Aide-mémoire
Writings of Alfredo Maria Bonanno yet to be translated (with a few exceptions) into the language of pirates and shopkeepers

Aide-mémoire

The unimaginable suddenly materialised. The eternal child forever present in the life adventure and its limitless vision of the impossible lay there before us, the smouldering volcano quelled as the laughter and the pain, thoughts and memories, impossible decisions, new old enemies to greet with the unexpected guest, dissolve in the ethereal unknown, moulding what, through its interruption that 6th of December 2023, is sealed forever in ‘a life’. The life of an anarchist. Alfredo’s life. The presence of his absence invades us, yet “what does remembering and its vast array of speech-like emphases and flattery have to do with life? ..the material logic of the word can access fragments of action now past, anchored to a specific time and space, and implant them in immediate reality where a dimension of immiserated life proliferates, but also link them to a vision of the future. Nothing is clear, nothing appears for what it really is, qualitative experience is the exception that confirms the rule of noise deafness to all other experiences, which it contrasts with its strict silence.”

The last time I spoke with Alfredo he mentioned the importance of caso, chance, in his life, and proceeded to give two examples. The first when as a young man at work in the provincial hell of a bank branch in Catania, a colleague, knowing of his philosophical writings, suggested that he accompany her to a printers, her husband was publishing some poetry. The printer, a certain Vicenzo Di Maria, was a man of another era, not only a point of convergence for many of the Sicilian literati, he also printed a vast quantity of anarchist publications of the Italian anarchist movement, that of Sicily, notably Franco Leggio’s La Fiaccola editions, and also of the mainland, including the paper Umanita Nova. Testimony to the effect that this chance encounter had on the tormented young thinker is the vast quantity of Anarchismo publications printed there on the magnificent Heidelberg to the sound of the clinking of the lead type, over many years to come.

Chance made another appearance some years later, in France, he continued. An encounter of ‘individualist anarchists’ was taking place in Chateau du Loire, attended by specimens from Arizona to Japan, not forgetting Sicily and Scotland. That evening, to the light of the fireflies on the long the walk back to our host’s little farm, chaos erupted into the life of the unsuspecting victim. Not a philosopical hypothesis or a scientific proposition but real tangible chaos in flesh and blood, the kind that drives ordered people crazy, upsets their linear existence, can even send them into bouts of delirious rage. Over time this chance collision of extreme opposites would contribute to exploding the linear horizon of the extraordinary mostro in his need to leave the rules, “break with the uniform sentence that housed me, the Jacobin paraphernalia, the revolutionary measure learned in books”. Over time, throughout his maturing of a vision of anarchism suffered and built day by day, obstacle by obstacle, he realised he had also discovered a peculiar quality of self-organising that works unseen within chaos, demolishing the need for enlightened elites.

Thanks to the unfailing dedication of a decisively non-chaotic comrade, what follows is a framework taken from the online presentation of the final update of writings elaborated throughout the years, many written from memory, by hand, in the countless notebooks that filled Alfredo’s baggage on leaving the various prisons in Italy and in Greece over the last two decades—to then print them, himself this time for as long as his health allowed it—in the volumes of Anarchismo editions. In the words of some comrades, “During Alfredo’s imprisonment in the prison of Korydallos, three successive members of our collective had the privilege of living with him over a period of time. Endless conversations in the prison yard, always with our disagreements, always with mutual respect. We will remember him in the heat of August 2010, inside the stuffy cell 15 of the first wing, while reading and writing on a chair, telling us that for anarchists to read should be a natural necessity, we will always remember him as a genial figure, one of the figures who inspired us to join the anarchist movement during our adolescence. But above all we will remember him for what he was: an anarchist revolutionary, an eternal guerrilla, an eternal enemy of the State and capital.”

A labyrinthian journey lies ahead for who is fearless enough to embark on it. With anticipatory zeal for the discoveries to be made along the way, in agreement with the author that, “in the books of anarchists (attention, I’m not talking about books about anarchists but books by anarchists), there is an air of topicality that flies above time and contingencies that history digests as facts. In anarchists’ books there is constant freshness because they are part of their life, not just any excrement from whoever is more or less able to smudge a piece of paper with ink. Rereading them I feel my heart beat just as when I was preparing to transform the world with all my courage and my strength intact.” That strength and courage was there to the last, no peace or satisfaction of the weary warrior but the torture of his oft-quoted words of the poet, La chair est triste, hélas, j’ai lu tous les livres... and his impelling need to strike the genocidal arrogance of the atrocious enemy, alone.

Strength and courage will not be lacking in the untiring seekers of lucidity and method who decide to pick up forthcoming pages behind the glimpses presented here. A unique adventure in our undying quest to realize and spread the qualitative self-management of demolition before derealisation wins, (already presenting some amusing indications in the tragi-comedy of our microcosm).

What is assured is a boundless legacy of ideas, methods, analyses, as well as allusions to and unpardoning anarchist scrutiny of decisive acts of liberation from tyranny. A propulsive force in the inextirpable journey of introspection and decision in the necessary destruction that is partially underway and which, besides recipes, also needs minds enriched with inspirational doubt and a few certainties. And the courage of our convictions.

Jean Weir
Jamais, rien, personne

On intellectuals

Product of a privileged class or newly emerged from the proletarian class at the cost of great effort, the intellectual feels privileged in turn and instinctively inclines towards the preservation of a state of affairs that guarantees this privilege elevated to the status of institution.

When not openly participating in reaction and imperialism he feels a sense of guilt growing inside him that leads him to criticism of the society that hosts him, criticism inspired by democratic concepts proposing a just plan of progressive reforms.

So, suspicion of the intellectual so common among the classes of the exploited is right, as is the former’s desire to understand this position and ‘do something’ that is not detrimental to his position of privilege.

Seen from a certain angle, particularly that of militant struggle, the figure of the democratic intellectual is extremely dangerous.

Alfredo M. Bonanno

La Dimensione Anarchica 1969

Culture to the pigs

Ultimately, the main purpose of the writer should be that of communicating, therefore communicating well, but that alone is not enough. In addition to communicating—sailors do nothing less important with their little flags—it is necessary to know what to communicate and, when you know it, to have the courage to communicate it. And there’s the rub. Do we really think we are communicating? Is it not all just a set-up for initiates which has ended up involving us to such an extent that we really believe we are communicating something? Then, what?

You happen to read that the guy, definitely an idiotic rehasher of the pigs’ ideological dictatorship, has abandoned the frown of the censor and put on a shabby suit. Well, then you risk not understanding anything. If a massive impassable wall looms in front of you, at least there is the satisfaction of banging your head against it, but this being a curtain of fog, not even such a meager satisfaction becomes possible. Then don’t even mention the contents, the game repeats itself monotonously without making any sense.

This disease of ours—that writing can also be considered sick today because culture has been mystified, perhaps irreparably, by the pigs—threatens to mask our impotence. Idiotically we repeat meaningless words now, deluding ourselves that we know what we want to say and basing this illusion on the certainty—solid, of conspirators —that others, those who read us in turn want to delude themselves that they know what we intend to communicate. The tyranny of printed paper ends up upsetting our minds and codifying our reactions: here is how the “writers”, those who have always given the pigs so many cats to skin, remain entangled in the system that these animal slaughters have woven.

The writer must still be able to illuminate a purpose, if he really does not want to represent the dark part of a burnt-out lightbulb, he must not have rules, structures, codifications, styles, forms. If the style is the man, as that naturalist of good memory said, he must forget that he is a man, he must become a thousand, a hundred thousand men all at once, he must not have traditions because he must not want goals, if he looks at something he must be able to set it on fire, maybe to then be able to shout together with all the others, “to the fire!”. Only this way, free from all that culture has created around him, can he put down the pen at any time and go out into the street, go beyond thought—a very sterile thing if not fueled by action—to the guerrilla, to combat. The alternative is not difficult: from death to life.

If the writer cannot take off these clothes in an instant, if he cannot get out of the mould that threatens to automise us all, he must not define himself such, in the same way that a TV repeater cannot define itself a transmitter of programs.

Beyond the number of pages, the publisher’s orders, the price of the volume, above all, the content and the very hopes of the author, beyond career and respectability, if there is communication and if there is content, there is the revolutionary action of the writer and then this becomes one with revolutionary action in the streets and squares, on the barricades and in the gunfights.

Alfredo M. Bonanno

La Dimensione Anarchica 1969

Titles by Alfredo M. Bonanno in Biblioteca di Anarchismo

Trattato delle Inutilità. Parte prima: Jamais. Treatise on Uselessness. Part one: Never[1]

Hybris. Distruggere la religione. Hubris. Destroy Religion

Trattato delle Inutilità. Parte seconda: Rien. Treatise on Uselessness. Part one: Never

La distruzione necessaria. The Necessary Destruction

Potere e contropotere. Power and Counterpower

Nove studi su Hegel. Nine studies on Hegel

Gianfranco Bertoli Carteggio 1998-2000. Gianfranco Bertoli Correspondence 1998-2000

Teoria e pratica dell’insurrezione. Theory and practice of Insurrection[2]

Max Stirner. Max Stirner

Teoria dell’individuo. Stirner e il pensiero selvaggio.Theory of the Individual. Stirner and Wild Thought

La dimensione anarchica. The Anarchist Dimension

Palestina, mon amour. Palestine, mon amour[3]

Power and Counterpower. Second edition with the addition of seven preparatory studies

Il falso e l’osceno. The false and the obscene

L’ateismo di Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach. The Atheism of Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach

Solchi. Sulci

Saggi sull’ateismo. Essays on Atheism

A mano armata . At gunpoint[4]

Machiavelli filosofo. Machiavelli philosopher

L’Inquisizione. La tortura in nome di Dio. The Inquisition. Torture in the name of God

Charles Baudelaire. Studi sull’assurdo Charles Baudelaire. Studies on the absurd

Michail Bakunin. Contro la storia. Michail Bakunin. Against History

Cloro al clero. Chlorine to the clergy

Nicola Abbagnano. Nicola Abbagnano

Dal banditismo sociale alla guerriglia. From social banditry to guerrilla warfare[5]

Saggi sull’esistenzialismo. Essays on existentialism

La rivoluzione illogica. The illogical revolution

Il cristianesimo delle origini. Dalla condanna alla

giustificazione della ricchezza. Early Christianity. From condemnation to the justification of wealth

Autogestione e anarchismo. Self-management and anarchism

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di filosofia. Bergamo. Philosophy lessons. Bergamo

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di filosofia. Parma. Philosophy lessons. Parma

Movimento e progetto rivoluzionario. Astensionismo

elettorale anarchico. Movement and revolutionary project. Anarchist electoral abstentionism[6]

Pëtr Kropotkin. Contro la scienza. Peter Kropotkin. Against science

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di storia della filosofia. Catania. Philosophy lessons. Catania

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di storia della filosofia. Catania.Philosophy lessons. Catania (2 vol.)

L’ospite inatteso. The Unexpected Guest[7]

Dominio e rivolta. Domination and revolt

I fondamenti di una teoria filosofica

dell’indeterminazione. The foundations of a philosophical theory of indeterminacy

Manuale scientifico a uso degli increduli. Scientific handbook for the incredulous

Miseria della cultura. Cultura della miseria. Poverty of culture. Culture of poverty

Senza una ragione. Without a reason. 2nd edition, with the addition of Saying the truth

Contro la chiarezza. Contro l’oggettività. Against clarity. Against objectivity

Critica della ragione politica. Critique of political reason

Dissonanze. Dissonances

Autodifesa al processo di Roma per banda armata, ecc. Self-defence at the Rome trial for armed gang, etc.

Zarathustra. Zarathustra

Chi ha paura della rivoluzione? Who is afraid of revolution?

Io so chi ha ucciso il commissario Luigi Calabresi. I Know Who Killed chief superintendent Luigi Calabresi[8]

La gioia armata. Armed Joy[9]

Parigi 1871. La Comune libertaria. Paris 1871. The libertarian Commune.

Distruggiamo il lavoro. Let’s Destroy Work[10]

La tensione anarchica. The Anarchist Tension[11]

Chiusi a chiave. Una riflessione sul carcere. Locked Up. A reflection on prison[12]

La bestia inafferrabile. The elusive beast

Anarchismo insurrezionalista. Insurrectionalist anarchism[13]

Critica del sindacalismo. A critique of syndicalist methods[14]

Come un ladro nella notte. Like a thief in the night

Internazionale Antiautoritaria Insurrezionalista. Anti-authoritarian Insurrectionalist International[15]

Errico Malatesta e la violenza rivoluzionaria. Errico Malatesta and revolutionary violence[16]

I giovani in una società post-industriale. The young in a post-industrial society[17]

Nuove svolte del capitalismo. New Developments in capitalism[18]

Guerra civile. Civil war

E noi saremo sempre pronti a impadronirci un’altra volta del cielo. And we will always be ready to storm the heavens again[19]

Carcere e lotte dei detenuti. Prison and prisoners’ struggles

Gli dèi al tramonto. The Twilight of the Gods

Passeggiate nel buio. Walks in the Dark

Il ripristino degli dèi. The restoration of the gods

La logica dell’“a poco a poco”. The logic of “a little at a time”

La ragione genera mostri. Reason generates monsters

Oltrepassamento e superamento. Going Beyond and Overcoming

Anarchismo e progetto insurrezionale. Anarchism and Insurrectional Project[20]

Autogestione e distruzione. Self-management and Destruction

Distruggiamo le carceri. Let’s Destroy the Prisons

Di quale natura parliamo? What Nature are we talking about?

Dio e lo Stato nel pensiero di Proudhon. God and the State in Proudhon’s Thought

L’Inquisizione spagnola e gli Ebrei. The Spanish Inquisition and the Jews

Il messaggio nella bottiglia. The Message in the Bottle[21]

Gli Ebrei e il male assoluto. The Jews and Absolute Evil[22]

IP - In preparation

EE - Available in Elephant Editions

1 - Treatise on Uselessness. Part one: Never. IP

2 - Theory and practice of Insurrection EE

3 - Palestine, mon amour EE, IP

4 - At gunpoint EE

5 - Social banditry IP

6 - Abstensionism IP

7 - The Unexpected Guest IP

8 - I Know Who Killed il commissario Luigi Calabresi EE

9 - Armed Joy EE

10 - Let’s Destroy Work EE

11 - The Anarchist Tension EE

12 - Locked Up. EE

13 - Insurrectionalist Anarchism. EE

14 - A Critique of Syndicalist Methods. EE

15 - Anti-authoritarian Insurrectionalist International EE, IP

16 - Errico Malatesta and revolutionary violence EE

17 - The young in a post-industrial society EE

18 - New Developments in capitalism EE

19 - And we will always be ready to storm the heavens again EE

20 - Anarchism and Insurrectional Project EE

21 - The Message in the Bottle IP

22 - The Jews and Absolute Evil IP

23 - EE

Trattato delle Inutilità. Parte prima: Jamais

Treatise on Uselessness. Part one: Never

Biblioteca di Anarchismo 1/2/3.

Year 2000, 3 vols. cloth bound, 1932 pages

In the end I would like to sit down and calmly remember, sit on a blue stone like those I have seen in the earthly paradise and count the birds ranged in multicoloured rows, contemplate the free lake, remember names engraved in my heart that would mean nothing to the passing traveller, memories that are mine and mine alone, secret like my dreams. From the many possible ways to begin this story I have chosen a not very spectacular one. I had imagined well constructed beginnings, rich in significance, logical, progressive. Then I realised that something in these narrated pages was wrong. Reality is movement. There is no such thing as a place where I can stop and make revelations, even for a moment. No matter how I put it, it would be a falsification. Better to say it right away and set off without too much fuss or putting one’s credentials on show. The place one keeps tools, where objects, models of objects, various utilities are made, is defined a laboratory. It is not, however, a fixed place. It moves, relates. Even when it fills up with dust, movement does not leave it alone.

Hybris. Distruggere la religione

Hubris. Destroy Religion

Biblioteca di Anarchismo – 9/10

2003, 2 vol. cloth bound, 1028 pages

Measure is law. The word nomos comes from nemein, to graze and also divide. Originally, shepherds had to pay much attention both to the breeding of cattle (counting them was a problem), and to the procedures adopted to divide herds and flocks. Measure, therefore, measure of what you own and on which you base your livelihood and a minimum necessary guarantee against the dangers and uncertainties of the future. A bond encircles the whole of the earth like a rope, or a snake, Ocean is this liquid bond, eternal river and inaccessible beginning. Life is related to the very idea of fluid. The nomos opposes it, restrains its uncontrollable spreading and puts order in it. In putting its feet down, measure constitutes and articulates itself. It eats the product of the original earth and divides itself into a thousand specifications that give interpretative comfort. Life seems to rejoice. Walls are born, ruin and pain of every joy of life. The wrath of God becomes fury as soon as distances are fixed, the blood of sacrifice is pressed into vats, the shadow of uncertainties erased, everything is assigned its place, from now on time will last forever, only some will be given for dissolution. The horizon is no longer free, it seems to narrow itself into a dome, it overlooks more than hand over the prying eye to the freedoms of wandering. Working rhythms bind to the earth and to the earth bind. Ocean no longer flows freely, first dome, now a cylinder.

Trattato delle Inutilità. Parte seconda: Rien

A Treatise of Uselessness. Second part: Nothing

Biblioteca di Anarchismo – 11/12/13.

Year 2012, 3 vols. cloth bound, 2002 pages

Personal research is another condition of the individual, proposing itself as involvement is the antithesis of the institutional need that never disappears completely in that it consolidates in the aspects of the field that every criticism, negative though it may be, cannot make disappear completely with the wave of a magic wand. In me, in the absence of the didactic motive, the provocative motive takes an unsuspected and unstoppable dimension of research, of solicitation to reflect, a motive, the latter, which is not at all of a pedagogical nature. Witticism and and insipidity. In me there is little willingness to wait, essential element of the teacher, and a lot of attitude to push on. I’m not a particularly pleasant person. Radical solitude does not necessarily lead to tracing who might be interior intimo meo et superior summo meo, [“You were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest” (Confessions 3.6.11).] according to Augustine. I am convinced that Augustine did not want to obtain from his god what he puts above all, the qualification that allows access to the city of God. I always imagined him with the Vandals at the door, completing his writings, revising words, curing rhetorical contortions. Kafka makes me think of Egyptologists. Mummies are the latters’ daily bread. Only drunks imagine (sich einbilden) that they know how to speak correctly. The search for quality is a matter of intimate drive, internal to my considerations in the course of impossible completion, something similar to jealousy. A matter of genius. For this reason Augustine was never a wise man, like Origen let’s say, absolutely unable to eviscerate himself as supreme confirmation of having won over the will. He knows that this path is wrong, and it is wrong because it is impossible for him. With pain I force my step towards quality, the definitive step. Augustine never wanted to take this step, he always kept himself in the balance, and when he could no longer, when he was about to access the thing, he decided to remedy the irremediable, speaking of superiority. We do not subordinate ourselves to the thing, we let ourselves be captured, but we always remain independent, separate, free. Augustine eventually realizes that he is free, and it is then that he fully understands how heavy predestination is. Was he truly predestined? Absolutely not. The holy city was not for him. Deciding on this ambivalence, even if it can safely be considered idle chatter, becomes important, can have repercussions on all the recesses of my life. I dared to consider it just a chat, out of the blue, a decision I made with the ardour and recklessness of youth, to then continue to eat and keep silent as always, often suffering. But courage could not arrive wrapped and fastened and adorned with tassels here, there were other ways from the caravan that in the meantime were carrying it to the dock of my departure.

La distruzione necessaria

The Necessary Destruction

Pensiero e azione – 1

2012, 2nd edition, cloth bound, 332 pages

This book was written on the spur of the moment in February 1968. A thousand problems were pressing inside me, wrapped in the need of absoluteness that was becoming ever greater. Precisely this need dictated the limits of the interpretive framework: abandon rules, break with the uniforming sentence that hosts me, say this rupture, say it as soon as possible, at any cost. Every need is always a partial act, it reflects and feeds on what is in the house. The Jacobin paraphernalia is evident in this book and the reader must take this into account. The anarchist ideal is far away but not entirely absent, it will emerge later. I am moving in that direction, but I am still a bearer of revolutionary measure learned in books.

Marking the points of lesser or greater distance from anarchism, from my mature anarchism, is useless and annoying work. The reader can do this, but is asked not to take the results into account. If what we are is an absolute universe, never definable with precision, it is as a requirement, as an infinite never completable task, implicit in everything we do. To remain silent like fish in an aquarium in the face of your backwardness, of the outstanding accounts of the past, is cowardice and stupidity. If I want to become what I am, it is because I am already what I will become. Otherwise the game is lost before we start.

To assist this second edition of The Necessary Destruction I called on some preparatory and collateral studies capable of showing the more or less declared interests that completed the framework of references.

Contents

Introductions - The necessary destruction - Preparatory studies: 1. History: Search for definitions [1965]; 2. Value as a delimitation of experience [1965]; 3. First essay on Machiavelli. Man [1968]; 4. Second essay on Machiavelli. Theory of Fortune [1968]; 5. Third essay on Machiavelli. Method [1958]; 6. Reality in the thinking of Ortega y Gasset [1968]; 7. Modern historiography and the concept of the Middle Ages [1969]; 8. The effectual truth [1968]; 9. End and means [1968]; 10. The theology of early Greek thinkers [1968]; 11. Analysis of normality [1967]

Potere e contropotere. Seconda edizione con l’aggiunta di sette studi preparatori

Power and Counterpower. Second edition with the addition of seven preparatory studies

Pensiero e azione – 2

2012, 2nd ed. cloth bound, 372 pages

In some respects, Power and Counterpower, an ominous title that never met with success among readers, constitutes an advance towards The Necessary Destruction.

While remaining a prisoner of some basic obtuseness, which the reader will easily identify, the analysis develops more widely and more determinedly. The main concern remains to provide organizational elements to the basic revolutionary and insurrectional thrust, which in the years immediately following 1968 seemed almost to reach its extreme consequences.

Another element of reflection is constituted by all the doubts raised about the possible immediate constitution of a free society, free in a definitive way, that is, of an anarchist society. In those now far off years no one, or almost no one, was paying any attention to the dangers of a quick recovery by the repression. By insisting on the defence and recuperation of a libertarian revolution you can inadvertently direct it towards a terrible reaction, perhaps under the very name of anarchy, and the Spanish experiences should have taught the revolutionary organizers of yesterday and today.

Contents

Introductions - Power and counter-power - Preparatory studies: 1. The power of physics [1965]; 2. Ideology and utopia [1970]; 3. Exploitation and workers’ struggle; 4. Manual and intellectual work [1975]; 5. The representative system and the anarchist ideal [1975]; 6. Saint-Simon and Marx [1970]; 7. Essay on Proudhon [1970]; 8. Keynes and Galbraith.

Nove studi su Hegel

Nine studies on Hegel

Pensiero e azione – 3

2012, reprint, cloth bound, 342 pages.

Faced with the immense dimension (and difficulty) that the philosophy of Hegel presents the more or less well-provided reader with there is reason to be afraid. In another respect, I must confess here that I have often been amazed by the work of this philosopher. The variety of research topics, the analytical material deepened and critically discussed, the authors borne in mind as a result of readings made, in a word the laboratory of a scholar worthy of this name has always impressed me in others and I tried, according to my possibilities, to work also, with results that I am unable to evaluate. It is easy to marvel at the work of others, while tending to underestimate your own. I am not expressing perplexity on the value of what I have produced from the intellectual point of view, this subject is quite alien to me, but only as effort and commitment, the amount of research, the breadth of references, the reading and memorisation, such as news accumulation and selection capabilities, etc. And, in this perspective, Hegel is second to none.

My rejection of the system, any philosophical system, but also of any system of ideas that claims to supervise and regulate my life, has however not leaned on the prosthesis of the demonization of every systematic research but, on the contrary, it has entered the most significant of these researches coming out from time to time fortified rather than weakened.

Hegel has often been my travelling companion and has never upset my dreams as an anarchist. With the peace of so many censori in pectore.

Contents

Introductory note – Theory of identity [1967] – The progressive synthesis as growth of consciousness - [1971] – Hegel’s phenomenology and that of Husserl [1971] – Dialectic of thought and dialectic of thinking [1975] – Activity of the “Hegel-Gesellschaft” at the beginning of the Seventies [1965] – Life’s restlessness [1971] – Progressive intentionality [1971] – Hegelian studies in France in the late 1960s [1969] – Metaphysics [1971]

Gianfranco Bertoli Carteggio 1998-2000

Gianfranco Bertoli Correspondence 1998-2000 With the addition of the second edition of Terrorism, a few imbeciles and other things

Pensiero e azione – 4

2013, cloth bound, 480 pages

Gianfranco Bertoli kills four people and wounds many others in front of the main Milan police station on the anniversary of the killing of chief superintendent Luigi Calabresi. His intention was to throw a bomb into the lobby of the police station on the occasion of the inauguration by Mariano Rumor of a statue to “Commissario window”. I have never met Bertoli personally, I only had that sporadic exchange of letters with him while I was in the prison of Bergamo, which

soon ended because, despite his availability, we basically had very few things to say to each other at the time. Then the letters, his letters. Sometimes a flood, so great as to fill the pages completely without leaving even a tiny space, other times more distant from one another, to eventually become distracted, almost a testimony of the imminent end. They are not a pleasant read, neither his letters nor mine. But I don’t have to delight my few readers. Gianfranco’s writing is bombastic, repetitive, rich in double adjectives that make reading difficult, but they are the direct testimony of a man who suffers, a weak man who continues to suffer. But he doesn’t suffer for those who died, for the pain caused, nor is it for the missed objective, he suffers for another reason, and it is here that I found him close, a brother, beyond the differences in character between us.

Contents

Preface – Introduction – Correspondence 1998-2000 – Bergamo letters (1989) – Appendice: Del terrorismo, di alcuni imbecilli e altre cose [1979]

Teoria e pratica dell’insurrezione

Theory and Practice of Insurrection

Pensiero e azione – 5

2008, 2nd ed. cloth bound, 416 pages

I’m not saying that this book, which is now seeing its second edition after almost twenty years, is at the origin of insurrectional theories, that would be a serious inaccuracy, however it has done its bit and we hope it can continue to do so.

As usual, every theory that tries to go beyond the stagnation that only feeds repetitive practices comes up against two obstacles: one internal and one external. If it is a revolutionary theory, the first obstacle is in the movement itself, which does not like to feel disturbed in its sleepy rituals. Carved into a niche somewhere, it waits for better times, anxiously guarding its own erythema.

Not just noises in the night, also wider practices, participation in specific struggles, placed precisely in time and space, struggles characterized by an ongoing repressive process against which people are trying to do something. Not generalized crusades against the symbols of domination, but intermediate struggles, more modest, visible to the eye without ideological lenses, struggles against something that prevents one from living here and now, struggles that sever one or many of the minimum conditions for not letting your life expire in the cowardly accommodation of a day at a time. Struggles for housing, for water, for reducing pollution, against armaments, against industries harmful to health, etc. And here the discourse on method becomes abundantly clear.

Contents

Introductions– First part: 1. What is insurrection? – 2. Revolutionary struggle and insurrection. ‘Our role as anarchists’ – 3. Rebellion - 4. The logic of the insurrection – 5. Insurrectional strategies and methods – Part two: 1. “Sinistra Libertaria” – 2. Autonomous base nuclei – 3. For a speficic organisation – 4. The insurrectional struggle in Comiso against the missile base – 5. We don’t like the Pope

Max Stirner

Max Stirner

Pensiero e azione – 6

2012, 2nd ed. cloth bound, 424 pages

The validity of one’s choices, what comes out of so-called self-determination, the dream of every good anarchist with their papers in order is the result of a spat between larvae, it comes to the light of an ephemeral life, even comforts the ferocity of maximalist thought, but it is not able to rise above its own limits (and how could it?). How many choristers of desire have I seen in the indecision of the moment, terrifiedly tossing away unavoidable destiny equipped with a smoking fuse in their hands.

Stirner is a fierce maker of abstractions, he produces an odious mechanism of objective verifications, none of his readers - not even the most extreme critics - could find a flaw in this mechanism. But in the end, the most extreme critic is victim of his own conclusions. When we come to the conclusion of the Unique, we realize that neither he nor we can move forward. The territory that opens up to us is that of desolation, the wild territory of the “absolutely other”.

Contents

Introductions – Stirner’s Environment and Philosophical Training – Analysis of the work of Stirner – The False Problem of Individualism – Stirner and anarchism – Bergamo annotations [1989]

Teoria dell’individuo. Stirner e il pensiero selvaggio

Theory of the Individual. Stirner and Wild Thought

Pensiero e azione – 7

2021, 4th ed., paperback, 385 pages

Wild thought, that’s what we need. Stirner’s is a contribution in this direction. Like all contributions it is only an attempt, not only does it not come to any conclusions (and why should it?) but it builds itself antibodies to avoid arriving there. And this is the ultimate sign of the wild attitude.

How do we find ourselves in the midst of the storm? Here’s the crucial question. No matter how many efforts we make we are always approaching, we approximate. The actual leap is too traumatic to talk about. We are confident that the truth of which we are firmly convinced will shed light on our journey. Illusions are hard to die.

Contents

Introduzioni – Max Stirner, the philospher of the Unique – The reference to Hegel – Contributions to a critical reading of the Unique – Individualism and communism: one reality and two false problems – The monster in each one of us – Transcending and overcoming – Coherence and incoherence – Crisis and failure – Iconoclasts to the end – Mr de Taillandier’s fears – Max Stirner’s anti-juridicism – A refractory – The first French translation of The Unique – Individual and diversity.

La dimensione anarchica

The Anarchist Dimension

Pensiero e azione – 8

2013, 2nd ed. cloth bound, 558 pages

Each of the pieces presented here - certainly not as chapters of a book but as testimonies of a revolutionary evolution and gaining awareness - is a world in continuous production that cannot be considered complete, although here it is presented from one point of the discourse to end in another, generally as if this last point were a landing.

Such an observation is falsely evident because its approximation is not linked to a question of a quantitative lack but to a qualitative deficiency, which does not belong to the incompleteness of the mechanism itself. This insufficiency is its condition of partial freedom, that which the will lets be the narrow space within which I move to have the impression of choosing concerning my decision. In fact, I am forced to make these decisions of which I am to some extent a prisoner. It is of this will that I must go in search of to find and circumscribe it, get round it and go further. There are times when the road to diversity opens, but they are not moments of particular solemnity, and there are moments when the superstition of doing grips me more than ever. They are the first ones, these flashes of intuition, that visit me and are often conceded to me without any specific solicitation. This book is therefore a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel, if only for my way of writing, as well as my way of dealing with concepts of efficiency and acquisition. It was not easy this struggle conducted within myself, not without blows. The destruction of the myths of the efficiency of elites, of the leading role of intellectuals, of the militaristic function within the revolutionary event, has been long and laborious. Parallel, in any case, to my reluctance to declare myself participator of a symbol, a flag, even the anarchist one which, by definition, should be alien to sclerotized connotations.

Palestina, mon amour

Palestine, mon amour. Third edition revised and corrected with the addition of The Jews and Absolute Evil

Pensiero e azione – 9

2012, 2nd ed. cloth bound, 336 pages

In April 2004, as soon as I entered the prison of Trieste, I wrote a fairly thorough text on radical evil, the project of the total destruction of the Jews, studied and partially implemented by the Nazis. On this occasion, for the first time, - I don’t know why but it came to me spontaneously, without any hesitation, perhaps because of being in prison, but perhaps because of the extreme radicalization of the ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians – I told of the torture that I had undergone at the hands of the men of the Mossad in far-off 1972. I didn’t think it possible that this story, however shortened into a few lines and with no unnecessary indications, could interest anyone. After seeing it written on the page, I realized that it interested me. A mad angel had wiped out the world. The desert was the result, a hideous incomprehensible hieroglyphs. The indications of the catastrophe are the most comprehensible consequence of the conclusion. The triumph of mediocrity is guaranteed, the world continually triumphs over itself, layer upon layer. History is an unreliable and nauseating witness. It believes that there are intervals in mediocrity, that someone in it leaves the mark of his genius intelligence. Instead the discontinuous signs are only the consequence of an increase in stupidity.

A heavy repellent mass, hardened by repeated vain attempts, a disappointment without pause, a wound that goes down deep, all this weighs on my heart. Don’t panic, it’s still me, even when I look down into the abyss. Beyond the frost and the evil of life that torments me daily, beyond the dismay and melancholy, beyond the anger of the righteous and the wickedness of the stupid, beyond the lies that help to survive, beyond the petty purposes that justify ferocious means, over the ideologists and the massacrers, placidly reality relaxes, safe, uncontaminated, devoid of explanations scribed in haste by inconclusive middlemen. Cockroaches, snakes, locusts and the falsely furious dust of dreamers and poets that reality scatters to the four winds.

Il falso e l’osceno

The Fake and the Obscene

Pensiero e azione – 10

2007, cloth bound, 344 pages

The development of political analysis has inherent in it an irremediable flatness. Its critical elements are intertwined with the conditions under which the political process functions. As everyone knows, the latter does not work without finding consensus and making all the changes necessary to make it possible.

Within this process the function of ideological deception was once assured by religion. Modern man prays less but, according to Hegel’s brilliant intuition, he makes up for this reduction by reading the newspaper.

It is generally accepted that today’s recipients of the political message, i.e. the passive subjects whose consent is requested, if not more educated, are more informed and so the swindle needs to be more sophisticated or, at least, more articulate. The matter is doubtful. If a few decades ago the ideological basis of consensus was oriented (to the left) towards proletarian internationalism and (to the right) towards the ethical State, today the ideological, let’s say spiritual, residues, the great values, have flattened themselves on the vague process of capitalist globalization. This resulted in a levelling of the cultural means employed, reaching miseries never known before, not even by the right-wing that differed least from the truncheon. Little cultural attention is paid to consensus-building, and the result is a petty ideology allowing any politician to talk rubbish. This being so, some people think that the use of provocation might produce some interesting effects. But what is a provocation? Saying or doing something that breaks with tranquillity and good manners. So something that contradicts the stupid talkativeness with which we put each other to sleep every day, leading us to accept an existence that we consider inadequate to our alleged desires for diversity. One wonders if it is possible to break with stupidity. Distressing question. Each of us harbours that kind of private idiocy that we consider beyond question, a reservoir of well-built opinions that help us get by. But no functionalism has ever saved anyone’s life. We are going to die with all our beneficial assumptions without blinking, thinking we are beautifully equipped to pick up all the expressions we collect like single moments of a long illness.

A custard pie in the face is hilarious, a sneaking poke makes you grit your teeth in an equally stupid grin. The enemies have strengthened themselves and we are unable to find the way to shatter their defensive wall.

They dematerialized the stones with which this wall is built, they did it while we dabbled with the most varied assumptions, accept yourself brother with callous hands, dark skin, uncertain sex, brother you have all your papers in order, accept yourself and we will be grateful, we will help you in your struggle to make room for yourself, to be even more accepted, so that then you can, honestly besides, give us a good kick in the ass after you have obtained all those awards that you presently lack.

The artificious formulae with which we are available for action are now presented as ghosts while their virtual reflections inhabit university classrooms, astronomical observatories and Indian temples. The provocation should insist on them, proceed beyond the enemy's scope, as this territory has extended to the edge of our tents, extending to challenge us on the identity we have attached to the true and the just, on to achievements considered undisputed and a style that nothing and no one thought could be expropriated and that we now see spreading in the culture of domination.

Contents

Part one: The Fake: Brief introductory note - Introduction to The Fake - The Sartre Fake - Jean-Paul Sartre, My Political Testament – At the origin of truth – Martin Heidegger and Parmenides of Elea – Karl Jaspers – Max Stirner – The two extremes of the same thesis

Part Two: The Obscene: The ambivalent ferry – Introduction to the obscene – Untitled – The Marquis de Sade – Antonin Artaud. Theatre and its double – Sylvan Maréchal. Man without God – Leopardi. The universe has no cause outside itself.

L’ateismo di Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach

The Atheism of Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach

Pensiero e azione – 11

2009, 2nd ed., cloth bound, 332 pages

The System of Nature is a great philosophical work. As far as one can identify and see its limits, it remains a point of reference in the history of the human adventure against God.

It is not acceptable today, in many respects, but courage must always be taken into account, it must be admired and this particularly when it becomes part of thought as living matter and does not only rely on the noise of more or less resounding words. And Holbach and his companions must have had courage in abundance. Very few years had passed since the Catholic and pyres, from torture and quartering, from Damiens to Chevalier De la Barre. Just four years before the publication of Holbach’s work [1766], the latter was executed for not kneeling in the street at the passage of the Blessed Sacrament.

Holbach’s central topic is matter. Atheism is a corollary.

The creation of a real scientific architecture is the result of the word that constructs and produces by saying, and is as much as possible inserted in the constraints of a pre-ordered correspondence. Unstoppably work to dismember the will and its control mechanisms. I have been fighting for decades against the prejudice that incensed this ill-fated fetish for centuries, carrier of false aggressivity towards possession and constructive production. The insignificance of these results is continually confirmed by the power of control and repression, with reduction of meaning to lack of significance and freedom. I insist on all this because it is a mechanism that continues to capture me and fuels the restlessness that keeps me awake. Although it is an arid one-dimensional mechanism, it is equipped with many aspects and continuous modifications. Freedom of speech is not absolute freedom, I know, but neither is it one of the freedoms granted in the productive modification, horribly disfigured by the limits and rules imposed by the usefulness of the aim to be achieved.

This power of the word is the mark of its conditions of support in the various developments of nominative history, where it takes the determined aspect of saying many times differently and many times taken back to the starting point, circular movement that sets the fundamental imprint on the whole story of speech and allows for a continuous loss and an equally continuous rediscovery of the so-called thread of the discourse.

Contents

Introduction – The atheism of Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach – The true meaning of The System of Nature – General bibliography essay on Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach – Bibliographic essay of the works of Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach.

Solchi

Sulci [grooves or furrows, especially on the surface of the brain]

Pensiero e azione – 12

2009, cloth bound, 330 pages

It is not easy to enter the moment, you have to be properly equipped, make your instruments subtle, lissome and unbiased. In the broad perspective, antagonistic causes are remote and can therefore be dealt with sufficiently. In the fragmentation of detail the enemy approaches and gets closer, even more threatening.

This book leads to inside my laboratory, revealing the methods of reflection that I apply within it, as well as the danger of the concreteness in which these methods find application. More than elsewhere, in these bewildered and bewildering notes one can grasp the sense of responsibility that everyone carries with them in the face of the merciless presence of every form of oppression and ignorance.

Production produces the object and its objectivization, that is, its legal characterization, possession. Life does not accept these conditions, it cannot be explained by mechanical or physical causes alone. Causalism penalizes the whole force of life, reducing it to an equation in balance between wonder and fatality. In life there is sometimes a sense of the end of world, in my life there is. My death produces the end of the world, at least the end of the world I created, which then is the whole world possible. There is also a sense of infinite despair, pure despair that no transformative conquest can satisfy. The shipwreck I stumbled upon when coming into the world, the ground on to which I was slammed, the fragments that I was able to put together, with difficulty, I managed to make all these curiousnesses become familiar to me, until I could call them my life, but I know that my life is elsewhere, in an elsewhere where the territory of the thing leaves its trace, and where I have gone as far beyond as my strength allowed, without being able to go beyond the dark areas of the void, the boundaries of the one who is.

Life is where it originated, fate can confirm this. I was born out of darkness and into darkness, and it is the night that still sculpts my memories, the modulated forms of my thoughts that can go back even beyond the occasional moment of birth. I sense my life as a reduced, formalized condition, and as a violent fracture, my life in action, I see myself agitated and moving forward as if I were certain of how to act. But in action there is no certainty, there is truth, which is not following a rule, so having no doubts, but being the truth, having all doubts and all certainties, and more, love to the highest degree, the tension and depth that the intellect will never be able govern no matter how many attempts it makes in remembrance with its mouth full of tow.

To come out of the word is a scandal, to come out trying to save what words conceal in order to guard it. I didn’t get a warrant, I don’t know why I use this device, I could be silent, stare at the wall of my tiny cell for years. Every once in a while some convict would shake his chains to see if he was still alive.

My life only makes sense if I lend it to it. But where to find it? Not the sense of lack of sense, all this sense that is constantly dribbled on the right and the left, sold in supermarkets and at the corner of every dark alley. Quality knocks on the door.

In all cases, there is no access to quality without involvement, and this may even be precluded to those who self-censor themselves feeling chosen by fate. In this passage an effort of further solitary concentration is required. Everything can easily be blocked by fear or disgust. Everything seemed ready for the departure towards the thing and instead I wake up in my rickety shelter.

Saggi sull’ateismo

Essays on Atheism

Pensiero e azione – 13

2009, 2nd ed., cloth bound, 336 pages

Here I am preparing the second edition of these Essays after almost forty years. Considerable effort for me, taking any re-reading or readjustment of my writings against the grain.

It is not the case to retrace the various stages of my philosophical maturation, whereas it seems indispensable to reaffirm my being an atheist, against any idea of God, even if disguised under the appealing veneer of truth, beauty, equality or freedom. If quality, in which all these ideas are summed up, can only be provided to me, or at least guaranteed, by some God, I prefer to remain in the suffocating condition of quantitative production, I prefer slavery. If I am to be a slave, I'd rather be a slave all the way, without being given some sort of liberation from a burning sky that would transform me from chained slave to courtyard slave.

Over the past forty years, I have discovered that science, the ideal of exactitude and measurable correspondence, the perfect functioning of reason, belonged to a divine realm, to an Olympus where aspects of certainty and control played various roles, all in the service of one central God. In short, not only was theism the counterpart of atheism, but also the much-vaunted science, on which I, like all my peers, had, at the end of the 1950s, placed our young hopes. One could therefore not accept a correspondence between atheism and scientific or dialectical materialism, the formulations are only apparently different. The struggle against God also had to be conducted against the dominance of science, the blind mother and stepmother of technology.

A secularization of religious thought is only one part of the task of atheism, the other is criticism of naturalism or realism, of what, in other aspects, is claimed by philosophy to be different from idealism or spiritualism, whereas deep down it proposes the same model of domination. Here, after long reflection, not only does the criticique of religion become central to my thinking but also the critique of science. Hence the importance of studies on the physical theory of indeterminacy and the epistemological limits of neopositivism.

I must mention here that neo-positivism in particular, along with the study of mathematics and economics, had, in my green years, been the tools for me to crack open the existentialist safe where I had enclosed not only my thought but also my heart, both of us fearful of being unable to do without the fascinating and continuous reading of the philosopher of absolute historicism, Benedetto Croce.

I think that being an atheist today can only be a starting point for considering life differently, your own life, not a vague smoky vitalism harbinger of sad conclusions. It is undoubtedly I who create the world and not the other way round. The fact that after me, after my death, the world will continue to be the world, is not something that comes from my doing, it is alien to me, for me it is purely an inference of the experience I have of others’ death but that is not my death, of my own death I have no experience.

Knowledge, also scientific, is mine if I make it my possession and archive it, but the accumulation is the whole of everyone’s knowledge, therefore also of the whole of reality, a total flux of which, however, I only have my own cognition, I only have my way of organizing the accumulation when I relate to it. This can fascinate for a while, then it begins to stink like an unwanted guest.

Contents

Introductions – Towards a constructive atheism – Education to atheism – Anthropologism and theism – The two ways of fighting religion – Methodological atheism and humanistic atheism – Atheism is not a faith – Rejection, explanation and absence of God – Atheism and theism – The creation of God – More on atheism and theism – Overcoming terror in the primitive – Atheism and anarchy – The problem of “coverage” – Religion in the USSR – Topicality of atheism – Atheism: the most important phenomenon of our time – The atheism of Bruno Bauer – The atheism of Michail Bakunin – The atheism of Albert Camus – The atheism of Bertrand Russell – Reasons for criticism of religion – My atheist research – The religious problem in the modern world – Atheism and class struggle – Nostalgia for God – Atheism between Nietzsche and Freud – Edmund Husserl and atheism – The one who is and atheism – Nietzsche and atheism: analysis of the Fragments.

A mano armata

At gunpoint

Pensiero e azione – 14

2021, 3rd ed., paperback, 332 pages

This book, especially now in its definitive form, is a reflection of my life, at least a substantial part of my life.

But the stronger the knowledge, the more its emptying yields lightness and joy.

This process is architecturally deployed in relation to absence as an anticipation of what the word is called upon to say. Whichever way one looks at this problem, the word here does not defend the powers of the will, it does not follow a path predetermined by it, but has its own anticipation, its own imprint in absence, i.e., in the already occurred.

Saying cannot grasp absence as though it were a presence, subject it to rules, but it can internalize it as anticipation of itself. In feeling myself light and in the silence that now enters all my fibre I no longer see this world conceived as a prison, even if in prison I truly am.

Life also expresses itself in silence and in the emptying of the thought of the thousand burdens of accumulation, conquests and defences. This life is thus pre-disposed to the word. The lightness of life is equal to its theatricality, there are no separate levels to live one after another successively. When it is knowledge that is realized, life shrinks, becomes impoverishing itself, in wisdom it reinvigorates, comes out into the open. All these affirmations sound very schematic, knowledge is seen in a critical, i.e. lighter, way now, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Action that takes shape from this inexhaustible possibility is beyond any possible experience that can be transferred, it sums itself up in something that does not exist in quantity and that I know from unproven experience if not for that different experience that I glimpse in remembrance, but always see as defeated quantity, not planned accumulation.

Action touches quality and produces transformation, but is not itself free, it can only make me experience quality, therefore also freedom, but just to the crucial point of the question that does not accept answers, the question, is that all?

I cannot insist endlessly if there is no objective answer, I would say almost generalised, an anxious questioning of the times not based, it may be that the answer is always absent, a persistent neglect. I cannot keep on insisting unless there is an objective answer, I would say almost generalized, an anxious questioning of the times is not enough, it may be that the answer is always absent, a persistent neglection.

The well of my excesses, the remote and useless religion of desires obtained because they were diverted from their source, which made them poor possessive conniptions, the red bitterness that clouds everything and closes with me inside, scrunching itself up like a huge sheet of paper.

Pity can wait, I have not taken it on board in the storm where I am sailing, I have forgotten it. I see even darker hurried clouds in the black sky.

Contents

Introduction to the second edition – Introduction to the first edition – Clément Duval – José Lluis Facerias – Love and death – Dying innocent causes more anger – The shadow of the executioner – The deliquent – The refusal of arms – The moral split – Ravachol’s ghost – No peaceful sleep – Alexandre Marius Jacob – Albert Libertad – Sante Pollastro – A ghost in the gallery – An aggressive mummy – Francisco Sabaté – Severino Di Giovanni – Please, let’s keep our feet on the ground! – Nestor Machno – The elusive beast – Like a thief in the night – Renzo Novatore – I know who killed commissario Luigi Calabresi – The anarchist tension

Machiavelli filosofo

Machiavelli philosopher

Pensiero e azione – 15

2013, cloth bound, 352 pages

Machiavelli is a hard man and, at the same time, an excessive one. He is a different author, one who managed to speak to my heart as well as my mind. What makes him sympathetic is soon said: his critical vision of life, the reduction of religion to an instrument of domination, the vital excess that sustained him throughout his life. The second part of the volume describes the cultural environment between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy. It is a piece that I wrote for a dear friend of mine, now dead, who published it as he thought fit. Here I am restoring the original draft.

Contents

Introductory note – Introduction – Machiavelli philosopher – The cultural landscape between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy – Annotations from Amfissa

L’Inquisizione. La tortura in nome di Dio

The Inquisition. Torture in God’s name

Pensiero e azione – 16

2013, cloth bound, 440 pages

Nothing succeeds in exacerbating spirits more than the study of the nefarious deeds committed by the catholic Church and its reformed version, particularly their respective Inquisitions. This book deals almost exclusively with the horrors of the first but the second does not deserve a less important place, only it is documentation that I have not gone into for purely incidental reasons. Yet the thesis here starts from the assumption that the Inquisition constitutes a rationalization in respect of previous procedures of the persecution of heretics based on the ordeal, on the judgment of God. But progress in horror, a regulation of horror, does not for this fail to affect our moral judgement. It was a rationalisation and the continuing, codified, of a disequilibrium. That fever that led to denouncing, imprisoning, torturing for twenty-four hours in front of a notary who drew up a relevant report, looking at it today, we avert still glimmering inside us. In the deepest depths of our immediate consciousness, so captive to daily doing, are we not still all afraid of the different? On colliding with behaviour different from our own, does not our angry reaction often contain an excessive response, politely excessive of course, but such as to indicate the existence of a possible collision? And then, if the Church has disarmed its executioners, replacing them with the watchful eyes of believers terrified by a more abstract devil and more concrete sins, it has only repainted its ancient and malevolent attitude of blessing crusaders and cannons wherever they may be. Violence is an institution of the Church in the same way as it is an institution of the State because it is inside man, it is a curse inherent in his way of being, not an exception. The torturer Fathers of a few centuries ago had the nerve to hand the condemned over to secular execution and in the relative act of judgement wrote “released”, washing their hands of it. In fact, how could the hands of those who make the god of sacrifice of Mass come alive daily, stain themselves with blood? The fact is that in violence man does not depart from himself by entering an evil realm only to return, reformed and repentant, to the good nature of original bliss. He abides in violence, this is his realm, he does not go against nature, his nature by ripping Damiens into four pieces, guilty of having made an attempt on Louis XV's life at the instigation of the Jesuits, the theorists of tyrannicide, he is not a monster, he does not go beyond himself, he simply remains what he is. And his acts of violence rarely rise up against him to critically assault his conscience, to reprimand him, to punish him. When this happens it is only because of a conflict inherent in the concept of freedom and a torturer does not even know what freedom is. If someone does not cut off his roots a torturer can grow old quietly convinced that he is in the right neither more nor less than Cardinal Bellarmine.

Contents

Introduction – Rational Catholic fundamentalism – Clashes of opinion – Attacks against the Inquisition – “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” – Medieval heresy: its motivations – the Cathars – The end of the Cathars – The Inquisition in Italy – Denunciation and torture – The Spanish Inquisition – Perfecting in rationalisation – Against the heresies of poverty – The flourishing of legal treaties – Storytellers old and new – The interrogation – Torturers old and new – Rules for the application of torture – More on torture – The death sentence – The prison – Promoting Autodafé and sub-penalties – Confiscation, trafficking and enrichment – Exhumation, trial and condemnation of the dead – The Jews and the “limpieza de sangre” – Racism.

Charles Baudelaire. Studi sull’assurdo

Charles Baudelaire. Studies on the absurd

Pensiero e azione – 17

2013, cloth bound, 344 pages.

Baudelaire is the genius of contradiction. He is perhaps the French poet I translated first, with all the consequences of the case. Continuous game of double meanings in the author and in the translator, later corrected by the best translations available at the time. But not all those double meanings would have displeased Baudelaire, who considered the illustrator of fashion magazines to be the greatest painter of romanticism. Astound to contradict. Double weaving of being and appearance, love and prostitution, blackmail and unpaid loans. At a time when I was desperately struggling to enter a closed and, ultimately, hostile environment, I could not be the author closest to existentialism, even if in practice nobody proposed the official location. But as I said, I wasn’t worried at all. Here there are neither Hegel nor Christ - nor the positive inspiration of poor Abbagnano - there are brothels and prostitutes, black consumptives and swans on the verge of dying asphyxiated, old women who dream of the high splendours and blind people who do not know where their night will end. There isn’t nature, there is man with his misery, poverty wan and sad, cowardice that gives up fighting, in short there is the being that wants to appear to be what it is not.

Contents

Introduction – Charles Baudelaire or shyness – Baudelaire and his fortune in Italy – The problem of translation – Still on Baudelaire’s luck in Italy – The translation of the Fleurs du Mal in Italy – Genesis of the poem “The man and the sea” in the life of Baudelaire and in the romantic culture – “L’Homme et la mer”. Analysis of translations. Technical problems and aesthetic problems – The many dead ends.

Michail Bakunin. Contro la storia [2 vol]

Mikhail Bakunin. Against History

Pensiero e azione – 18/19

2013, 2 vol. cloth bound, 696 pages

At the moment of publishing all my writings on Bakunin in one volume the question of my way of thinking about history arises. Over the past forty years, I have taken this issue up here and there, trying to clarify why I disagree with the way historians work, as, like philosophers - and perhaps even more brutally - they are often mere providers of material for the cave of massacres.

Their way of facing so-called sources goes hand in hand with the way philosophers approach existence and related problems. For these good people, historians and philosophers, the similarity of what they say and what they think documentation of what happened or had been thought is enough. As if the past were there before the eyes of the historian - let's put aside the philosopher of which we have said much elsewhere - as a dense web of correspondence, similarities, analogies and sympathies. That is obviously not the case.

As this is a book dedicated to Bakunin it cannot be considered a history book in the strict sense, and since I am not a historian it cannot be considered such in any way at all and that’s that. That said I’ve got rid of a weight and will carry on much lighter.

Bakunin is an anarchist revolutionary, his life and writings are inseparable, they are one and complement each other. There is therefore no sense in the distinction that has been made between biography and analysis of his theories. Precisely these distinctions show the poverty of so many efforts to not understand and not wanting to go into this man's action.

First of all, I would like to mention some of the main features of his action. I have already mentioned the non-separability of life and thought, the search for quality, not fearing completeness, the generous conception of courage as total involvement, destruction as a revolutionary fact, anarchy as the calling into question of any order, excess, the absence of prudence, always starting over again, overcoming as access to quality, devaluation of the forced administered productive world, and many others. These elements co-interact in the incredible fantastic melting pot of Bakunin's revolutionary action thereby providing true hallmarks to each individual realisation, thus finding itself inserted into an organic and significant context that nevertheless needs to be deciphered. And this reading cannot be done by a historian but must be done by a revolutionary, a partisan man.

Contents

Introduction – The polemic with Mazzini – Annotations – The First International in Italy and the conflict with Marx – Annotations – The Germano-Slavic question – State Communism – Annotations

Contents of the second volume

State and Anarchy – Annotations – Relations with Sergey Nechayev – Annotations – Slavic relations – Annotations – The Franco-Prussian War and the Social Revolution in France – Annotations – The Knut-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution – Annotations – Of Bakunin you die – Annotations

Cloro al clero. Apologia dell’anticlericalismo

Chlorine to the clergy. Apologia of anticlericalism

Pensiero e azione – 20

2013, cloth bound, 336 pages.

Anticlerical reader, perhaps you won’t find what you’re looking for here, don’t be mad at me. I hate priests just like and as much as you do, but I think the worst damage they have done, and they keep doing it in exactly the same way, is supplying moral justifications and suggesting loopholes to the exploiters.

With the blessing of the very nice priest-haters of once upon a time.

Ecrasez l’infâme! [Voltaire: Crush the loathsome thing!]

Contents

Something like an introduction – Actual introduction – Limits and justifications of economic activity in medieval thought – Essential features of Scholastic economic thought up to Thomas – Economics and ethics in ancient Christianity – The lawfulness of wealth in patristic thought – Hope – The Counter-Reformation and its consequences on political and moral theory – Benvenuto Cellini and Girolamo Cardano – Jus Primae Noctis – Catholic rural banks in the Catania area – The problem of education in the first series of ‘Civiltà Cattolica’ (1850-1852) – Jesus Christ never existed – A question of burning – God wills it – Back cover – The two Jesuses – Christian witchcraft – The religious plague – Witchcraft – The sign of the times – Soldiers of God – Nothing new in Ladispoli – The man dressed in white – Clothes and idols – The impudence of the throne – God doesn’t exist – Clericalism and anticlericalism – Of poverty – The tragic sentiment of life – For a concept of love – Thoughts of a mathematician – Notes of Amfissa.

Nicola Abbagnano

Nicola Abbagnano

Pensiero e azione – 21

2013, cloth bound, 352 pages.

The coldness and detachment of the methodology congenial to me at that time due to mere ignorance, started to crumble with the reading of the French and Russian poets and writers, anything but cold or camouflaged in their estrangement from the world. Dancing around the problem I could not help but be attracted by existentialism, even if, albeit from afar, Abbagnano’s version seemed to me to be a form of euphemism that downplayed the significance of the French and German version. Not particularly attracted by its novelty, not entirely new in the late fifties moreover, nor by the decadent modernity of some research that I was doing myself, the problem of being in all its nuances fascinated me and I felt that none of the three current directions, neither Sartre nor Heidegger nor Abbagnano, could satisfy me. The nullism of the first seemed to continually apologize for his extreme choices, the linguistic analysis of the second seemed to me directed at demonstrating the erasure of being, the positivity of the third reminded me - wrongly - of Croce and this for an ex-Crocian, was not a good presentation. The first two were ingenious, the second even fascinating in his ability to dissect language and make it speak, the third was prematurely aged, slow, unruffled, a kind of retired sinecure. I chose the third for the simple reason that I couldn’t choose the others. Going to Paris would have been materially impossible for me and to attend Heidegger was to go against two obstacles, the ostracism he was subjected to because of his Nazi past and the language. Going to Turin was still madness, but at least it was practicable madness. And so I began to read Abbagnano's three canonical books: Introduction to Existentialism, Positive Existentialism and Religion, Philosophy, Science, which constitute the analytical object of the present book, produced more than fifty years later on notes with margin notes made at the time.The impact was fiercely negative, I say that as regards the books, the next, that with the person, was better. Pleasant and captivating he was, though lacking the intellectual acumen that characterizes men of genius. But let’s proceed in order. I don’t want to use the faded colours of my current palette to talk about the man, I want to close my accounts with the philosopher, that’s all. Mine was a rising sun, warm and full of thrills, his was a setting sun, badly aged, eager to leave his mark somewhere in philosophy. I was devoid of purpose and scruples, he was full of the one and the other, as well as many other aspects, which, I discovered little by little, were certainly not likeable. I hated refinements and nuances as much as he loved them and I lived the scholastic condition in discomfort, it always weighed on me and annoyed me. I did not care much about positive acquisitions made in instalments, promises of future retribution, the neuroses of expectations of rewards to come, confessions of passions that I knew to be as lukewarm as mine were burning. I accumulated erroneously - all right - but I was fleeing from academic fraudulence or ineffable inspired attitudes. I had no fixed ideas and did not consider myself an aspiring philosopher. I did not accept watchwords or more or less long-term anointing or investiture. I was extremist and excessive, always ready to throw down the gauntlet.

Contents

Introduction – Introduction to existentialism – Positive existentialism – Existence and problematic reason – Value as problem – Faith, philosophy, religion – Time and sin – Man and science – The philosophical problem of science – The paradox of technique – Short conclusions.

Dal banditismo sociale alla guerriglia

From social banditry to guerrilla warfare

Pensiero e azione – 22

2013, cloth bound, 344 pages.

Persecuted by the law, feared by the rich, exalted by the poor, bandits have always been the subject of study for sociologists and material for popular ballads.

Contents

Social banditry – The internal front and rebellion – The guerrilla experience – The revolt of the slaves and the myth of Dionysus – Rinaldo and the Chanson de geste – Chairman Mao’s new clothes – Totalitarian democracy – Neither in heaven nor on earth – Strike! – The hard way – Nuclei Armati Proletari – Moro and the trombone players – Against militarism – Against the mafia.

Saggi sull’esistenzialismo

Essays on existentialism

Pensiero e azione – 23

2013, cloth bound, 400 pages

A choice of authors might have a guideline and might not. This one has one and sticks to it throughout the year's course, because that was how long the decision and effort of the study lasted, but it does not reflect the title. It is not so much a philosophy of existence that I nearly always sought, but the atrocity of life, that dark side which, thanks to the contrast, allows one to better understand what happens in the light. On these paths the tension rises continuously until it reaches maximum peaks in authors who experience the flames with which to live and destroy their lives, the flames of defeat. No certainty about being, appearing, rendered remote in so much philosophy of the dominant reason. In these authors being mixes and drowns in appearing, almost with irreversible irony, from time to time always different. The contraposition is never clear, because appearance is also a being, albeit reduced to that of a shadow. It is this veiled, sometimes almost invisible, atrocity that slips into consciousness and brings it into an intolerable tension where in the end it is forced to decide, either grow and self-centre as being, or fade into appearance, find a squalid quiet secluded sunset, next to the fire. Being lives of excesses, appearing of returns to order. The excess explodes in the improbable and unrepeatable, the weakening lives with itself in a funereal static agreement. ... Explosion of being means ruin, conscious exile of self in itself, breaking bridges, breaking down walls, no comfort or attenuation from the outside, often reduced to places of a unique squalor, with anyone who is able to mention a human relationship that does not lay bare the cruelty and bestiality of man. Here appearance retracts in its fictitious compactness, cannot explode, it is limited to leaking in an uncertain, bored, uneven way, as if a flame is extinguishing. If, in my opinion, existentialism raises the problem of being it is philosophy that cannot move a step if not does not take sides concerning the dichotomy with appearing. And I wanted to be, that is, live and act, not just dream or reflect. In front of these authors I did not wonder so much what they were saying but whether I was struck by their words, enchanted or simply indifferent. My yardstick was this, and it is the same one that we must now keep in this book that those essays are to relive, if we want to understand what they were saying and if they continue to say it today.

Contents

Introduction – The weight of the curse in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard – Arthur Rimbaud: genius and recklessness– Triumph of irrationalist philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche – The nihilistic dilemma and emblematic poetry – Franz Kafka and the condemnation of existence – The myth of Prometheus in André Gide’s adventure – Identity and sexuality: two psychological concepts to be saved – From the disordered affair of pride to the mystical return to God – Henri Bergson and the real duration – Existentialism and Marxism – Existentialist insights into contemporary spiritualism – The vertigo of horror in the poetry of the Count of Lautréamont – Giacomo Leopardi existentialist poet – Tristan Corbière and the freedom of destruction – Love and death in Keats’s poetry – Philosophers without philosophy .

La rivoluzione illogica

The illogical revolution

Pensiero e azione – 24

2013, 2nd ed., cloth bound, 344 pages.

The theses contained in this book are almost thirty years old but I believe that under the changed social and personal conditions they still preserve their validity. My own, first of all, and of the world around me - a prison, just for a change, a Greek one this time. The movement that these pages refer to, exasperated and in the grip of a thousand fictitious convulsions, is no more. The dynamism that characterized it, sometimes eager to be around just to prove its existence, was a process of disintegration. Of all the many objections in this book, the libertarian ones were not sufficient to produce a breakthrough. When something moved in that direction it was soon called to order, to a degradation active in the depths of many comrades, leading to the comforting quantitative illusion that I have often referred to. An illusion of action, as always destructive of any originality first, then also of analysis, in short, deficiencies in thought and action. The collapsing made such a din, cost so many lives, thousands of years of imprisonment and an acid exaltation, a sort of let’s pull the pillars down along with the Philistines. First of all, the pursuit of quantitative growth had the ill-concealed purpose of replacing an individual revolutionary consciousness that risked breaking up into a thousand facets. For this reason it was necessary to solidify it into something visible, an army that can be counted as an antidote to the threatened disease, that not well understood individualism often slandered as bourgeois nihilism, almost always despised but, in any case, which never disappeared completely. Not being a herd animal as this book also testifies, I was attacked from several angles, and this condition of mine exhausted me, it conspired accurately to my attrition but failed to get me to put my head down. I refused to hide behind the quantitative alibi, and always held on to my self-dominance. The relationship of the revolutionary movement with the level of the clash was present in my attention and concerns, but it did not suggest any machinations to magnify the former at the expense of the latter to me. These operations were precisely those of the armed party, suggested by weary minds, tired of always hindering themselves with their more or less metaphysical elucubrations and eager to give visible body to their exasperations by rehashing the great theories of the past, first of all the marxist ones. Avidity and misery of knowledge that teases itself, degenerating from hypothesis to culinary recipe to follow carefully and to the end. This, as I pointed out at the time, produces a lowering of the level of the clash, a tussle between leftovers left in the lurch, a dialogue between the deaf, a war summing up that only aspires to show off muscles and check who has the strongest biceps. A sick mentality produces the party because - armed or not - it cannot look for any other solution, the disease is fear of the unknown and the illogical, from which derives the vocation to count oneself to feel one’s back covered, safe, and secure one’s possessions. The association and the party are two sides of the same two-faced figure, enigmatic and grinning. Fear justified. What would become of the party in a condition of generalized self-management? Nothing, absolute nothingness, it would be set aside like scrap iron or would have to resort to the ancient methods dear to the massacrers of every era to curb the unreasonable rising up of a fearful idea inaccessible to the comprehension of stammering little bureaucrats. The latest metamorphosis of the quantitative illusion is the narrowest possible specialization, the most selected, a squad of massacrers at the service of a handful of theorists from the specialist schools of the dominant politics. Basically, the quantitative illusion reverses itself without realizing it into a minority dedicated to the construction of the spectacle. It is not the reality of the clash that counts but its transformation into spectacular presentation which fascinates and attracts many fearful little souls who still want to be close to those who have such great courage as to carry out gigantic actions for the simple purpose of saying: oplà, we exist.

Contents

Introductions – First part: The illogical revolution – The contradictory element of the revolution – The generalised clash – Movement and revolutionary violence – Critique of the armed party – On the clandestine organisation – Strategy of power and class clash – Against social peace – The baby and the bathwater – The armed hypothesis – Part Two: On doing and acting – Introductory note to the first edition – The individual and their acts – The situation – Relationships – Potential and power – Social action – The facts – Enemies of action – The false friends of action – Doing and acting – A yellow rose.

Il cristianesimo delle origini. Dalla condanna alla giustificazione della ricchezza

The Christianity of the origins. From condemnation to the justification of wealth

Pensiero e azione – 25

2014, cloth bound, 336 pages

In primitive Christianity there was a vitality that would never reappear again, it was not about conditions of struggle or danger that had to be faced before the official recognition and conquest of power, it was about ideas, projects, fraternal love, of mercy and piety, all qualities that would be submerged by bureaucratic procedures, by the ecclesial authority, by the theological decisions of the various Councils, by a compartmentalization that sometimes bordered on the exploitation of the poorest by the strongest, if not reduction to servitude in the name of the common Christian ideal.

Rather than study what has become of, one must understand what was at the beginning of Christianity, a Jewish heresy, radical and dangerous due to the precarious balance of power of the times and the communist message contrary to the riches that it brought to the wretched of Palestine, oppressed in the same way as they are today. The catalyst of power could not wish other than the status quo, this heresy preached the pooling of the goods of those who entered the community. Moreover, it did not accept becoming an tool of domination but proposed a division - perhaps late, indeed almost certainly due to the influence of the militant Paul - but present from the beginning in the tendency to live apart, not to mix with the intrigues of the dominant priests.

Neither power, nor king nor priests can place themselves on the side of the poor, only visionaries, utopians, heretics. The monstrosity of the ruling head has neither the time nor the desire to look down, it is proudly sure of itself, energetic, militarily able to extinguish any hint of diversity in blood. But primitive Christianity sought this diversity. It consigned it to the future, proposed it to destiny, to a different reign, that of heaven, a modest enticing metaphor, nevertheless able - in its pragmatic inconsistency - to give body to the dignity of the poor, to make them feel ready to consider themselves a carrier of value.

Contents

Introduction – Introduction to Greek economic thought – Greek economic thought from its origins to Socrates – The origins of Christianity and the problem of wealth.

Autogestione e anarchismo

Selfmanagement and anarchism

Pensiero e azione – 26

2014, 3rd ed., cloth bound, 336 pages.

In the long run, the path of the word succeeds in outlining sudden indications in the background, is capable of exploding absence, not mere expansions of memory, but lights and reflections that echo, in contradictory modulations and movements and unthinkable spaces, the underlying saying, the constant creative movement of the remembering word.

As time stretches, it casts shadows that cover the possibilities of comprehension, facts blur and become confused, calling for new interpretative sap. It is not always possible to avoid reflexes that deceive even the most exercised ear and eye. A gap, at times substantial, at times almost minimal, such as getting lost in the gap of memory, lying misunderstood. This gap is profound change

I have not tried to put a dressing on it, guilty conscience is one way of disturbing the iron custody of control, and perhaps in many cases it is not even voluntary but suddenly the considerable consistency of a cry appears, a quiver of wings, heat of scorching sun on the face covered by a light veil, a present that does not want to admit the past that defends itself by declaring ostracism and fixing revenge.

The will to attack, to defeat the enemy, returns to dominate and the sound gets even closer. The same misunderstanding is desire, something I worship because preserved from that degrading condition I call clarity at the ready. In this way, I free the world from its cosseted sufficiency and place it once again in a dimension that excludes limitation, that erases everything that limits. I profane with my muddy and since then never clean shoes everything that proposes sacredness and non-profanable limitlessness.

The struggle and piety that purport to manage knowledge are not easily matched. The word is a weapon that is sometimes handled piously, clumsily and foolishly. To dance with words, making them appear light and diaphanous when they can also be heavy and deadly, is to credit them with a function they only perform on behalf of the deceiver, of those who manage power. Certain nuances can be found in words and thus be collected, but it is not a question of desecrating fervor, only negligible refinements. Wanting to be inhuman with words is not difficult, after all it is about screaming louder, but that is a matter for weak spirits, going into their possible darkness instead is another matter, here dizzying depths suddenly arise that no one had ever suspected, without for this indicating the road to get right to the end. Rigidity and completion are not stimuli to be used for saying, only hesitation.

Contents

Introductions – The concept of self-management – Autonomy and self-management – The struggle for self-management – Anarchism and self-management – The counterpart – The ideology of production – Class struggle and self-management – Self-management and economic choices – Anarchist self-management – Self-management and real domination of capital – Space and capital – The LIP struggle – Theories of self-management – Amfissa notes.

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di filosofia. Bergamo

Philosophy lessons (out of place). Bergamo

Pensiero e azione – 27

2014, cloth bound, 352 pages.

During my stay in the Bergamo prison, I gave these (out of place) philosophy lessons to some fellow inmates.

As always, it happened to me in Bergamo as well, as soon as the prisoners learned I had a degree in philosophy, they asked me if I could give them some lessons. It could be said that there was not one prison, of the dozens in which I served my many periods of detention, where I did not receive this request. Although, also having a degree in economics, no one ever asked me to do any economics classes. We should think about this oddity. Authorized by the management, but without the presence of an educator as is foreseen by the regulation, the participants were six in all, including myself. The structure of the lessons was simple: an introductory intervention by me, followed by the reading of a text and the discussion ended with a comment of mine. I cannot give an account of the discussion because in prison recording of lessons wasn't authorised.

That’s all. It’s pointless to talk about results, I don’t know them. I made an effort with passion and interest and as far as I am concerned, it was useful for my research, I hope that something has also remained in the other hearts forced into the atrocious torture of imprisonment.

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di filosofia. Parma

(Out of place) Philosophy lessons. Parma

Pensiero e azione – 28

2014, cloth bound. 336 pages.

On 23 March 1980 I was arrested in Catania and taken to Parma. After a few months’ isolation I was put in a normal cell, still alone, but have the chance to see some prisoners who, having already learned of my degree in philosophy, asked me to give them lessons. We were allowed to gather in the games room and use the table tennis table to put our books on and take notes. The management initially imposed the presence of an educator, after a few lessons this person disappeared and we were able to be alone.

My research was focused on the relationship between Space and Capital at the beginning of 1980, so this is often the theme that provides the opportunity for the discussion, as well as the choice of texts to read. The structure of the lessons consisted of my initial discourse, the reading of some pages of the texts available to us, a discussion and then my closing intervention.

As the use of the tape recorder was not permitted, I don't have a record of the discussions that took place after reading the texts at the end of each lesson, but only the brief traces of my explanatory discourses, in most cases reconstructed through shorthand notes so long ago [1998] that they are almost indecipherable.

Movimento e progetto rivoluzionario. Astensionismo elettorale anarchico

Movement and revolutionary project. Anarchist electoral abstentionism

Pensiero e azione – 29

2014, 2a ed., cloth bound, 360 pages.

If concreteness is unusual and infrequent under the cloudy sky of political chatter, it can be replaced by forging something that can take its place, a full-blown ghost able to colonize the territory that it should occupy deploying its fullness to be what it cannot be. It is the illusion that plays its best cards here, it is of it that we speak, it is on it that we operate and that they then lengthen, terrible, the shadows of disappointment. But the world is made thus, despite the lucidity of the few it is the many who run festively into the arms of the fictitious and sew flags putting together strange and curious combinations of analysis and dullness, faith and neglect. The fact is that a real movement has many enemies waiting for it to break through and which they immediately grasp the weaknesses of to make it prop* and perspective on its reverse, the fictional side that every concreteness never fails to have.

And yet, even in an underground way, as perhaps happens in times of corruption such as those in which I am writing inside a Greek prison - this movement rooted in reality does not lay down its arms, it always advances, it takes air and breathes, sometimes it is almost suffocated, then miraculously finds the way to breathe and returns threateningly to make itself heard. It has no hidden tendencies towards despair, it does not care about its thousand-year misadventures, it works against fate and fortune, it does not care, basically, to achieve a precise goal, here and now, a contingent overthrow of enemy establishing in the form of power in any place, an exacerbation of repression, now, in the delirium of some dictator by the dozen, is not here its aim.

Here is a considerable element of reflection. The fictional side is coloured by historical teaching and philosophical props, embraces this or that doctrine of liberation, is stimulated by the many humiliations of slavery, but this is not the same ground on which the real revolutionary movement operates. The latter has not such modest dimensions, it expands to a universal concept of destruction that looks to the future with a different eye.

In the face of the fictitious, the real revolutionary movement is absolutely other, the one that most differently succeeds in gaining concreteness and power. It is not easy to grasp this diversity because it is a question of something unique. The being is chaotic in its intrinsic reality and cannot be understood except by great qualitative intuitions in acting, or discussed by contrast and in perspective drawing the effects and consequences of the experience that we can all have of the fictional movement. While the latter lives his discrete condition in flashes, the other has a condition of continuous life, not uniform, as we have seen, but continuous.

Contents

Introduction to the second edition

Part one: Movement and the revolutionary project – Introductory note to the first edition – Why a vanguard? – Fictitious movement and real movement – Revolutionary anarchist information – The limits of anarcho-syndicalism – The self-management perspective – New values and the self-organisation of struggles – Economists and the problem of socialism in the USSR – On feminism – Culture, territory and marginalisation – Class war

Part two: Anarchist electoral abstentionism – A weapon of the proletariat for social revolution – For subversive abstentionism.

Pëtr Kropotkin. Contro la scienza

Peter Kropotkin. Against science

Pensiero e azione – 30

2014, cloth bound, 360 pages.

I have dwelt on Kropoktin, his scientific theses and his revolutionary and anarchist analyses on many occasions. Gradually with less enthusiasm, to the point of taking myself away, in recent years, almost completely, at least after the drafting and publication of my afterwords to The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid, nodal points of the thought of this fascinating anarchist scholar. The fact is that with the passage of time two things have been growing inside me: distrust in the clear and luminous perspectives of the human soul and the parallel distrust on the possibilities of science, more or less modernized, to give support to any project of this kind.

Not that I had ever had great confidence in processes internal to reality, processes basically of a deterministic nature even if lived through probabilistic insinuations, but also my extensive research on indeterminism could not hide the dream, so well rooted in every anarchist, Rousseau’s good wild savage that sooner or later ends up coming forth. Now I no longer look to the future – since this, for me, can only be a short-lived affair – although I cannot surreptitiously say that the slime I found inside reality, any kind of reality, will continue like this until the end of time. I don’t know if the human beast will one day be able to soar towards that free “caught in the pile” of which Kropotkin speaks, not limiting it to the economic sphere alone, but I have not long since based my action on this hypothesis.

Against science, as well as against history. The parallel cannot be softened, the responsibilities are many, the millions of deaths are becoming more and more, slaughterhouses are opening up everywhere and few seem to notice it, given how busy they are in amusing themselves with their own interests. To gather under the scientific ranks or the historical ones, as my few readers know, does not have much of a distinguishing power for me. One is responsible under the aegis of science just as that under history, and the subsidiaries swarm in disorder, confusing the ranks, so much so that it becomes only a nominalistic matter to distinguish between those who embrace science as their idol and those who embrace history. From this point of view, I find more consequential Gentile in his haughty and self-conscious affiliation, than Croce. And yet these two fighters of positivism, who reigned in the name of the idealism to be upheld, were shouting from the rooftops that they were for unity, the first, for distinction, the second, fascism and liberalism, chatterbox nuances. Let’s leave them to the moths of memory.

Contents

Introduction - The Conquest of Bread - Mutual Aid - Preface for a new edition of Ethics - Russian Literature - The State and its historical role - The great revolution - The scissors of anarchy - Anarchy as organisation - Letters to Lenin - Manifesto of the Sixteen - Words of a rebel - Critical analysis of scientificity.

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di storia della filosofia. Catania [2 vol.]

(Misplaced) philosophy lessons. Catania (2 vol.)

Pensiero e azione – 31/32

2015, 2 vol. cloth bound, 718 pages.

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di storia della filosofia. Catania Vol. 1. Cartesio – Merleau-Ponty, 1953-1954

(Misplaced) philosophy lessons. Catania Vol. 1 Descartes – Merleau-Ponty, 1953-1954

Lezioni (fuori luogo) di storia della filosofia. Catania Vol. 2.

(Out of place) philosophy lessons. Catania Vol. 2 Presocratici – Galilei, 1954-1955

L’ospite inatteso

The Unexpected Guest

Pensiero e azione – 33

2014, cloth bound 368 pages.

Death and life. That is the object of this book. To place oneself at the crossroads between these two realities is to look into the abyss without trembling, without allowing oneself to be drawn downwards to find any solution to problems that are too big, too harrowing. Life might be appearance - indeed it almost always is - but it is different from death. The latter is the absence of that very appearance, the zeroing of what comes as a negation or rejection of being. Being is too demanding and so we fall back on appearing. So life is neither uniform nor necessary. There are people who live their whole life as if dead, a life of a corpse, and when they do die they are not even aware of what they have lost. We never think that our life is this one only and there are no replays. Living is therefore a commitment that could become being or remain a shadow on the wall of the cave of massacres. Everyone thinks they choose their life, build their possibilities. In spite of every possible illusion, this is only true to a very small degree. There is no biological calling that urges us to live; on the contrary, we often instinctively behave in exactly the opposite way. We take risks every day, develop harmful habits, close our eyes to vital evidence. But this is a doing that only leads - if carefully controlled - to building a more lasting machine, perhaps an unaware death exactly as long as one's own life. It is therefore not the purely biological aspect that captures the meaning of life. Perhaps it is precisely the opposite.

By putting oneself on the line, even dangerously so - and this book is a rough glimpse at my putting myself on the line - perhaps one gains access to the conditions of life, understands the intrinsic flow of living itself.

Do I get beyond appearance? Perhaps. This might just be wishful thinking, after all, we need means at our disposal. Willpower alone cannot free us, it pins us to the daily grind and doing - however reckless (who is writing is a former motorbike racer) - is always controlled by the will. Life is being and being is quality. Quality cannot be found in doing but in acting. Life is therefore action. Death, which will be spoken of many times in this book, is a moment of truth in action, a primary quality along with freedom. In action I can irremediably meet my own death and I can bring about the death of the enemy.

Dominio e rivolta. Seconda edizione riveduta e corretta con l’aggiunta delle conferenze di Patrasso, Atene, Iraklio, Volos, Thessaloniki, Ioànnina

Dominion and revolt. Second edition revised and corrected with the addition of the talks of Patras, Athens, Heraklion, Volos, Thessaloniki, Ioannina

Pensiero e azione – 34

2015, 2a ed., cloth bound, 352 pages.

The texts presented here are the transcription of the tape recording of a seminar held in four evenings at the Faculty of Sociology of the University “La Sapienza” in Rome. Although slightly put in order for easier reading, they are strongly affected by the discursive origin both in the form and the evolution of the arguments. The theme of domination and revolt mark the front of the clash, the line of combat, the division between included and excluded.

All the texts, it seems to me on rereading the transcribed text, are traversed by a desire to break with the classic framework of the reflective way of proceeding, the logical proposition. Something impossible, of course, without falling into pure delirium, a choice my listeners kept me away from. There is no way to avoid being influenced by those who want to listen and by the place itself, the environment in which words resound (as the ancient Greek philosophers knew perfectly well).

Contents

Introductory note to the first edition – First seminar – Second seminar – Third seminar – Fourth seminar – Striking the enemy – Destruction of work – Debate on radio 98 FM Athens – Discussion with the comrades of the anarchist archive of Nicosia – Without collaborating – Insurrection – Attacking the weak points of the enemy – Decline of the proletariat – Appendix: Exploration of defeat

I fondamenti di una teoria filosofica dell’indeterminazione

The foundations of a philosophical theory of indeterminacy

Pensiero e azione – 35

2015, 2nd ed., cloth bound. 336 pages.

The second edition of this book has come out after almost half a century. Other times and urgencies were moving on my horizon. New practices were about to unfold, and previous research would be concluded without offering me an arrangement that would silence my concerns.

Contents

Introduction to the first edition Limits and possibilities of a philosophy-science collaboration – + and - Essential principles of logic – Philosophical indetermination – Appendix: Questions for discussion

Manuale scientifico a uso degli increduli

Scientific handbook for the incredulous

Pensiero e azione – 36

2015, 2nd ed., cloth bound, 335 pages

Who are the unbelievers? Those who do not accept established authority, not on a matter of principle, which would still be an incongruous attitude of acceptance of authority, plain simple ideologism as it was agreed to call it, but who do not accept it because they want to fight in practice, beyond formal aspects and maximalisms good for all seasons. Negative criticism? Yes. That too. But still more beyond.

Miseria della cultura. Cultura della miseria

Poverty of culture. Culture of poverty

Pensiero e azione – 37

2015, 2nd ed., cloth bound, 368 pages

These two pamphlets, initially condemned to separation and excessive simplification, have been brought to life again. Now they have been completed with further reflections on the subject, almost all carried out in the prison of Trieste, and with a few more recent testimonies.

No didactic intent, just as there was none in the first edition. The topic lends itself to extremism of all kinds, let’s leave them aside. The word is what it is, culture is its degenerate amplification, as is obvious. We are all on the wrong side and it will certainly not be some clever little adjustment that straightens the rudder.

Senza una ragione. Seconda edizione riveduta e corretta con l’aggiunta di Dire la verità

Without a reason. Second edition revised and corrected with the addition of Saying the truth

Pensiero e azione – 38

2015, 2a ed., cloth bound, 320 pages

These texts, which concern two extremely painful problems: the deep reason why there must be or must not be a reason in doing and consequent possible acting, and the no less profound reason why it is not possible “to tell” the truth, are seeing the light again, updated and expanded. Much has been said about these two problems, particularly by philosophers and mathematicians. They remain open and there is no reason why these late papers should solve them, if it were ever possible to solve problems one way or another. So, this is more a preparation for action or, if you prefer, a suggestion on the best way to leave one’s baggage on the shore before embarking on a navigation that not only could be but is life and death.

Contro la chiarezza. Contro l’oggettività

Against clarity. Against objectivity

Pensiero e azione – 39

2015, 2nd ed., cloth bound, 320 pages

Set things right, one by one, with manic care. The dream of every good conservative, even the one who, shrewdly and discreetly, dwells within me. Another possibility: throw everything in a drawer somewhere, possibly that imaginary archive that I have always fed so many papers of the past into in homage to my misadventures on the one hand, and my contempt for documentation and mould on the other. Archive punctually emptied into the rubbish collection. Peace to all. But there is something that moves under these texts of mine that still concerns me, even now on the threshold of seventy-seven years (a few days and it’s done), fateful threshold, far beyond the limit I had set myself, naively, like when as a child I played alone, skipping on the pavement, avoiding putting my feet in the seams of the lava slabs.

Critica della ragione politica

Critique of political reason

Pensiero e azione – 40

2015, cloth bound, 352 pages.

The texts assembled in this book are not strictly inherent to the current concept of “politics”. The emphasis should therefore be on the term “reason” rather than the accompanying title “critical”. Let’s see why. It is not possible to deflesh strictly political arguments, so attempting to do so would be a waste of time. Many ghosts huddle at the door of the cave of massacres in which the slime of human activity that adorns itself with this not very commendable title “politics” bubbles. It is therefore appropriate to forget the ancient sign left by Aristotle and realize that is the science of the State, the only one that can be called politics in the strict sense. But what is the “science of the State” if not the study of how to massacre and oppress in the best possible way paying the lowest possible price, those who for various reasons end up being passive subjects of exploitation?

Contents

Introduction – Critique of political reason – The bee and the communist. Critique of a Treatise on theological entomology – Repression and social control – The struggle against fascism begins with the struggle against Bolshevism – Anarchism and democracy – Aldo Capitini’s political analysis between Kant and Hegel

Dissonanze

Dissonances

Pensiero e azione – 41

2015, 2nd ed., cloth bound, 729 pages

Contents of the volume

Introduction to the second edition – Introduction to the first edition in six volumes – Buy the Vatican – Animal-Man – Animals – Anticlericalism – Antifascism – Rendezvous with the apocalypse – In pieces – Antonin Artaud – Just blanks – Flattering mortal aspirations – Abstentionism – Rancour – John Vincent Atanasoff – Freshly printed banknote – Mustachioed and skirt-wearing – Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli – Benefactor – Ignacio Matte Blanco – Bombs apart – A full barrel and a drunk wife – Bruno Bozzoli – Football – Cab Calloway – Corporals – Carabiniere – Carrion – The judgement of Cerberus – Certainty – The fierce certainty of one’s duty – What is economy – Who gains in devaluation – Class – Commanders – Community – Conservation – Buddhists wanted – Social control – Consciousness – Culture – Cyberpunk – Guy Debord - Decisionism - anything and everything - Let’s destroy school - Drugs - Doubt - Doris Durante - Social ecology – Entrism – Salvation Army – Family – Force - Franco Fortini - Between the lines of the state budget - André Frossard - Jumping the gun - Game and death - The old lady’s woes - Ludwig von Hackwitz - Hacker - Hooligan - Idea - Imaginary - Cultural impoverishment - Innocuous little examination - Internationalism - Labour - Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy - Henri Laborit - Work how much? - Liala - National Liberation - Enrique Lister - Insurrectional Struggle - Lord Lovat - But Working Tires - Mafia - Illness - Mia Martini - Mass - The Slaughterer and the Slaughterers - Mathematics - Cipriano Mera - Measurements: 86-55-86 - Aeronautical Threats - Miserable Military Glories - Modernity - Monks - Student movements - European Muscles - Edda Mussolini - Not just Napoleon - Not just producers - Fiscal objection - Homosexuality - Order - Ear - Spontaneous organisation - Recurring obscurity - Pagliacci - Vincenzo Parisi - Participation - On the workers’ side - Particle - A little man in Singapore - Giandomenico Pisapia - Pluto, lord of darkness - Police - Always policemen they remain - Karl Popper - Pornography - Produce what? - The Trial - Some Little Gift - The Repressive Project - Psychoanalysis - Racism - Religion - Repression - Rebel - Reduction - French Revolution - Carlo Rubbia - Leonardo Sciascia - Discussion outline for school intervention - Above and below - Sindone - Experimentation and billions - Joe Slovo - Studying as a spy - Salty pond - Statuette - Ugo Stille - Suicide - Skinheads - Tolerance - Again, not again - Totality - Courts - Mamma, the Turks are coming! - Utopia - Vendee - Old Guard - High Speed - Journey - Violence and Stupidity - Davide Visani - Bruno Visentini - Volunteering - Eugene Wigner - Harold Wilson - George Woodcock.

Autodifesa al processo di Roma per banda armata, ecc. Seconda edizione riveduta e corretta con l’aggiunta di Liber asinorum

Self-defence at the Rome trial for armed gang, etc Second edition revised and corrected with the addition of Liber asinorum

Pensiero e azione – 42

2015, 2nd ed., cloth bound, 368 pages

The vexed question of defence in court by anarchists should be taken up here. I have spoken at length about it elsewhere, perhaps more than I should for the simple reason that, as a frequenter of courts I have been asking myself this question for some time, say since 1972.

Still today, and it’s been a long time and so many good people, trusted comrades and also clowns with encircled countersign, have paraded before my eyes, still today I think in a simple way. There are cases where it is pointless to attempt to defend yourself in court, situations where you are caught in the act in an action of attack gone wrong, and so it is better—still in my opinion, of course—to stay in jail rather than attend a farce that turns out to be alien and absurd. But there are cases in which the fabrication by power is not only evident, because this repressive means is almost always used against anarchists, but is also badly devised and even more badly realized. Now, in these cases, the very purpose of the frame-up is to aggravate the criminal condition of the accused, that is, make sure they keep us in jail as long as possible, subtracting us from the struggle that we could be carrying out more effectively outside. It is in the latter case that we need to make ourselves heard in court. And it is such a case that we will be discussing in this volume.

Contents

Introductory note to the second edition - Part one: Introductory note to the first edition - Statement given to the Court of Assizes of Rome on 30 November 1999 - Defence memorandum presented to the Judge of the Preliminary Hearing of Rome on 8 March 1997 - Frame-up - The executioners in togas - Apart from the obvious exceptions - Part two: Interrogation conducted by Public Prosecutor Marini on 15 December 1999 - Interview given to Radio Onda Rossa on 20 November 1997 - Various documents - Notes to the text of the ROS - Notes for lawyer Paolo Venturino relative to the defence in the Marini trial - From the first degree sentence of the Rome Court of Assizes of 31 May 2000 - From the second degree sentence of the Rome Court of Assizes of 1 February 2003 - Other trials - Investigations - Part three: Liber asinorum - Appendix

Zarathustra

Zarathustra

Pensiero e azione – 43

2015, cloth bound, 352 pages.

Zarathustra on my fourth reading. A strange book for a comrade, difficult, devious, rhythmic in a crazy, irrational way. Yet a friendly book, of that friendship that clashes and does not provide cheap alibis or windowsills for observing known sunsets.

Chi ha paura della rivoluzione? Terza edizione aumentata e corretta

Who’s afraid of the revolution? Third edition revised and corrected

Pensiero e azione – 44

2015, 3rd ed., cloth bound, 336 pages.

Here’s a book I wasn’t planning on bringing out again. Not because I thought it was out of time, outdated, chatter to be left on the bottom shelves of a library, but because I thought many of these problems had been cleared up once and for all. It’s not like that. There are no problems that end to be gone beyond and never again mentioned. After all, we always go back to starting all over again.

To exorcise this perspective, a little disturbing at my age, I have removed the subtitle, that «Let’s start all over again», which even in its time had seemed defiantly provocative and now seems pointless coquetry to me.

Contents

Introduction to the third edition - Note to the reader - Introduction to the first edition - A few steps forward, many steps back - The flight into fantasy - Keeping to the surface - Anchoring oneself in dogma - Cleaning the sign - Infamy pure and simple - Groping in ignorance - Not knowing how to make up one’s mind - Drafting the catechism - Nature above all - Starting afresh - Afterword from 1990 - Identifying the enemy

Opuscoli provvisori

Io so chi ha ucciso il commissario Luigi Calabresi

I Know Who Killed chief superintendent Luigi Calabresi

Opuscoli provvisori – 1. 2013, 4th ed., 120 pages.

If this world is based on commensurate justice, on the numerical calculations of give and take, of a punishment for the wrong done and doing a wrong for the punishment suffered, it is a world that has nothing to do with the idea of justice that came forth collectively at that moment, that evening, in the Cemetery of Milan. So it was that night, without anyone wanting or knowing it, that an idea of justice emerged that had not existed before, an idea that goes beyond and makes laughable individual desire, the single fantasy of shooting the good chief superintendent Calabresi, a desire and fantasy certainly cultivated by almost all of those present.

That’s why I know who killed chief superintendent Luigi Calabresi, on May 17th 1972, outside his house, in via Cherubini 6, in Milan, at a quarter past nine in the morning.

No forgiveness. No mercy.

La gioia armata

Armed Joy

Opuscoli provvisori – 2. 2013, 3rd ed., 74 pages

The comrade who sets off in the fog every morning and walks into the stifling atmosphere of the factory, or the office, only to see the same faces: the foreman, the timekeeper, the spy of the moment, the Stakhanovite-with-seven-children-to-support, feels the need for revolution, the struggle and the physical clash, even a mortal one. But he also wants to bring himself some joy now, right away. And he nurtures this joy in his fantasies as he walks along head down in the fog, spends hours on trains or trams, suffocates in the pointless goings on of the office or amidst the useless bolts that serve to hold the useless mechanisms of capital together.

Distruggiamo il lavoro

Let’s Destroy Work

Opuscoli provvisori – 4. 2013, 4th ed., 36 pages

I do not think many of us can see the refusal of work simply as an acceptance of the deadly boredom of doing nothing while keeping on the lookout for traps set by others who might try to convince us to do something through solicitations or flattery, perhaps in the name of an ideal, or personal affection or friendship, or who knows what other devilry capable of threatening our condition of complete inertia. Such a situation would be pointless.

On the contrary, I think that the refusal of work can be seen in the first place as a desire to do what one enjoys most, that is to say of transforming obligatory doing into free action.

La tensione anarchica

The Anarchist Tension

Opuscoli provvisori – 7. 2013, 3rd ed., 56 pages

Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, old people or children, is not something definitive: it is a stake we must play day after day. When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground we must have a good reason for getting up, if we don’t it makes no difference whether we are anarchists or not. We might as well stay in bed and sleep. And to have a good reason we must know what we want to do because for anarchism, for the anarchist, there is no difference between what we do and what we think, but there is a continual reversing of theory into action and action into theory. That is what makes the anarchist unlike anyone who has another concept of life and crystallises this concept in a political practice, in political theory.

Chiusi a chiave. Una riflessione sul carcere

Locked Up. A reflection on prison

Opuscoli provvisori – 8. 2013, 4th ed., 104 pages

Prison is the mainstay of the present society. Often it does not seem so, but it is. Our permissive, educative society allows itself to be guided by enlightened politicians and is against any recourse to strong measures. It looks on scandalised at the massacres dotted all over the world map, and seems to be composed of so many respectable citizens whose only concerns are respecting nature and paying as little tax as possible. This society, which considers itself to be far beyond barbarity and horror, has prison on its very doorstep. Now, the mere existence of a place where men and women are held locked up in opportunely equipped iron cages, watched over by other men and women wielding bunches of keys, a place where human beings spend years and years of their lives doing nothing, absolutely nothing, is a sign of the utmost disgrace, not just for this society but for a whole historical era. I am writing this introduction in Rebibbia prison and I don’t feel like changing a word of the talk that I gave in Bologna a few years ago. If I compare the thick headedness of the prison institution today with that of my experiences recounted in the text published below, I see that nothing has changed. Nothing could change. Prison is a sore that society tries to in vain conceal. Like the doctors in the seventeenth century who treated the plague by putting ointment on the sores but left rats running around among the rubbish, today, at every level of the prison hierarchy technicians are trying to cover up this or that horrible aspect of prison, not realising that the only way to face the latter is to destroy it. We must destroy all prisons and leave not one stone standing, not keep a few around in order to remember them in the way that humanity has done with other constructions that testify to the most atrocious infamy.

La bestia inafferrabile

The elusive beast

Opuscoli provvisori – 9. 2009, 2nd ed., 128 pages

Chasing it for a long time, the animal becomes ferocious. It realizes how the alleged civil cohabitations are ridiculous features of the State fetish and how the ancient repressive substance of domination remains intact underneath, that of unquestionable absolutism because it is certain of its own strength. The beast had heard of it, even when it was caressed in the direction of the hair, when fraternal words of comfort and tolerance were addressed to it, so that it did not feel the spikes of the collar or the teeth of the bite with which its good-natured and lustful exuberance was restrained. The chain had been lengthened to the edge of the field and, in recent times, was even coloured. Thus, his eyes of tame beast had been able to see, as in a dream, what remained of the distant landscape, never reached because out of reach, always desired. And so, as if for fun, he had begun to bare his teeth to the master, make him some rude faces, some howls too many. It is not that the master no longer has confidence in the chain, even if elongated, it is that he does not want the thing to be known, for other chained beasts to allow themselves to grind their teeth, to jeer or howl looking with an eager eye at the distant landscape of freedom that they should never should have seen.

Anarchismo insurrezionalista

Insurrectionalist anarchism

Opuscoli provvisori – 10. 2019, 3rd ed., 192 pages

Behind every aspect of anarchist insurrectionalist theory hides a project. I do not mean a lifeless picture complete in every detail, but a sufficiently identifiable project far beyond these pages. Without taking this into account no analytical explanation will do much, it would risk remaining what it is, a set of words claiming to contest reality, an incongruously idealist claim. That does not mean that the problem of method can be approached out of the blue without taking account of what has been said in a whole host of ways, even by classical German philosophy; that would be naive. There are no shortcuts or recipes in this perspective, only hard revolutionary work, study and destructive action. In wanting to be free there is monstrous temptation, you would rip your chest open. The very word freedom is already a scandal, to be able to pronounce it without blushing is a scandal. For me to insist on saying this word without dealing with the consequences that it implies and confronts me with, would be just as outrageous. After all, freedom cannot be said, so the word freedom is deceiving and deceives me as soon as I say it.

Critica del sindacalismo

A Critique of syndicalist Methods

Opuscoli provvisori – 12. 2009, 2a ed., 190 pages

Many of the insights and thought-provoking elements contained in this book have at times been violent in a certain way, verified in the daily reality of this beginning of the millennium. The unions have become more and more what they have always been, including any tail fringe. They could not have had any other fate. The workers, hit in full by the instruments of class disintegration, have recoiled to the point of finding themselves cornered. Looking around, they saw that they had been left alone, surrounded by various spare productive components available at minimum wages, and ended up losing confidence in themselves after losing it in their union leaders. Now the latter, in the places of production, play the simple role of transmission belts with the managerial class of the included, rather than with the political class of the parties, also disintegrated and prey to its own problems, which, here, are not worth talking about. The outbursts of anger are different, and from these, as per the manual, the union keeps a distance. In many respects this book continues to hit the nail while it has now completely entered the wall. A de profundis? maybe not, who knows? You never know with these things. See you on the barricades.

Come un ladro nella notte

Like a thief in the night

Opuscoli provvisori – 13. 2009, 2nd ed., 108 pages

Action that does not involve me, that does not change my life by putting me at risk, is simply doing, a routine that even risks infecting my everyday life. I would like to write all this for others, and I am doing it, for me this is a necessary evil which I try in every way to escape. When I find a reader my heart leaps and I wonder if who will be able to read what I, only I, can barely see in what I am writing has finally arrived. Freedom, and therefore also anarchy, must not be told, it is a blind condition, it does not allow itself to be written down. The will only apparently resets it, to better control it, but it can never erase it completely. Even in the worst, in the trades and the sold out, it turns into false conscienciousness and bites mercilessly. The will lives on the credit of freedom. The pain it brings with it is not easily distinguishable from pleasure. Anarchy is the highest level of freedom, recognizing this itinerary, discovering it, following it, are exhausting exercises and require a certain murderous tendency. The anarchist does not dream of destruction, he destroys. Anarchy, and therefore also freedom, cannot be sought as a concluded communion, a perfect completion of what I clearly lack in life. The effort of action is directed, at best, to a disappointment, to finding a defeat, but this end is for the few, in fact few are those who do not let themselves be overwhelmed by the triumph decreed to them by the stupid.

Internazionale Antiautoritaria Insurrezionalista

Insurrectionalist Antiauthoritarian International

Opuscoli provvisori – 14. 2009, 2a ed., 176 pages

Thinking of a series of stable relationships between comrades within the Mediterranean basin, an essential nucleus from which to start towards a possible greater future breadth, even beyond the initial geographical limits, has been a cherished dream for many years. Not just any organizational fetish, a strong high-sounding acronym that like a dummy scarecrow kept away the malicious repressors and attracted the pure souls of the anarchists eager to know each other, but something concrete, real, able to go beyond the formal aspects or, if you prefer, the flag, to essentialize the problem. Attempts in this direction have been many, all animated by a broader, more generic perspective, the one that as a rule feeds encounters between comrades at the international level, important knowledge to get hold of, in a direct way, the news that only those who live in a specific place possess. The repressive aspects, almost always, much less also the initiatives of struggle understood in the precise sense of the term, i.e. when we ourselves take the game in hand and direct it our own way. The project of the Anti-Authoritarian Insurrectionalist International is sufficiently outlined in this book, its path is still to be imagined.

Errico Malatesta e la violenza rivoluzionaria

Errico Malatesta and revolutionary violence

Opuscoli provvisori – 17. 2009, 76 pages

At first Malatesta seemed to limit justification of the use of violence to the realm of defence. The only violence that is justifiable is that with which one defends oneself against an injustice. But later on he adds: he who finds himself in a constant state of self-defence, i.e. the exploited, is always justified in attacking those who exploit, taking into account the ‘utility’ of this attack and the human suffering that it inevitably causes. So, he is not speaking of ‘violence’ in abstract terms, as often happens among comrades, unfortunately,—fuelling much of the misunderstanding concerning pacifism—but is speaking of the class condition in which nearly all those who are morally entitled to use violence find themselves. The fact that this use of violence comes up against a sentence sanctioned by the laws in force is of no interest to the anarchist. There remains the practical assessment, the utility of the action and the suffering that it might cause.

I giovani in una società post-industriale

The young in a post-industrial society

Opuscoli provvisori – 19. 2009, 78 pages

The conditions surrounding what remains of the human being are far more bewildering for the young, those still looking towards the future not having on their back the abyss waiting to open and swallow up an old man. I am well aware that the following considerations might move some to laughter, and I’d like to see that in young readers. What to do with an old man’s words? What can they mean to those looking wide-eyed at the wonders that await them far away from cataloguing a life that has seen everything? After all, youthful hopes and strength are precisely there, almost made to be squandered when confronted with others’ advice and experience. That is the way of the world, and as I am now playing the role of talking gibberish, I might as well go the whole hog. The text I am proposing here is an attempt to clarify the conditions I mentioned earlier, post-industrial society and its foolish servants on the one hand, young people with their still unexpressed potential on the other. It is not a given that everything will go as it is threatening to. There is still an area of shadow, a chaotic amalgam that could always bring forth the unexpected. This unexpected thing should always be ready to spring forth, especially in the heart of a young person not atrophied before their time. I delude myself that they are not, I dream that their pulsations are strong and sure, could accelerate in the face of humiliation and abuse and the rules that society imposes on us, with which it seeks to shape and coerce our lives.

Nuove svolte del capitalismo

New Developments in capitalism

Opuscoli provvisori – 21. 2009, 2nd ed., 128 pages

On September 17, 1996 dozens of anarchists were arrested in Italy, the “Marini Frameup” had begun. Accusations of kidnapping, robbery, murder, possession of weapons, etc. All wrapped in an underlying accusation, an armed band denominated ORAI, acronym taken from a paragraph of this brochure: Organizzazione Rivoluzionaria Anarchica Insurrezionale - Revolutionary Anarchist Insurrectionalist Organisation. As the reader will realise, there is no theory of an armed band in these texts, but an examination of insurrectionalist organisational methods. I realize that for the obtuse mentality of a carabinieri this can can seem a biased reading, but what I cannot understand is the claim to entrust the task of holding up a model of armed band to a text such as the one published here, still fermenting in the prosecution’s brain, prepared to do anything to prove our guilt.

Il falso come strumento di lotta

The fake as a tool of struggle

Opuscoli provvisori – 26. 2013, 88 pages

The fake, falsification of an object or idea, can, under certain circumstances, constitute an instrument of revolutionary struggle.

“Insurrezione” Parafulmini e controfigure

“Insurrezione” Parafulmini e controfigure

Opuscoli provvisori – 28. 2013, 3rd ed., 96 pages

The criticism developed in these pages, now more than thirty years old, is still valid. Not because, like the truth, it can be said once and for all, it was not a question of truth and is still not, but because the art of saying what one thinks remains the only valid thing in this kind of matter. When it comes to what to do with one’s life, the chatter must stop, and these words, which the prepared reader will perhaps read here for the first time, since of the old readers—with few exceptions—no trace seems to have remained, are anything but chatter. They have hurt and continue to hurt, especially as they strike as never before the stubborness of that doing that calls as its witness precisely itself. An atrocious gimmick like never before.

Carcere e lotte dei detenuti

Prison and prisoners’ struggles

Opuscoli provvisori – 32. 2013, 2nd ed., 126 pages

What is the dividing line that pushes to irremediable revolt? It is a question of confrontation of balances with power and it is not easy to discover the latter’s cards, just as it is not easy to put on the table the cards that each one has in their hand, generally modest and of little weight, if you exclude your own life. Who looks at the walls of a prison from the outside does not realize how precarious this balance is and how it can break at any moment. Those who live in a prison know this and stay alert, waiting for the right moment to strike the enemy which every night, with exquisite accuracy, locks the armoured door. The extreme place of the total institution is that where power shows its true essence, the most intimate fabric of which it is made.

Guerra civile

Civil War

Opuscoli provvisori – 35. 2013, 2nd ed.

The transition towards revolution, if it should ever open up, will cross the scorched earth of war, the worst war imaginable, usually called “civil war”. This book, which I am presenting to the attention of my few readers again after more than a decade, tries not to take one step back in the face of the disgust and dismay that usually grabs their throat when considering the murky depths of the human soul, the hideous content of the bloodthirsty beast. Man, unfortunately, with all his ambitions of greatness and progress, is also this, and it is also with these dark feelings that we must reckon. Please keep the illusions of the adjustments of the enlightenment aside for a moment. We are in a minefield. Warning.

E noi saremo sempre pronti a impadronirci un’altra volta del cielo

And we will always be ready to storm the heavens again

Opuscoli provvisori – 38. 2013, 56 pages

Situated at a time when the turbulence of doing was giving way to lonely and disconsolate saying, this writing, while not able to do anything other than what is its own nature, i.e. relying on the word, usual traitor of so many good intentions, puts the word ‘end’ into an indecent debate about the fate of four thousand prisoner comrades. The time passed, almost thirty years, does not allow us to grasp the burning climate of those days, but readers who approach these lines today should make an effort, important to understand the reasons that were—and continue to be—the basis of our rejection of any compromise. In the background the possibility of the various Scalzone and Negri, abject like anybody reaching agreements, with moreover the heaviness of imposing, from the height of their own scientism without appeal, the knowledge of the absolute. The road ahead is still long and, still today, there is no sign of any clarity anywhere. Not only that, but some of those disgusting figures, blabbering chatter about a necessary surrender because of a war now lost, sometimes come back into circulation and come to pilfer the good faith of many comrades.

Gli dèi al tramonto

The Twilight of the Gods

Opuscoli provvisori – 42. 2013, 2nd ed., 122 pages

If we were to take stock of the last thirty years, from the point of view of what we were going to do and which we have only partially completed, we would be shocked. Little, almost nothing. Or a lot, indeed really a lot? Who can say? The re-reading of this text can give us certain indications. Nor has power, in the wide range of its metamorphosis, gone right to the end in its projects, always in the short term, therefore incapable of giving a definitive structure to exploitation. That social peace that seemed to be at the door, as a productive form (after the great fear of the seventies), was not obtained. The wall we talked about wasn’t built right up to the height we had feared. Perhaps the very forces intrinsic to the capitalist process have contradicted each other, perhaps it is congenital to the mechanism of exploitation to never reach perfection, perhaps new horizons are opening up for a more radical and significant clash. Why not?

Passeggiate nel buio. Contro il nucleare

Walks in the Dark. Against nuclear

Opuscoli provvisori – 46. 2013, 136 pages

But then, don’t they just reconstruct them? Inevitable objection, which I have heard a thousand times. Of course they punctually reconstruct all the felled high-voltage pylons, and the same for the other targets struck by the rage and the cold decision to sabotage capital in its structures, at least the visible ones. But the objection blooms immediately on the lips of fools who always look at the sky before going out for fear of getting wet. Revolutionaries should not espouse these perplexities. However, they do not always avoid this marriage. Sometimes—perhaps more than sometimes—for fear of getting caught, they hurry to distance themselves, invertibly displaying the intimate pusillanimity they should logically keep hidden. But, what do you want, fear makes you do incredible things. Basically it was a question of walks in the dark, which for the moment—but only for the moment —seem to have stopped. When will we breathe the sharp air of the night again, going for a walk in the mountains?

Il ripristino degli dèi

The restoration of the gods

Opuscoli provvisori – 47. 2013, 2nd ed., 108 pages

I do not know if a new perspective is opening up in the clash that awaits us, which has involved us for many decades under skies that are always different but basically all gloomy from the same, malodorous climate imposed by the exploiters. All I know is I’m not going to take one step back. To delude oneself about openings or possible gaps where the ultimate revolutionary wedge can be driven in is pure idiocy, or cunning in disguise, to the reader the assessment they prefer. Continuing the struggle means acting in two directions: the first requires an in-depth theoretical look at the enemy in front of us, its strategies and its means of offence and defence that it continues to equip itself with, the second consists of a decision, first of all, of a personal order, getting involved and not waiting for an enlightenment to reach us from somewhere. So, to attack, once again, with the means of always or with new means, that each one, in the meantime, has been able to give themself. Here are some analyses on changes in the production structure. Perhaps they should be updated, as some suggest, but basically what we are experiencing in this second decade of the century is nothing more than the completion and exacerbation of the profound changes of the transition from the old to the new millennium. With peace of mind of all those who think of some mechanism that objectively digs away into the structures of capital thereby building the revolution of the future.

Nichilismo e volontà di potenza

Nihilism and the will to power

Opuscoli provvisori – 52. 2013, 2nd ed., 126 pages

The hauberk of the will has protected anarchists for a long time, it is time for someone to reflect on the costs of this bulwark, psychological costs and, ultimately, social, revolutionary costs, revolutionary. To desire, first of all, is the automatism of immediate consciousness, that is, the intimate connection of the factual process with which we are bound to the administered and forced life that we lead in the everyday, measure of the quantitative, first of all, then the accumulable and the possessibile, part of our heart that withers, in this way, and must be protected, defended, guarded, cared for, in short, protected from all attacks from outside that can put it in danger. But wanting is also useful, in that it provides us with those tools that are indispensable to the struggle, first of all the cognitive tool, culture, the ability to understand the natural and social mechanisms of a world of which, good or bad, we are a part. And then what? Then we should have the ability to understand that will alone is not enough to provide us with a critical distance between these acquisitions (albeit indispensable) and action. The attack on the enemy that stifles us and builds around us the walls within which we live our forced everyday lives, albeit with the chrisms of the will capable of deciding and knowing, of assessing and understanding the limits of what we acquire and defend, must break down these walls, therefore also the voluntary mechanism involved in maintaining and perfecting them, and this rupture goes beyond any capacity to will or to know.

La logica dell’“a poco a poco”

The logic of “a little at a time”

Opuscoli provvisori – 60. 2013, 2nd ed., 120 pages

Suggestions for the reader, not one. A small book that puts its finger on the scourge that makes us all more pure, mercilessly, in the belief we all maintain we are on the side of reason, that we are right, that we live our daily struggle with life on the logical ability to choose. Well, there is no such ability, there has never been in any of us. We improvise, navigating without a compass. The best take a look at the stars and draw more omens than guidance. The potbellied and the saturated cry scandal and show, with extremist haughtiness, the tables of the law, not those of the burning bush but those of practice and profit, of giving and receiving, in short, stuff of shop-keepers. And they raise their voices and scream from their chairs and newspapers, they dirty paper and disturb ears, but only to put their heart at rest and bring home the salary. May my teachers sleep in peace, and dreams of organizing the world in the best possible way sleep with them. De profundis.

La ragione genera mostri

Reason generates monsters

Opuscoli provvisori – 61. 2015, 120 pages

But are we sure that Goya was not mistaken? Is it true that the sleep of reason generates monsters? Or is it exactly the opposite? But do you really think that the machine of the “final solution”, perfected by the Nazis, was made in a moment of distraction from reason? And what did Hegel’s teaching produce? If the “real is rational”, even a machine like that, perfectly oiled and made possible by the (well paid) intervention of IBM’s American technicians and the use of punch cards, could not be anything other than a product of reason. But to realize this, and be horrified to right inside the smallest vein that circulates around our heart of fainthearted respectable people, we do not need to think of millions of deaths. Far fewer are enough, it takes little. The horror is right next door to ours.

Oltrepassamento e superamento

Going Beyond and Overcoming

Opuscoli provvisori – 64. 2015, 64 pages

The problem of quality is not a philosophical question, it belongs to life and from this, and from the wild turmoil of stinging anguish that comes out of it, it then finds arrangement and appeasement in reflection.

Excess is a journey backwards, to the dawn of the world, when everything was possible, and in excess everything is possible, absolutely everything. Overcoming lives in it and goes on towards shores inaccessible to me that only it knows, and even further beyond, in areas where only paroxysm allows access, where tensions cannot be broken up because they continue to stretch endlessly without any respect, where there are no words that open new ways, because the ways are all open and all the words mute.

Less than ever am I ready to dwell on the dividing line. I don’t know where it is nor, after all, have I ever looked for it. I am blind and I don’t even remember ever having had eyes to see. Yet I went beyond all the same. Beyond all this, even beyond these very lines that I’m sewing on myself like a shroud.

Anarchismo e progetto insurrezionale

Anarchism and Insurrectional Project

Opuscoli provvisori – 66. 2015, 2nd ed., 172 pages

New readers, and there are some so “new” as to hamper any presumptions of a writer of prefaces, please note that the word “insurrectionalist” is cited three times, in these pages. Twice to refer to a presumed Malatestian theoretical choice of some anarchists that, beyond the threshold of their own bookshelves, have nothing but vain memories of more or less goliardic ancient skirmishes, and once to speak precisely of the theses relating to the insurrectional project. It is not a question of terminology, but on the contrary it is an important problem.

We think that reading this booklet could still be useful. We are talking about the first theoretical (and practical) steps, but this is another problem. The discourse we are having today is not all that different.

Gutta cavat lapidem. [Constant dripping wears away a stone] Or, at least, so it seems to us.

Autogestione e distruzione

Self-management and Destruction

Opuscoli provvisori – 68. 2015, 86 pages

Self-management, not just understood in the sense of self-management of production but also of struggles, is not possible unless it remains insignificant, a small negligible example, a model of difficult implementation on a slightly larger scale, in short, something that is there, waiting for a future event which on its occurrence could give anti-state meaning and danger to this limited and insignificant experience.

And this happening is not just a quantitative growth of self-management experiences, not only a widening of self-determination and also of the struggles and social conflicts that make those practices their own, but something else, something qualitatively different.

There, this something that gives different body and meaning to the word “self-management”, is the pure and simple destruction of the society in which we are living.

Contro la coerenza

Against coherence

Opuscoli provvisori – 71. 2015, 128 pages

Thankless task, that of waking up the sleeping.

And the harder it was to fall asleep, the harder the struggle to ward off the ghosts of what could have been done and wasn’t, the more bitter the reaction of who was disturbed while asleep will be.

Anarchism can very well help to pacify all those who put their conscience at rest this way. The ideal is safeguarded, the chatter also, so nothing new under the sun.

Consistency, that is, the perfect correspondence of what one does with what one thinks, thinking as anarchists and acting as anarchists, is a very common and widely used form of silencing one’s conscience.

To prick the idol of coherence, as I do in this booklet, is an infamous practice, therefore in perfect coherence with my being a criminal and an outlaw.

As I have said publicly several times, I am not an architect or an artist to ask to redo the facade of a building, but a plumber able to work out how to fix the toilet.

Sweet dreams to the dormant.

Leccaculi e delinquenti. Quindici scritti fascisti di cui suggeriamo la rilettura

Arse-lickers and deliquents. Fifteen fascist writings that we suggest rereading

Edited by Alfredo M. Bonanno and Santo Calì

Opuscoli provvisori – 72

2015, pagine 96

A few weeks before dying at Segrate, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli published a large volume of fascist writings. Soon after, Underground editions of Catania and La Fiaccola of Ragusa bring out a pamphlet with a few of the writings contained in that volume. Our aim was to make known the fascist responsibilities of some intellectuals and politicians, all still alive at the time (apart from Adriano Tilgher, dead in 1941), recycled in the democratic arch, and of some fascists, also covered in a new respectable halo, yet at the time compromised not only with fascism but with its racist version.

Distruggiamo le carceri

Let’s Destroy the Prisons

Opuscoli provvisori – 75. 2015, 86 pages

Prison is the backbone of the State. Prison and State are two aspects of the same monstrosity. Anarchists are against the State, that is why they are against prison.

As has been said many times we tend to shy away from addressing problems of the future society, that founded on the beauty of anarchy, and are interested in earthly not angelic matters, it all boils down to discussing the term ‘against’.

What does it mean to be against prison?

It is soon said. We are for the destruction of prison. In exactly the same way that we are for the destruction of this society that we are submerging in.

So we are not only against prison with talk but also with deeds. Deeds and the preparation of deeds. We are for projects, for detailed knowledge of relationships, responsibilities (individual and structural), dislocations over the territory, regulations that allow the management of tens of thousands of people enclosed within four walls, deprived of their freedom.

Destroy the State. Destroy prison.

Trieste, 8 May 2014

Alfredo M. Bonanno

Introduction - Monza talk - Modena talk - A guide to disincentivizing profit on prisoners - Some prison food supply companies

L’anarchismo nella rivoluzione russa

Anarchism in the Russian Revolution

Opuscoli provvisori – 77. 2015, 106 pages

It is necessary to bear a few points in mind before reading the texts published here. Paul Avrich was a historian, and as such equipped with vast knowledge of the problem (anarchism within the Russian revolution), also being a native Russian speaker. But, unfortunately, he was a historian and nothing more.

The Italian translation, much larger than the excerpts published here, done by La Salamandra in 1976, contains the historian’s clarifications and comments in addition to other minor texts. Not publishable. By way of example, we have quoted here his (positive) comments on the destiny reserved by the Soviet power structure for the Kropotkin Museum, a school for children, a choice that, according to Avrich, would have made the old anarchist happy. And of the concept of recuperation? And of wanting to erase even the slightest traces of a persistence that, in 1967, the year of Avrich’s visit, was evidently still disturbing? Not a word.

Another unreported pearl is the judgement comparing Bakunin’s insurrectional choices in Lyon with Kropotkin’s interventionist choices in the Manifesto of the Sixteen. Impossible judgement.

Apart from all this, and the misplaced ranting, typical of those who are in the business of remembering while carefully avoiding re-proposing, Avrich’s Introduction remains a useful read.

Recently, during a public debate among comrades, I think in Milan, I happened to affirm the need to shoot, at the opportune moment, first the authoritarian communists, even before, perhaps, shooting the policemen. I saw a certain uncertainty in the audience. Well, I am sure this pamphlet can be important reading, still today.

Trieste, 17 May 2014

Alfredo M. Bonanno

Di quale natura parliamo?

What Nature are we talking about?

Opuscoli provvisori – 79. 2015, 64 pages

Any sectoral struggle led by anarchists is destined to be recuperated if it fails to connect with the overall project of destroying the State.

The struggle for the defence of nature is a resounding example and joins the other struggles that enclose themselves within a comfortable qualification, which at first gives the impression, but only the impression, of being more understandable and more generalizable, without asking for that total commitment that the revolutionary confrontation threatens to impose mercilessly.

I am not talking about intermediate struggles linked to the clash that develops in one sense and not in another based on the needs of the exploited, their needs, because of particular and well localized initiatives of the repression of power, and to which anarchists participate in the attempt, often not immediately understandable even to themselves, to realize the anarchist method. This can be summarized in its concepts of self-management, permanent conflict and destruction of a repressive project that is maturing in a given territory.

I am speaking of the divisions, artificial and incomplete, that the revolutionary movement, and even the anarchist movement in its broadest sense, often accept acritically. What’s the point of fighting for animals? For example. Or an anti-militarist struggle? And so on: an abstentionist struggle, a struggle against prisons, a struggle against death factories (asbestos, and everything else)?

Of course, they have a sense, attacking, albeit partial objectives circumscribed by we anarchists on the basis of preclusions or, if you prefer, purely ideological choices. It is always better than sittng in chairs scratching your back, leafing through series of old magazines, full of old examples of how old kings and presidents of the republic were killed.

What if we were nto try to turn this around? If we were to try to insert the specificity of a struggle intervention—let’s say against animal exploitation—not in the limited perspective of vegetarianism or animal liberation struggle, but in the wide range of a revolutionary destructive confrontation? If we were to bring within the circumscribed struggle the proposal and the destructive methodology of attack against the enemy, first of all the State?

Not only would we be more effective, but we would immediately see the disappearance of all those ghosts that approach us in the course of the clash, who agree with us, anarchists, only for the diminutiveness and partiality of our struggle, while they would not accept the proposal of a general clash, precisely an anarchist clash.

Let’s bring the partiality of a struggle—for example, against prison—into the generalization of the clash and here immediately make way for another model of intervention, no longer “against prison”, but “for the destruction of prison”.

Just words? I don’t think so.

Yet again, let’s move on.

L’Inquisizione spagnola e gli Ebrei

The Spanish Inquisition and the Jews

Opuscoli provvisori N. 85

2015, 78 pages

In respectable times, typical of Franciscan Jesuitism (not a squabble of words), it is good to re-read some events of the more or less ancient past. Let shame and reproach not be so easily erased with a wipe of the sponge and a few charitable words. The current Pope Francis is a continuer of the massacres of the past let us not forget, even with all his openings to dialogue and with the new broom that he seems to hold firmly in his hand. No illusions.

Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis ut Deus et Dominus noster auferat velamen de cordibus eorum… Which could be translated as follows: Let us also pray for the unfaithful Jews... that the Lord and God may remove the veil from their hearts... but that the people, over the centuries, not knowing Latin well, understood as “perfidious”, treacherous, capable of the worst wickedness, unreliable, etc.

The epithet “perfidious”, not exactly pleasant to modern ears, disappeared in 1959, reign of John XXIII, but the question of the “veil” remained, and therefore the reference to the impossibility of knowing the truth. This reference falls in 1962 with the Second Vatican Council.

Now, bearing in mind that the initial formulation starts from the seventh century, one can have an idea of how much damage the propaganda of the Church caused and how this has contributed to the development of racism of all kinds has caused, in thirteen centuries.

The problem of “blood purity” is even more specific and important. It was not a general exhortation to convert to the truth, but a search made house by house, ancestor by ancestor, descendant by descendant, also with regard to those who had converted to escape endless persecution and condemnations.

And finally racism today, a racism of return. The persecuted become persecutors. History reversed.

Without end, always.

Il messaggio nella bottiglia

The Message in the Bottle

Opuscoli provvisori – 88

2015, 160 pages

Only silence.

Why no more words? Because at some point the struggle for the possession of words turns out to be unsatisfactory, the rituals that accompany it lose their charm, have no more thrust, do not make me fall in love, as the unknown becomes known I discover the plot is always the same. And I also discover a lack, the impossibility of the perfect connection, of completeness. I have knowledge and techniques, but I have a myself dimidiated from the same specification procedures. I have nostalgia for something that is not in knowledge and that has no lexical characteristics. This restlessness brings forth the fear of the terrible, of what I cannot grasp, and which escapes me, though my hunt is ever tighter, something that indicates to me how it is not in quantity what I am looking for and therefore I am thrown into a disorientation that runs the risk of rising to delirium. I wonder about this power of absence and I have no answers. Silence. Quantity reveals only its internal origins, its internal relations with the multiple, but I have no news of quality. There was a perceptive orientation, but where did it go?

Only silence.

Opuscoli provvisori N. 92

Prima edizione: settembre 2015

Introductions

Michail Bakunin Opere complete di Michail Bakunin – Vol. I – La polemica con Mazzini. Scritti e materiali (1871-1872)

Michail Bakunin Opere complete di Michail Bakunin – Vol. II – La Prima Internazionale e il conflitto con Marx. Scritti e materiali (1871-1872)

Michail Bakunin Opere complete di Michail Bakunin – Vol. III – La questione germano-slava. Il comunismo di Stato (1872)

Michail Bakunin Opere complete di Michail Bakunin – Vol. IV – Stato e Anarchia. Dove andare cosa fare (1873)

Michail Bakunin Opere complete di Michail Bakunin – Vol. V – Rapporti con Sergej Necaev (1870-1872)

Michail Bakunin Opere complete di Michail Bakunin – Vol. VI – Relazioni slave (1870-1875)

Michail Bakunin Opere complete di Michail Bakunin – Vol. VII – La guerra franco-tedesca e la rivoluzione sociale in Francia (1870-1871)

Michail Bakunin Opere complete di Michail Bakunin – Vol. VIII – L’Impero knut-germanico e la rivoluzione sociale (1870-1871)

Ernest Cœurderoy - I giorni dell’esilio

Charles Fourier - Il nuovo mondo amoroso

Charles Fourier - Teoria dei quattro movimenti e dei destini generali. Prospetto e annuncio della scoperta

Pëtr Kropotkin - La conquista del pane - Afterward

Pëtr Kropotkin La Grande Rivoluzione 1789-1793

Pëtr Kropotkin - Il mutuo appoggio - Un fattore dell’evoluzione - Afterward

Pëtr Kropotkin - Memorie di un rivoluzionario

Pëtr Kropotkin - Parole di un ribelle

Albert Libertad - Il culto della carogna

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - Sistema delle contraddizioni economiche. Filosofia della miseria

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - Che cos’è la proprietà? o Ricerche sul principio del diritto e del governo

Max Stirner - L’unico e la sua proprietà

Bernard Thomas - Jacob Alexandre Marius - Afterward

Antonio Tellez - Sabate

Severino di Giovanni

Anarchist papers and magazines Indices in preparation

Anarchismo

LUDD 2000 Le mille ragioni della distruzione - 4-monthly of anylyses and documentation on the new techniques of post-industrial power

- N. 1 April 1992. Editorial - Il linguaggio della tecnica, Le ragioni della distruzione

- N. 2 September 1992. Editorial - L’accesso logico della distruzione. Dalla parte del dominio

- N. 3 April 1993. Editorial - Tecnologia e specificita industriale. Dalla parte del dominio

PANTAGRUEL rivists anarchica di analisi sociale, economica, filosofica e metodologica

- No. 1

- No. 2 - May 1981

- No. 3 - October 1981

SENZA TITOLO

ANARCHISMO

PROVOCAZIONE

“Negazine” n. 1 / 2017

“Negazine” n. 2 / 2018

“Negazine” n. 3 / 2019

“Negazine” n. 4 / 2020

“Negazine” n. 5 / 2021

“Negazine” n. 6 / 2022