A Laughter That Will Bury You All: The Antagonistic Gesture of Autonomia and Operaismo Luhuna CARVALHO September 2020 Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, London, for the award of Doctor of Philosophy. II Abstract Several contemporary critical currents, from post-operaismo to autonomist Marxism, report their conceptual lineage to the Italian political struggles of the 60s and 70s, a period known as the “long 68”. Operaismo’s famous claim of a political primacy and autonomy of the working class within the reproduction of capital is synthesized as the essential trope of the period’s legacy and set as the keystone for ulterior developments. While partially accurate, such assertion erases the complexity of the conceptual debate around the period’s intense antagonism. In different ways, operaismo, a theoretical current, and autonomia, an insurrectional social movement, sought to derive a theory of antagonism rather than establish a normative periodization of the transformations within the relations between capital and labour. This thesis reads such effort as an attempt to conceive a repertoire of forms of action and being within real subsumption. Within operaismo and autonomia, alongside the constituent claim of class primacy, a tentative theory of a destituent power is also to be found. It is the confrontation between these positions that will spell out the movement’s development and demise. This first part of the thesis addresses how the categories of refusal of labour, antagonism, and movement emerge out of the confrontation between Marx’s critique of political economy and the period’s autonomous struggles. The antinomies of Marx’s concept of labour are read as an open problematic from which operaismo grasps emerging repertoires of dissent: the refusal of labour as social form. Antonio Negri affirms this as the position from which to fully understand the Marxian critique of political economy as a theory of class antagonism. This effort, however, grounds Negri’s attempt to derive a political leadership to the burgeoning self-consciousness shown within the struggles themselves. The widespread generalization of the proto-insurrectional practices associated with the refusal of labour throughout the 70s unearths an assemblage of wildly contradictory positions and repertoires that coalesce around the attempts to build a common ontology of antagonism and refusal while refusing any process of institutionalization. The second part of this thesis looks at such ontology of refusal. While autonomia was seemingly split along “organized” and “creative” factions, in both we find a shared understanding of political action as an undoing of capital’s apparatuses of command. Giorgio Agamben’s III work, a seemingly unlikely figure in this context, emerges as the most earnest attempt to deduct the categories of such undoing, an effort which reaches its apex in his theory of a destituent power. Going beyond the aporias of Agamben’s exposition of the problematic, the possibility of a “negative care” is found, of a common gesture of aid and antagonism that does not attempt to affirm any identity or method. IV Acknowledgements First of all, a warm thank you to Peter Hallward for his dedicated assistance and sharp commentary throughout the years. Peter’s incisive remarks were pivotal in turning a handful of scattered impressions into a coherent project. Howard Caygill, Éric Aillez, Catherine Malabou, and Peter Osborne also provided precious insights at several points during my research, my acknowledgments extend to them. The friendship and help of my colleagues Franziska Aigner, Luke Collision, and Nicolas Schneider will be remembered much after I have forgotten the countless hours spent in London’s trains. Thanks also to Neal Miller for courageously editing and proofreading this thesis. Thanks to Bruno Peixe Dias for the multiple occasions he found the time to discuss it with me. Sometimes through long and ongoing conversations, sometimes through unrelated short remarks, all these people were, at one time or the other, crucial to the elaboration of this project: Frederico Ágoas, Jacob Blumenfeld, Marten Bjork, JC, Cooper Francis, Jacopo Galimberti, Carsten Juhl, Sabu Kohso, Bruno Lamas, Rita Luis, Zé Nuno Matos, Ben Morea, Ricardo Noronha, Matt Peterson, Pedro Rita, Pavlos Roufos, John-David, Jason Smith. Special thanks to Marcello Tarì. Very warm thanks to Alice Pickering, whose hospitality and grace were a never-ending source of harbour. Thanks too to the Russels (EJ, Veronika, Ada, and Sasha), who housed me on numerous occasions and always made me feel part of the family. Thanks to José Barbosa, Nuno Bio, José Canelas, Bruno Caracol, Clément, Rui Duarte, Mariana Goes, Ricardo Malcata, João Melo, Gonçalo Mota, Mariana Pinho, Rui Ruivo, Catarina Santos, Mara Sé, Ana Virtuoso, and to all my friends and comrades at RDA69. Thanks to my mother, Rute Magalhães. And, most of all, thank you, in ever increasing ways, to Inês Carvalhal. V This dissertation was generously supported by a Kingston University scholarship between 2016 and 2019. VI Table of contents • Introduction: A piano at the barricades . 2 Part I: Antagonism • Chapter I: The Refusal of labour and “the party of anarchy” . 19 I. The Antinomies of labour . 22 II. Neocapitalismo and antagonism . 40 III. “The party of anarchy” . 52 • Chapter II: Nevermind the dialectics, here’s autonomia operaia . 56 I. Self valorization . 58 II. The ceto politico of use value . 69 III. The end of dialectics . 79 IV. Antagonism . 80 • Chapter III: Movimento and Gemeinwesen . 88 I. Autonomia and/or movement . 89 II. Spontaneity, invisibility, partiality . 96 III. Negri and movimento . 105 IV. Movement . 115 V. Movimento and Gemeinwesen . 122 VI. The partisan Gemeinwesen . .133 Part II: Gesture • Chapter IV: Prairie fire: violence and/or exile . 141 I. Comrade Walther P38 . 144 II. Friendship, territory, class . 152 III. The area of autonomia: inside/outside/on the margins . 162 IV. The critique of anti-authoritarian reason . .. 174 V. Gesture . .183 • Chapter V: Destitution and negative care . 187 I. Agamben in Mirafiori . 188 II. The messianic gesture . 193 III. Destituent power . 204 IV. Use and care . 210 V. Negative care . .225 • Conclusion: Pessimism of the intellect, antagonism of the gesture . 236 VII 1 Introduction: A piano at the barricades. Saturday. Dusk already. Piazza Verdi and Via Zamboni are covered in debris, burnt tear gas cartridges, and small pieces of marble. The police have left. Weariness. Anger. Joy. A perfume of rebellion after years of submission. Comrades smile with eyes reddened by the tear gas. Expensive wine bottles, stolen from the bars, travel from hand to hand. Champagne. Marijuana. Molotov… A Piano plays Chopin. It stands in the middle of the road, taken from a bar, just behind a barricade. Everyone is drunk. Today nobody rules. Tomorrow? Tomorrow the tanks will arrive. We’ll be expelled again, but today, for a few hours, this land is free. Chopin. Wine. Rage and play. Marcello Tarì, Autonomie! (2012) Operaismo, an Italian Marxist current from the 1960s and ‘70s, and autonomia, its contemporaneous social movement cum failed insurrectional experiment: “the ‘68 that lasted ten years,” “creeping May,” the “long ’68.” Long as in lasting a decade, but also long as in a strenuous affair that longs to come to terms with itself. 50 years after, the whole ordeal remains fairly unknown, clouded by its mythical status and shrouded in the secrecy of ill-resolved family affairs. Beneath the eulogies, the movement’s piling memoirs are for the most part tainted with an intense melancholy and the burden of not being able to distinguish one’s dreams from one’s regrets. This is very much the opposite of the sanguine optimism normally associated with Antonio Negri, who still remains the period’s most recognized interpreter. The documents that testify to this bitter memory are scattered just beyond the reach of curiosity. Faux hard-boiled novels like Massimo Carlotto’s Arrivederci Amore, Ciao: Storia di un Canaglia (2005) tell of the movement’s foray into violent criminality once its collapse became obvious. The main character traverses all the stages of moral decay and betrayal, only to end up becoming a police collaborator. The novel touches upon all the ill-resolved violence that remains from the period. The same tangible despair, albeit in radically different overtones, appears in Vingt Ans Aprés: Refugiés 2 Italiens, Vies en suspens (2003), a compilation of photos taken by some of the exiled autonomi in France.1 Grainy Chiaroscuro silhouettes haunting the Parisian bas-fonds, the price to pay for all previous attempts to storm heaven. Sergio Bianchi’s exile diaries2 could serve as intertitles for a silent film unfolding in such images: days spent waiting for nothing, a void filling an affective space which just years before had been wild and festive. This bitter and intimate aspect of the experience remains buried beneath the myth of a ’68 carried all the way to its maximum power. Such a “first prize” is certainly indigestible: its wounds still open, its enemies still in power. By “myth” I mean to suggest that this maximal ’68 also prevails as grounding fable. The popularity of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire (2000) within the anti- globalization movements of the 2000s, and the significance of these movements in the reconstruction of the left after 1989, meant that operaismo and autonomia were relegated to scenic backdrop for the rise of a “post-operaismo” and an “Italian theory.” For many readers, this seemed to embody what remained to be salvaged from the period, purged from its excesses, its folklore and its sanguinity. This is not surprising. Until very recently, the Italian 1960s and ‘70s was either overly synthesized under post-operaismo’s “party line” or, on the contrary, their historical documents were left scattered amongst diffuse archives and personal tragedies.