The Concept of Resistance in Italy

Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Maria Laura Mosco, Pietro Pirani, Maria Laura Mosco, Pietro Pirani

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783489572
• eBook ISBN: 9781783489596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Concept of Resistance in Italy brings together experts from different fields to reflect in a new, comprehensive critical approach, on an event that has shaped the young Italian nation from the onset of Fascism in the early 20s. Although grounded in the Italian context, its theoretical frameworks, provided by the variety of disciplines involved in the volume, will prove beneficial for any critical discourse on the concept of resistance nowadays.

Moving from a reflection on the legacy of the Italian Resistance to Fascism and the
Resistance Movement born in the latest years of WWII, when Italy witnessed the presence on its territory of foreign troops from opposite corners, and was involved in a Civil War at the very same time, this collection reassesses the concept of Resistance within the Italian 20th and 21st century cultural context, moving beyond historical perspectives. The multidisciplinary scope allows for an historical, philosophical and artistic exploration of the concrete actions that define resistance to Fascism, and the Resistance Movement during WWII, their representations in literature, cinema and music, and the more abstract philosophical concept of Resistance in a rapidly changing globalized world, with oppressive political orders, new global economic structures, and emerging new philosophical fields.

Chapter One

Autobiografia di una nazione: Memory and the Italian Resistance

Luca Pocci

Let’s suppose that Piero Gobetti was right when he maintained that fascism is ‘l’autobiografia della nazione’, the autobiography of Italy and the Italian people; let’s suppose that Gobetti had truly captured the alleged spirit of the Italian nation.¹ Well, then what about the Italian Resistance, one might ask? Couldn’t we say that the Resistenza is also an autobiography of the Italian nation, a counter-autobiography in relation to Gobetti’s view of fascism, a counter-autobiography that Gobetti himself, notwithstanding his premature death, contributed to make possible? In other words, couldn’t we say that the time and events of the Resistenza have been transposed into a narrative that was (and is) meant to be the epic narrative of the birth of the Italian republic, of the official, though disputed, origin of Italy’s autobiography after fascism? Suppose this is also taken to be the case (as indeed it has been and still is by many people); as a consequence, we would have two contrasting and conflicting narratives or autobiographies and, more important, two contrasting and conflicting images of the Italian national character (the national character being imagined or fantasized, after all, as a fictional character writ large). On the basis of the schematic contrast that I have drawn, the last one hundred years or so of Italian history would have seen the rise and fall of a fascist nation followed, in post-war Italy, by the emergence of an anti-fascist Italian nation that in opposing the first reasserts, as it has been argued, a presumed continuity between a before and an after, between a pre-fascist and a post-fascist Italy (let us recall that this presumed continuity was defended by none other than Croce, who famously liquidated fascism as a temporary moral disease, a historical parenthesis).²

The main premise from which my reflections will follow here is an old but still divisive problem: the problem concerning the place of the Resistenza in the history of Republican Italy. I would formulate this problem through a question: was the experience of the Resistenza right from the start an impossible, impracticable and, in fact, counterfactual – again, right from the start – source for the national autobiography that Republican Italy needed to ‘write’ (e.g. create) in order to legitimize itself as the Italians’ imagined community? In addressing this question and in proposing a tentative answer to it, I will raise another related question about memory and, more specifically, about the memorial uses of the Resistenza in today’s Italy. How is memory of the experience and historical meaning of the Resistenza kept alive in today’s Italy? In fact, can it be kept truly alive? How?

Recently, Sergio Luzzatto has argued that Italy’s socio-political climate in the past two decades has been dominated by a pervasive imperative (pervasive because accepted and supported by ample sectors of the Left), an imperative that Luzzatto terms the ‘post-antifascist paradigm’, while I would rather call it the ‘post-antifascist doctrine’.³ The principal target of the post-antifascist doctrine and of its revisionist agenda is the Resistenza, seen not so much as the historical core but as the ideological myth underlying the anti-fascist paradigm and the official narrative on which the republic and the post-war Italian nation have been founded. Rhetorically, the gurus of the post-antifascist doctrine – a motley crew comprising historians, journalists and politicians, most of whom are ex-communists, and also, more often than not, professionals of trasformismo, an Italian specialty – have taken advantage of a fact, that the relationship between the Resistenza and Italian anti-fascism is so intimate and historically incontestable that people have considered it normal, for decades, to name and refer to Italian anti-fascism through its metonymic designation, which is precisely the word Resistenza.

The movement described by Luzzatto, with its political revisionism and revisionist politics of memory, is doubtless a specific phenomenon indissolubly linked to the events that have changed the Italian political arena since the collapse of the prima repubblica and the rise of Berlusconi’s populist telecrazia. However, without denying the specificity of this phenomenon, would it be far-fetched to suggest that what Luzzatto calls post-antifascism was, at least in part, already a reality, although a concealed or a not-openly-endorsed reality, at the very moment in which the Resistance ended and the Italian republic was born? I would like to argue that it is not far-fetched at all to say such a thing. In fact, it is interesting and telling that some important protagonists of the Italian Resistance had sensed that the uniqueness and value of that experience were bound to be tainted, if not obscured, in post-war Italy. And they had come to this realization while the struggle against Nazi-fascism was still in progress. One of them is Giorgio Agosti, who had been among the founders of the Partito d’Azione in 1942. In Fascismo/Antifascismo: Le idee, le identità, co-authored with Marco Revelli, Giovanni De Luna mentions a few passages from the letters that Giorgio Agosti wrote to another azionista, Dante Livio Bianco (member of the Action Party). For instance, in a letter dated 4 April 1944, Agosti imagines or, indeed, anticipates the fate that he and all his fellow partisans in post-war Italy will have to face as follows: ‘ “Per gli uni saremo dei pazzi, per gli altri dei sovversivi”: … “a cose finite tutto il buon senso filisteo ci giudicherà con sufficienza o con avversione” ’. “ ‘The Italians will take us either as fools or as subversives” … “when all this is over philistine common sense will judge us with condescending superiority and loathing.” ’⁴ This prophecy, which is expressed in a pseudo-future anterior mode, is an example of anticipation of retrospection, a temporal outlook that is central both to the human experience of time in reality and to the (re)presentation of time in storytelling. As Mark Currie has argued, anticipation of retrospection is ‘the tendency to view the present as past, or as the object of a future memory’.⁵ When applied to human experience, anticipation of retrospection is a perception of time that converts strings of events into stories whose future end results can be known in advance or, better still, ‘read’ ex ante.⁶

Compare now Agosti’s words with those that Bianco himself pronounced, only four years later in 1948, to describe his experience as a Resistance fighter. Bianco’s words are also cited in De Luna’s and Revelli’s book, and they are extrapolated from a letter that is reported in a work by A.A. Mola on Bianco’s political life and thought: here is what Bianco writes: ‘Nella mia vita, c’è stata una grande vacanza: ed è stato il partigianato, venti mesi di virile giovinezza, sradicato davvero, e staccato da ogni vecchia cosa’. ‘There has been one great holiday time in my life, my experience as a partisan. During those twenty months, a time of virile youth, I felt that I had truly freed and detached myself from the old world’.⁷ On the surface Agosti’s and Bianco’s words seem to differ considerably – in Agosti’s case, the tone being one of anticipated bitter disillusionment, while in Bianco’s case the tone is one of celebratory reminiscing. Furthermore, where Agosti’s prophecy can be seen as an ‘anticipation of retrospection’, Bianco’s ex post facto comment reminds one of what Currie calls ‘teleological retrospect’, a temporal perspective, antithetical to anticipation of retrospection, that consists in ‘looking back from an endpoint’ in order to attribute to an event ‘a significance it did not possess at the time of its occurrence’.⁸ However, at a deeper level Agosti’s and Bianco’s words, as De Luna himself implies, reveal a fundamentally common understanding of the experience of the Resistenza. The Resistenza emerges in both descriptions as a historically unique and unrepeatable time totally cut off, in the mind and perception of those who lived through it, from the time before and the time after. The time of the Resistenza, that is, is invested, either a priori (as in Agosti’s anticipatory comment) or a posteriori (as in Bianco’s memory), with the fullness of meaning and experience, with the existential and political plenitude, which render it of necessity a breaking point from the past and the future alike. Agosti and Bianco talk of this historical experience as that time, that opportune and vital time, during which they and other Italians – for the most part young Italians – wrote the collective autobiography of a minoritarian nation (a minoritarian Giovine Italia) through their active struggle against Nazi-fascism.

What should be emphasized at this point is that Agosti’s and Bianco’s testimonies describe the partigianato as an experience that they lived, from beginning to end, as a minoritarian adventure, or, in other words, as a becoming that they experienced, for its entire duration, along the lines of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘becoming minoritarian’.⁹ This is more evident in Agosti’s description, while Bianco’s tribute to his partisan period presents a more nuanced and covert connection to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept. What both Agosti and Bianco suggest quite clearly is how the formidable existential fervour and unprecedented political performativity that characterized the experience of becoming a member of the partisan minority could not continue and could not be reiterated in post-war Italy. That experiential fervour and that political performativity could not become the norm or routine for the political life of the new, post-Resistance Italy. Bianco’s description of his twenty months as a partisan is especially revealing, in particular his definition of vacanza for the entire period of time that he spent as a Resistance fighter. The word vacanza, while signifying the eventfulness of a time redeemed from the insignificance of ordinary, uneventful time, also disassociates or, better still, rescues the experience of the Resistance from any reference to a sacrificial or martyrological representation. This is very important because the sacrificial or martyrological interpretation has fostered, in post-war Republican Italy, an authoritative, though hardly communal, narrative that has endeavoured to represent the Resistenza as the arché of the civil religion that should unite Italians: anti-fascism.

The problem is that post-war Republican Italy is born of a civil war, as prominent historians like Claudio Pavone and writers such as Calvino and Fenoglio have told us through the specific tools of their trades, the historian’s and the novelist’s tools. And once the civil war fought in the centre-north of Italy from 1943 to 1945 was over, the process of nation rebuilding led to the writing of an anti-fascist constitution and to the celebration of the Resistance within the official narrative of the newly reformed state (a state that had abandoned the monarchic form to adopt the republican form), but, at the same time, this very process of nation rebuilding generated the socio-political context for the rise of a powerful ‘normalizing’ discourse that promoted an aggressive post-antifascist rhetoric and agenda. Taking advantage of the somewhat favourable climate created by the exclusion of the Communist Party from government (an exclusion that began with De Gasperi’s fourth government, from June 1947 to May 1948), the normalizzatori (normalizers) launched their campaign against the memory of the Resistenza and the new Italy that had been envisioned by young partisans like Agosti and Bianco. These normalizzatori were a numerically considerable and politically powerful group of intellectuals who shared a ferocious anti-communist bias and, in some cases, a personal history of temporary involvement with, and adherence to, the fascist regime. These were people like Leo Longanesi, Curzio Malaparte, Indro Montanelli and Guglielmo Giannini, the founder of the Fronte dell’uomo qualunque, four among the most influential names. All of them were devoted to demonstrating that the Italy dreamt by the Resistenza was not so much an imagined as an imaginary and undesirable community; it was a fantasy conceived by the communists and their allies, the azionisti. For the normalizzatori, the idea of Italy cultivated by the leading forces of the Resistenza was imaginary because it ran against the vision of the majority of the Italians. This idea of Italy did not speak to the belly of the Italian majority, that very majority that had supported or tolerated Mussolini in the 1930s, at the time when the popularity of the fascist regime was at its peak.

As Sergio Luzzatto argues in Il corpo del duce, the campaign of the normalizzatori was inspired by an ideology that can be defined as ‘anti-antifascism’. In particular, Malaparte and Montanelli’s campaign ‘rappresentava la versione patinata, borghese, della protesta volgare, plebea dell” “Uomo Qualunque”: corrispondeva a una rivolta contro il mito della Resistenza e gli eccessi dell’Epurazione. Colpevoli di cosa, gli italiani che avevano creduto nel duce? Colpevole di cosa, Mussolini stesso’?¹⁰ To recap, on the one hand, anti-fascism and the Resistenza feed the constitution and the official narrative of Republican Italy right after 1945. On the other hand, the social and political life of the nation in post-war democratic Italy is characterized, already in its early days, by the presence of a strong current of anti-antifascism whose goal is to push Italy in one specific direction: in the direction of a society that in its day to day is simultaneously both post-fascist and post-antifascist.¹¹ In addition to this contrast between the life of the institutions and the socio-political life of the paese (or the paese reale - the real country - to use a worn-out but common formula) vis-à-vis the Resistenza, what is even more important to note is a point of convergence between partisans such as Agosti and Bianco (who were not isolated voices but voices that expressed the feelings of a vast number of former partisans) and the normalizzatori.

This point of convergence is the view of the Resistenza as an exception to, and even a negation of, the presumed continuity that would characterize the history of the Italian people and of the Italian nation from the unification onwards. The fact that in one case the Resistenza is seen as ‘the’ missed opportunity which could have affected the birth of a new Italy – a utopian Italy that has not come into being, an Italy unborn¹² – whereas in the other case the Resistenza is described as a historically marginal experience predicated on the affirmation of an illusory ethical difference from an immutable, eternal Italy (which is the only Italy that the Italians should cherish or resign to accept), does not cancel out another equally significant fact, that the relation between the Resistenza and the history of Italy before and after is viewed in both cases in terms of extreme...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Autobiografia di una nazione: Memory and the Italian Resistance
• 2 Resistance on Screen: Varieties of Witnessing, Modes of Remembrance
• 3 The Italian Resistance: Of a Literary ‘Path’ and a Cinematic ‘Stratagem’
• 4 La revisione di sé: Women’s Autobiographies of the Resistance
• 5 The Legacy of the Resistance in Italian Security Policy: The Case of the Italian Military Intervention in the Yugoslav Conflict (1990–1995)
• 6 The Five Ways of Memory: The Italian Resistance Retold
• 7 Ettore Scola’s Cinema of Encounter: Neorealism as the Resistance’s Prosthetic Memory in C’eravamo tanto amati
• 8 Benedetto Croce and the Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance
• 9 ‘Ha detto male di Garibaldi’: Quirino Armellini and Dissent in the Royal Italian Army
• 10 Notes on the Anti-Fascist Singing Tradition (1922–2011)
• 11 The Possibility of Resistance in Esposito’s Account of Persons and Things
• Index
• About the Contributors