Negri on Negri

in conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle

Antonio Negri, M. B. DeBevoise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135924089
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

Political philosopher, convicted activist, leftist intellectual and coauthor of the bestselling Empire, Antonio Negri is one of the most controversial thinkers at work today. In this booklength conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle, Negri offers thoughtful responses to twenty-six terms, alphabetically arranged, that have had special significance for his life and work. Negri speaks openly here of his involvement with political movements, his exile, his return to Italy and years there in prison, and his life since. But beyond the biographical there is much here to explain Negri's ideas on globalization, the future of social change, and the history of political thought. The book's subjects - fascism, Heidegger, the Red Brigades, Wittgenstein, empire, Kant, the unconscious, and many others - are often thresholds from which Negri shares his views on still larger topics. Negri on Negri provides a fascinating glimpse into his mind and life. Perhaps nowhere else can one engage so readily the ideas of this major contemporary thinker.

A
AS IN…

Perhaps we might begin with A as in Arms. How did the armed struggle begin?

There was such a desire for liberation—but this desire found itself confronted by a systematic state terrorism that planted bombs, that killed people, that practiced repression. It is now known that the first terrorist acts were planned by the state. Statesponsored terrorism was based on fear. And the construction of fear was based on the government’s fear of the masses, which it imposed upon the masses to prevent unrest, exactly as Spinoza remarked in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

It is too often forgotten that Europe was in the midst of the Cold War.

The Italian government would never have dared to act in this way if it hadn’t enjoyed the legitimacy given it by the anticommunist climate of the period, and the tension of the Cold War. Italy is this strange, very long country that stretches toward the Mediterranean…

What would have happened if the regime in Italy had changed during the Cold War? The Communist party in Italy was so important—it was the party of the Resistance, the only one that had really been antifascist. After 1968 Berlinguer was the head of the Communist party. He had said that even if the party got 51 percent of the vote he would refuse to form a government. This was after Chile: he absolutely did not want to play the game any more. On the one hand there had been Yugoslavia; on the other the Mediterranean, Israel, and Palestine. It was an explosive situation.

At the time everyone knew that the first major attack, the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, in December 1969, was una strage di Stato—a massacre of state. Still today poor Adriano Sofri is in prison for that, having been accused of having the chief of police in Milan killed by his political group, Lotta Continua.³ This execution was alleged to have been carried out to avenge the death of an anarchist named Pinelli who had been arrested by the police following the attacks. Pinelli, of course, had nothing to do with the Piazza Fontana bombing, but he “fell” from an upper-story window of the police station under shadowy circumstances that remain unclear. These are typically Italian stories, but one has to try to imagine the climate that prevailed at the time. In short, it is true that there was terrorism in Italy; but terrorism began with the terrorism of the state. The Piazza Fontana bombing at the end of 1969 ushered in a new period.

Why?

When the police said that it was an anarchist attack, nobody believed them. Today the courts themselves believe that the CIA was involved, even the Italian secret services; and that the state—diverted from its true purpose, yes, but nonetheless the state—was behind all this. In Italy, if you look at the reports of the parliamentary commissions charged with investigating the Piazza Fontana bombing, or the bombing in the Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, or the Italicus train bombing, you always arrive at the same conclusions.

Why, then, did the government embark upon this course of action? To create terror. And why create terror? Italy was governed by the Christian Democrats: a country on the edge of Western Europe with a Communist party and other left-wing parties that together accounted for 35 percent of the vote—a completely uncontrollable social dynamic. But there was also an obvious modernity in the conception of labor not only as material labor but also as intellectual labor, in the rejection of wage labor—themes that still, thirty years later, constitute the daily bread of sociologists and economists.

And so the people organized themselves in response to this violence. But was it necessary to respond with terrorism to these terrorist acts, which you maintain were sponsored by the state? Was there no alternative?

The response that was given was not at first a terrorist response, but an extremist response. It was necessary to respond at the same level that had been imposed by the police actions of the state. The first military actions began three or four years after the Milan bombing, in 1973 or 1974.

Fairly late, then—

No one has ever shown that there were infiltrations—it was spontaneous. Confronted with the increasing violence of the forces of order, the people who were demonstrating began to arm themselves in self-defense. The repression by the state operated on all levels: in the factory, in the street, everywhere. There had been innumerable layoffs. The extremists responded militarily because all other responses had become impossible. Then there came a very difficult moment in 1977: the September demonstrations in Bologna.⁴ There were tanks in the city. French intellectuals came to Italy—Deleuze, Foucault, the whole intellectual Left that was opposed to the repression taking place.

Were you able at the time to imagine a nonviolent response?

No, absolutely not. We, too, were organized. The only thing we hadn’t anticipated was that the state would resort to Stalinist techniques. This began with the arrest of dozens of leaders of the extreme Left, on April 7, 1979, which led to what came to be known as the Sette Aprile trial.

What happened that day?

We were arrested—myself and some sixty others, almost all of us academics. They struck at the intellectuals within the “movement” with incredible accusations—“armed insurrection against the state,” for example. For a long time the sentence for this kind of thing had been the death penalty! Fortunately, with the constitution of 1948, the death penalty had been replaced by a life sentence. Still, it was incredible and terrifying. We laughed, we couldn’t believe it, but it was terrible just the same. Paradoxically, the extreme Left found itself caught between the Christian Democrats, the party of the bourgeoisie, and the Communist party! The Communist party considered us uncontrollable and therefore dangerous. Some feared that we would form a separate party.

The Communist party attacked you in the name of what?

In the name of the nation, or, more precisely, the Treaty of Yalta, which is to say the willingness to align oneself with the Soviets. It is this logic that we rejected: it meant having to defer to the Party and allowing it to go on cultivating its singularity. But this singularity wasn’t defensible.

You were defending Communist ideas, then, not the Communist party?

We were absolutely opposed to totalitarianism in any form. We were seeking a true redistribution of wealth. It is almost impossible to live decently if one isn’t able to study, to work: society must be organized in such a way that people have these rights. This isn’t really a very utopian dream—the paradox is that many of the ideas that we advanced were later adopted by advanced capitalism!

The problem is that government, in order to make the job of managing society easier, invents increasingly elaborate disciplinary procedures. We offered to take over this management role because we were searching for a real transformation of social relations. And it was this offer that the Italian authorities turned down so harshly.

And so you found yourself abandoned on both sides.

The Communist party taught the Christian Democrats the usefulness of Stalinist trials— absolute condemnation, eliminating one’s enemies, crushing them. Outrageous arguments were employed, depraved modes of reasoning. In my case I had, it is true, written revolutionary things that the authorities judged dangerous. Therefore I had to have been in contact with those who did “dangerous things.” Therefore I was also the head of a criminal conspiracy. And to the extent that I was the head of a “subversive” political group, all my close friends and associates were necessarily members of this group. Thus it came about, for example, that I found myself in prison with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for ten years: a miracle of surreal logic! There was no limit to “preventive” incarceration. Most of those who were accused in the Sette Aprile trial ended up being released, but not before they had spent six or seven years in prison under preventive detention, waiting for a trial that never came. Six or seven years for nothing. And not a word of apology. I was fortunate to have been elected a parliamentary deputy after four years in a maximum-security prison, and so I was able to get out. Two months later there was a great debate in the Chamber of Deputies over whether my parliamentary immunity should be revoked, and I lost by a vote of 300–296. Those four votes would have sent me back to prison. The situation was so tense that I feared for my life, and I decided to leave for France. All on account of four votes…

They let you leave the country?

No, I escaped. But I always thought that they let me get out because, of course, they had informers, and if they’d wanted to prevent me from leaving they certainly could have done so. The paradox is that the decisive four votes were cast by members of the Radical party, which had put me up as a candidate on its lists to get me out of prison. Three months later they sentenced me to go back.

If you had not been elected, you would have remained in prison like the others.

I imagine I’d still be there, yes.

Like Adriano Sofri.

Sofri went to prison only four years ago. He had been arrested at the same time I was, but not for the same reason. And ten years ago he was arrested again. This whole business was organized as an act of revenge: Sofri found himself once again accused of arranging the assassination of the police superintendent involved in the defenestration of the anarchist accused in the Piazza Fontana bombing. The anarchist, Pinelli, had nothing to do with that, but he was dead. In the meantime the superintendent, who was named Calabresi, had been shot down by gunmen. The courts then charged Sofri’s organization, Lotta Continua, on the basis of accusations made in the 1980s—much later, then—by a very dubious “penitent” who had been an active member of Lotta Continua. The whole affair caused an enormous stir in Italy, a great many signatures calling for Sofri’s release were collected—but there was nothing to be done. He was sentenced, just like the other former members of Lotta Continua, to twenty-two years in prison, and has been incarcerated since February 1997. All this is absurd. How can I explain it to you? Mechanisms of vengeance have been employed by the police in France as well, and these mechanisms are particularly formidable when one of their own is involved. Someone has to pay.

Is it true that the Red Brigades never forgave you for leaving for France?

No—the Red Brigades wanted me to declare that the war was over.

The war against the state?

Yes. A decision had to be made. It’s a long story…

I knew certain members of the Red Brigades, and so I had an inside view of the movement’s formation—I even had a certain sympathy for it, at the very beginning. Together with a few members of the Red Brigades I was one of the founders of a journal called Contro-informazione. But then they began to kill. Obviously I no longer endorsed their actions! There were many other comrades whom I was in contact with who rejected this strategy as well. And so we said publicly that we did not agree with it. Moreover, the first assassination committed by the Red Brigades was purely accidental—the theory came afterward, it was absurd. The assassination occurred in Padua, at the university, where I was teaching at the time: they attacked the offices of the Fascist party, and a carabiniere—a policeman who had infiltrated their group—opened fire on them. They killed him. There was no intention to assassinate anyone, it was an act of selfdefense; but the leadership of the Red Brigades decided that it was absolutely necessary to explain this murder by giving it a theoretical justification. From that moment on they acted irrationally. The most serious moment, of course, was the Aldo Moro affair. We did everything we could to save Moro’s life. We even went to speak with a member of the government, Bettino Craxi, who was then the head of the Socialist party—we felt that that the armed struggle had reached a point of no return and that it was absolutely necessary to save Moro. The Red Brigades had to be stopped. A year later we tried to isolate the Red Brigades in the factories. It was then that the state took the initiative and decided to “deprive the fish of the water in which they swam”—that was the image they used! To make a long story short, we were the ones who were arrested. We later found ourselves in prison with the very people in the Red Brigades whom we had tried to reason with. These were special prisons—we were all thrown together, which made it easier for us to be lumped together in the public mind. It was convenient for the authorities: I was accused of being the head of the Red Brigades, and so the “movement” was decapitated…

Was it at this moment that you said that the armed struggle was finished?

In 1981 I was one of ninety prisoners at Trani who issued a statement—the “Document of the 90,” as it was known—saying just this. It declared that the armed struggle was over, and that all those who pursued it in the future would be considered enemies. The response of the Red Brigades was to say that they were going to kill us. And, of course, they were going to begin with me. It was a death sentence. When I came back to Italy, in July 1997, I was put into a cell with the man who was ordered to kill me! It was amusing to see that the authorities were still trying to toy with us, even though twenty years had passed and that none of that any longer had any meaning. The man assigned to eliminate me has since become a good friend—together we have established a cooperative to help prisoners when they get out. There are still dozens of brigatisti in prison, many of them for life. A few have become very dear friends.

What do they say now?

That I’ve remained a communist and they haven’t! Sometimes we talk about that period. They’ve all changed—a life sentence leaves time to reflect, but also to make other choices, to learn, to study, to choose a trade. And so to go on keeping them in prison, at this late date, really no longer makes any sense, unless it is purely and simply a matter of vengeance. One of my cellmates is now the head of an enormous advertising company in Rome, and this has been his life for the ten years that he has been granted partial liberty. He built up the business himself and has been very successful: at night he sleeps in prison; the next day he turns into a brilliant businessman. When I was subject to the same regime we used to leave in the morning and come back together in the evening. It was a bit like a boarding school—at night we traded stories of what we’d done during the day.

And this man who was supposed to kill you, he never really thought about it, until—

No—it’s rather odd, but that’s how it was. He’s a gentleman, you see. When he speaks about the past now, he finds the whole thing crazy—he doesn’t understand. I believe that for people like him it was, in fact, a totally schizophrenic experience. He remained a man of the Left, but others veered to the Right. At the beginning we talked a great deal, because there were six of us in the cell. We talked all the time. Later there was just two of us, and at night we often went to sleep after watching a little television. The ex-Red Brigades member who went into advertising told me an incredible story, funny and sad at the same time, that goes back to 1982, which is to say to the last stages of the armed struggle. He was part of the commando team that abducted an American general, Dozier, an important NATO official.⁵ Each member of the commando team had a specific responsibility. His job was to go to Dozier’s home, restrain him, put him in a crate, and hand it over to the others. When he’d finished doing his part he found himself all alone and suddenly realized how absurd the whole thing was. He’d wanted simply to be an ordinary thief, not a revolutionary—so he pocketed the general’s war medals and his wife’s jewelry, without, of course, saying anything to the other brigatisti. In reality the Red Brigades had reached a moment of crisis—its time had passed and he knew it, and so stealing the jewelry and medals amounted in a way to an act of survival! Eventually the case went to trial and they were all sentenced to life, but he was given three months extra for “aggravated theft.” The others, learning all this in the courtroom, were stunned. Prison is full of terrible stories like this that are both comic and tragic.

It needs also to be pointed out that stealing was a real transgression, because in general the brigatisti lived in real poverty. They all received a worker’s salary, the minimum wage authorized by the revolutionary party; but living underground was difficult, and their expenses were exorbitant. They lived in total destitution, ready to flee at any moment, moving from one apartment to another. And so to steal jewelry because one is faced with a political crisis and dreams only of being, just once, a common, small-time criminal…

Not all the members of the Red Brigades were arrested.

No—almost all of them, except for the ones who had gone to France, and a few others who were in Brazil, England, Central America. But the rest were all arrested.

In short, from the moment that we signed the “Document of the 90,” the rupture was complete, even in prison. We declared a policy of total separation with regard to the armed struggle. This policy went into effect in 1981–82, and the brigatisti ended up abandoning the struggle in 1986. On Christmas Day in 1980 there had been a revolt in the special prison we were in at Trani. It was put down with such violence that we quickly came to the conclusion there was no point carrying on. Renouncing armed struggle and no longer recognizing actions that were taken outside prison was called “dissociation.”

The second reason why the armed struggle lasted so long in Italy has to do with a certain communist tradition anchored in the memory of resistance to fascism during the Second World War. There was a very strong historical homogeneity between the movement for liberation and the postwar socialist struggles. The antifascist resistance had spread throughout the various regions of the north of Italy. Catholicism also found itself shaken, and the great crisis of Catholicism, with John XXIII, was a response to the sudden changes in values and the economy confronted by parish priests in the north. In the small communities formed by the young in Italy, after 1968, there were two problems: resistance to the capitalist colonialization of life on the one hand, and the emergence of a model of intellectual labor on the other—these in addition to the communist tradition of class struggle and the problem of internal immigration. All this led to a radicalization of the struggles, which is to say a “class war.” What happened following 1968 was therefore perceived as a resumption of wartime resistance. This is probably also why it lasted for ten years, and not a few weeks as elsewhere, which had the effect of strengthening the movement’s capacity for reform. Italy was the first country where the struggles did not take place in the factory but permeated society as a whole: there were demands for the “autoreduction” of rents and the cost of public transport tickets, for example—one struggled for a better life. In Milan, where I lived a good part of the 1970s, there were neighborhoods that had been “liberated” and where neither taxes, nor transport charges, nor rents were paid—

“Self-managed” neighborhoods?

Yes, self-managed. These were neighborhoods where another form of organization could be experimented with. The joy there was amazing. If the police came into the neighborhood, they were immediately expelled. All available houses were occupied—empty apartments were taken over and inhabited. I lived on the edge of one of these neighborhoods. It was an incredible life, unimaginable.

Let’s come back to the Trani revolt.

It was a special prison, a maximum-security wing for political prisoners where we were all confined. There was a revolt, the guards were taken prisoner, we barricaded ourselves in the prison for three days. The police came and attacked. It was war. So we resisted by overturning garbage cans, smashing the pipes and flooding the buildings, knocking down the walls, and arming ourselves by all possible means. Think of American films, it was just like that. Later, when the revolt had been put down—bombs were dro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• A: As in…
• B: As in…
• C: As in…
• D: As in…
• E: As in…
• F: As in…
• G: As in…
• H: As in…
• I: As in…
• J: As in…
• K: As in…
• L: As in…
• M: As in…
• N: As in…
• O: As in…
• P: As in…
• Q: As in…
• R: As in…
• S: As in…
• T: As in…
• U: As in…
• V: As in…
• W: As in…
• X: As in…
• Y: As in…
• Z: As in…