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Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 162 an INTERVIEW with GIANNI RIOTTA NEW YORK, 12 OCTOBER 1996

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Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 162 an INTERVIEW with GIANNI RIOTTA NEW YORK, 12 OCTOBER 1996 Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 162 AN INTERVIEW WITH GIANNI RIOTTA NEW YORK, 12 OCTOBER 1996 (A RETROSPECTIVE) uestion: As an observer of the Italian scene, how do you view Qthe relationship between intellectuals and political society? Riotta: You've just told me that you have been interviewing a few other people about the role of the intellectual in Italian society today, one of whom is Luigi Manconi, the present spokesperson of the Verdi, the Green Party. To be honest, I wouldn't rate him as an intellectual at all. We're friends and so I can say this. I've known Luigi for a long time, for about 25 years, since he was the head of the servizio d'ordine for Lotta continua. Then, to make a living, I started writing for newspapers and Luigi went to work at the University. But he's a politician, always was, he was never an intellectual. In a sense, that's my position too. I'm not a politician, but neither am I an intellectual. That's to say that the difference between me and many of the people you have interviewed, many of whom are friends, and even close friends of mine, is that they are intellectuals and they always feel forced to give you opinions. I was raised professionally in the Manifesto newspaper and later at Columbia University as a journalist and when I consider politics outside of my fiction writing my attitude is always that of a journalist. In Italy, this is very bizarre, and it is even more bizarre because I always use the word "fairness", or "fair", which I think are quite nice words. But we don't have anything like that in Italian. We have oggettività, but it gives you some coldness that "fairness" does not have. After thinking about it for quite a while I came up with equanimità, which means that your animus is equo when you consider issues. Q: If the position you have adopted as a journalist is, as you say, so eccentric in the Italian context, how does that effect the way you are An Interview with Gianni Riotta 163 seen in Italy and how are your opinions received? Riotta: In Italy the Right doesn't particularly appreciate me, and the Left considers me a stray dog. I'm giving you all this as a premise because this is what will drive the rest of the things I have to say in answer to your questions. I will try to give you a fair analysis of what is going on in Italy, not an opinion on what I think should happen, because the day I start thinking in terms of what I think should happen I will run for office and be a politician myself. So, if what you are looking for is a more angled position, you might end up being disappointed. Q: Let's begin with some general rather than specific questions. In the Italian tradition the figure of the intellectual has been most closely studied by Antonio Gramsci. Even though you personally may want to take your distance from the figure of the intellectual, for Gramsci the journalist, like the teacher, the doctor, the priest etc., is an intellectual insofar as they are figures who shape consciousness and help form a world view. Riotta: The more time passes, the more I come to think that we have, of course, made a big deal of Gramsci. Yet, the real figure that has formed, and is still forming, the paradigm for the Italian intellectual is not Gramsci, but Benedetto Croce. Gramsci has a great line, not one of his best known, but it is still one of my favorites. He says: after you have spent years studying Hegel and Marx what is the real difference between these two? What really makes Marx different from Hegel? And the answer he comes to is this: Marx had experience as a journalist, by which he means that Marx got his hands dirty in the contradictions of everyday events, while Hegel always stayed at a comfortable distance from the everyday. Hegel distilled his wisdom and did not allow any contradiction to cross over his thought. Not so Marx. And what is true for Marx is also true for Gramsci. The Gramsci that we know is the Gramsci sanitized by Fascist and Communist censorship. There is no doubt that Gramsci was an Italian Tito, but it was purely by chance because he didn't go in exile to Moscow. If he had gone to Moscow he would have either ended up dead or become a Third Internationalist like Palmiro Togliatti. The fact that he was in jail, paradoxically, allowed him - painfully - to have a clearer point of view. Gramsci really let science, journalism, sociology and the American way of thinking cross his thought, within the limits, of Eugenia Paulicelli/David Ward 164 course, of the access he had to these areas. Piero Gobetti did that too. They both knew that there was more around them than what the idealists of the time were willing to admit. Q: If this is one of the lessons left by Gramsci to intellectuals, but a lesson that, if I follow you correctly, has been to a large extent ignored, what about the lesson imparted by Croce? Riotta: Croce, on the other hand, has left a great inheritance to Italian intellectuals. First of all, and you can say this both for Croce and for Giovanni Gentile, we get from them the idea that the intellectual is someone who gets his rubber stamp, that is to say his or her position of authority, from the academy or the university. The intellectual is someone who works in the university and for a living does exams and reads dissertations. From Croce we get what I think are two very wrong ideas: the first is that the intellectual is someone who deals with the humanities, not with the sciences. I clearly remember when I was at the Manifesto - my wife is a scientist, by the way - and what Rina Gagliardi, who then went on to be editor of the newspaper and is now head of cultural policy at Rifondazione comunista, used to argue. She got her degree at the Scuola normale in Pisa and would honestly and with a lot of passion make the case that scientists were not real intellectuals, because the real intellectual deals exclusively with the humanities. And this comes from Croce. You see this, by the way, in how we consider university or college courses on creative writing. We still tend to think that fiction writing is not something you learn but something which comes from the inspiration of the genius that strikes you. Things are changing a bit, Alessandro Baricco is running a school of writing in Turin, and Grazia Cherchi, my former editor at Feltrinelli, who was a great editor but sadly passed away in 1995, also helped push things in this direction. Now that I think about it, there was a report on editing I came across last week in Corriere della sera and it mentioned a writer who is on record as saying that his pages will never be touched by an editor because they are sacrosanct. But enough of this, let's get back to politics. Q: Yes, let's get back to the question of influence. Whether as fully- fledged intellectuals within the academy or, like you, I think, as an intellectual who fashions himself along the Gramscian lines you just mentioned, what is the intellectuals' role within political and civil society? An Interview with Gianni Riotta 165 Riotta: Intellectuals bring something that the politicians can not: namely, prestige. There have been two seasons: the season when the intellectual would run simply to cover up for the Party. The Christian Democrats were a little corrupt so they would ask, say, Franco Zeffirelli to run for them. Or the Communist Party would seek to justify its position as a liberal party by asking the singer Gino Paoli to run for office. I would still like to know why on earth Gino Paoli ran for office, I don't understand. He's a great singer, but... Q: And the footballer Gianni Rivera? Riotta: No, Gianni Rivera is different. He's pretty much like Jack Kemp here in the US, Bob Dole's running mate in the last elections. Rivera is a former sports jock who gave up playing football, went to another profession and performed very nicely. He could have gone with Berlusconi and been a hero for Berlusconi, but he chose to go with Mario Segni and stayed with Segni. He was always very serious. Rivera was elected on account of his fame but then he did his homework and became a politician. And I say this as an Inter fan, while Rivera played all his life for our archrival Milan, Berlusconi's team. Q: What about someone like Massimo Cacciari? A Professor of Philosophy at the University of Venice who stood for election as Mayor of his city in 1992 and won. Riotta: Cacciari used to be a professor. Since 1972 he is a politician who has the hobby of writing philosophical books. He wrote Krisis in 1976, and he was elected to Parliament in 1972. Cacciari is a politician. What I don't like about the present attitude about politics and intellectuals in Italy is that the intellectual is still considered a high priest. You see this in the way intellectuals are treated once they enter Parliament. Political parties never recruit intellectuals on the basis of what they can do, for their actual expertise: for example, Sergio Romano, the ex-ambassador, runs for office and you employ him in foreign affairs, it didn't happen; my friend Brutti Liberati, the judge, runs for office and then you employ him in law, it didn't happen.
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