34	REVOLUTIONARY MORALISM

One of my students went to jail for terrorism, too, found on some list, I believe. I don’t think he’d pulled a trigger yet, but he was certainly one of the many who were semiclandestine, one of those pretending to be a worker: he would leave the house at 6:00 AM with his lunch pail, to make people think he was headed to the factory, but he didn’t go there; I don’t know exactly where he went.

He was drop-dead beautiful. But he had such revolutionary moralism. . . . He wrote letters from jail as though he were under a death sentence for being in the Resistance. Those in the Resistance actually did die, they were allowed some rhetoric, but him . . .

I said to myself: Is this supposed to be my new Nietzschean overman?

I was preparing a second edition of my book on Nietzsche. I wrote a new preface in which I stated that I had come to realize that the liberated man, Nietzsche’s overman, could not be the professional revolutionary subject. Take power? Look how that turns out. You wind up in charge of the troops in Afghanistan . . . give me a break!

This was also the period of Autonomia. I was fond of the word “autonomy.” Pity, then, that the autonomi sometimes did dreadful things. But the word itself already spoke a different notion of politics, the one I hold now: we should just obstruct the development of the system; it’s the only thing we can do.

And it contained a hint of the idea of weakening as a way of eluding power. All powers, and at all levels.

Autonomia appeared to me a nonviolent form of anarchism. I didn’t want to do violent things, but I was so fed up with the system of police repression and emergency powers that I didn’t know what to say any more.