26	THE MOVEMENT

Becoming a Maoist (I say this half in jest and half seriously), discovering that as a Heideggerian I was also a Hegelian-Marxist, didn’t make me a convert to the student movement overnight. Far from it.

My stance as an anticapitalist romantic made me think: the capitalist world is a big rubbish heap, but these people here, these well-bred students, will never change anything, much less make the revolution.

And to be honest, the slogans that got them worked up made me laugh. For example: “We want university departments, not institutes.” Laugh? No, that was really stupid. Okay, the institutes were based on single professorial chairs, meaning that someone like Pareyson had a room, a library, and the money to keep the show going. The students wanted departments instead because departments consisted of all the professors running things jointly. Well, you know . . . “department” was fundamentally an American term. It was hard for me not to agree with Pareyson during our long debates, when he would say, needling me for my anticapitalist Heideggerism, “We are much more revolutionary than that lot, all they want is to change a few university structures, we are people absolutely outside the organicity of this situation. I prefer a traditional university to a more functional, modern university run like Fiat.” That was convincing to someone like me who had always been against modernity and the oppressive functioning of positivist capitalism.

I have to admit, though, that when I was wearing two hats myself, as a professor and a revolutionary, I found myself pulled both ways. But I participated in the assemblies and the processions, and I used to tell the ultra-Catholic Pareyson: “Professor, why don’t you come to the demonstration too, look, it’s like going to church, everyone calls everyone else comrade, there’s a real feeling of coming together for justice.” And he would reply, “You must be kidding. I don’t want to wind up like the mayor of Peking”—whom the Red Guards had paraded around wearing donkey ears.

The situation was embarrassing, and not just from the intellectual point of view but in practical terms too. Picture a packed hall, with students shouting “Gianni Gianni sei tutti noi” (Gianni, Gianni, you are all of us), and there I am, president of my faculty, standing on the podium beside the rector and the other presidents and coping as best I can. . . . There was Galante Garrone, too; he had been a good partisan in the wartime Resistance, but nobody took the sixties student revolt less seriously than he did.

But before, when the protest movement first exploded, I didn’t know. Didn’t know the most important thing. That within a few months, in summer, June 1968, my whole life would change. I was about to meet two people who, as well as giving me love for the first time at age thirty-two, would be my true masters, life masters, would make me more free with myself and vis-à-vis others, even freer inside my head, in my work as a thinker, a philosopher.

Between 1968 and 1972 I worked a lot on Nietzsche, studying and taking notes. Then, in twenty days of marvelous madness, in the mountains once more, in the summer of 1972, I wrote Il soggetto e la maschera (The subject and the mask). In 1969, the year Adorno died, I had become full professor of esthetics. And I was about to turn another page right after the summer of 1972, because I had been invited to teach in America for the first time.

But for now we’re still at the start of the summer of ’68.