Rebibbia, 7 April 1982
Cher David,
I’ve been inside for three years now. I ask myself what has changed outside of prison – this helps to focus my restlessness. Once again, I have the sensation of being – in the parabola described both by the story of subjective liberation and by that of human emancipation – in a situation that is initiatory, propaedeutic. These conversations that I’m having with myself are elemental, even in the strong sense – rather than having the fragmented rhythm of philosophy, they are more like music in their flowingness. Pipeline. Here, in describing this structural morphology of the passions and the ways in which it affects me, in the confrontation with the violence of the other, my solitude finds a moment of reflection. I have completed one, two, three innumerable experiences. So, once again, a breaking point. A desire for a projectuality. New Wanderjahre [years of wandering]. (It is as if each time a transition has been accomplished and one has liberated oneself from the indistinction – in practical terms, by constructing a displaced composition – there arises a new scenario with new demands. This moving from one threshold to another is the form of my joy – and it is a creative overthrow of life.) On this new margin of being, freedom and knowing seek to turn themselves into potency – into collective organisation and into struggle for transformation. Freely, having burnt all memories and preconceptions. It would be worth the effort to collect these transition points within theoretical frameworks, if we were capable of the kind of powerful imagination that characterises the approaches of originary or very early ages – life’s fables, morphologies in the manner of Propp’s fables. Would that we were not ashamed of the sensual ideas of classical times – love, violence, knowledge! (And then – why not? – organisation and revolution. Are they not classical themes?) The reality is that we are faced with weaker and more adulterated narratives: emotionality, cynicism, utopia, set to the rhythm of admiration and determination – along these lines I recognise alternatives and motivations expressed in these letters – but there ought to be other ways of expressing this process of passions and overthrows. Relocating itself at ever higher levels of composition, being determines the productive power and the constitutive potency of the subject. Thus far I have considered these dynamics by following the track of my own lived experience. Now, on this edge of being, I would like to succeed – how eager I am about this! – to build a bridge over the void, to take a grip on the tendency. Being in prison both blocks and refines this possibility – it blocks the project of the body and locks it within experimentation, albeit a passionate one – but it also sharpens the bodily imagination, the first and most fundamental among the faculties of the collective experience. It lives by experimenting, and, in experimenting with the time that is not yet, it constitutes it. The horizon of the imagination is narrow when viewed from prison. Escape is difficult. And yet, between the contradictions, difficulties and small experimentations, the adventure of constitutive imagination has to be embarked upon.
Now, the transcendental is practical. I have found myself in recent years rereading its foundation, in Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx – the three authors of the modern, anomalous and savage struggle against spiritualist metaphysics and its historical figure: the absolutist state of nascent capitalism. I took to it as to a beloved body. On the opposite face: the declaration of the formal nature of the transcendental lies at the base of concepts of representation and sovereignty and of the abstraction of the market and the political – and all this fits like a glove the boss’s hand. There is no longer any room for these ideograms of exploitation. And yet, whether conscious or unconscious, they frequently emerge where you would least expect them, both in the refusal of the practical character of truth and in a creeping loyalty to spiritualist definitions. So I find myself alone and facing a certain hostility from the comrades when I reject the old communist aphorism ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. But I ask: when a task out of symmetry with reason is entrusted to will – is it not the case that the transcendental, the collective and the tendency become a spiritual and independent presupposition rather than a practice? A presupposition that is as prudent and cautious as the will can be terroristic and crazy? It seems to me, instinctively, that ‘pessimism of the intellect’ is an ideology of economic determinism and ‘optimism of the will’ is a statement of Jacobinism. And so what, then? So imagination and the desire of doing, the desire for project, for a transcendental that is absolutely practical reverse the aphorism, so that it becomes ‘optimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will’. In order to establish an ethics rationally and to take it as a horizon of the bodily imagination and thus as a project of constitutive liberty. Rationality cannot be either determinism or valuelessness if it is capable, before all else, of grounding itself in practice. (And so we shall also erase the word ‘transcendental’).
Rationality is a passion in the strong sense. The prohibition of the possibility of passion, which prison’s regime of isolation and deprivation imposes, is thus a ban on reason and a limitation of it. And this, cher David, is the cause of my great tiredness. But I am resisting – imagination has resisted and has helped us not to be expelled from the realities of the political movement. Indeed, precisely in this solitude, with this angst in our bodies – ‘pessimism of the will’ – albeit with a head that is not capable of giving up the pleasure of reason and of modulating its sensual systems in imagination – ‘optimism of reason’ – I find that I am there too, there with the movement in the whole of Europe, between the end of time and new hope. With that same attentiveness with which, in 1981 and also before, we followed what was happening in Amsterdam, Zurich and Berlin – die grosse Bruch [the big break]. ‘No future’, the comrades said – but actually they were putting their future into practice, occupying houses and transforming them into community. And they were fighting – they had resumed the struggle – against the danger of nuclear war, against the proliferation of the nuclear industry, against the increasing militarisation of the territory and of the cities, against the destruction of the human biosphere, against the slavery of family relationships and the slavery of production, against unemployment and welfare cuts, against prison and torture. They had restarted the struggle. Where previous generations had wanted to build a future, this generation was asking: do we still have a future? And the anguished reply was followed by a new, very powerful and rational ‘here and now’. Hier-und-jetzt-Denken [thinking in the here and now]. What could be more constructive than this pragmatic and combative rationalism? If the whole of being can be unmade and destroyed, then being can also be constructed and made whole. It is a new radical Calvinism, a practice of predestination. A labouring Beruf [vocation] on the infinite distance and liberty of grace. Optimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will. There is nothing more important than this. One single condition: that this generation really is the product of the development of the struggles and of the long travail of theory, a Renaissance, the potency of all that desire for transformation – built, imagined and tested – in the preceding decades. For sure, es ist nicht alles rot, was grünt. Not everything that grows green is red. But, whereas for us, in many instances, the negative was preponderant and overbearing and the need to destroy had engaged people’s consciousnesses in contradictory ways, now the constitutive content of negativity has revealed itself. What we have here is not transcendental sublimation, nor is it the old dialectical solution. The sublime is left only to the grunfs. For us there is instead a revolution that has already taken place, in bodies. ‘Funny, wise and true’ is the nature of this genetic appearance – an eternal happening of the ethical happiness of birth.
You see, cher David, this is precisely what the optimism of the intellect is based on: the fact that the fundamental determinations of the revolutionising, of radical transformation, are given in this situation. Otherwise we would not be able, with such irrevocable assuredness, to conceive only of what is dead as being our adversary and to see it irremediably depicted on enemy faces. Nor could we, without such a certainty, recuperate everything to our desire – the divisions would pass also into our own bodies, whereas in fact they do not affect the generative processes except by separating them from the old and the inert. This revolution is aggressive – it dissolves the separations that the tradition of exploitation had piled up. Being seeks to conquer the ontic. Being is whole within the positive pole of an antagonism whose other pole is the entirety of negativity. So let us work towards a constitutive hermeneutic, to an expressed genealogy of the future. Only death is placed there, at the front, as an enemy. And that is why bastards, reactionaries and bosses want us dead. The nuclear is the symbol of their state. Exterminism. Robert Oppenheimer says: ‘the world is moving in the direction of hell with a high velocity, and perhaps a positive acceleration and probably a positive rate of increase of acceleration.’1 With a degree of black humour E. P. Thompson adds: ‘I don’t think of the extermination of all forms of life. I just think of the extermination of our civilisation. That is no small matter.’2
The angst is reborn on this extreme limit – which is precisely that of the arrogance of power. The angst that is born, however, becomes immediately struggle for peace and revolt for life, construction of community, a concrete utopia in the relationship of collectivity. The dry images of my Veneto come to mind and, as if in a delirium, a parade of people and experiences, and all our attempts to think things in concrete terms, and the determinations of the struggle – the Petrolchimico plant, the faces of a thousand comrades, the courage, the hopes, the defeats, the sweetness, the love, the Golem – the gentle giant of my renewed adolescence, Torino-FIAT, Berlin, Manhattan, the turning points, the carnival, the ferocious alphabets of despair, of repression and of resistance – and always going beyond, moving from threshold to threshold, and living reason. I would say that the centuries have never seen such an extraordinarily massified Renaissance. It was a fullness of time. From around us disappeared all sense of guilt – guilt is only the stuff of Power, inherent to its existence, incarnated in its project of destruction. Power is Schuldfrage [the problem of guilt]. Revolution, on the other hand, is possible in peace, because people’s consciousnesses are revolutionised. Power is despotism – revolution is freedom.
(Sometimes, talking about the world as we see it from prison, it amuses us to oppose two Idealtypen: the ‘oriental despotism’ of the tendency of capitalist power – be it bourgeois or socialist – and ‘gothic government’, that is, the appearance of castles, of communes, and, why not, of bishoprics – which represents the diffusion and the wealth of the new subjectivity and materiality of constitutional desires. Of course, all this happens on the basis of the enormous displacement that the computerised unification of the universe has brought about, on the deployed horizon of communication – so we should beware of the foolish image of craft solutions to problems, or of spending our time on Proudhonian utopias of the ‘small is beautiful’ variety or on the Camorristic institutionalism of our professors of law – the landscape of gothic government is universal and computerised – it is not the landscape of Neapolitan nativity scenes!)
It is here, then, on this displacement, that we measure the effectuality of the Renaissance. And the arrogance of the repressive anomalies that we are suffering. Cher David, with dark irony I sometimes think that this same prison that I am enduring is the effect of a nightmare Stalinism, taking place within a revolution in progress. A revolution has already happened – it is now being suppressed, just as it was in Russia in 1917, while it is still in its cocoon. But it nevertheless continues to expand its presence. We wait for it to give birth to a large multiformed butterfly. Remember Yalta? That solid sign of the counterrevolution, that syndrome from which we have suffered so much? For sure, it is not a worn-out old tool – but it is equally true that the status quo is unsustainable in the face of the new composition of the proletariat. Time resolves the past and its fatigues. Whereas the Soviet dissident movement, even in its most decidedly workerist aspect, still had a value that could be used in the eternal game of mirrors that was distorting reality – and it was indeed so used – Solidarnosc did not permit it any longer. It is a revolutionary movement that mediates the great means of the insurgency of the industrial worker with the complexity of popular culture and of the new layers of the intellectual and tertiary proletariat. This recognition, which traverses both the West and the East, of the necessity of a radical transformation, this maturing of the ‘revolution in the two Germanys’, very probably represents the true trend within which we are called to define our liberation. Poland, a continuing exception in European history in modern times, has now become, in a strong sense, its structural cypher. It goes without saying that the need for war and destruction turns entirely on this symbol – like on the clinamen [swerve] that innovates the vortices of physics. Stopping war and affirming peace is therefore revolution. Developing that constitutional dimension where the radical independence of the proletariat resides in the effectual possibility of consolidating itself and proceeding forward.
For this reason, cher David, it’s so important to hold firmly to the extra-parliamentary and anti-constitutional character of the movements – not to exorcise eventual integrations or to avoid old and by now impossible compromises, not to exclude opportunist movements through institutions (which may be necessary expressions of the pessimism of the will) – but to guarantee the objective of reason, in other words the dynamism of the liberation of the subject. We are not gambling on opportunity, but on necessity. The point of view is not deterministic – and thus prey to an astute rationalising logic, illusorily stretched between adversities and defeats – rather it is necessary because it is given and must therefore unfold, and in the practice of its unfolding it becomes real. The point of view is not historicist – a ball of wool whose thread extends endlessly and without interruption. Break it, Ariadne, so that the legend does not repeat itself and life becomes new! – albeit constitutive and constitutional; it commits itself solely to the truth of the autonomy and independence of the subject. I am struck by the ontological radicalism of this configuration of the tendency – the fact that the refusal of work has become irreversible and insistent on the destruction of the working day and on the construction of community; that the concept of productivity is now being joined with that of knowledge; that social crisis is not the result but the premise of economic crisis; and that a completely new basket of goods of proletarian valorisation has affirmed itself, ruining the market and its blandishments. The real abstraction of exchange as a form of social synthesis is failing. (From within our societies, those selfsame obscene corporativisms that govern them are the proof of this.)
So a new constitutional form has to appear. But a new constitutional form is, first of all, a new way of being responsible. So what was this political responsibility of the bourgeois – then, in development, and today, in the crisis of developed capitalism? If such a concept ever existed, what is now left of it? Responsibility: it was, in origin, flight from the determination of the existent, and trust in a kind of weakened theodicy, such as the one personified by the market. It is now, of course, rejection of humanity – justified by the crisis and resolved in a universal and mystified projection of its necessity. There is no longer even faith in destiny – there is only a kind of expression of the will to potency, a sign of selfish misery, of an inner moral tearing, which in the lack of logical reference and determination becomes simulation. (The discussion on the life of Moro, and the negotiation, and the holding firm …) This world of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie has become an Aztec kingdom, David – our Castoriadis refers to this; for he recognises again, speaking of the USSR, the figure of world bourgeoisie: de te fabula narratur [the story is about you], as he already taught us. An Aztec kingdom, hierarchical and cruel. Thus a simulation of the universal, of the economic plan, of the emergency, of the common good. But is it not possible to have responsibility without simulation? Is it not possible to have responsibility in terms of tendency and of the collective? As a project? Is it not possible to have responsibility as revolution, intersubjectivity and community? And to make it materially real and juridically effective, this living concept? It is possible – in a constitutional process in which the functions of communication do not become determinations of Power and the potentialities of the subjects are recognised in their ontological force. If there is an ethical call, and therefore responsibility, they can today live only as the destruction of every mechanism of neutralisation of subjectivity and as sabotage of every process of alienation. Aufstandsforschung [study of revolt], as the sociologists put it. The concept of responsibility becomes constitutional only through the analysis of the insurgence of the subjects.
Cher David, do you remember Harrington’s Oceana? I’m rereading it. In our situation we could repeat that very real, Machiavellian utopia. Harrington sees a monarchy or a republic as being based on the capacity of landed appropriation of the gentry or of the small peasantry: it is the amount of land appropriated by individual classes that determines the figure of the political regime. Now, for the criteria of land ownership that he uses to define the classes, let us substitute the themes of the appropriation of time and of the liberation of innovative needs that now characterise the proletarian strata. In this context, political responsibility is reborn as a concept, in the construction of free time – and the proletarian republic wins over the capitalist monarchy to the extent that the determination of time is actually in the hands of, and under the responsibility of, the multitudo. Liberated time is appropriation of the world of communication, insofar as it ties communication to production and to freedom – it is a republican reappropriation of being, a mass construction of freedom. A liberation of free projectuality.
It is on this terrain that the traditional labour movement – but also the mass Catholic movement, here as in Poland – has to be constrained. They are constrained. To the extent that works do not follow the historical felicity of the tendency, consciousnesses become a source of simulation and the political forces are delegitimated. I am not interested in the daily news – particularly when it’s read from prison. What interests me is the tendency of this epochal transformation we are living. I am interested in this utopia that is becoming so real as to be domestic. I am interested in Solidarnosc – in other words, in the possibility of feeling the new potenza of this proletariat, which has become the sole source of the knowledge and of the development of this people of emancipated poor – and in how the potenza becomes liberation. Never as much as today did the urgency of cancelling the memory of the single articulations of the crisis of spiritual and political life – consummatum est – go hand in hand with the necessity of uncovering the accumulated potentiality.
For this reason it has been useful for me to write these letters to you, cher David – to review the past no longer as a past, but more like a future. (It’s like when, here in prison, I remember a very sweet conjunction of love; and the perception is immediately a future, a desire that I live.) Gradually, one story has come to its end and another is beginning – and that transformation, which each of us has lived in oneself, each one has rediscovered as operating in reality … I call this the ‘Niccolò da Cusa effect’: the macrocosm is contained in the microcosm. Historical–social reality is commanded by a law of displacements produced by the collective consciousness of liberation. From the point where the revolutionary workers’ movement set out to oppose itself to the social organisation of capital, this law has become fundamental. And the process has finally reached this high level of potenza. A degree of potentiality that, in me, reproduces the indifference of the situation that I took as my starting point in this story, in the experience that is the plot of it – but only formally. What I mean is that we are all just as poor as when we were born, and in the indifference of a maternal womb we felt ourselves mixed up – but now we are immersed in a new indistinction and in a new love – the benefic Queen of the Night in Mozart’s revolutionary story – and we recognise ourselves. A story of emancipation has begun again. The fact is that we do not have a politics, but we do not even have preconceptions and predeterminations. A projectuality: this reconstruction of ours is a rebirth, and our having removed all links with the history and the leftovers of the traditional labour movement gives us an enormous strength. In short, today the rebuilding of a revolutionary politics on a human scale is once again possible. This is why the indistinction in which we are living is only formal – actually it interferes on a surface that is transparent and powerful. A surface that is solid, a stronger and more sensitive skin, as happens to all animals after the winter and after moulting. The revolutionary class presents itself on the stage of today’s society as the only force capable of dominating it. The proletarian class – the poor, the abstract labour power (intellectual, male and female) – is a law of society well before it is empowered to enact this law. Really we do not need to invent anything – but only to express, to build, to lay out positive proposals, to reveal what science and consciousness already possess. Here we can also reconcile ourselves with memory. In fact, today this emergence may turn out not to be simple rebellion, but the maturity of an effectual dominion. Without ever losing the restlessness of its subject. When this maturity of being proposes itself to us, we can decently call the passion of admiration our own – and here the production that we are capable of, and admiring, can and must develop itself into a practice of collective organisation and into the reconstruction of a theory of value on, and of, the complexity of the social fabric. But admiration, production, and consequent revolutionary organisation of value will always be synchronously traversed by new displacements and by processes of the collective consciousness moving towards even higher configurations. Solitude, violence, knowledge – love, suffering and freedom will renew once again the story of life. We are in the future – our present reflects some features of that future. Kojève, ‘l’identité de la satisfaction et de l’insatisfaction devient sensible’ [the identity of satisfaction and insatisfaction becomes sensible]3 – any abstract and transcendent premise, any dialectic are removed on the sinuous, ambiguous front of the human – on the horizon of transformative practice. The future has a relationship of reciprocity with the past – but it is ontologically prior to the past, even though in logical terms it comes after. And this is how I think of our friendship, cher David: projected forward, together. And I embrace you …