Veneers And Gums And Infection

faceless

Taken from the Corriere della Sera, June 10, 1974, republished by Garzanti under the title 'The real fascism and then the real anti-fascism' in the volume "Writings pirates" 1975

What is the culture of a nation? Currently it is believed, even by educated people , that it is the culture scientists, politicians, professors, writers, film-makers etc.. Namely, that it is the culture of 'intelligentsia . Instead, it is not. And it's not the culture of the ruling class, which, of course, through class struggle, seeks to impose at least formally. Nor is even the culture of the dominated classes, namely popular culture of the workers and peasants. The culture of a nation is the sum of all these cultures of class is the average of them. It would therefore be abstract if not be approved - or, rather, be seen - and lived in existentialism, and had he not therefore a practical dimension. For many centuries, in Italy, these cultures have been distinguished, even if historically unified. Today - nearly all of a sudden, in a kind of Advent - distinction and unification of history have given way to a type that almost miraculously fulfilled the dream of the old inter-class power. What causes this type? Apparently a new power.

write "Power" with a capital P - which Maurizio Ferrara charges of irrationalism on 'Unity' 12.06.1974 - because frankly in the Armed Forces. I do not recognize not even in big industry, because it no longer consists of a small number of large industrial to me, at least, it appears rather as a whole (industrialization total) and, moreover, as a non-Italian all (transnational).

know, because I see and live, some features of this new power even without a face: for example, his rejection of the old and the old Sanfedism clericalism, his decision to leave the Church, his determination (successful ) to turn peasants and petty bourgeois in the underclass, and especially his desire, so to speak, cosmic, to fully implement the "Development": producing and consuming.
The identikit of this new power of the white face still vaguely attributed to it of whether "moderate" due to tolerance and a hedonistic ideology perfectly viable, but also of the ferocious and fundamentally repressive traits: tolerance is in fact false, because in reality no man has ever been as normal and conformist as the consumer, and how to hedonism, it obviously hides a decision to pre-order everything with a ruthlessness that history has never known. So this new power [...] is really - if you really want to keep the old terminology - a form of "total" of fascism. But this power has also "approved" culturally Italy: so this is an approval of repression, even if obtained through the imposition of hedonism and joie de vivre . The strategy of tension is a spy, even if substantially anachronistic, all of this.

Maurizio Ferrara, mentioned in (like Ferrarotti, in 'Country night, "6/14/1974) accuses me of aestheticism. And with this tends to exclude, recludermi. All right, my optics can be an "artist", that is, how he wants the middle class, of a madman. But the fact for example that two representatives of Power (which are, however, now, in fact, even tentatively, the new power) are blackmailed each other about the party financing and appropriate Montesi, can also be a reason for doing crazy: that discredit such a ruling class and society before the eyes of a man, make him lose sense of opportunity and limits by throwing it into a real state of "anomie." It must be said that the optics of the insane is to be taken seriously: unless you want to be advanced in everything except the problem of the insane, merely to remove them easily.

There are some crazy watching people's faces and behavior. But not because followers of positivism Lombroso (as crudely insinuated Ferrara) but they know semiology. They know that the culture produces codes, codes that produce the behavior, that behavior is a language, and that in a moment in history when verbal language is totally conventional and sterilized (mechanized) the language of behavior (physical and mimic) assumes a crucial importance.

to return it to the top of our discussion, it seems that there are good reasons to argue that the culture of a nation (in this case Italy) is now mainly expressed through the language of behavior, language or physical a certain amount more - fully conventionalized and extremely poor - to verbal language.

is at such a level of linguistic communication that occur: a) the Italian mutation of anthropological; b) their full approval to a single model.

Now: decide to grow your hair from the shoulders, or cut his hair and mustache to grow (in a quote protonovecentesca) decides to put a bandage on his head or kick a scopoletta eyes and decide if you dream of a Ferrari or a Porsche, to keep all the television programs, know the titles of some best-seller, dress pants and shirts to the overbearing fashion obsessive relationships with women have held alongside ornamental, but at the same time, the pretense that are "free" and so on. etc.. etc..: all these are acts of cultural .

Now all the young Italians do these same acts, have the same physical language and are interchangeable; something old as the world, if limited to one social class to a category, but the fact is that these acts of cultural and this language are inter-somatic. In a square full of young, no one can tell from his body, a worker from a student, a fascist a fascist, which was still possible in 1968.

problems belonging to an intellectual ' intelligencjia are different from those of a party and a politician, even though the ideology is the same. I wish my current contradictory to the left understand that I am able to realize that in the event that the development would suffer a crash and a recession, if the Left parties did not support the existing power, Italy simply falls apart but if the development continues as it started, this is clearly unrealistic to the 'historic compromise', the only way to try to correct the development in the direction indicated by Berlinguer in his report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (see "l 'Units', 04/06/1974). However, lines do not compete at the Mauro Ferrara 'faces, "I do not see this maneuver of political practice. In fact, I have, if anything, the duty to exercise my critique on it, and maybe even quixotically extremist. So what are my problems? Here is an example for

. In the article that has caused this controversy (Corriere della Sera, 06/10/1974) said that the perpetrators of the massacres of Milan and Brescia are the government and the Italian police, because if they wanted the government and police, these massacres there would be no. It is a commonplace. Well, at this point I'll definitely laugh back and said that leaders of these massacres are we progressives, anti-fascist leftists. In fact all these years we have not done anything

1. why talk of 'Slaughter of the state "would not become a cliché, and stopped all there;

2. (and worse) we did not do anything because the Fascists were not there. We have just condemned gratifying our consciousness with our outrage and stronger and petulant indignation was quieter was the conscience.

Actually we did with the Fascists (I speak especially of those young people) racist that we have hastily and relentlessly wanted to believe that they were predestined to be racist fascists, and faced with this decision of their fate there was nothing to do. And nascondiamocelo: we all knew in our very consciousness, that when one of those young people decided to be a fascist, it was purely accidental, a gesture that was not unprovoked and irrational: it took was a word because this does not happen. But none of us have never talked to them or to them. We have now accepted as inevitable representatives of Evil. And maybe they were adolescents and young teens, who knew nothing about anything, and have thrown him into a headlong quest to simple despair.

But we could not distinguish them from each other (do not say other extremists, but all others). This is our appalling justification.

Father Zosima (literature for literature!) Has been able to distinguish between those who had stored in his cell, Dmitrj Karamazov, the parricide. Then he got up from his chair and went to prostrate before him. And he did (as he later told the younger Karamazov) because Dmitrj was intended to make the most horrible thing and endure the most inhuman pain.

think (if you have the strength) to the boy or boys who went to put the bombs in the square of Brescia. There was to get up and go to prostrate before them? But they were young with long hair, mustache, or with such early twentieth century, had bandages on his head or fell scopolette eyes, were pale and presumptuous, their problem was fashionably dressed all alike have Porsche or Ferrari, or motorcycles drive like idiots archangels with little girls behind the trim, yes, but modern, and in favor of divorce, the liberation Women, in general, and development ... They were short, young people like everyone else: nothing distinguished them in any way. Even if we wanted we could not go to prostrate before them. Because the old fascism, albeit through the degeneration of rhetoric, made a distinction: while the new fascism - which is entirely different - no longer makes a distinction: it is humanistic rhetoric, and American pragmatic. Its purpose is the reorganization and approval of the brutal totalitarian world.

Pierpaolo Pasolini