Rebibbia, 26 March 1982
Really, cher David, if I had to weigh my life – like those Indian gentlemen who are weighed on the scales against bars of gold – I would have to conclude, like Groucho Marx, that I’ve worked up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty. The strange thing is that I am incapable of taking weights and measures seriously. As the attorney general told me during the questioning after 7 April: ‘But don’t you understand that you are possibly facing life imprisonment!’ – No, I do not understand. Then he added: ‘You don’t seem to have your feet on the ground.’ Ah no, I certainly do have ‘my feet on the ground’. I have spent all my life following the spatial indications of the other Marx, the communist, the materialist. It is just that weights and measures, directions and orientations are relative and manifold, and now, as things stand, the systems are neither credible nor unifiable. The paradox of capitalist development consists in this: the most enormous work of unification of the world has definitively split it into two, and master and servant are no longer part of the same family but are two separate races, each with its own civilisation. Jehovah is not the metric yardstick in Sèvres, whatever Bernard-Henri Lévy may think. The bosses feel this truth intermittently. So offensive do they find it that they must distance themselves from a continuous perception of it. No less effective, however, is this intermittent consciousness that they have opted for, and they label deviant and subversive behaviours ‘criminal’ – simply because these are material from another culture. Then they force you to honour their pantheon: Richelieu, Robespierre and Rothschild – the three Rs of terrorism – protean unifiers of a difference that we maintain intact, of a world that is not ours.
Cher David, at midnight on 6 April 1979 we said goodbye to each other – at the Gare de Lyon. By midnight on 7 April I was in Rovigo Prison. While I was fitfully dozing on the train that brought me back to Italy, unaware of the voyage au bout de la nuit [voyage to the end of the night] on which I was embarking, they had already turned on the flashing signal of repression against me and my comrades. I was not particularly surprised by the arrest, which followed one of the many searches to which I had been subjected in those years. What did amaze me, however, was the heading on the charge sheet: ‘armed insurrection against the powers of the state . . . the armed group known as the Red Brigades . . . the killing of Aldo Moro’. As for what followed, you read it in the papers. Never was a judicial vagary more egregious. Never was a provocation more blind. Subsequently, the sarabande of self-justifications designed to cover the political responsibilities was shameful. To correct the situation, they complexified it – after having set in train a major repressive plan, justice sold itself off to a bunch of utterly implausible repentant terrorists, to filthy rogue killers. Oily legal operators would remove one of the charges, only to replace it with another, so that grotesquely the sum totals of homicides varied between twenty and one – because at least one always had to remain in place, as a kind of sleep-walking guarantee, for the forces of justice, of the possibility of life imprisonment. Yes, life imprisonment, or what the attorney general chose to call being ‘down to earth’ – or the long journey on the Sentier des chamois in the highest clouds, which in my case meant moving from one special prison to another. (Rebibbia G8, clinical asphalt, only asphalt – sounds and noise reach you in attentuated form – unless it’s some prisoner on drugs, screaming out his torture. Fossombrone, wooden . . . everything creaking – an archaic prison, gutted and rebuilt in line with the modernity of new repressive functions, and all the more cruel as a result. Palmi, steel – it screeches in the wind, metallic, and the abstract screeching penetrates into your brain and everything sounds like an out-of-tune violin. Trani, all concrete – a cursed prison – it has a railway running alongside – at night the whistle of the train carries away your hope. Rebibbia, yellow. Fossombrone: the blue of the Umbrian fades into a dirty brown. Palmi, greenish. Trani, grey.) A mad round of prisons, and unbearable tiredness. In the special prisons I was confronted with a past that had been petrified. Anger and desperation that didn’t know how to make themselves political. Combatants incessantly restating their vocation of death – Japanese soldiers keeping on fighting for decades after Hiroshima, in honour of the Mikado, in some jungle in the Pacific. I was crushed on this landscape.
In its small way, in its improvised nature, the political–policing operation of 7 April was an action of great design and of overbearing mystifying efficacy, a Schmittian Entscheidung [decisionism] by the bosses and their baleful allies and avengers. O you, poor Communist Party, of what dark nemesis did you make yourself the bearer, with your subpatriotic compromises? They had recognised the real enemy, the social enemy, the class enemy, the new subject in his separateness, and with 7 April they had sought to crush him. But this operation took place in the powerful ambiguity of the normative will of the state: in this ambiguous space, crushing is also to recuperate the enemy to oneself, to describe the enemy as part of oneself, to name it as a terrorist face of power. To restore juridical meaning, to reorganise things into categories of crime, to homologate the other race, all in order to relegitimate the unity of a divided power: this is what the symbol of 7 April represented. I understood the operational logic of the accusation; its infamy consisted not in regarding me as an enemy but as an homologous one, in destroying my difference along with my identity. A lightning operation – a reactionary jetzt-Zeit [present time] – a reduction of reality and of time to the immobility of destructive legal norms – a cursed blasphemy against the creativity of collective life. On the other hand, the initiative sought to be, and was, a broad underlining, with a big brush, of the end of the ‘Italian case’ – of that continuity of struggle and proletarian uprisings that the previous twenty years had experienced. The end of the Italian case: this could be a fortunate and ‘catastrophic’ innovation, I told myself, the beginning of a new history of the new subject: the repression can serve to highlight the dissymmetry of the transition and of the dislocation of the subject . . .
Consolatio philosophiae!1 In fact a vague theoretical consciousness cannot always sustain the weary labours of practice. In prison, in the early days, the temptation was to let go of the moorings and set off, to allow my old but secure boat of independence and proletarian autonomy to drift along. It was less wearisome to accept the double diktat to which the state and the terrorists subjected you. It is hard to survive in jail, in the grip of this vice. In prison you become a monk, and you can also become a bad monk – nec cella ei cella, sed reclusio et carcer est, aut sicut viventi sepoltura [for him, the cell is not a cell but a space of reclusion and a prison, or something like a tomb for the living]2: this is how the medieval Cistercian apologist describes the situation. Continuous flashes of death were assailing you from the inside and from the outside: no one who did not live it – that season of ordinary murders – can imagine its abominable cruelty – ‘ferocious alphabets’ – a war whose parties, according to the attorney general, had their ‘feet on the ground’ . . . et tant pis pour l’angélisme [and so much the worse for angelism]! You have to be either on this side or on that; they tell you so – repeatedly and obsessively. Mars, like Janus, has two faces. Either a repenter or a ‘Japanese’ combatant, like all those who had their ‘feet on the ground’. But the earth goes round, I protested to myself. As far as I was concerned, though, the only thing that was going round was my head, at least for as long as I still had it attached to my body, in this war of fools – but for how much longer would it remain attached? Occasionally, in some special prison somewhere, they did take off people’s heads – grunf, grunf, with a lump of iron. Prisons that were grade A butcheries. And outside: this was the time of the massacre in via Fracchia. We had to break, break that cage, tear off that hood, fracture that logic. You have to do it, I told myself on the very first day of special prison. But you can’t do it. Every movement is mechanically immobilised; it’s like being in a big popcorn machine where you are pushed out from the middle to the walls, and wheat and millet and sugar turn into sweet stuff.
What an effort, cher David, to regain a foothold. And what illusions! The movement – you told yourself – or you whispered to the few comrades you had – will regain its identity, and its irreducibility to this insane armada of two sides will become clear again. A movement of liberation that comes forward and looks at you? An illusion of transcendence. Idiot. Pointless. That is where we were, and it was there that we had to settle our accounts and regain our dignity, right there in jail. The movement, if it was to be reborn – and it was likely to be reborn – would find itself beyond the end of the Italian case, and would therefore be supported on the deployed reality of the new subject. It was for this that we had worked, this global dislocation was what we wanted – so the new movement would not have recognised us as fathers because this movement, at its origins, did not want fathers. It was not patricidal but virginal. Sprachlosigkeit [speechlessness]: do not utter, do not talk, do not repeat, do not remember: that’s the meaning of it. But we, yes, we would have been able to recognise it – once again – as a creative sign, and this recognition would have renewed us. The way to recompose oneself within the movement could not therefore be based on brainpower, but had to form itself on the tracks that the movement was signalling, or those warning signs that we intuited. It was a way, a poor but potentially powerful way, an extreme outer edge of a life that was defended, the only one that prison left us: our body, our bodily community. For the good monk the cell is domicilium pacis, secretum templum, officina pietatis [the home of peace, a secret temple, a workshop of piety]. It was necessary to work on the body, in the same way that the movement worked on the body. Aufstand der Körper [the insurrection of the body]! The opposition is not between life and death but between death and the body – because all the rest of our life had been taken from us.
And yet all one needed was to think a little, and one realised that we had not lost our sense of direction. All the communist theoretical research, around and after 1968, had in fact been going in this direction: from the phantasm of the party as body to the discovery of the collective body. A great classic exploration De corpore politico.3 It does not matter if explorers fail in an uncharted territory – theoretical research leaves traces and hypotheses. So then, let’s pick them up. Let’s strip the flesh off the ideology to refind the community, let’s articulate the community in order to invent the body. From the body as the last sign of your individuality and existence – as prison would wish it – to the body as a collective substance of communication and of organisation. Let us reappropriate the body through a practice that empties out the meaning of prison, of deprivation and isolation. Cher David, only since the prison struggles took on this dimension was the dreadful pincer grip of state and terrorism broken. On the design of corporeality you rebuilt life. Listen to Spinoza: ‘no one has yet determined what the body can do’; ‘he who has a body capable of a great many things has a mind whose greatest part is eternal.’4 I rediscovered, cher David, what I had desired – in a collective hope that ripped chains off and turned prison into a laboratory of liberty. While the terrorists were killing people and the state was lucky to gamble its legitimacy on piles of corpses, while legal incivility was advancing with Nazi arrogance and betrayal became the exclusive source of truth in our trials, we, in the prisons, joined our resistance to terror to a claiming of a new collective revolutionary body. In dubio pro libido – or a will to live, a desire to innovate – collectively. Communism is a race, a way of life. The new prison movements, from San Vittore to Rebibbia, on the right to affectivity and on internal and external solidarity, moved from these early political intuitions. The transformation of the subject, the new cycle of proletarian self-valorisation, the Vergleichung [comparison], unity and equalisation of the strata of the socialised worker – all this we remade, in vitro, in a prison system that could not contain us because we were too many and too large and beautiful. The belly of the whale could not hold Jonah.
And so it has to vomit him out. On 28 December 1980, in Trani Special Prison, there was a revolt against conditions in Asinara Special Prison. Like Japanese soldiers from a war long since over. In a coup de main the Red Brigades kidnapped warders from the political prisoners’ wing. They connected their action to the D’Urso kidnap, which was underway at that time, and they started sending out hallucinatory messages. The state decided to fight fire with fire. On 30 December, as the revolt was running out of steam, the state shows its infinite power as apocalypse – special forces landed from helicopters onto the prison roof, using explosives to break through the gates and walls, and firing wildly. They took us all into captivity and subjected us to a fearsome lynching. It was the body – the extreme poverty and extreme richness of your body – that had to be suppressed. A massacre ensues. They destroy and devastate everything in sight. The few means of reproduction of your body, your books and notebooks, letters from loved ones and postcards from your children: they tear them up, destroy them and drown them in piss. They throw you down the stairs; they split heads; they hammer you with lumps of wood, on your knuckles and your knees; they lash your ribs. The state unleashes the lumpen. When you have run the last gauntlet of the murderous thugs, you finally end up in an open space where you can rest. Your head is bleeding. You put your bloodstained hands on the concrete walls, making meaningless arabesques. But it’s not over yet. During the night the lumpen return to the attack: ‘Kneel, son of a bitch’; ‘Beg for forgiveness’; ‘Your wife sucks cock’; ‘Communist shit’ . . . The winter night is wet, God has spat out this thick dew. A huddle of men embraced, holding each other close to resist the wounds, the cold, the fatigue. There can be no stars on a night like this. Like whiplashes in the dark, like freezing rays, the spotlights of those killers search you out. And the body just resists. Then, the next day and the days after that, huddles of men again, dozens at a time, in a big barn of a dormitory, like wagonloads of Jews on their way to Poland – to sleep at last, at least to sleep.
But you have to survive – and only struggle allows you to survive; the reaffirmation of your body and of the community of these bodies together. 31 December 1980: a New Year’s Eve that is at once desperate and very sweet. The world is far away. You no longer know where you are. There has been a news blackout on what is happening to you. You have to regain a relationship of communication with the outside, at all costs. Drumming sounds from everywhere. People banging on the bars, on the doors, on the gates and the ironwork that close you in. A huge drumming noise, like the rumble of a subway tunnel, a sound that overwhelms you until your whole body is shaking. An incredible unity develops; the sound waves carry the pollen of solidarity. Proletarian unity is a high unity of the new social and intellectual labour power. What we have here is a low-level unity, abysmal but entirely human – the unity of poverty, of the body, of the wretched of the earth. Here you understand the metaphysical substratum of slavery: the negative limit of the human productive essence that is configured in it. The new body resists. Besieged in the cells, for one week, two, three, four . . . Masked individuals enter, fearsome and ferocious beasts. They beat, they search, they terrorise, they kidnap your comrades. ‘You’re going into solitary!’ Sudden transfers. Jetzt-Zeiten, blitzes of death, and again there follows the stark capitalist negation of the time of life. You spend sleepless nights barricaded in. You defend yourself by collecting up garbage and throwing it into the corridors to prevent the incursions of the guards. Metres and kilograms of filth, mixed and muddy, all piled up. You’re a rat now, caught in a deadly trap. But you must resist. I have never felt so much the need to cry, and never has my body so vigorously refused it.
Cher David, death is the enemy and the body is the friend. We lived a whole story, and it was neither more nor less than the parabola of the incarnation of the proletariat. The historical tragedy of the capitalist mode of production is the fullness of time. The end of time, the crisis, is a great renaissance. A great new body. Had it not been for this thought, which I had permanently stuck in my brain, I would have given in to the temptation of suicide, which often crept up on me. Rosenzweig: ‘The terrible capacity to commit suicide distinguishes man from all other beings that we know and that we do not know.’5 A shame of the spirit. I had my support from the body, from its hope. If there is spirit, then killing oneself is stupid – one does not die. You live again, petrified and unmoving, in the memory of other spirits. The body, on the other hand, does not want to die, because it is life – not something that comforts but something that produces. The body is a proposition of life. In the cells at Trani, where this extraordinary spectacle of resistance was running wild, you saw the body die in the misery of individuality and restructure itself into community. ‘Against the destruction and colonisation of the body.’ A gentleness, playing cards, doing tarot, delicate homosexual approaches, and then discussions, political polemics, rebuildings of the project, clashes, thoughts, feelings, reason, and a mutual and fraternal Aufklärung [enlightenment]. A transformation taking place in hell. Freaklich in die Katastrophe [Freaklike in the catastrophe].6 Is this not the fate of the new subject? Is it not in this absolute misery that you recognise yourself to be part of the movement? And with you it grows to maturity? Is it not in this internal mediation that multiplicity becomes responsibility and community becomes tendency? Our animal spirits need all this, and there is no more than a pinch of utopia in this experience.
In fact this matter of the bodily community is a productive discourse – it is the ens realissimum [most real being], on which takes place the clash between the classes, to decide who will appropriate the effects of productivity and who will organise this collective productivity. In the cells of Trani we experienced at first hand a story of the modes of production. On the one hand, the custodians, the guards – enemy lumpen – in cahoots with the boss. On the other, the transformation and upwards equalisation of intellectual labour power, of the various class experiences. A division that was a diachronic section. Thus we experienced, and not just occasionally, a theoretical history of the working class and of its political transformation: from the composition of the party, universal and abstract, to this warm body of the communist community.
You come now, you policemen of high culture, you indecent Arbasini, you diplomats in pink, you angelic sewer rats, and you laugh at our warm community, sometimes wearing face masks, sometimes raggedy-arsed, but always, in the factories and in society, building and producing a condition that is denied to your position of nonproductive privilege, of whores, judges and voyeurs! But let’s leave the dead to bury the dead.
The long journey into the underground world of imprisonment still continues. The ‘7 April case’ is still here, cher David, refusing both the terrorist blackmail and the blackmail of the state, both of which are intent on the regulated homologisation of the body with the soul. Whereas our project is to destroy the soul, in whatever way it proposes itself. And to recognise the place of the body in the collective constitution of the proletariat. So I was living in prison the first concrete dimensions of a long-term project, the realisation of the new dislocation of proletarian composition. A major effort that nevertheless enabled us, within the continuing struggle, to be participants again, but now transformed, in the resumption of the movement. The whale gets shipwrecked, and Jonah finds himself on the beach again. Jonah, Ulysses – and then us; a shipwreck that repeats this eternal myth of renewal. Not an eternal return, but an eternal renewal: only jailers of thought can think of reducing the second to the first. A renewal that carries me continuously beyond 7 April, beyond the trial, beyond the countless skirmishes that this case entails. Outside of any possibility of rendering my memories homologous to the procedure and to the substance of the trial and to its logical circularity and unmoving sameness. Far from the ‘ferocious alphabets’ of this age of repression. The project of breaking the resistance of the body fails, the body testifies only to its corporeal nature, to what it is and what it becomes – it recognises no form of transcendence, not even judicial. It is irreducible to soul, to spirit, to an equivalence with justice. Principium individuationis. Quantitate signatum [The principle of individuation. Signed by quantity]. But then it is a body of higher qualities of expression and of communication.
Now, I don’t know what more to add, cher David, except that in this I feel justified, both responsibly and morally, in the face of a story that is body – both mine and that of the collective, together. At bottom, if you think about it a bit, it is precisely by insisting like this on ourselves that we avoid the continuous frustration of a philosophical reduction of problems: we are fighting a life battle, solving the unattainable universal in the proposition of the collective – and, faced with nothingness and negation, we lessen them in the positivity of the body. Of course, the body is fragile. But it is capable of many things. It reproduces life and produces the world. The body is frail, but extreme poverty is an extraordinary force. For my part, I imagine communism as a great collective body that takes on board, transforms and enhances the productivity of the single individual. And don’t start talking to me about Menenius Agrippa and organicism! This body is a surface of liberty. This body is made up of singularities from within, and they build and rebuild it indefinitely. It is for this reason that the only memory is of this collective subject – I do not know how much longer it will take to see it mature, but it is certain that this is the way I have lived it, and it is on this that my memory is hooked. I don’t understand reasons that are not the strategies that this body has seeded and brought to life. So this is how I see the past, and I proceed to the next stages of my life as a prisoner – with pride in having participated in this. And with a great longing to see you all. Goodbye.