Diary of an Escape by Antonio Negri

Author:Antonio Negri
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Polity Press

Folio 64

Padova – it’s three in the morning. I think I started my phone-in at Radio Gamma at about ten last night. It has continued until now. I am very tired. Not so much because of the phone-in as because of the charge of love and affection that I have felt among people, among friends and comrades. A love which, for me, means responsibility, and which overloads me. A joining together of affection and joy which could become new movement – but there is no time. Let us consolidate immediately what is irreversible. And yet I am slightly frightened about this project. Precisely this evening, in the discussion on the phone-in, I had a clear sensation that an irreversibility of behaviours, if it is not conjoined with an articulated strategic discourse, can become an ossified fetish. The resistance also accumulates negative stuff: bad feelings, lack of imagination, repetition – a kind of obligation towards repetition, forced on us by the memory of a movement which was great, yes, but has now become rigid. This reactionary phenomenon shows itself in stereotypical language and in a poverty of analytical reference points. So what we are getting is a kind of second-hand heroism – the heroism of solidarity pure and simple. I find it hard to see the strength of this continuism – and anyway, if it has strength, it is only a bureaucratic strength; within itself it shows definite symptoms of cancellation of potential and progressive exhaustion. A stunting of growth. If things were indeed this way, it would be a disaster. I try to widen the discussion, to advance provocative suggestions and proposals for the building of a new movement – one capable of recalibrating its forces in the light of the changed conditions. My impression is that people understand what I am saying – but they are dominated by a fear of not being able to control consequences – almost an expectation of counter-productive side-effects. If state repression has been successful in bringing about such a deep and negative expectation, we have to admit that they have done well. We need to break this condition of substantial passivity. How? What is the radical political change that will make this possible? (Padova – 22 July)

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