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Title: Enter... enter... Author: Anonymous Language: en Topics: insurrectionist, Killing King Abacus Source: Translator’s revised version, March 2015
[A new magazine has recently appeared in Italy called Diavolo in Corpo
[December 1999]. It is a magazine of anarchist ideas that is intended to
get beyond the anarchist ghetto. The following text is a translation of
the introduction the publishers of this magazine wrote for it. It is
printed here as an introduction to the ideas of certain of the
insurrectional anarchists of Italy.]
To have the devil within. This is an expression that has fortunately
survived from its medieval origins. Since the last witch burned on the
pyre of the inquisition, the devil has continued to creep into human
beings to shake them from the torpor of their existence. Indeed,
something of the sulfurous remains in this idiom, an odor of heresy. To
have the devil within means to be in continual motion, not knowing a
moment of reprieve, of quiet: refusing to lie down on custom. It has
nothing to do with the frenzy to which modern life invites us. On the
contrary, the fibrillation of the I—when it is not adherence to external
speed, but a spark that exceeds every utilitarian expectation—is
customarily looked at with suspicion, considered a pathology.
Possession, obsession, fanaticism: many are the descriptions with which
the defenders of that which is have liquidated the lovers of that which
is not. But the recourse to diagnosis without appeal first of all
reveals the embarrassment of the one who finds herself facing a
condition of perpetual motion that is not the fruit of logical choice,
but of visceral action. This does not mean that those who have the devil
within do not possess one’s own reasons; on the contrary. These reasons
exist and even have solid bases. So long as the solidity of the
projection of desires that they would want to carry out into the future
gives way to the enchantment of their lived experience, to their
immediate substance. With all our knowledge and understanding, there are
still not enough words together to ease the burning of that which we
lack, a life to invent. Like many before us, we think that no
possibility, even if it is the most unreal, can ever be outlawed or
rejected beforehand, no part of life can ever be condemned to death. If
that one expanse, increasingly limited, of unknown places does not
remain on the earth, it is within the individual himself that a world in
motion and without limits opens, the exploration of which has barely
begun. Rather it runs the risk of beginning again every day. This
thought provokes the vertigo of the absolute in anyone who has come
across it. And it is to avoid falling and hurting oneself that the human
being clings daily to the external reality that he knows, transforming
this existential vertigo into an aesthetic thrill. Through the centuries
the passion for the unknown has seized the human being, and through the
centuries she has sought relief in art or in science. In such a way he
accepts the dream into her own little interior kitchen, utilizing it in
doses and tensions that are not themselves able to cause burns. Safety
above all. This is the creed of a world that prefers the pension to
adventure. Now anyone who is not satisfied with the comfort that only
the domestic walls of habit are in a position to give him finds herself
in the unpleasant situation of having to create the other: another way
to think, another way to feel, another way to live. This other is
vulnerable to criticism and to drolleries from anyone who brags about
having his feet on the ground, because it ventures beyond the verifiable
facts. And since the accountability of giving and of having that scans
our days on earth demands that we all balance our accounts, it often
happens that one willingly dedicates only the season of adolescence to
the persistent search for freedom. The desire to rebel is an infantile
disorder: how many times we have heard it repeated. Yet in every epoch,
in every circle, the tyranny of objective reality has known its own
ageless outlaws. Individuals and ideas that, referring to Utopia, or to
the Impossible, or to the Unknown, or to the Marvelous—the name with
which they have christened the thirst that devoured them matters
little—have sought to escape the (un)quick sand in which they were
trapped by the means that they had at their disposal. Today, a fine
example of the (un)quick sand is furnished to us by the dominant way of
thinking. Its inactivity cannot amaze anyone: it is the necessary
consequence of a perspective dictated by the indispensable need to
preserve the foundations of the world in which we live, the world of
authority and of the commodity. In order to mold the world to its own
image and profit, power must make the existing order appear natural. It
must present and impose today’s social relations as eternal, define them
as proper to all societies, for the purpose of establishing Progress,
Money, Work, Democracy, State, as if it were a question of absolute
concepts. The purpose is to spread the inner persuasion everywhere and
within everyone that the world has always been this way and always will
be, and that it will never know a rupture, an upheaval, a revolution.
The world in which we live is thus presented to us as the ripe fruit of
a linear progress that has brought us from the hell of primitiveness to
the paradise of civilization, and no one has the right to bring this up
for discussion. As for the alternatives to this one-way thought, they
appear to us to portray the unfaithful shadow. They limit themselves to
demanding a different outline of the form within the substantial
identity of content: a left government as an alternative to a right
government, thirty-five hours of work as an alternative to forty hours
of work weekly, organic merchandise as an alternative to adulterated
merchandise, and so forth. Realism is the tomb of Utopia, but the last
hope of politics, of work, of the market. And to us—to us who, to stay
with the example, wish the end of every government, all work, every
market—nothing is left but to build castles in the air. Or else to try
to demolish those that are on earth. It has already been said many times
that a theory critical of society possesses no concepts that can build a
bridge between the present and the future, offers no promises, shows no
outcomes, but remains destructive. Indeed if we could formulate a
concrete idea of the alternative, it would not be that of an
alternative: the possibilities of the other world are so remote and
incongruous with respect to the universe of today as to defy every
attempt to identify it within the boundaries of this universe. This is
why, at the very moment that we take the floor to question everything,
whoever listens to us is certain to hear nothing. But nothing else is
possible. Any one who is deafened by the roar of identical days and
signs that follow one after the other will never succeed in catching our
murmur. If we trust our flow to superficially banal reflections, it is
because we have not yet reached to all of the depths. If we recite
apparently mysterious formulae it is to awaken the demons that reside in
most of us. Here we will record the incarnations. Here we will retrace
the appearances. We will try to evoke the strength from them as well as
the reasons.