A boat, a cup, a hand

A window faces east
A balcony north
Cardinal points remain.



Days and nights of early winter
Back pain and insomnia
A gecko between the shutters.



Blue screen and loose
Connection across continents
Difficult homework.

Pasolini: Censoring the Body of Ideology

Pier Paolo Pasolini, writer, film-maker, and essayist, is possibly the most controversial figure in modern Italian culture. His debut in writing consisted of a slim volume of verses written in his mother's dialect of the Friuli (an economically depressed region of Northeastern Italy), previewing the author's subsequent interest in subaltern cultures. In the late ‘40s, as a teacher and active member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the Friuli, he began to suffer the animosity of conformist forces of the time. Pressed by a local priest to resign from the PCI or else, he refused. As a result of this he was denounced for making advances on his young male pupils. The ensuing scandal caused him to be relieved of his teaching position and to be expelled from the PCI in 1949. That incident brought into even greater conflict the already seemingly contradictory dimensions of Pasolini's life: homosexuality, Marxism, and Catholicism. This would colour Pasolini's artistic expression and his rapport with Italian society until his controversial death in 1975.
From 1949 to 1977, two years after his murder, Pier Paolo Pasolini was the subject of approximately 33 trials on various charges brought against him, his writings and films. These include: "offensiveness toward good customs and to the common sense of morality and decency" (for Mamma Roma, 1962); "contempt toward the state religion, under the pretext of cinematographic description, by mocking the figure and value of Christ through musical commentary, mimicry, dialogue etc." (for La Ricotta, 1963); "scenes offensive to the public decency in the depiction of intercourse between the guest and the maid, the woman of the house, and with the male components of the household, as well as the homosexual tendencies of the head of the household, the father, which are contrary to every moral value, social and familial." (for Teorema, 1968); "blasphemous, subversive, pornographic, indecent, etc." (for The Decameron, 1971); "a film full of obscenities ... nothing more than a series of vulgar exhibitions of sexual organs, all very clearly photographed." (for Arabian Nights, 1973).
While all charges take aim at what may most obviously be offensive to a sector of any population, they hide a more insidious challenge to cultural and ideological diversity. As a cursory viewing of any Pasolini film will reveal, the author does not merely seek to shock for its own sake, but rather to present a world view that is ideologically conflictual and compromising for the dominant culture. In order to negate the presence of alternative cultures, the dominant takes refuge in catch-phrases such as "public decency" and "common sense of morality and decency." So as to expose this strategy, in the article "Pornography is boring," (1969) Pasolini presents his own view of pornography in order to differentiate his work from it, and qualifies his dislike for pornographic films as a matter of aesthetics. While he condemns the censors who take it upon themselves to protect the morality of others, rather than pornography, which he considers dangerous to him as author. Because of the possibilities for censorship that pornography allows, it also functions to justify restrictions in all forms of expression. As a result, Pasolini argues, pornography becomes the pretext by which ideological expression is attacked and silenced.
What exactly is subversive in Pasolini's work? What scandalizes? Simply, the effectiveness of this artist's production lies in what he portrays, "it is something that scandalizes for its being what it is. It scandalizes because of its nature: because for one reason or another it is a diverse nature.” Pasolini proposes and produces art "as an exploration of the unsaid in common and official ideological discourses;" of great importance to this art is the author's own concept of "diversity." "Diverso," which would literally translate to "different," carries with it the secondary meaning of "diverse," and is used in Italian as a colloquialism in reference to homosexuality. In order to diffuse the negative connotations of the word, Pasolini set himself the task of infusing it with a sense of cultural importance and militancy. While the concept was largely biographical at its inception, with time it acquired cultural and political dimensions by which the author sought to bridge various kinds of "diversity" (his homosexuality, the subproletariat, the Third World) in a common oppositional front against official cultures. As such, censorship, applied to a cultural expression not condoned by officialdom, becomes strictly a political exercise.
In Pasolini's view, the subjects of marginalized cultures, products of specific socio-economic conditions and/or a-historicity, represent their condition by their physicality, their bodies and sexual organs. And, since "the language of action or simply of offensive presence [is a] stage of pre-revolutionary contestation," official culture finds it necessary to silence and render these bodies invisible. The uninhibited display of subproletarian bodies present in most of Pasolini's films is offensive to societal norms because it offers a code of being that demystifies the ideal body of bourgeois representation. The "language of action," aside from signifying the potential for revolution represented by those bodies, is also, literally, the spoken language, the dialects, the modes of expression of those marginal masses; these too stand as infractions to accepted cultural codes of conduct.
For Pasolini, the diverse yet bourgeois intellectual, it becomes essential that he give up his own language and be initiated to a revolutionary one if he is to establish a bond with the groups he represents in his art. Initiation into language takes place twice for Pasolini: once into the language of Marxism, and then into the language of marginalized cultures (such as Friulano). The two are integrated and then restated in the author's own language of social critique which, through literary and filmic production, privileges specific sites (the body of the subproletariat, for example) to engender a discussion of marginality, exclusion, repression, and confrontation. Pasolini's works are an attempt to dissipate the officiality of particular discourses by juxtaposing them to disparate elements. For example, in Accattone (his first film), the verses of Dante or the music of Bach, very definitely representative of a dominant cultural code, are used as backgrounds to the actions and bodies of subproletarian characters. Such acts of transgression are not easily forgiven by the keepers of the code; as a result, the bodies scripted by Pasolini in his films, and the language that emanates from them, become the focus of the scrupulous defenders of the "common good."


Abjuration and Confrontation

The Decameron (1970), Canterbury Tales (1971), and Arabian Nights (1974) form Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life," a series of films in which the author's scope was to represent the revolutionary power of subproletarian bodies, and highlight their potential through the highly imaginative narratives of tales and fables. In his "Abjuration from The Trilogy of Life," Pasolini comes to deny these films as an error in judgment. But this abjuration was by no means a surprising turn for Pasolini. He had described the frustration of not being understood in these verses from "A Desperate Vitality"(1964):

Death lies not
in being unable to communicate
but in the failure to continue being understood.
(14)

This then developed into feigned adaptation and conformism, as in this "Communiqué to ANSA [stylistic choice]" (1971):

I have ceased to be an original poet, it costs
freedom: a stylistic system is too exclusive.
I have adopted accepted literary schemes
to be free. For practical reasons, of course.

In his renunciation, Pasolini takes a very cynical stance by which he claims that the bodies, meant to represent the last stand in opposition to the subculture of mass media and consumerism, were in fact doomed long before he made the film. The culprit was none other than the famed "economic boom" of the 60s, a phenomenon that threw Italy into the realm of post-industrialism and neo-capitalism, which Pasolini blamed for its cultural and anthropological deterioration.
However, criticism of his work, and accusations of a nostalgia for an irretrievable past, continued to be leveled against him. Pasolini's response to those who called for him to describe contemporary society, to show a conscience of the present, results in the rhetorical abjuration of the “Trilogy” that in effect comes to justify his last project: Salò (1975).
A loose adaptation of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Salò was Pasolini's way to revive the last days of fascism during W.W.II, as an instrument by which to suggest a matrix for contemporary fascism's homogenization and objectification of the human body and being. The degradation of bodies, their use and abuse, torture, sadism, the corruption of eroticism and sexual relations, are the subjects of Salò. In effect, Pasolini believed that the fascism that had found fertile ground during the early to mid part of the century was never shed, it merely changed form. Consumerism, the new fascism, had, in his opinion, decimated the Italian subproletariat as it threatened to decimate the populations of the so-called Third World. Of course, Salò was no less susceptible to censorship than previous works. While Pasolini's early works had been threatening for their portrayal of the pre-revolutionary potential of the subproletariat, Salò is subversive in its out and out identification of the perverse power of fascism.
That fascism works its spell by insinuating itself as protector of accepted norms, order and clarity is addressed ironically by Pasolini in the previously quoted "Communiqué to ANSA." Freedom through "accepted ... schemes" is, of course, not at all freedom, but Pasolini succeeds in subverting this too in Salò. In fact, he gives prominence to the narrative of fascism by having each set of atrocities prefaced by the narrative voice of the captors. The scheme in Salò is much more direct than in other films and, as the fascist initiation of stories degenerates into the subjugation of the unsaid subjects, the "practical reasons" of Pasolini's rhetoric come to light.
Thus, one distinction between the "Trilogy" and Salò can be made at the level of communication. The works of the "Trilogy" still preserve a hope in the dialectic potential of the eroticism of subproletarian bodies, as communicative of their condition. Salò, on the contrary, dismisses any chance for communication through the total objectification of sexuality. The dialectic is wholly disrupted and interjected for the sole function of a system of consumption. Communication, or the lack thereof, defines eroticism and pornography respectively, and Salò becomes Pasolini's accusatory finger by which he links fascism, censorship, and pornography. The film elicited a negative reaction even from those who had been supportive of Pasolini. Italo Calvino, in "Sade is Within Us," suggests that

A "moral" effect can be drawn from Sade only if the "accusation" keeps its finger pointed not at the others but at ourselves. The "place of action" can only be in our conscience (111).

Complaining about how Pasolini was wholly discounting of Sade's intentions in The 120 Days of Sodom, and of how poorly that text transfers as a vehicle for the recounting of the last days of fascism in war torn Italy, Calvino suggests that the film-maker was out of touch with the world in which he lived. But Pasolini was painfully aware of his inescapable situation as a privileged bourgeois intellectual in society, and the effect that the maintenance of the status quo has on those considered expendable. Calvino's suggestions may in fact be symptomatic of the very loss of diversity in contemporary society, and the conviction that pedagogically we are restricted to the lessons of the dominant culture.
In closing, I would like to suggest a reading strategy for Pasolini's films that undoes the accusations listed at the beginning of this piece. This strategy is dependent on an aspect of the filmic process itself, as outlined by Pasolini in "Observations on the Sequence Shot," where editing is described not merely for its practical function in putting together a film, but also as a descriptive concept for life, production, and death. In that 1967 article, Pasolini insists that the life of an individual, or a person's work, is comparable to the long sequence shot, that only takes on significance after its completion. Death becomes an important editorial component by giving a sequence its significatory start. In Pasolini's words: "Until I die, no one can guarantee to really know me, that is, to be able to give a meaning to my actions, which therefore, as a linguistic moment, can be deciphered only with difficulty ... Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives." In concurrence with this definition, any attempt to edit an author's works before the end of his discursive reality is a premature act that can only be qualified as censorship. It is, in fact, as applied to works such as Pasolini's, a premeditated act meant to distort and question their worth and integrity. Partial or total censorship led to the removal of the films from theaters, to the cutting of scenes in some versions, or to the films being shown in porno theaters rather than regular run movie houses.
Salò, in conjunction with the author's death, provides a revelatory glance backward that gives Pasolini's works a strength that may escape if the films are viewed as individual moments of expression. This is not to diminish their value as singular pieces, merely a suggestion to provide yet another viewing angle for this complex corpus. By splicing together the parts that spurred official censorship one may in fact have, as an end result, Pasolini's ideology represented most clearly. A censorship in reverse which brings to the foreground that which we would ordinarily not be allowed to see would both legitimize the excerpts, and deny censorship. By focusing attention on something other than the forbidden, censorship diverts attention from the true subject of the work as well as from its own function. In fact, in acting upon selected portions of a film or a body of literature, it becomes an act of violence against the ideas that the work seeks to represent. What we are not meant to see or hear are the parts that are connected by the interstitial frames upon which the accusations are based.
What we have in conclusion is a correlation between censorship and pornography, both of which negate communication and deny presence. Eros, on the other hand, is the possibility of reaching outside of a given system, of reaching outside of the norm in order to savour alternative presences. Eros is the force that strains a system and foresees its death. The move to censor the revolutionary eroticism of Pasolini's subproletarian bodies is also aimed at disrupting their communicative power, the threat of their presence. In Pasolini's eyes, the subproletarian body represents a challenge to consumer society's advance; its test of society brings upon it charges of subversion, making it a most likely subject for censorship.

Pasquale Verdicchio, San Diego

PASOLINI'S LAST INTERVIEW

WE ARE ALL IN DANGER
The last interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini
By Furio Colombo

This interview took place on Saturday, November 1, 1975, between four and six in the evening, a few hours before Pasolini’s assassination. I want to emphasize that the title as it appears was his, and not of my own making. As a matter of fact, at the end of the conversation, which, as in the past found us on opposite sides of certain points, I asked him if he wanted to give me a title for the interview. He thought about it a while, said it was not important, changed topic, and then something brought us back to the subject that had emerged time and again in the answers that follow. “Here is the seed, the sense of everything – he said – You don’t even know who, right at this moment, might be thinking of killing you. Use this as a title, if you like: ‘Because, we are all in danger’.”


FC: Pasolini, in your articles and in your writings you have given various accounts of what you detest. You have carried out a solitary struggle against so many things: institutions, trends, people, and power. So as to make things easier I will refer to it all as the “situation”, by which you know that I mean the whole of which you generally battle. Let me propose one objection. The “situation”, with all its evils as you describe it, also contains all that makes Pasolini possible. What I mean is that, even with all your talent and merit, your tools are provided by the “situation”: publishing, cinema, organization, even objects. Let’s say that yours is a magic thought. One little gesture and everything that you detest disappears. What about you, then, would you not be left all alone and without any of the tools you need? I mean, the means or tools of expression, I mean…

PPP: I understand. But I not only attempt to achieve that magic thought process, I believe in it. Not as a way to mediate with the world, but because I know that by constantly hitting the same nail on the head one can possibly make a whole house fall down. We find a small example of this among the Radical Party, a motley crew who is able to influence the whole country. You know that I don’t always agree with them, but I am about to leave right now for their conference. Most of all, it’s history that gives us the best example. Contestation has always been and essential act. Saints, hermits and intellectuals, those few who have made history, are the ones who have said “no”, not the courtesans and Cardinals’ assistants. So as to be meaningful, contestation must be large, major and total, “absurd” and not in good sense. It cannot merely be on this or that point. Eichmann had a good lot of good sense. What was he lacking then? He did not say “no” right away, at the beginning, when he was a mere administrator, a bureaucrat. He might have said to some of his friends “I don’t really like Himmler”. He might have whispered something, the way it’s done in publishing firms, newspaper office, in sub-government, in the newsrooms. Or he might even have objected to the fact that some train had stopped once a day for the deported to do their business, for bread and water, when two stops might have been more practical and economic. But he never stopped the machine. And so, there are three arguments to make here: what is what you call the “situation, why should we halt it or destroy it, and how?

FC: Well, describe the “situation” then. You know very well that your observations and your language are like the sun shining through the dust. It’s a beautiful image, but things are sometimes a little unclear.

PPP: I thank you for the sun image, but expect much less than that. All I want is that you look around and take notice of the tragedy. What is the tragedy? It’s that there are no longer any human beings; there are only some strange machines that bump up against each other. And we intellectuals look at old train schedules and say: “strange, shouldn’t these train run by there. How come they crashed like that? Either the engineer has lost his mind, or he is a criminal. Or, even better, it’s all a conspiracy.” We are particularly pleased with conspiracies because the relieve us of the weight of having to deal with the truth head on. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, while we are here talking, someone in the basement were making plans to kill us? It’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s the resistance. We might lose a few friends, but then we’ll gather our forces and wipe them out. A little for us, a little for them, don’t you think? And I know that when they show Paris is burning on TV everyone sits there with tears in their eyes, wishing only that history would repeat itself, but clean and beautiful. The effect of time is that it washes thing clean, like the walls of house in the rain. It’s simple, I’m on this side, and you’re on the other. Let’s not joke about the blood, the pain, the work that people then too paid with so as to “have a choice”. When one keeps one’s face flat against that hour, that minute in history, choice is always a tragedy. But let’s admit it, it was easier then. With courage and conscience, a normal man can always reject a Fascist of Salò or a Nazi of the SS, even from his interior life (where the revolution always begins). But today it’s different. Someone might come walking toward you dressed like a friend, very friendly and polite, but he is a “collaborator” (let’s say for a TV station). The reasoning goes that first of all he needs to make a living somehow, and then because it’s not like he’s hurting anyone. Another one, or others, the groups, comes toward you aggressively with their ideological blackmail, the admonitions, their sermons, and their anathemas that are also threats. They march with flags and slogans, but what separates them from “power”?

FC: Well, what is power in your opinion? Where is it? How does one cause it to reveal itself?

PPP: Power is an educational system that divides us into subjects and subjected. Nevertheless, it is an educational system that forms us all, from the so-called ruling class all the way down to the poorest of us. That’s why everyone wants the same things and everyone acts in the same way. If I have access to an administrative council or a Stock Market maneuver, that’s what I use. Otherwise I use a crowbar. And when I use a crowbar I’ll use whatever means to get what I want.
Why do I want it? Because I’ve been told that it is a virtue to have it. I am merely exercising my virtue-rights. I am a murderer but I am a good person.

FC: You have been accused of not being able to make political or ideological distinctions. It is said that you have lost the ability of differentiating the sign of the deep difference that there is between Fascists and non-Fascists, among the new generations for example.

PPP: That’s what I was talking about when I mentioned the train schedules before. Have you ever seen those marionettes that make children laugh so much because their body faces one direction while their heads face another? I think Totò was quite adept at such a trick. Well, that’s how I see that wonderful troop of intellectuals, sociologists, experts and journalists with the most noble of intentions. Things happen here, and their heads are turned in the opposite direction. I’m not saying that there is no Fascism. What I’m saying is: don’t talk to me of the sea while we are in the mountains. This is a different landscape. There is a desire to kill here. And this desire ties us together as sinister brothers of the sinister failure of an entire social system. I too would like it if it were easy to isolate the black sheep. I too see the black sheep. I see quite a lot of them. I see all of them. That’s the problem, as I said to Moravia: given the life I lead, I pay a price…it’s like a descent into hell. But when I come back – if I come back – I’ve seen other things, more things. I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m saying that you always find yourselves changing topic so as to avoid facing the truth.

FC: And what is the truth?

PPP: I’m sorry I used that word. What I wanted to say was “evidence”. Let me reorder things. First tragedy: a common education, obligatory and wrong that pushes us all into the same arena of having to have everything at all costs. In this arena we are pushed along like some strange and dark army in which some carry cannons and other carry crowbars. Therefore, the first classical division is to “stay with the weak”. But what I say is that, in a certain sense, everyone is weak, because everyone is a victim. And everyone is guilty, because everyone is ready to play the murderous game of possession. We have learned to have, possess and destroy.

FC: Let me go back to the first question then. You magically abolish everything. But you live from books, and you need intelligent people who read…educated consumers of an intellectual product. You are a filmmaker and, as such, you need large venues (you are very successful, and are “consumed” avidly by your public) but also an extensive technical, managerial and industrial machine that is in the midst of it all. If you remove all of this, with a sort of magical paleo-catholic and neo-chinese monasticism, what’s left?

PPP: Everything. I am what is left, being alive, being in the world, a place to see, work and understand. There are hundreds of ways to tell the stories, to listen to the languages, to reproduce dialects, to make puppetry. The others are left with much more. They can keep pace with me, cultured like me or ignorant like me. The world becomes bigger, everything is ours and there is no need to use the Stock Market, the administrative council or the crowbar to plunder. You see, in the world that we dreamed about (let me repeat myself: reading old train schedules from either a year or thirty years ago) there was the awful landlord in a top hat and dollars pouring out of his pockets, and the emaciated widow and her children who begged for mercy, as in Brecht’s beautiful world.

FC: Are you saying that you miss that world?

PPP: No! My nostalgia is for those poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord. Since they were excluded from everything, they remained uncolonized. I am afraid of these Black revolutionaries who are the same as their landlords, equally criminal, who want everything at any cost. This gloomy ostentation toward total violence makes it hard to distinguish to which “side” one belongs. Whoever might be taken to an Emergency Ward close to death is probably more interested in what the doctors have to tell him about his chances of living than what the police might have to say about the mechanism of the crime. Be assured that I am neither condemning intentions nor am I interested in the chain of cause and effect: them first, him first, or who is the primary guilty party. I think we have defined what you called the “situation”. It’s like it rains in the city and the gutters are backed up. The water rises, but the water is innocent, it’s rainwater. It has neither the fury of sea, nor the rage of river current. But, for some reason, it rises instead of falling. It’s the same water of so many adolescent poems and of the cutesy songs like “singing in the rain”. But it rises and it drowns you. If that’s where we are, I say let’s not waste time placing nametags here and there. Let’s see then how we can unplug this tub before we all drown.

FC: And to get there you would want everyone to be ignorant and happy little unschooled shepherds?

PPP: Put in those terms it would be absurd. But the educational system as it is cannot but produce desperate gladiators. The masses are growing, as is desperation and rage. Let’s say that I’ve flung a boutade (but I don’t think so), what else can you come up with? Of course I lament a pure revolution led by oppressed peoples whose only goal is to free themselves and run their own lives. Of course I try to imagine that such a moment might still be possible in Italian and world history. The best of what I imagine might even inspire one of my future poems. But not what I know and what I see. I want to say it plain and clear: I go down into hell and I see things that do not disturb the peace of others. But be careful. Hell is rising toward the rest of you. It’s true that it dreams its own uniform and its own justification (sometimes). But it’s also true that its desire, its need to hit back, to assault, to kill, is strong and wide-ranging. The private and risky experience of those who have touched “the violent life” will not be available for long. Don’t be fooled. And you are, along with the educational system, television, the your pacifying newspapers, the great keepers of this horrendous order founded on the concept of possession and the idea of destruction. Luckily, you seem to be happy when you can tag a murder with its own beautiful description. This to me is just another one of mass culture’s operations. Since we can’t prevent certain things from happening, we find peace in constructing shelves where to keep them.

FC: But to abolish also means to create, unless you too are a destroyer. What happens to the books, for example? I certainly don’t want to be one of those people who is anguished by the loss of culture more than for people. But these people saved in your vision of a different world can no longer be primitive (an accusation often leveled at you) and if we don’t want to repress “more advanced”…

PPP: Which makes me cringe.

FC: If we don’t want to fall back on commonplaces, there must be some sort of clue. For example, in science fiction, as in Nazism, book burning is always the first step in the massacres. Once you’ve shut down the schools, and abolished television, how do you animate your world?

PPP: I think I already covered this with Moravia. Closing or abolishing in my language means, “to change”. But change in a drastic and desperate manner such as the situation dictates. What really prevents a real dialogue with Moravia, but more so with Firpo, for example, is that somehow we are not seeing the same scene, we don’t know the same people, and that we do not hear the same voices. For you and them, things happen when it’s news, beautifully written, formatted, cut and titled. But what’s underneath it all? What is missing is a surgeon who has the courage to examine the tissue and declare: gentlemen, this is cancer, and it is not benign. What is cancer? It’s something that changes all the cells, which causes them to grow in a haphazard manner, outside of any previous logic. Is a cancer patient who dreams the same healthy body that he had before nostalgic, even if before he was stupid and unlucky? Before the cancer, I mean. First of all one would have to make quite an effort to re-establish the same image. I listen to all the politicians and their little formulas, and it drives me insane. They don’t seem to know what country they are talking about; they are as distant as the Moon. And the same goes for the writers, sociologists and experts of all sorts.

FC: Why do you think that some things are so much evident for you?

PPP: I don’t want to talk about myself any more. Maybe I’ve said too much already. Everyone knows that I pay for my experiences in person. But there are also my books and my films. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll keep on saying that we are all in danger.

FC: Pasolini, if that’s how you see life – I don’t know if you will accept this question – how do you hope to avoid the risk and danger involved?

It’s late, Pasolini did not turn on any lights and it’s become hard to take notes. We look over what I’ve written. Then he asks me to leave the questions with him.

PPP: There are some statements that seem a little too absolute. Let me think about it, let me look them over. And give me the time to come up with a concluding remark. I have something in mind for your question. I find it easier to write than to talk. I’ll give you the notes that I’ll add on tomorrow morning.

The next day, Sunday, Pasolini’s body was in the morgue of the Rome police station.

Sabina Guzzanti

If you don't know Sabina Guzzanti...if you haven't see her film Viva Zapatero...if you have not seen her performance about the current political situation in Italy and its resemblance to that past merger of state and corporate power that ruled the peninsula from 1922 to 1942...you MUST!!!

PASOLINI Il romanzo delle stragi / The Novel on the Massacres

I know.
I know the names of those responsible for what has been called a “coup” but what is actually a series of “coups” carried out to ensure the security of power).
I know the names of those responsible for the Milan massacre of December 12, 1969.
I know the names of those responsible for the massacres in Brescia and Bologna in early 1974.
I know the names of the “committee” that manipulated the old fascists into actualizing the “coups”, the names of the neo-fascists who carried out the first massacres and, finally, those of the “unknown’ authors of the most recent massacres.
I know the names of those who directed the two different yet opposite phases of the tension strategy: first, the anti-communist phase (Milano 1969), and then the second, anti-fascist phase (Brescia and Bologna 1974).
I know the names of that group of powerful men who, with the help of the CIA (and then by the “Greek colonels” of the mafia), first created (yet failing miserably) an anti-communist crusade to halt the ’68 movement and then, always with the help and inspiration of the CIA, they reconstituted an anti-fascist virginity so as to stall the disaster of the “referendum”.
I know the names of those who, between Holy Masses, gave their directives to young neo-fascists, or better neo-nazis (so as to give full weight to the anticommunist tensions). They further assured them and common criminals of their protection, alongside old Generals, whom they kept as a standing reservist organization for an eventual military coup. These privileges are still active today and will most likely last forever for these nameless individuals who will be used to create the next antifascist tension. I know the names of the serious and important ones who are behind the comic characters like that general of the Forestry Corps who was in Città Ducale (while the forests of Italy burned), or some of the gray and purely organizational characters like General Miceli.
I know the names of the serious and important people who are behind the tragic young men who chose the suicidal fascist atrocities and the common criminals, Sicilians or something else, who made themselves available, like hired guns or hit men.
I know all these names and I know all the actions (massacres and attempts on a variety of institutions) of which they have made themselves guilty.
I know. But I do not have the proof. I do not even have the clues.
I know because I am an intellectual, a writer who tries to keep track of everything that happens, to know everything that is written, to imagine everything that is unknown or goes unsaid. I am a person who coordinates even the most remote facts, who pieces together the disorganized and fragmentary bits of a whole, coherent political scene, who re-establishes logic where chance, folly and mystery seem to reign.
All this is part of my art and of the instinct of my art. I think it quite unlikely that the “plan of my novel” might be wrong; that it may not be in touch with reality, or that my references to events and actual persons are wrong. I also believe that many other intellectuals and writers know what I know as an intellectual and a writer. The reconstruction of the truth regarding what has happened in Italy after 1968 is not that difficult after-all. That truth – and one feels it with absolute certainty – forms the background of most journalistic and political commentaries and opinions: in other words, not works of imagination or fiction such as my work is by its very nature.
One last example: it is clear that the truth sought to emerge, with all its names, from behind the editorial in the Corriere della Sera of November 1, 1974. It is very likely that journalists and politicians even have some proof or, at least, some clues.
But the problem is this: journalists and politicians, even having some proof, and most certainly some clues, do not name names.
Whose responsibility then is it to pronounce these names? Obviously, it is up to whomever has not only the necessary courage but also someone who is not compromised in his relationship with power, and someone who has nothing to lose. This person is an intellectual.
Therefore an intellectual could very well publicly pronounce those names: but he has neither the proof nor the clues.
Power and the world, that even while not being power maintains a practical relationship with power, have excluded free intellectuals (for their very nature) from the possibility of having proof and clues.
Someone might object that I, as an intellectual, as an inventor of stories, could enter that explicitly political world (of power or close to power) and, through compromise participate in the right to share in the proof and clues.
But to such an objection I would have to answer that it is not possible. It is the very repugnance of entering into such a political world that defines my potential intellectual courage to speak the truth, to name the names.
The intellectual courage of the truth and political practice are presently two irreconcilable realities in Italy. Political practice imposes upon intellectuals – who are profoundly and viscerally despised by the whole of Italian bourgeoisie - a falsely high and noble mandate. In reality, the task of debating moral and ideological problems is servile at best.
If he is given this mandate the intellectual is considered a traitor to his duty. Shouts go up of a ‘betrayal of the clerics” that is a gratifying alibi for politicians and the servants of power.
But along with power there also exists and opposition to power. In Italy this opposition is so widespread and strong that it represents a power of its own. I am referring, of course, to the Italian Communist Party.
It is more than certain that at this moment the presence of a great party of opposition such as the Italian Communist Party is the saving grace of Italy and its poor democratic institutions. The Italian Communist Party represents a clean Country within a corrupt Country, an honest Country within a dishonest Country, an intelligent Country within an idiot Country, a wise Country within an ignorant Country, a humanistic Country within a consumerist Country. The Communist Party is a compact unit of leaders, base and voters. During these recent years a period of negotiation has opened between the Italian Communist Party, an authentically unified group, and the rest of Italy. The Italian Communist Party has, as a result, become a “Country onto itself”, an island. And it is for this very reason that today, as never before, it is able to have a very close relationship with actual power, corrupt, inept and degraded as it is. But these are diplomatic relationships, similar to those between nations. In actuality the two realities are incommensurable, understood in their concreteness, in their totality. It is possible to project on this very basis that realistic “compromise” that might in fact save Italy from falling apart at the seams. This “compromise” might be considered to be an “alliance” between two bordering states, or between two states jammed one inside the other.
But everything positive thing that I have said about the Italian Communist Party makes up its relatively negative aspects as well.
The division of the country into two separate nations, one up to its neck in degradation and degeneration and the other intact and uncompromised, cannot be a good reason for peace and constructivism.
Furthermore, conceived in this way as I have outlined it, as a nation within a nation, the opposition identifies with another power, which is nevertheless still and always power. As a result, the politicians that make up this opposition cannot but behave themselves like men of power.
In the specific instance that at this moment so dramatically concerns us, they too have deferred to the intellectual a mandate of their making. So, if the intellectual does not meet the expectations of this purely moral and ideological mandate he is, to everyone’s satisfaction, nothing more than a traitor.
And now, why do not even the politicians of the opposition, if they have – and most likely they do – proof or at least clues, name the names of those truly responsible, of the politicians, of the laughable coups and of the terrifying massacres of the last few years? Simple: they do not name them as a result of the fact that they make a distinction between political truth and political practice, something an intellectual would not do. And so, naturally, they too keep the intellectual in the dark about proof and clues. Given the objective factual situation, they do not even give it a second thought.
The intellectual has to continue to keep to what is imposed on him as his duty, to reiterate his codified mode of intervention.
I know very well that presently in Italian history, it is not the case to make a public declaration of distrust against the political class. It is not diplomatic; it is not an opportune time. But these political categories, and not political truth, are what the impotent intellectual is required to serve, however and whenever.
Very well, for the very reason that I cannot name those responsible for the attempted coups and the massacres (and not in place of it) I cannot make my weak and idealistic accusation against the entire Italian political class.
Let it be known that I act fully believing in politics. I believe in the “formal” principles of democracy, I believe in the Parliament and I believe in political parties. Obviously these beliefs are filtered through my own particular communist view.
I would be ready and eager to recall my motion of non-confidence if some politician would decide to name the names of those responsible for the coups and massacres. But his decision would have to be not opportunistic, because the moment has come, but rather as a way to create the possibility for such a moment. This politician might decide to name the names of those responsible for the coups and the massacres, which he evidently knows as I do. The difference between us is that he cannot but have the proof, or at least some clues.
Most likely – if the U.S.A. will permit – maybe “diplomatically” deciding to concede to another democracy that which American democracy has conceded itself in the case of Nixon – these names will be named. But, even if this happens, men who have shared in their power will pronounce the names. It will be a case of those least responsible against those most responsible. And, as in the American case, it does not mean that they will be any better than the others. That would most definitely be a true Coup d’etat.

First Published in Il Corriere della Sera, 14 novembre 1974

Antonio Gramsci's SOUTHERN QUESTION

Guernica Editions, Toronto, Canada, has just released the new edition of my translation of Antonio Gramsci's THE SOUTHERN QUESTION. It includes an updated (as much as possible) introduction and notes to the original text.

At Home Here

AT HOME HERE

Not of this going on day trips
a habit to break
through with some thought or other
it is just around the corner
related incidents would suggest

the very old and very young susceptible
new strains develop
these maladies
are all enveloping

very large and no one in charge
of what might happen

people try to survive
property of someone else’s attempts
but ready for anything

and where I am not here
when there is another place
appear or someone else
and when I am at home here.