Wounds of the Common

diacritics Volume 39.4 (2009) 135–145 © 2012 by the Johns Hopkins University Press

WOUNDS OF THE COMMON IDA DOMINIJANNI

In speaking of Italian thought outside of its original context and language, there is a sense of displacement that invites interrogation. This can have two different effects. One can try to master it, assuming the stance of a sovereign subject who seeks to conquer a foreign territory and lood its markets with a homemade good, which is an already known factor in its proportions and intensities, its potentialities and fallouts, its composition and inter-nal hierarchies—there remains in this case the fantasy of deciding the destination and im-pact of this thought, of prescribing how it will be received as well as its uses and effects. Alternatively, one can let this feeling of displacement run its course, accepting the risks of misunderstanding, the friction and dispossession that it involves, as well as the promises of opening, contamination, and doubt that it implies. Within the ontological condition that marks us as inhabitants of global space and time, thought (and particularly the construc-tion of a tradition of thought) is not immune to identitarian contractions and sovereign temptations. But it is only at the intersection of different cultural perspectives, where “the demand for translation is acute and its promise of success, uncertain” [Butler, Gender Trouble ix] that the conditions for thinking creatively are given. Referring to the theme of “commonalities,” we can say that such an opportunity is also given “commonly”: that is to say, in a way that is not engaged in afirming or defending an identity, but rather is open to the risks of dislocation and contamination. Far from believing that we are here to display a “Made in Italy” product, I believe instead that reconsidering Italian thought by displacing it in a different language can help us discern its qualities but also its limits: in other words, it can help us to “globalize” as well as to “provincialize” it, putting it to the test of different experiences and opening it to other voices.1

More so in theory than in other areas, national labels have a relative or allusive value. The philosophers who have been convoked or evoked here—Remo Bodei, Roberto Es-posito, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben—all work at the limits and the intersections of international debates. As for the Italian thought of sexual difference, despite its speciic valence within the international maps of feminist theory, it wouldn’t be the same without a relationship with the work of French thinkers like Luce Irigaray, American ones such as Judith Butler, or with other less famous, though no less interesting feminist laboratories across the globe. Therefore, if the deinition of “Italian thought” has any value, it does so insofar as it reveals something of the questions it provokes and the expectations to which it corresponds. This is why I ask myself what expectation might lie behind the shift of inter-est in the United States from “French Theory” to “Italian Thought,” and whether this shift has something to do with the semantic shift between the two words, theory and thought. One could say that the former evokes a thorough systematicity while the latter elicits the very activity of thinking itself, a thought-experience, a living thought, as Esposito would say, one that lives in praxis and as praxis.2 On a similar note, Negri—who singles out the creative and transformative power of workerism and of the feminism of sexual difference as emblematic of “Italian difference” in twentieth-century philosophy—emphasizes three aspects of these theoretical and practical experiences born within the anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal struggles of the 1970s: they gave voice to a subjectivity in action; they

Thanks to Brett Neilson and Donatella Saroli for their kind assistance with the English text.1 On this double movement between the globalization and provincialization of Italian thought, see Brett Neilson, “Provincialising the Italian Effect.”2 See Esposito, Pensiero vivente.

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were not limited to a critique of the status quo but rather they generated transformation (social, linguistic, inner, and collective); they developed not as schools but as practices of thought.3 I agree with Negri in his valorization of these experiences, but unlike him, I don’t see workerism and feminism as exceptions in a philosophical milieu that is politi-cally weak. Rather, in a way that is closer to Esposito, I see them as the tip of the iceberg in a milieu characterized by an unavoidable relation between philosophy and politics. Italian thought, be it antagonistic or moderate, revolutionary or conservative, is a thought of the political, a thought that stems from a political laboratory of extraordinary density, in a country that between the 1960s and the 1990s turned from a case study of the greatest expansion of democracy in the West into its opposite, a case study of the greatest defor-mation of democracy. Over the course of thirty years, Italy moved through the crisis (and conversely, the deconstruction, and the critique) of the entire conceptual architecture of modern politics: the crisis of the state, of representation, of the political form of the party; the crisis of the form of law, of the Constitution, of the relation between legality and le-gitimation; the crisis of the subject and of the social contract. This accelerated collapse of the ediice of modern politics forced thought to face a sort of permanent state of exception and to search for new conceptual constellations within the crisis itself—a search that is still underway, and that now has to confront the effects of that peculiar form of biopower that Italian society experienced under the reign of Silvio Berlusconi. I will return to this theme later.

1

Within such a search for new conceptual constellations, Timothy Campbell rightly iden-tiies two events—1968 and 1989—that “tighten” the relation between philosophy and the political and generate or regenerate new inlections of the common. On the one hand, 1968—the long ’68 that in Italy lasted ten years—saw the explosion of the question of subjectivity and the invention of forms of common life as alternatives to the dominant ones. On the other hand, 1989 saw the implosion of both the order and the categories underlying twentieth-century political thought. This implosion placed the construction of the common on the agenda in a way that meant it could no longer only be pursued within and against, but also after and beyond the state, the party, and the bonds of national and ideological belonging.4 It must also be said in passing that the link between these two dates is quite complex on both the historical-political and philosophical levels, and quite controversial in the narratives of those who experienced them: much depends on how we assess the effects of 1968 on the political anthropology of contemporary democra-cies and how we interpret the subsumption and translation effected by neoliberalism and democracy on the individual and social demands freed up by ’68. These are issues that are not peripheral to the interpretation of the political history of the last twenty years in Italy and the nature of “Berlusconism,” but unfortunately I cannot dwell on them here. I would like instead to add to those dates singled out by Campbell two more: one very Italian, May 9, 1978, and the other very American, but quintessentially global, September 11, 2001. These are two dates that seem just as crucial to me as 1968 and 1989 for read-ing the fortunes of Italian thought—at least in my experience. And since the experiential and philosophical levels inevitably intersect in a story that is still near in time and ongo-ing, I will begin with four “impressions” in the Freudian sense of the term, left on my

3 Negri, La differenza italiana. On workerism as a style of thought, see my 2006 interview with Mario Tronti, “Fuori norma: Lo ‘stile’ operaista.” 4 See Campbell, “A Common Milieu” and “Pensiero italiano: Quel milieu cresciuto tra 1968 e 1989.”

137Wounds of the Common / Ida Dominijanni

memory by these four dates.5 These four snapshots correspond in turn with four stages of a research process carried out in common and on the common where the happiness of dis-covery and the spark of the new intersect with the wounds of separation and of loss. First, however, there is a need for some clariication. I understand the “common” as a political and subjective construction: the construction of an open community made of relations that are played out in and that modify public space. In this sense, the common coincides with what the Italian feminism of difference calls, in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt and without regret for more traditional meanings of this word, the “political.”

The irst snapshot is a photograph of a cut [taglio], a cleavage that takes us back to the birth of feminism.6 We are at the end of the 1960s. Through a completely unforeseen gesture, women separate themselves from men so as to meet with other women in con-sciousness-raising groups. It is an archival photograph because the separatism it depicts, at least as an explicit and declared practice, was later abandoned. But that cut retains the value of an inaugural gesture, and as such deserves to be revisited every now and then for what it meant and what it means today. This gesture was not only a tactical move of rebellion against discrimination. Rather it was primarily a strategic move of exile from a “common” that, with the promise of equality, hid the injunction to neutralize sexual dif-ference and, with the promise of revolution, reproduced the same scission between life and the politics of the system that it wanted to bring down. It was then—with a sundering that dislocated bodies in public space (men on the one side and women on the other)—that a female “common world” came to be, based exclusively on free relations among women without any organized structures, a common world that happily anticipated the relational fabric of the common that is today à l’ordre du jour for all of us. Less felici-tous, or rather more hazardous, was the reconstruction of a “differential” relation with men, a viable relation “without feeling equality as an obligation and without any loss of freedom of one sex with respect to another” [Muraro, L’ordine simbolico 7]: this wager is still open but obviously it isn’t only up to women but also to men. There remains the fact that this original split fractured the “community of equals,” shattering the dream of its unitary recomposition. And it reminds us that the subject of the common isn’t only multitudinous and plural but differential, marked, that is, by a difference that doesn’t recompose itself as an identity, that doesn’t unravel into equality, and that doesn’t add up to a coalition, but rather acts as an alterity that is potentially always present and that can-not be reduced. This difference—and sexual difference as the primary difference among human beings—is what we have in common. It is what unites us by separating us, what joins us by distancing us.

The second snapshot is the famous photograph of the body of Aldo Moro, found in the trunk of a Renault on May 9, 1978 in Rome’s Via Caetani after ifty-ive days of captivity by the Red Brigades. It is the image which closes the long Italian 1968 and not only that: it was then that the First Republic came to an end, without waiting for judicial investigations into the corruption that would take place twelve years later. It was then that the state revealed its true impotence, without waiting for globalization to obliterate its functions. And it was in that trunk that the sacral aura of the “king’s two bodies” dis-solved, long before Berlusconi’s “videocracy” brought about its complete destruction. The alter-community born in 1968 was hit by an implosion of violence. The national po-litical community was wounded by a grief that it never successfully processed but rather preferred to disavow under the phantasmatic and conspiratorial interpretations of the kid-napping. That unhealed wound is not unrelated to the political parabola that followed nor to the undoing of social bonds in today’s Italy. The credibility of politics began to wane.

5 On the Freudian notion of “impression,” see Derrida, Archive Fever.6 On the “cut” (in Italian, taglio) as a founding gesture of Italian feminism, see Bono and Giardini, “Crisis and Adventure.”


The body of the sovereign has become far too profane. And if Berlusconi ifteen years later embodied the “obscene father” of the injunction to enjoyment described by Slavoj Žižek and Massimo Recalcati,7 perhaps it is to that photograph that we must return to ind the beginning of the end of the Oedipal Father and his symbolic order.

The third snapshot is more familiar. It is the meeting of the editorial board of my newspaper, il manifesto, on the morning of November 10, 1989, the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Again a split, this time not between genders but between generations. The 1968 generation exalts over the end of the bipolar world and of state communism, while the generation of the antifascist resistance suffers over the end of the socialist world, which bestowed an identity even for the more heretical among Italian communists that had been brought up in the PCI. The weight of the “mourning of the communists for the end of communism” is announced, which Jacques Derrida will write about in Specters of Marx: melancholy will characterize a large part of the radical left who survived the end of the century, not only in Italy. It is a melancholy in which, to quote Derrida again, the regret for the end of twentieth-century communism is mixed with and confused with mourning over “the very concept of the political in its essential traits, and even in the speciic traits of its modernity (nation-state, sovereignty, party form, the most accredited parliamentary topology” [For What Tomorrow 79]. I know that many of us did not and do not share this melancholic regret for the end of state communism and the waning of mod-ern politics. And here I could list one by one the Italian Left’s “wounded attachments,” as Wendy Brown would call them [States of Injury 52–76], to its own defeat. Yet I also know well that this melancholy extends its shadow over our ability to imagine a politics and a common that are inally emancipated from the state and party, reminding us that the community-to-come is always indebted to preceding generations and to their legacy, including its melancholic shadow.

Last snapshot. New York, September 11, 2001. Two airplanes penetrate the Twin Towers, destroying forever the myth of American inviolability and showing at once the completeness of globalization and the fragility of the Empire. The spherical form replaces the axial spatiality of modern politics. There is no longer an outside. Interdependence be-comes the characteristic feature of the present. The common has become global, and that which was at the margins suddenly inds itself pushed to the center. Vulnerability no lon-ger belongs only to the weak but to the strong as well. The wound of Ground Zero lends itself to being saturated with a nationalist and revanchist reaction of war, but it opens as well to the possibility of healing based upon the knowledge of common exposure to the other.8 The community that is constructed around grief for the victims of the collapsed Towers paradigmatically becomes a “community of loss,” which overturns the propri-etary statute of community delineated by the philosophical mainstream.9 Together with the loss of the victims who died in the World Trade Center comes the loss of the illusion of omnipotence and self-determination that joins into one destiny the sovereign state and the sovereign individual: both are buried underneath the rubble of the Towers; both are ready to return spectrally and vindictively to defend their proper space and the proper I. The ontology of vulnerability and precariousness, sketched in Italy by Adriana Cavarero as well as by Judith Butler in the United States, works against this spectral return. At stake

7 See Žižek, The Ticklish Subject; and Recalcati, L’uomo senza inconscio.8 On the ambivalent semantic of the wound, see the issue of Filosoia politica edited by Adriana Cavarero: Materiali per un lessico politico europeo: “violenza/vulnerabilità.” 9 “The Community of Loss” is the title of Esposito’s introduction to Georges Bataille, La congiura sacra and, due to an involuntary but symptomatic borrowing, it is also the title of my review of Butler’s Precarious Life as well as of a later essay by Olivia Guaraldo on the feminist thought of vulnerability and mourning after 9/11.


is a destitution of the sovereign paradigm which, at precisely the moment of maximum catastrophe for the lexicon of modern politics, shows the advantages accumulated by the feminist critique of the subject.10 I will return to this point shortly, but only after adding a inal caption to my four impressions.

2

Cuts, separation, wounds, loss, mourning, vulnerability—if I have chosen these four mo-ments in which these six words recur, it is not in order to undermine the thought and the practice of the common, let alone to sabotage the positive project of the “instituting hap-piness” with which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri close their book Commonwealth [376]. I myself belong to a “positive” feminism that has always appealed more to women’s freedom than to their oppression; more to the generative effects of the relations between and among women than to the violent implications of patriarchal domination. Moreover, I believe that happiness, in some ways quite like freedom, is never given as only a future objective, but it entails, to borrow a phrase well known to Italian antagonistic move-ments, a “practice of the objective.” Nevertheless, I think that expunging the negative from our political projects, or liquidating it as only a burden of “sad passions,” risks reproducing the anthropological optimism that was not a secondary cause of the failure of the revolutionary subject in the past and sometimes returns today in the iguration of the subject of the common.

I also think that the best way to prevent the negative from turning into destruction and self-destruction is to name it: to recognize it and give it space in both life and politics without remaining imprisoned by it. This means accepting the ambivalence of the real and the on-again, off-again quality of the creative power of desire—not as a hindrance, but as a constitutive and constituent element of action and of feeling in common.11 More generally, I believe that these six words, and the different combinations in which they can be present in life and in politics—the common with separation, birth with the wound of labor, the working-through of mourning with repetition, the refusal of vulnerability with the obsession for the sovereign and so on—all of these help us to keep in mind that zone of contiguity between the political and psychoanalytic lexicons that “Italian thought” does not voluntarily frequent, showing in this avoidance its attachment to the will to power of political rationality, which is the dark side of its intrinsic political valence.12

Nevertheless, I have not evoked these six words only in order to make space for the negative or to dispel the claims to omnipotence of political rationality, but rather because they bring the question of the common and of the community back to its roots, which lie in the ontology of the subject. As Esposito argues in Communitas, the form of community in the modern tradition is superimposed over the form of the subject: the community is a community of individuals traced on the statute of modernity’s “‘absolute’ individual” [13]. Furthermore, according to Esposito, at the origin of community there is a constitu-tive relation with violence—a fratricidal violence that lares up among brothers “because they are of the same blood and joined to the womb of the same mother”; and this origin, which is passed down by all narrations of the social contract, doesn’t cease to reassert itself, marking the history of community and compromising the destiny of the common

10 See, for example, Cavarero, Horrorism; Butler, Precarious Life, Giving an Account of Oneself, and Frames of War. See also Pulcini, Care of the World.11 See the edited volume under the collective name, Diotima, La magica forza del negativo in par-ticular the introduction by Luisa Muraro [1–8]; Diana Sartori, “La tentazione del bene” [9–33]; and Chiara Zamboni, “Quando il reale si crepa” [99–112].12 See Dominijanni, “Soggetto dell’inconscio, inconscio della politica.”


[“Community and Violence”]. It follows, in my view, that a different statute of the com-mon can be glimpsed only beginning with a different statute of the subject and with a different narrative of the origin of community. It is from this perspective that the Italian laboratory of the thought of sexual difference offers a decisive push to such a change in the political-philosophical paradigm.

Before going on, I must introduce an important parenthetical clause about the very expression, “the thought of sexual difference,” which is often misunderstood in our dia-logues with other feminist thinkers. “Sexual difference” is well known as a French notion (Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva), which has had its own theoretical and political develop-ment in Italy, and which many anglophone feminist theorists distrust, considering it a late-metaphysical and essentialist notion that they oppose with poststructuralist theories of gender. There is not time here to enter into this debate: more than once Cavarero and I have questioned its cultural and philosophical premises, trying on the one hand to show the convergences and false opposition between these positions, and on the other to out-line in a different way the real conlicts that traverse this dispute.13 I will limit myself to conirming that “sexual difference” is neither a name for a quintessence of femininity nor for a female collective identity, nor—like gender—a mere cultural construction. It is an element of human constitution that stays—or, better, “vacillates,” accepting the formula-tion of Butler [Undoing Gender 186]—at the threshold between nature and culture and between the psychic and the social, where it is exposed to historical and political signi-ication. It is not therefore a ixed datum but an open signiier that is an object as well as an agent of interpretation and signiication. In fact, what we call “politics of sexual dif-ference” is nothing but our wager to interpret and signify it freely: that is, independent of the two paradigms which imprisoned it before feminism—the hierarchical paradigm of sexist domination, where “sexual difference” is synonymous with female oppression, and the egalitarian (democratic and/or Marxist) paradigm, where it is destined to dissolve into neutralization or assimilation (a destiny that on the other hand returns in some postmod-ernist theories of gender). Finally, what we call the “thought of sexual difference” is noth-ing but a theoretical practice corresponding to this wager. More than a systematic theory on sexual difference, it is a style of thinking that does not disregard it and re-signiies it “beginning from oneself” in-between with other women.14 This style of thinking, or this theoretical practice, keeps alive the original feature of feminism as a movement of sexed subjectivity that cannot be reiied into a female question or a gender identity. In other words, the thought of sexual difference puts forward not the problem of constructing or deconstructing gender according to the sociology of identity but the problem of rethink-ing subjectivity according to the ontology of difference.

To return to my main argument, such ontology results in a radical deconstruction of the status of the modern individual. Whereas the modern individual was—as the word’s etymology relects—undivided and one, neutral, sovereign in its rationality, a voluntary actor in the social contract, an independent atom among other independent atoms, the subject of difference is an embodied and sexed singularity, born of tensions between reason and drives, aware of his/her vulnerability, marked from and depending on relation-ships with others, irst and foremost on the relationship with the mother as the matrix of life. It is therefore a subject that is no longer one, an individual that is no longer undi-vided, an identity that is no longer self-identical or self-identiied, but always dislocated and traversed in its own constitution by difference and alterity, with regard to the other

13 See Cavarero and Bertolino, “Beyond Ontology and Sexual Difference”; and Dominijanni, “Lo stile della differenza” and “Matrix der Differenz.”14 On the thought of sexual difference as a philosophical practice see Diotima, La sapienza di par-tire da sé; and Zamboni, Pensare in presenza.


and even inside him or herself. Strictly speaking, the subject of sexual difference is no longer an “individual” as conceived by the lexicon of modern politics. Consequently, the whole lexicon of modern politics feels the effects of this shift. Equality, freedom, frater-nity, power, authority, representation, right and rights, community and common all turn out to be marked by the neutralization of sexual difference and need to be rethought in the perspective of the embodied and sexed subject.

I won’t even try to reintegrate here the results of a thirty-year journey. I only want to highlight some of the effects of feminist thought both on the problem of the common and the community. I said at the beginning that the “differential” conception of the sub-ject breaks apart any nostalgia for a political subjectivity as a unitary, full, and compact identity. At this point, I would like to linger on the consequences for political subjectivity of a “relational” conception of the subject. The recourse to the category of relation has frequently occurred in those areas of recent political thought which seem on the one hand to lack ancient organizational prostheses, and on the other to be too trusting to be able to translate into politically productive and effective relationships the lines of connection and communication that proliferate in global capitalism. But the category of relation can-not be taken for granted, and the practice of relation is anything but simple. Considering how we have conceived and practiced it in feminism, relation is neither a means nor a tactic. It isn’t simple connection, and it isn’t even a mere link between two or more sin-gularities. Rather it is the constitutive condition of the subject without which the subject does not exist: the “I” can neither be formed nor say itself without a “you.” Relationality is a condition that arises at birth and which from birth delivers us over to sociality; it returns us to our infantile dependence on the mother and delivers us over to reciprocal interdependence as adults. It is, inally, an expropriating condition that exposes us in our vulnerability to the welcoming and the abandoning of the other; to the violence and the love of the other, to the recognition and the nonrecognition of the other; to the presence and the loss of the other. As such, relationality is an operator that is both potentializing and destabilizing, an extraordinary multiplier of subjectivity that is capable of mobilizing the body, mind, desire, affects, and the unconscious. Nevertheless (and precisely for this reason), it is never completely up to us. It doesn’t allow itself to be brought under the control of a supposed sovereignty or of the transparency of our ego, and it resists becom-ing an institution or organization, or being picked up and taken to where we want it to be.

This is the extremely contingent nature of relationality. But this characteristic of maximum contingency is the price to pay for the advantage we gain if we shift the center of the social bond from the sacriicial rite of fraternal violence and parricide to the gen-erative relationship with the mother, and if we turn the debt that keeps community from the sense of guilt for the death inlicted on the father to the gratitude for the gift of life received by the mother. I am aware that this shift from the patriarchal order to “the sym-bolic order of the mother” (following the title of a well-known book by Luisa Muraro) can seem too symmetrical to those who are not close to the theoretical-practical elabora-tion that sustains it and which rather points to a radical asymmetry between these two orders.15 I am also aware that it can seem an archaic and regressive proposition to those who think that it is time to deinitively emancipate the political imagination from the Freudian and post-Freudian “familistic” imaginary. Without dwelling too long on these two points, I will limit myself to emphasizing that the igure of the mother functions here as the origin of a narrative—and thus of a destination—of an alternative community to the one based on violence; and that this is less an origin to which one returns than, to play on words, an origin that originates original forms of the social bond (the form of relation

15 On the re-signiication of the mother as an origin of social and political forms, see Muraro, L’ordine simbolico della madre; and Diotima, L’ombra della madre.

Daniela Comani, C’était moi. Journal 1900–1999

installation view: Centre d’Art Passerelle, Brest, France, 2010–2011 print on net vinyl: 13 x 52 feetCourtesy the artist and Centre d’Art Passerelle


above all) and rehabilitates affects cancelled by the mainstream political lexicon. If, as Hardt and Negri write in Commonwealth, the power of love is to be returned to the center of a political lexicon, the re-signiication of the relationship with the mother moves in the very same direction. And if, as Esposito writes in his most recent book, “the problem of a future philosophy is that of thinking a subject free from the dispositif that separates it from its corporeal substance, and to tie again at the same time its constitutive relation with the community” [Pensiero vivente 33], the thought of sexual difference can well be said to have sprung in a future past tense.

3

I could close here, with that little touch of rhetoric that makes for a happy ending. But I wouldn’t be—si parva licet . . .—an “Italian thinker,” if I didn’t feel the weight of a contradiction that reaches us from what remains of our national community and has to do with the fortunes of the common in a political regime that systematically operates to destroy it. In the Italy of the past few years, the construction of the common as we understand it here has been attacked both by the liberalist individualism of Berlusconi and by the security-based communitarianism of the Northern League, and things haven’t improved with the advent of the technocratic government of Mario Monti. A galloping process of de-democratization discourages attempts at self-government, while an inces-sant project of de-constitutionalization pushes the greater part of the opposition more toward the legalistic defense of constituted power than toward the extralegal mobilization of constituent power.16

Secondly, for almost twenty years Berlusconian biopolitics has produced consensus on the one hand through “affective” dispositifs—aesthetic, emotive, sensorial—that are extraneous to the rational political lexicon of the left; and on the other hand, through the postindustrial and mass-media production of a regime of true and false, of the speakable and the unspeakable, of the visible and the invisible that systematically implies a suppres-sion, a deformation, or a spectralization of the real by the imaginary, altering the percep-tion both of reality and its transformation. This was true above all in the example of the so-called “sexgate” of recent years, when a gigantic mediatic and performative operation concentrated the gaze on the female body, succeeding on the one hand in removing the attention from the masculine use of exchanges of sex, power, and money; and on the other hand succeeding in convincing large swaths of progressive public opinion, both male and female, that we had gone back to a patriarchal medieval era. This occurred in a society macroscopically marked, in the last four decades, by an increasing protagonism of women, where the problem isn’t about a return of oppression but rather the forms, often antinomical, that women’s freedom takes in post-patriarchal times and under neo-liberal hegemony. Indeed, and this is the third point, “Berlusconism” has been an em-blematic example of those biopolitical regimes, which, as Foucault taught us, take over not against our freedoms, but by using and transcribing them in a neoliberal sense. This makes it much more dificult both to decipher strategies of power, which are not classi-cally authoritarian, and to single out strategies of resistance. More generally and thanks to these features that I have briely discussed, the long age of Berlusconi has displayed a kind of governmentality that is remarkably biopolitical, against which the opposition of the oficial Left can do little or nothing, given how much they hold on to a classical political lexicon of sovereignty. But these same features also challenge the unoficial Left—the “we” that we are trying to reformulate—to deine a more acute analysis both of

16 On the notions of de-democratization and de-constitutionalization, see Brown, “American Night-mare.”


the governmental machine that redraws social subjects and of the politics of affect and of the imaginary that is inscribed in the body and in the unconscious of singular subjectivi-ties. The institution of the common doesn’t only move through forms of cooperation and self-government; it also moves through an affective grammar that is an alternative to that manipulated from the top, through a rehabilitation of desire against the “enjoyment of the object” imposed, to quote Lacan, by “the discourse of the capitalist,” through a political imagination more powerful than the politics of the imaginary.

Of course, such a gap between this political framework and the thought of the com-mon which, with varied inlections, we are working on here, brings us back to our point of departure: the speciic nature of “Italian thought.” This gap can be read in two opposite ways: as an indifference of Italian thought to such a context, or as a conlict between thought and context. I opt for this second position and I think that it conirms the link that in Italy joins the creativity of political thought with the permanent or recurring anomaly of the institutional ediice.

But we are also obliged to respond to the many accountants of the constituted order, or of a “reasonable” reformability of it, who urgently ask us to account for the “eficacy” or the practicability of radical thought. Here the last and crucial problem comes into view. It concerns the measure we use to determine change in a time when politics, or, better, biopolitics, inally becomes freed from the obsession of sovereignty. At this time, transformations cannot be measured by the taking of power or seats won in parliament or by a change in government, but by life changes, and changes in lives. From this point of view as well, feminism has the value of a paradigmatic experience, if it is true that the form of politics that it generated has never given itself objectives like power, governing, representation. Yet such a politics has profoundly changed the lives of women and men, as well as social networks, normative frameworks, and the symbolic order in which such lives are immersed. The construction of the common does not topple power; it empties it and pulverizes it, unmasks it, takes away its credibility. The common disputes power’s hold on life, and, in so doing, it also challenges power’s reason for being, opening at the same time a space in which a politics that does not identify with power can be thought and acted upon.17

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installation view: Centre d’Art Passerelle, Brest, France, 2010–2011 print on net vinyl: 13 x 52 feetCourtesy the artist and Centre d’Art PasserellePhoto: Nicolas Ollier

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