Diary of an Escape Read online

  This picking up of a book from the pile is somehow symbolic. I laugh. It’s like Erasmus picking out a page of the Bible at random, or myself as a child opening random pages of Leopardi. So the party is starting over, says the casual soothsayer. Maybe that is the case in Germany. But here everything’s carrying on just the same. Including this infamous trial. I read, distractedly. The caricatural machine of justice is writ large before me, and I see how it is shored up by the daily torment of prison and the ferocious stage-setting of the trial. Four long years. And then, all of a sudden, I see the faces of Paola and Rossana, of those faithful old witnesses to truth. A sudden doubt rises in me. Maybe in this trial truth cannot win. This enlightenment of ours, this communist hope of ours, which does not surrender. Tell the truth, shout the truth. But what is truth in a political trial? On the one side – the stage-setting, the machinery, the dramatization. On the other – this wounded humanity of ours. Four years of preventive imprisonment. A great heap of memories, passions and suffering. And, first and foremost, a revolutionary passion lived to the limit, the joy of transformation. Two worlds. This trial is pitting two worlds against each other. It is recomposing life in the form of legality. No, this cannot be done … ‘Cheese, cheese.’ They, too, know that it’s not possible. That’s the reason why nothing surrounding this trial has any rationality to it. The courtroom cages, the handcuffs, the hours and hours of waiting in the cells. No, they don’t want the truth. They want the ritual. They want a sacrifice. Legality is restored in the symbolic, not in the rational. Paola, Rossana, why are you there, loyal, full of reason and beautiful? Go away! This is Aztec justice. Giuliano, why do you continue playing the lawyer, you who know about these things? At last I drop off to sleep. Just for a while. I dream that I am sleeping on a mattress full of knives and spears. The density of the institutions? How many times have you recalled me to that? ‘Merde. Cheese.’ And yet I am serene. I smile. Pietro wakes me with a kiss. I sit down to write. (G12 Rebibbia – 24 February)

  Folio 2

  Second day of the trial. It’s going to be postponed until 7 March. In other words, until Milan decides to release me from the trial that I am supposed to be undergoing up north. What looked at first like a great procedural mess has been sorted out and becomes insignificant. But the fact remains that I still have to undergo two trials – one here in Rome, for insurrection and for having supposedly set up an armed band, and the other in Milan, for crimes (demonstrations, robberies and so on) which, according to the prosecution, substantiate and demonstrate both the ‘armed band’ charge and the charge of insurrection. First the sentencing in Rome, and then the proofs in Milan. There’s always something new to learn – absurdity is never sufficiently appreciated in our life. To arrive at this crazy result, which presumably he thinks is a neat operation, the president of the court is playing for time. He wants to wind up today’s proceedings without having the charges read out, so as to delay the formal opening of our trial; he wants to avoid a situation in which we end up being judged ‘simultaneously’ in both Rome and Milan. The likelihood is that this would make one of the two trials collapse: most probably the one in Rome, under his jurisdiction. In short, two trials on the same evidence is fine, but those two trials taking place simultaneously is not fine. The contradiction within the system has to be controlled and contained, so that ‘systemic circulation’ is maintained. The contradictory fact is put out of the way. However, this operation of systemic logic is happening in the most banal fashion. Sometimes the spectacle is downright comical. For Santiapichi, it is a question of ownership: he has a property to be defended. For Abbate, the assistant judge, the problem is how to get into a position where he can pass the sentence he already has in his pocket, ready-made. Great confusion in court, a fluttering of robes and continuous sharp interchanges on all sides: between the court president and the lawyers, between the lawyers and the aggrieved parties, between the lawyers and the prosecuting counsel, and between the latter and the president. Our friends – Massimo, Giacomo, Marco – watch the scene in a state of consternation. Myself much less so. In fact (and I see and feel it more and more) there is a reversal in my way of seeing things, a complete reversal of perspective. They – the friends, the comrades on the outside – look at me in the cage and see me as if suspended in another reality, in another time. But I have the same sensation when I look at them – and I appreciate how much this happens in the continuity of my reversed perception. I see them in suspension. They come into the courtroom and, albeit with a degree of scepticism, they do believe in the idea of justice. They hope to tear down these damned bars and to win me back into the real-time of life. I know that this hope is irremediably lost, here, in this trial – the trial is purely and simply a continuation of prison. I look at them and I look at their hopes, as if I see everything projected onto a screen, far in the distance. Whereas my own ‘real’ is constituted by my ability to live the continuity between prison and trial. Certainly it is an absurd continuity, a constrained world, a substitution of the world – but it is nonetheless real for that. Thus there are different identities, counterposed. In this instance, my refusal to identify myself in the law and in the trial permits me to construct for myself, in prison, a way of surviving which is a force of resistance, an intellectual and ethical concentration. Thus the suspension of time, which the friends on the outside are denouncing, is for me a substitution of time: being-for-prison is the only form of resistance possible. It is, on the one hand, existence as an appendage. They do everything they can to remind you of it – a day of trial is ten or twelve hours of work. I find a desire insinuating its way into my head – that they should stage the trial directly in prison, lock, stock and barrel. But there is also a continued sense of internal freedom, of irreducible resistance. Freedom! That’s certainly not something that the trial will give me. Here inside, and through those mechanisms, the word appears to have no meaning. No, freedom has nothing to do with the dimension of time involved in the trial. So don’t look at me as if this trial is going to win me back into life. The trial is only dragging me into the abyss of an injustice that has turned itself into institution and machine. How can a monster generate freedom? By now my freedom is already stronger than any illusion, than any trial. It will make me something other. Inglan’ is a bitch (LKJ) [Linton Kwesi Johnson]. (G12 Rebibbia – 25 February)

  Folio 3

  Much nervousness in prison. Enea and Pietro have suddenly been transferred, one to Volterra and the other to Fossombrone. For the moment they are in the isolation cells in those prisons. We hear that the authorities are possibly planning to clear out Rebibbia. A general state of hysteria. I spend these days of the suspended hearing going over the trial in my mind. I ask myself continually, what exactly is a political trial? Certainly not a process designed to arrive at a truth. Rather it is one of the forms which exhibit the ongoing restructuring of the equilibrium of constitutional powers. The life of the law is the law of the jungle. What is happening here is that justice is advancing and organizing, within the totality of constitutional powers, its powers of political exclusion. A political trial is thus the pivotal point around which, through the medium of the magistracy, all the powers of the state re-consolidate their mutual loyalty and exclude the forces of difference. They formalize the exclusion of the forces of renewal. Thus a political trial becomes very much an act of state. It is here that law is formed – constitutional law of exclusion, of banning from the polis. I am frightened by the compactness of this power which, in judging me, rediscovers and reformulates its own identity. I am blinded by the strength of its presence. It seems to me impossible to resist it. I begin to think about the past. Was it not against precisely this overbearing presence that we were struggling – against this continuous, latent and efficacious overdetermination of the constitution? Against this perversion of democracy? Against the narrow-minded and closed character of its institution? Here instead we have power in the final instance. Juridical exclusion. I have been re-reading my Pipelin
e, which has just been published: in my view the concept of exclusion relates to that of poverty. The person who is excluded is like the person who is poor. In the great ceremony of repression I experience myself as a poor person [unpovero]. In my mind’s eye I see again images of our struggles and conquest of a revolutionary consciousness. A delirium? No, I am simply reconfirming a passion for justice – in the social, in reality, and in poverty. A chasseur noir, as Vidal-Naquet says. (G12 Rebibbia – 26–27 February)

  Folio 4

  How is it possible for an ethical totality – like the one represented by us, the defendants in this trial – to constitute itself in the presence of another figure, which also presents itself as a totality? Logic excludes the co-presence of two totalities. Such a relationship can exist only if one of the two totalities is a nothing, is unreal. But I cannot accept this – I claim the ethical totality of our project, of our existence. Our adversary is power. But power cannot accept to be stripped of its value either. In this clash there is no possibility of transcendence. So how can there be any meeting point here, how is any dialectics possible in a trial? Aristotle sees this clash of absolutes as the essence of tragedy. Paul Ricoeur in his latest book, which I am reading, relates the polarity of the dramatic plot to the absolutization of the time of consciousness as Augustine describes it in his Confessions. In the unfolding of the plot, every actor lives the absoluteness of consciousness. However, recognizing this and saying it is not the same as overcoming the irreducible split. Here dialectics is not possible. Particularly not in the postmodern scenario we inhabit. All the contradictions have lost any hierarchical dimension. Conflict takes place on the surface – a surface that is flat. The trial is therefore not a hierarchical function – it is simply a terrain on which absolutes rebound off each other. One against the other. The impermeability is complete. And yet consciousness does not remain content with the plot. Sometimes, on the basis of my studies and my beliefs, I think that our ethicity is Spinozan potenza [potentiality] and imagination, and that the ethicity claimed by the adversary is a tendency to nullification – to the unitary and nullifying appropriation of being. I fear my metaphysical presumption, but I don’t know how to lessen its fascination and its grip. I understand that hard objectivity of relationship, by virtue of which every character is affected by the irresoluteness of the plot and every form of awareness is relative. But, having said that, I am not able to convince myself that our witnessing the real has been, and is, less than absolute. I think of the trial; of how this ethical content of ours has rendered our language – within the trial – entirely specific and untranslatable; and of how, in consequence, no dialogue will be possible. Thus our trial will be a rolling-out of life and of its truths, one against the other, but with an impossibility of finding a middle way, a mode of confrontation. The passages become invisible – mine to them, and theirs to me. The determinations become impossible to define – mine to them and theirs to me. Perhaps this tragedy of ethics that we are living is no longer resolvable: neither in ourselves nor in the globality of the drama. I regard with extreme bitterness this obligation of mine to move within the ethical. In its extreme hardness. I do not understand how this trial can be resolved. Or rather, there is only one way: that of frontal clash, that of the affirmation of our humanity. In postmodernity, in a world which roots values singularly in a horizon with a flat surface, how would a trial, a judgement, a restoration of power be possible? The only thing possible is my, or our, capacity to assert the truth – without illusions, without any claim to reconquer any dialectic of recomposition. And yet this ethical affirmation of ours is, in essence, radical and given. Without presumption I live this irresolvable paradox of separation. (G12 Rebibbia – 28 February)

  Folio 5

  Everyone is saying that Negri is not to be forgiven. I am the unpardonable one. Strange rumours are reaching me from Milan, where the trial has begun in my absence. In Milan the situation is dominated by the ideology of the ‘evil teacher’ [‘cattivo maestro’]. This was constructed by the chroniclers of the Historic Compromise – and pliable judges, armed with that horrible Machiavellianism which makes their thinking so antiquated, have happily taken it on board. The lawyers, from what I understand, are having a hard time getting to grips with the reality of the trial in its twisted complexity, in its dis-levels and in the articulation of its various layers, in the ruinous direction it has taken – that of attributing moral responsibility for everything that has happened to me and my comrades. They employ ferocious murderers as ideological accusers, and with this they attempt, almost furiously, to cancel out the history of the class struggles – and also the empirical history of the party struggles that produced the killing of Tobagi. This horrific crime must be covered by an ideological smokescreen. The restorative function that the political trial fulfils in the composure of domination has to run its full course. So I am the unpardonable one. I read Girard, on sacrifice, on the scapegoat: among so many vague points, the only truly restorative function of this sacral act is that of enabling the ensemble of power to regain its composure. And in the present-day repetition of this drama, in the Milan trial, I feel the heavy inertia of a power which is incapable of liberating itself from similar expiatory and recompositional [ricompositiva] imaginings – materially incapable of anything other than a mystifying and falsifying identity, as if it were a force of gravity, a black hole. (I have written to the socialists, urging them not to accept in Milan this fundamental mystification and providing evidence to unmask the operation under way. I hope they will have the courage to act.) It seems, however, that I am to all intents and purposes unpardonable. I believed, and I still believe, that only a great mass awakening can lead us out of a situation in which justice is restoration rather than truth – not an allocation of responsibility but a repetition of power. This dialectical fetish: what you have removed you must give back, what you have taken you must restore. No, life is not this. I am not an evil teacher – and I am not the evil teacher by antonomasia, as the press would have me appear. I have lived, and I still live, a process of liberation that is exhausting, continuous, non-linear, but fairly oriented. There is no doubt that it breaks with consolidated being, both as ethics and as a relation of power – but that it is capable of blowing it apart is more difficult to say. You run through the internal fissures of this being; others want to find the cell into which to lay the mine. I have taught how to follow the deep veins of being, not how to place bombs. There is no place from which this world can be made to explode. It has to be extinguished. Just as there is no justice, there is no juridical place on which articulations of a new life, which are liberated, can be recomposed.

  ‘We’re di forces af vict’ry / an’ wi’ comin’ rite through / we’re di forces af vict’ry / now wat yu gonna do’ (LKJ). So do what you like … Don’t pardon me – I am guilty of having put myself in unison with being. For that, and only for that, am I responsible. And happy. And my hands are clean of blood. Facing me I have insane killers who have now become ‘repentants’ – and, on the other side, the heroes of the restoration, men whose hands are red with the blood of the scapegoat. Who knows why the analysis of the ritual maintains itself always so high and rarefied, so theoretical, and does not reconstruct instead Foucauldian small histories and genealogical life stories of the executioners … (G12 Rebibbia – 1–3 March)

  Folio 6

  In Milan they have cut me out of the Rosso–Tobagi trial. A temporary suspension. What does this mean concretely? It means that they will try me first in Rome and then in Milan. I assume they are thinking – or rather making the insane supposition – that, if by some chance I am found not guilty or set free for any reason, they will be able to keep me in prison anyway, awaiting the trial in Milan. In fact the preventive detention coming from Milan starts later than the Rome version. Two trials, two preventive detentions, two sentences, two punishments: and I’m going to have to go through all this, this tortuous Calvary, before I can even begin to think about living again. Wh
at barbarism! This is how this Milanese decision avoids a situation of having two trials going on at the same time. It solves problems of etiquette – but the net result is a jail sentence for me, just like that, out of the blue, without the case even being argued. This system really does stink. This little Milanese manoeuvre reveals its whole deeper nature. No use in summoning you to higher principles – this is another world. Sometimes even I find myself protesting: all this is completely Kafkaesque! But it’s not true; all this is only vulgar, clapped-out, caricatural. It is not that the suffering and torment are distributed by processes of bizarre and irrational logic: what we have here is just dirty dealing and the sniggering of those who are in power. In Italy the penal legislator and the magistrate observe the old rules of agrarian power, which lies somewhere between despotism and the mafia. The undoubted repressive functionality of penalties and, above all, of procedures smacks of hatred for the adversary, the enemy, the subversive and the marginal, a hatred which has the dry transparency of the midday sun. Nothing is tortuous and tormented here: the intrigue of the legal system is played out with cruel and devious cunning. There is brutality and brutality: the wooden, mechanical brutality of the Anglo-Saxon sovereign, the perverse brutality of the regimes of realized socialism, and then this Mediterranean brutality, which is both a bit Levantine and a bit Islamic. When I think of the magistrate who uses these standards of doubling the number of imprisonments and penalties, I cannot imagine him other than as a cat sitting and picking his teeth after having eaten the mouse. A ferocity which is entirely natural. They say that legality and enlightenment were supposed to soften and rationalize this kind of Sultan’s justice. But in Italy they have perfected – and now in this state of emergency they exalt – the liminary characteristics, the combination of class hatred, cunning and force. (G12 Rebibbia – 4 March)