concessions: a rigour of repression that destroyed every certainty of the law, which transformed the guilty into the innocent – after having put the blame on, and having killed, too many innocent people. Parodying a terrible and looming danger, political parties and corporations thus adopted, in their unfriendly relationships, the methods they used to use against their external enemies: internal hostilities in the constitutional parties went into overdrive. In defending his own life, Moro had offered descriptions that now seemed more like curses. His letters, huge in their sudden wisdom, became an unpredictable, powerful, drifting, threatening object: they denounced a lived reality that was a system. Corporatism is to constitutionalism what terrorism is to the movement.
If I pause here for a moment and try to define a general mapping of the meanings offered by that particular set of events, I think we can say that we were witnessing a process, as powerful as it was new for Italy, of a symbolic transfiguration of class conflict. The extraordinary dimensions of the struggle that the development of the new social subject had brought about, and that had imposed themselves – in the globally social figure in which they were represented – were now, through the operations of the state of emergency, traversing the entire institutional context. But this subsumption of the conflict by the state was merely formal – in other words it was closed within the symbolism of terrorism and was charged only with the meanings that the two parties – the terrorists and the state – attributed to it. The true fabric of the class struggle, the true effectual adversary – in other words, the movement of the new social subject – was not recognised. Except in formal terms. The new subject was reduced to a phantasm; its wealth and social autonomy were constrained within the reductive and malevolent figure of terror. But when the real terms of the conflict are mystified to such an extent, only madness and brutality remain: the independent variable of terrorism was matched by a mirror image resulting from the collapse of the system of power. The Italian autumn was tropical – filled not with mists but with destructive cyclones. A state wretchedly poor in democratic traditions underwent a decisive incentive for its own illiberal and administrative overdetermination, with blind and unthinking determination. The emergence of the new subject was blindly attacked and transformed into a legal state of emergency. A Jacobin meteor crossed the Italian sky. Ideas of the compact solidarity of institutions were joined together with notions of public security; the informational blackout appeared as an act of political pedagogy; those who opposed it were hysterically denounced as enemies of the constitution. In reality, we went from a symbolic transformation of reality to a suspension of reality. Not demonstrative facts, but only the indices of violence showed this now. This is exactly what Moro was denouncing in his letters. So had the terrorists won? How could anyone think of this as a victory, the fact that like was accreting upon like? That the blackmail of the Red Brigades could be conjugated with the interests of the ruling parties? This is merely an entropic reaction, a relationship of death.
If you give a child grappa to drink, the child gets drunk, but then remains teetotal for life – that’s the completion of the homely proverb. However, between jail and exile, between police repression and trade union repression, the movement now began its new ‘long march’ – or, if you prefer, a large-scale and solid initiative of maturation and reorganisation. Intent on recapturing reality. (Thank you, David, for the quotation from Origen. The living are saints; the saints are living.) Leave aside the arrival, every once in a while, of the angelus novus, symbol and event of sudden transformations – struggle for peace, community struggles for housing, new workers’ struggles, freedom struggles in prisons – articulations of one single theme. But more on this later.
So, David, let us return to our reflections of that time and to our conviction of the substantial correctness of the point of view adopted. But – and today we can admit it – how abstract and ineffectual our conviction was! A position that was politically untenable in that transitional phase. And not only that. With a certain masochism, we realised that this position of a double confrontation, with the terrorism of both sides, was not only tactically unsustainable but also strategically immature. But what was to be done? The precipitation of the conflict rendered impossible the proposition of reason – one was reduced to a position of mere witnessing. Hence, again, our lack of motivation. Hence that paralysing sensation that comes from having to transfer the strong ethical insistence of the collective on a terrain of a future proposal and to entrust it to a return of propitious times. But was it possible? This tragedy that we were living, was it not rather a sign of the end of times? Was it not the case that from now on the situation would be blocked around the polarity of war, in a definitive and cruel manner? The temptation of catastrophism is strong when the historic presence configures catastrophe as the immediacy of the Lebenswelt [lifeworld]. But does this immediacy not change also the meaning of catastrophe? If the catastrophe is not just a transient and contingent element – but is rather the normal determination, the metaphysical meaning of our living in this time, the epochal and ontological sign of our collective existence – what then? Beyond the groans of power and its desire for revenge, beyond the mad cunning of terrorism, the catastrophe was only an effectual condition. All were products rather than causes of this. Why, then, let oneself be taken by some superficial ambiguous alternative? To avoid a few years in prison?
There were those who did that, with hasty and impromptu demonstrations of obsequiousness to power. But above all there were those who built the pressure, together with us, from within the official labour movement, interceding, through cultural mediation, to help us avoid prison. The blackmail, albeit softened by the refined style, remained what it was. And yet the style and the speech should not be underestimated, in their paradoxical and cynical valency. We pushed toward the dissolution of our double rejection – of the institutions and of terrorism – insisting instead on an alternative: either in the institutions or in terrorism, in other words either within dialectics or against dialectics. What difference does it make, in fact? The important thing, the persuaders added, is to take nihilism as the only present terrain: the nihilism of the institutions that are empty of value, or that devastating nihilism of terrorism. Choose. Yes, they may be equivalent – but the one leaves you free, while the other lands you in jail. An honest, practical compromise on the cynical paradox of a pervasive nihilism. Or a mechanicist seventeenth-century temptation! We laughed – a Pascalian response? – we laughed, we, unique among many, at the blandishments of the choices on offer. And that gave Calogero his starting point.
But is there really not a third way? Of course there is, it is present, it is given. Not third but first. It is within the desire for transformation. It is the possibility of the new subject being constitutive, alternative – constitutional. It arises precisely from the fact that the catastrophe constitutes the originary terrain of our existence – a division that can no longer be mediated, that is socially fixed, so that value cannot consist in any relationship with power but exists as autonomy, as separation, as non-homologous and nondialectical construction of a new productive force. If it’s war, then let us direct it the way it was commanded by the genius that presided over Brest-Litovsk: neither with the one nor with the other, neither with the Germans nor with the Russian nationalists, but against both of them in terms of class, against the political embrace within which they are qualified. The appeal of the old revolutionary constitutionalism, which is able to give each part of reality its proper place – Calhoun: not contract but compact – enough of the dialectic of the Jacobin general will! – the constitutional position of proletarian autonomy. A revolt and an insurrection, both constitutional; and banish all temptations to Jacobinism and dictatorship.
If only we had been able, mon vieux David, to push this awareness to the limit at that time! But we couldn’t. We watched, with despondency and disgust, the fulfilment of that which we lacked the power to block. And the one who lacks strength is often wrong. But what an enormous growth, what a dislocation of the collective consciousness was brought about by this series of unspeakable events! In Moro’s grave was a closing of the first republic and its historic opposition. It was not buried by virtue of the terrorists or the ineptitude of the system – or at least they were not the protagonists. The author had been the movement of the 1970s, the development of the struggles of the new proletarian subject. But now the main character was absent. Theatrical masks, contrived characters ran after these events, but all that was present of the protagonist was only disgust for the horrible game played over life. We, who had worked so hard on the workers’ and proletarian overcoming of the first republic, were effectively overwhelmed, both by the tragic form in which the event, the long-awaited event, took place, and by the mess of the outcome. As always, in our case the tragedy necessarily had to have a tinge of irony: in this case we had to pay, ironically, the price of the out-of-timeness of our intelligence. Thus, cher David, while you were reading aloud the news of the kidnapping of Moro, I was looking at the clear sky outside the windows of the café and I was smiling: no, these fools have not destroyed the hard and beautiful core of the real, no, they have not constrained us, the struggle goes on. The sky and the transformations of class consciousness will always be able to sustain the long and effectual times of the revolution. If Moro’s death marked the end of the first republic, it also marked the entry into the mature phase of the revolutionary project of the new subject. It marked the point at which constitutional transformism, the compromise of the existent, would no longer have been possible. The new constitutional battle of the proletariat had opened – and, sooner or later, once the last corpse-like representatives of the first republic were moved out of the way, it would become effectual. There, one half of me flying with a desire for knowledge, and the other prisoner of a past that I saw uselessly reproducing itself, I was wondering what my future was going to hold. And I saw the difficulties in it. However, hope did not fail. That history is badly made, of this there is no doubt: and even if you anticipate the way in which it renews itself, you find yourself driven into a corner and anyway you risk being covered by the fallout of the event. History laughs at your solitude. But if the solitude is that of a collective desire, it does not stand up and it will be welcomed into a new position of being, into the project of its innovation. With tenderness you hold firm to this principle, even when the violence of events slaps you in the face. And to curses you bring discussion, to bewilderment you bring hope. In short, an ironical Job. On the other hand, the snake of tragedy was crawling close – but it would not succeed in copulating with the earth, as the ancient myth would have it. The land was dry, as dry as the new ontological potentiality of the subject. Everything that was happening would have just slid over it, worthy of beasts and not of human beings. Here a new epoch had begun. With a full sense of the tragedy we lived, I embrace you …