François Dosse | Félix Guattari & The “Molecular Revolution”: Italy, Germany, France

2022-10-042022-10-04 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: A/traverso · Antonio Negri · Félix Guattari · François Dosse · Franco "bifo" Berardi · Louis Althusser · Potere Operaio · Radio AliceLeave a comment

In 1976, the Basque country was restless— certainly on the Spanish side of the border, where ETA,1 the Basque separatist movement, was engaged in an armed struggle against the powers of Madrid. Félix Guattari was dreaming of building a federation of regional protest movements, which could open up secondary fronts and weaken the Nation-State. Despite his extensive network of contacts, he never managed to realize this perilous project, which was located on the cusp between democratic combat and terrorist action. The Italian May ’68: 1977 Guattari and his friends were, however, bathing in a veritable fountain of…

AFTER THE DEATH OF NANNI BALESTRINI [by Raúl Sánchez Cedillo]

2021-09-152021-09-30 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: AUTONOMIA · Nanni Balestrini · Potere Operaio · Raúl Sánchez Cedillo · RossoLeave a comment

Nanni Balestrini passed away on 20 May 2019, at the age of almost 84. Writer and poet, revolutionary activist, visual artist, publisher. Now the necessary task begins of collecting and publishing a vast and varied body of work, hardly known to the wide majority of people who follow literature, poetry, design and performance art. More than simply being Italian, Balestrini was a Milanese character. It will be difficult for us to understand his trajectory if we do not take into consideration the importance of Milan during the republican postwar period, the city we see in Antonioni’s The Night, industrial…

Nanni Balestrini | “I write to you opposite the balcony from whence I contemplate the eternal light whose radiant fire slowly fades on the distant horizon”

2020-05-272020-07-07 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: AUTONOMIA · Communism · Nanni Balestrini · Potere Operaio · Revolution · SabotageLeave a comment

At one point in ‘Blackout’, Balestrini writes, “This poem should not be published because it is a political manifesto.” The historical events with which ‘Blackout’ is concerned and toward which it is critical began with the wave of conflicts in 1968 at the universities and factories and eventually spread throughout the West. The protests culminated in the “troubled autumn” of 1969, eventually involving the entire Italian working class in strikes, demonstrations, and acts of sabotage.

Alberto Toscano | Mayakovsky at Mirafiori: Operaismo and the Negation of Poetry

2020-02-182021-08-11 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Alberto Asor Rosa · Alberto Toscano · Antonio Gramsci · Communism · Franco Fortini · Jacques Rancière · Leo Trotsky · Mario Tronti · Nicholas Gorlov · Operaismo · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Potere Operaio · Revolution · Viktor Shklovsky · Vladimir Lenin · Vladimir MayakovskyLeave a comment

Though many of the watchwords and guiding axioms of Italian operaismo and its successors have percolated into critical discourse on aesthetic production, and multiple analyses of its intersections with visual art and architecture in the 1960 and 1970s have been advanced, little has been made of its specific approach to the question of poetics. This chapter aims partially to correct this tendency by exploring the arguments about the unhappy marriage between avant-garde poetry and communist politics sketched out in some interventions by the key literary critic and historian in the collective of militant intellectuals that made up ‘classic’ operaismo,…

Nanni Balestrini | Wer das hier liest, braucht sich vor nichts mehr zu fürchten (Interview)

2019-12-172021-06-10 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: AUTONOMIA · Nanni Balestrini · Potere Operaio · Red BrigadesLeave a comment

Der 1935 in Mailand geborene Schriftsteller Nanni Balestrini gehört zu den wenigen, die, obwohl sie im normalen Literaturbetrieb anerkannt sind, weiterhin über die revolutionäre Bewegung der 60er und 70er schreiben. Selbst Aktivist der sozialen und Klassenkämpfe der Jahre 1968-80 in Italien, hat Balestrini alle seine Romane über die Geschichte der radikalen Linken geschrieben. Seine Bücher handeln von den Arbeiterkämpfen bei FIAT, von den Ursprüngen des bewaffneten Kampfs oder von der Jugendbewegung (Autonomia) Mitte der 70er. Sein Standpunkt bleibt dabei klar, an der subjektiven Sicht der Rebellierenden rüttelt Balestrini nicht. Ihm geht es, auch wenn er nach eigenem Bekunden, „keine…

Nanni Balestrini | “I close my eyes and start to sing”

2019-05-212022-09-14 Categories: Poetry & PoeticsTags: AUTONOMIA · Blackout · Class Struggle · Communism · Lotta Continua · Mariarosa Dalla Costa · Nanni Balestrini · Potere Operaio · Revolution · Riots · Sabotage · The Golden Horde · The Strategy of Refusal · Vogliamo TuttoLeave a comment

NANNI BALESTRINI (1935-2019) I close my eyes and start to sing threads are entangled and transformed into spots whose dance moves ever more slowly I sang my repertoire then I started monologues with my eyes closed I walked back and forth in the cell four steps forward four steps back I invented dialogues for two characters that spoke different languages like at the cinema when the film ends there are those who make love who smoke there are those who merely exist Nanni Balestrini, the radical Italian experimental visual artist, poet, and novelist known for recombinatory, revolutionary…

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))

Tag: Potere Operaio