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

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 youth under the Italian sun. Roughly a decade after having been at the heart of the movement of May ’68, there they were in the streets of Bologna—awestruck, stupefied—watching their wished-for molecular revolution unfold. This was a movement against all manner of apparatus, expressed in a completely new language with heretofore unheard-of methods. In 1977, when Guattari’s essay Molecular Revolution came out, Italy witnessed the birth of a movement so radical and violent that France’s May ’68 seemed like an isolated college-student event in comparison.

Italy in 1977 was undergoing an unprecedented crisis. Economic indicators were hopeless. Each month, the country collapsed a bit more. Two million people were unemployed, and the leaders’ projections were not encouraging. In January 1977, as a New Year’s wish, the minister of industry himself announced that unemployment would rise in February by 600,000. A 25 percent–per-year inflation rate made the lira plunge; it lost 38.9 percent of its value against the dollar in three years. Paradoxically, in a country that was losing its bearings and its jobs, the broad movement of dissent that broke out did not demand a better distribution of jobs, work for all, or salaries pegged to rising prices. Instead, much less traditionally, protesters wanted to weaken the system’s foundation by attacking head on the values of labor, property, and the delegation of power and representation.

The economic and social crisis was widespread, but the political machinery was stymied. The Andreotti government lacked all direction. The large and very influential alternative force that was the Italian Communist Party (PCI) under Berlinguer called merely for a national recovery plan, civil order, and an acceptance of austerity. In the name of a necessary “historical compromise,” the PCI became a progovernment party. Italian communists had at that time stepped back from the Soviet big brother and had formed a promarket wing favoring a kind of “Euro-Communism.” At the same time, their alignment with Italian authorities and the search for an alliance with a party as jeopardized as the Christian Democrats had dramatic effects. The great mass of marginals who were hard hit by the crisis and deprived of all hope were now being given no way out.

This deadlock fed radical reactions, spontaneous irruptions, and violent clashes. Whereas the May ’68 movement ultimately spoke in the old Marxist-Leninist tongue, whether in its Trotskyite or Maoist dialect, the Italian dissent a decade later was seeking new inspiration. A whole series of far-left Italian currents found a new language in the theses of Deleuze and Guattari, notably in the 1975 Italian translation of Anti-Oedipus and the notion of “desiring machines.” The postwar decades of economic prosperity were but a dim memory, and students lacked even the slightest hope of making their diplomas worth anything. Because there was no future, alternative and autonomous currents made the idea of changing life itself the order of the day. They wanted to invent, there and then, new, self-managed spaces and communities prone to liberate the individual in open, collective milieus. When compared to 1968, it seemed that a generational shift was in the works.

Another element in the Italian situation was fueling the radical nature of the conflicts: the persistence of an Italian fascist party, the MSI, which could rely not only on active troops but also had at its disposal a like-minded network at the highest level of the State apparatus able to call out auxiliary forces to suppress any whiff of social dissent. On top of this already explosive situation, there was the strategy of the desperate Christian Democrats, who hoped to manipulate this fascist violence both to intimidate the social movement and to justify an all-out repression of far-left movements. The fascists would carry out repeated bombings; the police would hold the far-left activists responsible and then hold public prosecutions and convictions. The PCI, which benignly watched this unfold, rejoiced at the repression of its rivals.

On December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded on the Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing sixteen people and wounding eighty. For Isabelle Sommier, this was an “original trauma.” The next day, the police arrested twenty-seven far-left activists. Other terrorist acts followed: a train derailed on July 22, 1970 (six dead and fifty wounded), a bomb in Brescia detonated during an antifascist demonstration (eight dead and ninety-four wounded), and on August 4, 1974, a bomb detonated in a train (twelve dead and 105 wounded). This “strategy of tension” continued to grow during the 1970s—and with it the number of victims. The P2 Lodge scandal broke out, revealing to the public the high degree of fascist infiltration in the seats of power. Italian leaders were compromising themselves with the worst enemies of democracy, and the PCI was championing “historical compromise” for marginals and dissidents of all stripes. The only path left was the path of radical opposition. When Luciano Lama, the general secretary of the large Italian union group CGIL, turned up at the University of Rome, he was summarily kicked out, which led to clashes among students, police forces, and the PCI security group.

The Italian far left, however, underwent a veritable mutation between 1968 and 1977, which took the form of a creative quest for some and a recourse to terrorism for others. Leninist-like organizations coming out of 1968 had for the most part disappeared from the political landscape.2 From their ruins arose a movement that vindicated worker autonomy and included many collective movements, especially some particularly powerful ones from some of the largest Italian companies—Fiat, Pirelli, Alfa Romeo, and Policlinico. This movement rejected the traditional forms of delegating power and the right to expression. Many activists from the former Potere Operaio group participated. In 1977, the “Metropolitan Indians,” the most creative branch of the movement, insisted on the need to transform relationships between individuals and attacked the system, wielding derision and irony as their principal weapons. They met and moved about in tribes of “Red Skins” through the large cities of Italy, fighting for the liberalization of drugs and “requisitioning empty buildings, the creation of antifamily raids to abduct minors brainwashed by their parents, a square kilometer of green space for each inhabitant, and the return of all animals held captive in zoos to their countries of origin.”3

As in 1968, these dissident movements did not need to proclaim the need for student-worker alliances. Such alliances already existed between students, young workers, and the numerous subproletarians and unemployed people who identified themselves in the emergence of a movement that put its autonomy at the forefront against any kind of manipulation. The worker’s autonomy actions multiplied right up to 1977, and many of them were, in their deeds, against the law and, in their intentions, against political actions: there were occupations of private homes, self-styled reductions in public- service fees, expropriations, and bank robberies. The year 1977 was a boom time for this turbulence, with a “77.62% increase in crimes against property from 1976.”4 Young people, students, workers, and outsiders made up a youthful proletariat that was shaking up the system by praising immediate action to change the life of the outcast. The tension continued to mount between this uncontrollable movement and the desperate powers that be.

This situation had an added aggravation, not present in May ’68 and post-1968 France: terrorism, practiced increasingly by a certain number of Italian ultraleft organizations. The Red Brigades (BR), created in 1970, benefited from their presence in the factories, particularly in Agnelli’s Fiat plant in Turin. In 1972, they played a central role in impromptu strikes, which unsettled that industrial group; they then seeded panic among the foremen and nonstriking workers by launching the “red scarf” movement. But the BR later turned to terrorism, and their abductions targeted first and foremost magistrates and politicians. Outside the BR, this terrorist branch also included an organization that had been created in 1974, the Proletarian Armed Nucleus (NAP), which brought together far-left activists and former common-law supporters. These two organizations proffered clandestine armed struggle and terrorism. In 1977, not a month went by without abductions, bombings, and assassinations.

Others chose communication and dialogue rather than the path of the Walther P38. Making the best of the 1976 end to RAI’s radio monopoly, a profusion of free radio channels took over the airwaves, opening them up to the possibility of countercultural expression. Among the many sites of cultural agitation, Radio Poloare broadcast from Milan to an impressive audience and with the ability to get people into the streets. In December 1976, it transmitted live the riots at the opening of La Scala, and, in March 1977, announced “the death of a woman who had been refused an abortion for medical reasons. In the minutes following, five thousand women took to the streets.”5

Of all those countercultural radio stations, Radio Alice, launched by the former head of Potere Operaio, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, was one of the most important. Broadcast from Bologna, a university town historically known as a showcase for compromise with the communist municipality, Radio Alice claimed a huge, loyal, and vibrant audience. Bifo was doing his military service at the age of twenty-three when he discovered Psychoanalysis and Transversality. Guattari’s reflections about psychoanalysis and the way it can change our relationship to the political sphere ignited his activist fire. In the preface to a book about the station, Guattari writes, “Radio Alice goes to the eye of the cultural cyclone—subverting language, publishing the review A/Traverso—and it has also plunged directly into political activity that it would like to ‘transversalize.’”6 In 1976, Bifo was arrested for “inciting rebellion.” As he put it, “Radio Alice had an incredible international impact. Loads of people listened to it. In the factories, groups of workers would go to their workshops with radios and turn on Radio Alice.”7 In 1977, however, the situation became tenser.

On February 8, 1977, students protesting university reforms were occupying most of Italy’s large universities, and at the end of the month a national student-movement gathering was held in Rome and led to violent clashes. On March 11, 1977, a Lotta Continua activist, Francesco Lo Russo, was killed in Bologna by the carbiniere; the next day, more than one hundred thousand people demonstrated on the streets of Rome. Gunshots broke out. The city was under siege. In Bologna, the situation was also very tense. “In March 1977, we moved from occupying to creating ‘free zones.’ We decided that a part of the city would be forbidden to cops and fascists and we set up barricades. The police fired and killed a student.”8 News of the student’s death was immediately broadcast in Bologna by Radio Alice, which sparked a gathering of one hundred thousand people.

On March 12, “at 10:25 pm, the police took over the street where Radio Alice was located, an area where until then, nothing had happened. They closed down bars and restaurants, fired tear gas, and stood with pointed guns and bullet-proof vests in front of this ‘dangerous lair.’ ”9 The radio station was closed, and the carbiniere made eight arrests for incitement of delinquency and subversive association, but they were unable to find Bifo. The next day, March 13, Bologna was under siege. Three thousand carbiniere and policemen, backed up by armored tanks, occupied the university area under orders from the Christian Democrat prefect. Zanghari, the city’s communist mayor, urged the forces of order to exert the highest level of repression. “Between March 11 and 16, a kind of insurrection broke out in Bologna. The entire city center was barricaded, certain neighborhoods were held by students but also by a good number of young workers. An armory had been pillaged.”10 The funeral of the murdered student gave way to violent confrontations. On March 16, the Christian Democrats and the PCI together organized a 150,000-person-strong march protesting the violence, and 15,000 students paraded through the streets of Bologna. A police dragnet arrested three hundred. On May 13, the minister of the interior enacted antiterrorist measures—from then on, those behind bombings would be condemned to life in prison.

Bifo fled to Milan, then Turin, and then crossed the French border, arriving in Paris on May 30 with a burning desire to meet Guattari, whose texts he had so much appreciated. The painter Gianmarco Montesano, a friend of Bifo, and the philosopher Toni Negri introduced him to Guattari. Gianmarco Montesano was a former activist in Potere Operaio and had been instructed by its head to broaden the Italian movement, making it European by creating contacts to develop an alternative leftist network. He had been in Paris for a while and while at the ENS had met Yann Moulier-Boutang, who was working on his agrégation in the social sciences. Together they created the group Camarades, which published an information-and-analysis brochure entitled Matériaux pour l’intervention (Materials for the Intervention). Montesano met the sociologist Danièle Guillerm in this group: “When I suggested that Camarades translate things about the movement in Italy and about Radio Alice . . . they proposed that I go speak to Félix about it.”11 The upshot of this meeting was a book on Radio Alice with a preface by Félix Guattari.12

At first, Guattari knew fairly little about the Italian situation, except for the antipsychiatry movement, with which he was tightly linked. On a political level, Montesano was his first informant. “My first encounters with Félix were totally self-serving.”13 Beyond the primary motivation to create an efficient, international activist network, a friendly bond quickly formed between them, and Guattari became increasingly interested in the Italian situation. He welcomed Montesano to his home, on rue de Condé, an address open to dissidents and outcasts of every sort. When Bifo, who knew Montesano well, found himself on the lam in Paris, he had little trouble meeting Guattari.

Bifo saw Guattari many times from June 1977 on and quickly became his friend. In Paris on July 7, he went to a friend’s house; the Italian police were waiting for him at the door. He was arrested and incarcerated at the Prison de la Santé and then at Fresnes. Guattari and some friends quickly organized a support network to get him released and launched the Center for Initiatives for New Free Spaces (Centre d’Initiatives pour de Nouveaux Espaces Libres, CINEL),14 whose primary objective was to ensure the defense of prosecuted activists. This collective published a journal, found a headquarters on rue de Vaugirard, and immediately rallied its forces to free Bifo.

The trial, whose stakes hung on the Italian legal authorities’ request for Bifo’s extradition, took place only a few days after his arrest. Although he was being prosecuted for being a host on a free radio station, the extradition request identified him as the head of a gang behind a kidnapping in Bologna. The defense team of French lawyers, including Kiejman, easily revealed the absurdity of the official reasons behind the prosecution. On July 11, Bifo was considered nonextraditable and was welcomed in France as a political refugee. “The afternoon of my release from prison, we wrote up an appeal against repression in Italy to be signed by French intellectuals.”15 Out of prison, Bifo moved into Guattari’s home on rue de Condé. He had only just met him but already considered him an “older brother.”16 The two friends scripted the appeal condemning the repression meted out to the movement in Italy, openly pinning the blame on the Christian Democrats and the PCI’s policy of historical compromise. This initiative caused a flag-waving national tantrum in Italy. Intellectuals and politicians accused the French of meddling in affairs they knew nothing about, arguing that the French had no right to proffer any lessons to Italians.

Bologna Reacts

To counter this repressive policy and take back the initiative, the entire Italian far left joined together for a great meeting and colloquium in Bologna from September 22 to 24, 1977. The PCI, which governed the city, denounced this assembly as a provocation, with its general secretary, Enrico Berlinguer, using the term “plague carriers.” Expecting predators, they witnessed instead a three-day gathering of Dantesque proportions for a midsized city like Bologna: eighty thousand people occupied the city in the greatest peace and quiet and without the slightest violence. Given the tension in the air and the size of the crowds, this was a feat indeed. Bifo spent these three days being updated by telephone on what was going on in the city. But the whole Guattari gang was on the Bologna streets, in awe. Every group of the Italian far left was there, from the terrorist wing to the worker-autonomy group, not to mention the “Metropolitan Indians,” feminists, homosexuals, and “red dykes.” PCI activists were discreet in their home-town, a symbol of the contested historical compromise, making sure that tens of thousands of young people were fed and housed during those three days. A tacit agreement had been struck with the BR so that it would in no way resort to violence. The BR cleverly respected the pact but took advantage of this unique occasion, which gave them the right to march in public with impunity, to recruit new members on a massive scale. “This all occurred obviously without our knowledge. We hadn’t imagined this possibility.”17 Over those three days, people marched day and night through the streets of Bologna and debated everywhere, most of all at the sports arena, where thousands came to the “permanent forum” to discuss tactics, strategies, and the abolition of labor. From the windows of the Bologna town hall, the powerless PCI bigwigs watched the rainbow-colored flow of humanity. “This was the first time that we had seen a demonstration of twenty thousand young women shouting and making the ‘pussy’ sign with their hands. It was so beautiful! That was the first time we saw that it was possible! Women Power!” remembers a thrilled Gérard Fromanger.18

Guattari became a hero figure in Bologna. He was considered one of the essential sources of inspiration for the Italian left, and he watched the marches with the utmost delight, seeing his thoughts take shape in a social and political force. The day after the gathering, the daily and weekly press put his photo on their covers, presenting him as the founder and creator of this mobilization. Guattari had suddenly become the Daniel Cohn-Bendit of Italy. “When he walked down the streets of Bologna, everyone rushed to greet him, touch him, kiss him. It was crazy. Unheard of. He was Jesus walking on water. I was very happy myself, because I received a few sprinkles.”19 During these three days, Hervé Maury was also in Bologna in the same hotel as Guattari, Christian Bourgois, and Maria Antoinetta Macciocchi: “I was with François Pain like Fabrice at Waterloo, I didn’t understand a thing. It was a huge party celebrating the pacification of far-left movements and at the same time we were marching toward the prison to liberate comrades and all of a sudden I see some young people pulling guns.”20

The publisher Christian Bourgois, infuriated by the Italian campaign against the French intellectuals, decided with Yann Moulier-Boutang to go to Bologna to have it out. He took part in the marches alongside Henri Weber, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).

We found ourselves in Bologna with tens of thousands of people, telling ourselves that we had provoked all of this, with a feeling of fear not for ourselves, but that things could degenerate and people would become completely irresponsible. I learned a great lesson about Italian politics at that point because the Communists were nowhere in sight. They were in the hallways of the buildings along the route and in the inner courtyards. The police were patrolling the city but were staying outside.21

Yann Moulier-Boutang was in the French delegation to Bologna. He was an essential player in creating Franco-Italian solidarity, having early on made connections with the Italians of the autonomy movement, with which he identified politically. An activist in the Censier collectives since 1968, he had offered to lodge Italian comrades since 1970. A rather libertarian communist, his leanings were more along the lines of Cahiers de Mai, a weekly publication coming out of the May ’68 movement that ran until 1974. In 1972, he organized a meeting at Jussieu with representatives from Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio. In 1973 and 1974, he mobilized with immigrant collectives, insisting on the autonomy of their movement: he had adopted the idea of autonomy from the Italians and it implied taking the singularity of each group into consideration. This political gesture also meant that each group would define its own objectives. Starting from this conception, the social movement was conceived not around a formal unity but in terms of a connection of multiplicities. While working on this appropriation of the Italy-inspired French movement and acting with Montesano, Yann Moulier-Boutang met Guattari in 1977 and was soon involved in creating the CINEL to free Bifo. In September, he quite naturally found himself in Bologna. “I met Félix for the first time at the rue de Condé apartment about this call to go to Bologna.”22 He traveled to Italy with Gérard Fromanger.

Not all parade participants had the same good intentions. Several thousand members of the BR had donned ski masks and were wielding weapons. This demonstration of force definitely helped the Red Brigades usurp a good part of the movement. The celebration did not degenerate into violence, but ultimately the challenge of Bologna was a failure because, beyond the euphoria of the moment, it offered no clear perspective to a movement that imploded on itself, newly confronted by repression and isolation.

The Wall of Silence in Germany

The dissident movement in Europe was being strenuously repressed. The various governments armed themselves with a sufficient legal arsenal to make their repressive policies as efficient as possible: in France, the antirioters law was passed on June 8, 1970; in Italy, the president of the Italian Republic decreed a law in August 1977 that included new “dispositions concerning public order,” strengthening the main legal instrument of Italian repression. The Reale law of 1975 had already allowed police to hold someone in custody indefinitely. Organizations had to be vigilant about the violations of personal freedoms, and the CINEL, which could alert intellectuals at any moment, was eyeing the gathering storm.

Barely two months after the Bologna events, two Germans arrived at the CINEL headquarters, where they were greeted by Guattari and Fromanger. “They told us, ‘We’d like you to do for us what you did for the Italians in Bologna, because we are going nuts.’ ”23 They were seeking international support for the thousands of alternative communities in Berlin, who were living uncomfortably with a State power that suspected any and every outsider of being part of the Baader gang. Guattari had already committed himself to a trip to Brazil to meet Lula, the Workers’ Party leader. He looked to his friend, Gérard Fromanger, to respond to the Germans’ request.

Fromanger spoke no German and felt poorly prepared for such a mission. He thought that Félix’s proposition was “crazy,” but he went all the same, flying to Berlin with Gilles Herviaux, one of his CINEL comrades. During the stopover in Frankfurt, they got a sense of the prevailing climate of terror in Germany—photos of wanted terrorists were posted everywhere. “We got to the Berlin airport. Nobody was there. We were wondering what we were doing there. We almost went back when, several hours later, we saw a guy in the back of the airport with a scarf tied around his neck hanging down to his feet, and a girl with pretty golden hair.”24 Those were their contacts, who shuttled them to central Berlin for a meeting of around sixty people, where they sketched out the groundwork for a large gathering at Frankfurt, at which they expected one hundred thousand people. To get things ready and loosen the stranglehold around the Berlin communities, they would need to bring several thousand people in Berlin together two months later. “In fact, twenty-seven thousand people came to Berlin for three days and three nights, inventing a code called ‘Tunix’ (Do nothing, don’t move).”25 Members of alternative Berlin groups, constantly suspected of being linked to the Red Army Faction (RAF), could no longer even move about their own neighborhoods. Their wives were insulted and called “dirty whores.” If three or more of them were on the street, the police would pull out their machine guns, frisk them, and drag the girls to the station. During those three days, the police suddenly and miraculously disappeared—a breath of fresh air to the Berlin movement. “As a painter, I had invented a little color strategy. Ten thousand little color bombs, hot and cold. Everybody had two or three of them on him, and each time we walked past a tank, splat! In front of the Wall, splat! The tanks were soon covered with all the colors of the rainbow. Depardon took photos. Félix was there, as were Foucault and Deleuze.”26 As in Bologna, Berlin organized a permanent forum in the huge lecture hall of the Polytechnical University, where up to five thousand people could assemble.

In 1977, the CINEL was also on the front lines for the liberation of Ulrike Meinhof’s27 lawyer, Klaus Croissant, who had been imprisoned at the Santé during his visit to Paris. The CINEL had decided, together with the League for Human Rights, to organize a meeting at the Mutalité to defend him. Six thousand people packed the room. But the mobilization failed to prevent the extradition of Croissant by the German authorities.

We were crammed inside a narrow hallway of the court in Paris as of the early afternoon in front of the door to the courtroom that was carefully packed with plain-clothes policemen. This is where the court had to “publicly” rule on the appeal of the refugee Klaus Croissant to be extradited to Germany. Impossible to get in, so why wait? A lot of beaten-down people discreetly walked away. But this was out of the question for Félix, with his mussed hair, his cheeky humor, and his glasses ready to fly off his face. A few dozen of us held on as he did for many long hours. To not back down, to bear witness, and in the end to learn that the appeal had been rejected. That was Félix. He was always ready to give his all.28

The night of the extradition, a small group came to the League for Human Rights headquarters to protest in front of the Santé Prison. Many lawyers, including Jean-Jacques de Félice and Michel Tubiana, were in this group, as was Foucault.

During the CINEL meetings on rue de Vaugirard, a good number of dissidents from the mobilization against Croissant’s extradition were starting to adopt the terrorist postures of the Italian Red Brigade and the Baader gang in Germany. The legal expert Gérard Soulier bemoaned this, speaking openly to Guattari about this shift, which he found problematic, confiding that he could not and would not follow suit under any circumstances and threatening that he was ready to quit the CINEL. “Félix told me, ‘Don’t do that, by no means! It’s very important that you stay.’ That’s when I understood that he was conducting collective psychotherapy. And if there had been no blunders of the Italian/German type, it was because of that. Because it was a venue for catharsis.”29

Éric Alliez confirms Guattari’s very firm position on the question of this terrorist shift, despite Bernard-Henri Lévy’s accusation that he had more than a weakness for terrorists’ positions: “During those Italian ‘somber years,’ one had to, for example, go, as I did, to the universities of Rome or Bologna, be on site and speak to potential Red Brigade disciples to dissuade them from taking the plunge. But talking directly with BR members and debating with the assassins themselves, as someone like Guattari did at that time? No, absolutely out of the question.”30 It is true that Guattari did not publicly condemn the Italian Red Brigade or the RAF in Germany in 1977 and 1978. His silence could be explained by the underground work that he was doing to dissuade rather than condemn those tempted to take the terrorist path, explaining how such a choice would be horrible for other people and would lead to self- empoisoning. Guattari played a major role at this level, notably in his rue de Condé apartment, which was an outsiders’ drop-in during those years. “The way Félix welcomed and lodged those people! Félix would say, ‘Their spying pisses me off.’ He’d take in people who were being stalked like animals and tempted by the armed struggle. He’d add, ‘We should get a refund from the national health care system.’ ”31 According to Jean Chesneaux, another of Guattari’s friends in the CINEL mobilizations, “If France was spared Red Brigade– or Red Army Faction–style armed actions, this was largely due to his therapeutic contacts with outsiders and autonomists tempted by direct violence. Félix told me that he hung out with those people because he could keep them from making their Molotov cocktails and instead put them on his psychoanalyst’s couch.”32

The Italian “Somber Years”

The Red Brigade’s 1978 execution of the Italian council president Aldo Moro heightened repression in Italy and started legal proceedings all over again. The CINEL was again on the front lines as, for example, when Italian legal authorities asked for the extradition of Franco Piperno, who had been arrested in Paris on September 18, 1978, along with Lanfranco Pace, because they were suspected of being linked to Moro’s assassination. Given that this warrant led nowhere, a final demand for extradition was justified on the basis of common-law offenses. There was nothing in the files. These Italian activists had never been linked to terrorist groups. In Italy, many well-known personalities, including Leonardo Sciascia, Alberto Moravia, and Umberto Eco, petitioned the Italian magistrates. In France, the CINEL collected signatures against the extradition.33 Piperno, a former Potere Operaio activist, would have gone to prison instead of becoming what he is today, a professor at the University of Catania and a Nobel Prize–winning physicist.

But the most publicized affair of the late 1970s was the arrest of Toni Negri, another former Potere Operaio director who was not linked to the Red Brigade terrorist network either. A friend of Gianmarco Montesano, Negri, like his friend, was a supporter of worker autonomy. As a philosopher, author, and professor of political and social science at the University of Padua, Toni Negri had the status of a great political leader. He came to Paris in 1977, and thanks to Montesano met Guattari who was then preparing the Bologna gathering. His writings neither defended the Red Brigade nor praised armed violence.

As a leader of the Autonomia group, and more particularly of the Milan Rosso group, Toni Negri was named in an arrest warrant and fled to avoid being arrested, first to Switzerland, where he stayed for three months, and then to Paris in September 1977. He took refuge at Guattari’s home. A friendship grew between them, and subsequently he often spent weekends at Dhuizon, near La Borde.

Yann Moulier-Boutang then had Louis Althusser invite Toni Negri to the ENS to teach a seminar on Marx’s Grundrisse; the seminar was published in 1979.34 Toni Negri also attended Deleuze’s classes at Vincennes. “Listening to Gilles Deleuze was a kind of cleansing of what had been predetermined in my brain. . . . I became a Spinozist after those classes.”35 In 1978 and 1979, Negri foolhardily divided his time between France and Italy, where he was arrested by the Italian authorities on April 7, 1979, along with Oreste Scalzone, another PO leader. Both were accused of being legal frontmen for the Red Brigade and implicated in the assassination of Aldo Moro. They were immediately sent to a “special prison,” the Italian equivalent of a maximum-security prison, where Negri remained incarcerated for over four years. At the end of his 1983 trial, the high court of Rome condemned Negri to thirty years of imprisonment and Scalzone to twenty years for subversive action and the creation of armed groups. Of course, the CINEL, with Guattari at the fore, mobilized immediately. “The idea that Negri could be the head of the BR was as ridiculous as if someone had said in 1937 that Trotsky was the head of the KGB.”36

The CINEL sent activists to visit Toni Negri and Oreste Scalzone in prison. This was an intensely active time for the CINEL, which was facing increasing numbers of demands for extradition and imprisonment. “We incorporated legal experts and lawyers into the CINEL, like Jean-Pierre Mignard, Georges Kiejman, Jean-Denis Bredin, the judge Yves Lemoine, François Loncle from the Socialist Party, and Senator Parmentier. We mobilized and got petitions signed. We challenged well-known individuals and exposed those responsible for bringing the charges.”37

Immediately after Negri’s incarceration but before his trial began, Deleuze defended Toni Negri’s innocence to his judges in a letter that was printed in La Repubblica on May 10, 1979.38 He was stunned that someone could be prosecuted and imprisoned without the slightest tangible evidence, and he made the analogy that Carlo Ginzburg used later during the trial of his friend Adriano Sofr, comparing the interrogations to the Inquisition. Deleuze laid out some principles: “First, the courts should hold to a certain principle of identity.”39 In this case, however, the prosecution had no tangible evidence at its disposal to prop up its prosecution. Second, the investigation and preparation of the case must be carried out with a minimum of coherence, according to the principle of disjunction or exclusion, whereas the prosecution “was proceeding by inclusion, by piling up contradictory terms.”40 The Italian press apparently was claiming that Toni Negri possessed the power of ubiquity, since he allegedly had been in Rome, Paris, and Milan simultaneously. Last, Deleuze reacted to the vehement Italian criticisms of French intellectuals concerning the call to Bologna and the charge that they were meddling in others’ affairs that did not concern them: “Negri is an important theorist and intellectual in France as well as in Italy.”41 Shortly afterward, when Bourgois published Toni Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx in 1979, Deleuze took up his pen for Le Matin de Paris to remind everyone of Negri’s innocence. He invited the judges investigating Negri’s intentions and his degree of implication in the Moro affair to read his work, which “is literally a proof of innocence,”42 because the notions he argues confirm that he could only be hostile to such an assassination.

Guattari went to Italy several times to visit Toni Negri in prison and the two men corresponded for more than four years. Above all, this epistolary contact was a great comfort for Negri, who was growing impatient and starting to despair. In May 1980, Guattari visited the prison once more and offered a more regular exchange of letters. Two months later, Toni Negri described his weariness. “I was doing rather badly and am starting to feel a prison fatigue and be in a psychological state that often turns to laziness.”43 At the end of the 1980s, Toni Negri was transferred to the Rebibbia prison in Rome to undergo the first interrogations since his arrest, after seventeen months of incarceration. He had just read the latest book by Deleuze and Guattari. “I’ve read A Thousand Plateaus almost in its entirety. It’s an important book. Perhaps the most important I’ve read in the last twenty years.”44

In 1983, to help his friend hang on, Guattari suggested that they write a book together on the basis of their correspondence. Toni Negri accepted the offer gladly, since it would help him endure the morbidity of prison life. He also hoped to benefit from the shared writing experience that Guattari had already acquired with Deleuze. “You have more experience than I do working as a couple, and I think you should do the final assembly work.”45

In June 1983, Toni Negri was freed before being formally condemned, because he had just been elected European deputy for the Italian Radical Party. As he was leaving prison, the political class mobilized to eliminate his parliamentary immunity. Persuaded that he would be sent back to prison, Toni Negri turned to Guattari. In September 1983, a majority of four votes (300 to 296) in the Italian parliament removed his parliamentary immunity. “I left for Corsica in a boat that was most certainly paid for by Félix,” he remembers.46 Helped by Gérard Soulier and Guattari, he arrived secretly in Paris.

He and Guattari then continued the already advanced work on their book. “From 1983 to 1987, my name was Antoine Guattari. He paid for everything. I moved from the place d’Italie to boulevard Pasteur and then to rue Monsieur-le-Prince,”47 into apartments that Guattari found for him. “Félix looked after me like a brother. He helped me everywhere.”48 Rue de Condé continued to be a hub for the movement. That was where Toni Negri met Daniel Vernet, a journalist for Le Monde, Serge July, and Régis Debray. “That was where the ‘Mitterrand Doctrine’49 was conceived. It was not some external position concerning Italy. It was an inside construction.”50

New Spaces for Freedom was published in 1985.51 It opened with a defense of “communism,” a termed branded with infamy, clarifying that “we conceived of it as a path to a liberation of individual and collective singularities.”52 This break with the traditional Marxist schema claimed that “community and singularity are not in opposition.”53 This essay reaffirmed that what happened was deeply rooted in the 1968 experience, which led to the title of the second chapter—“The Revolution Started in ’68.”54 The May ’68 movement was not just about political emancipation. It was also the expression of a true will to liberation, both radical and plural.

What some would call the death of the political is only the birth of a new world and new politics: the success of the 1970s reaction and the appearance of a “No Future” tendency linked to the creation of an Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) that neatly slices up the planet. With the IWC, individuals are all the more subjected since they cannot localize power. The world market is presented as an efficient instrument for putting poverty into a “grid” and “enmeshing” marginalization. Despite the global grid overlaying the social universe, the revolution and hence hope are not things of the past.

The book concluded with two personal contributions: one by Guattari on “Liberties in Europe” and another by Negri, “Archaeological Letter.” Beyond their shared struggle, we can measure here once more what distinguishes Guattari’s open approach to deep questioning and Negri’s determination to hold onto the classical revolutionary tradition at any price. Guattari explains that his fight to defend the rights of Bifo, Croissant, Piperno, Pace, and Negri led him to reconsider his judgment “on the importance granted to those supposedly formal freedoms that now seem to me totally inseparable from other ‘on the ground’ liberties.”55 And Guattari could take satisfaction with the positive role played by organizations like Amnesty International, the League of Human Rights, France Terre d’Asile, and the Cimade in France. He suggested that we talk about “degrees of freedom, or even better, differential coefficients of freedom.”56 This pluralization of our idea of liberty is linked with the concern not to present the State as a monster somewhere outside of society. As Foucault had sketched it out, power is everywhere and first of all in us. We must “make do with it.”57 In his contribution, however, Negri let his ineradicable attachment to Leninism shine through.

If repression and reinforcement were not being used to the same degree in France as they had been in Germany and Italy, it was not thanks to a more robust democratic tradition. Other than for a few marginal incidents, France had simply not lived through the terrorist movements. Nevertheless, the desire to wipe out the leftist menace, the June 1970 antirioter law, and the tough clampdown on some demonstrations in France helped give the international climate of the 1970s the weighty feel of those “somber years.”

On September 19, 1979, one of Guattari’s best friends, the filmmaker François Pain, was arrested, imprisoned, and prosecuted for events that had occurred more than six months earlier, when he had participated in a metalworkers’ demonstration on March 23, 1979, that had culminated in clashes and excesses. François Pain ended up between République and Opéra on the boulevard, which was being ravaged by the independents, shattering shop windows and looting the luxury boutiques. François Pain was walking on the sidewalk in front of a Lancel store when he was hit in the face by a sack. He was photographed, amid a group of ski-masked demonstrators, as he was looking at what had hit him, and the photo appeared in the far-right weekly Minute. Already well known to the police for his links with the Italian left and for his activity in support of the free radio stations, Pain was immediately identified and locked up for stealing a bag that the police never found. This was a wonderful opportunity, nevertheless, to make Guattari, through his proxy François Pain, pay for having supported the Italians.

During his interrogation, François Pain was persuaded that he had been arrested because he had just returned from Rome, where he had helped several wanted activists find shelter. “When they showed me the photo of the bag, it was a big relief! I burst out laughing!”58 The CINEL went into action immediately, and Jean-Pierre Mignard and one of George Kiejman’s assistants handled Pain’s defense. During one of the CINEL meetings, a heated audience came up with absurd proposals to grab the public’s attention. Once, someone at the back of the room yelled, “Some dough for Mr. Pain [Bread].” Guattari answered, “That’s great! That’s exactly the campaign we’re going to lead.” François Aubral remembers that at that moment “the guy next to me said, ‘Listen, if they keep going like this, he’ll stay in prison the rest of his life. I’m Henri Leclerc. I’m defending him.’ ”59 Pain was first prosecuted under the antirioter law. His incarceration lasted over four months. His friend Guattari frequently visited him at the Santé Prison and decided to launch, in tandem with the campaign for Pain’s liberation, a battle against preventative detention, which would allow the judge to keep Pain in prison for six months before beginning proceedings against him. The National Audiovisual Institute, Pain’s employer, intervened in his defense, and the CINEL gathered character references. Pain remembers, “They made me laugh a lot, telling me that Jean-Luc Godard wanted to take the witness stand with a sugar lump stolen from a café and throw it at the judge. The judge would have caught it, and Godard would have said, “He’s handling stolen goods! That sugar was stolen!’ ”60 The public-opinion campaign worked well, and not a day went by without some article appearing in the press about this affair. Persuaded that he was the real target of the operation, Guattari gave Pain and his girlfriend Marion “a fifteen-day vacation in southern Morocco to make him happy.”61

At the end of 1979, Guattari was targeted by a police sting that started with a search warrant at La Borde during an investigation of the kidnapping of billionaire Henri Lelièvre by Jacques Mesrine, then public enemy no. 1. The police found nothing, but the daily L’Aurore still published an article, “The Leftist Way,” signed by Pierre Dumas, supposedly revealing the links between certain crooks and the leftist milieu. That journal also blew out of proportion the case of a certain Charles Bauer, someone Guattari was said to have helped reinstate into normal society at the behest of his friend Pierre Goldman and who had since become Mesrine’s accomplice.

From Court Jester to Free Radio

In March 1980, the weekly Charlie Hebdo proposed the idea of presenting the comedian Coluche as a presidential candidate. But, in October 1980, what started out as a gag took another turn. The first polls revealed that around 17 percent of the population intended to vote for Coluche. To carry it off, five hundred elected officials would have to sign a petition for his candidacy. However, what might simply be a formality for large political parties can be quite a hurdle for candidates with no party support. In October 1980, the lawyer Gérard Soulier received a phone call from his friend Guattari. “ ‘You won’t believe it,’ he said. In fact, Guattari couldn’t believe it either. ‘I just got a phone call from Gilles Deleuze. Do you know what he told me? He’s supporting Coluche’s candidacy!’ ”62 Gérard Soulier was thrilled. Not only did he appreciate Coluche’s humor, as did many others, but he had been secretly hoping for this candidacy for at least six months. Thus began the famous petition on behalf of the “Candidate for Morons.”

A whole series of intellectuals, especially the CINEL network with Jean-Pierre Faye, got behind Deleuze and Guattari, committing themselves to supporting Coluche. “Félix called me and said, ‘With Gilles, we’ve decided to support Coluche’s right to his candidacy.’ The right said that Coluche would lose in France; the left said that he was going to lose the left vote, and that he still needed his five hundred signatures. I answered, ‘Coluche? Who’s that?’ And he answered, ‘He’s Père Duchesne.’ ”63 Jean-Pierre Faye, who had written a study on Père Duchesne, saw quite clearly how abrasive such a character could be for the French political system. He agreed and actively participated in meetings with Coluche.

To understand this commitment and its strong dynamic, we have to recall the confusing political situation during the fall of 1980, with the reelection of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing for another seven-year term almost certain. It was thought that François Mitterrand was getting ready to repeat his 1974 failure, as he was supposedly unable to alter the destiny of the left. For some activists, not much more than laughter remained, and the Coluche candidacy created a sense of ephemeral energy. “So, Coluche arrived, and he was quite the court jester, because he was talented,”64 according to Paul Virilio, who met Guattari at that point and became his publisher.

At the end of the 1970s, non-state-accredited radio broadcasting (which means some private radio stations such as Europe 1, Radio Luxemburg, and RMC) was a felony with severe legal repercussions. François Pain, a specialist in this kind of technology, was particularly implicated with his friend Guattari in setting up an alternative radio network that would broadcast without the knowledge of the police. “I created a supply network for transmitters that we smuggled in from Italy.”65 The Italian network was linked to Radio Alice in Bologna, where a particularly efficient technician made excellent transmitters that Pain regularly picked up at the Gare de Lyon.

As soon as the free radio broadcasts were detected, the police jammed them. But they increased in number, proof of the desire to speak out ten years after May ’68. Guattari struck up a friendship with a professional who was very involved in the free-radio struggle and who created the Association for Free Airwaves (ALO) in September 1977. The association broadcast a call to liberalize the airwaves that was signed by eighteen personalities, including Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault. For his part, François Pain managed to organize small associative radio stations into a network fol- lowing a large 1978 meeting of radio broadcasters. The ALFREDO association grew out of this meeting and brought together this bevy of small networks.66 Then a majority in the free-radio movement sympathetic to Guattari’s positions founded the National Federation of Noncommercial Free Radio Stations.

One of Guattari’s sons, Bruno, who was twenty in 1978, became involved in the undertaking. In 1979, while every free-radio attempt was meeting with repression, Bruno took advantage of Jussieu University’s neutrality to bring a local radio station to life. Starting from that small success, he broadened his ambitions with Radio Paris 80, for which he supplied the material. When Félix Guattari and François Pain created Radio Libre Paris, which became Radio Tomato in December 1980, Bruno Guattari did the programming.

The repression was getting stronger. The July 1978 law set fines ranging from ten thousand to one hundred thousand francs for any infraction and prison sentences from one month to a year. These measures hardly dampened the determination of those wanting to free the airwaves, and their energy culminated during the great summer 1978 No-Jamming Festival in the Hyères Park. The audience was treated to forty-eight free hours of nonstop music by the best singers of the day, including Jacques Higelin and Telephone. For many small stations, however, the risks were too great, and they had to give up during the fall of 1978 or go underground. As for personalities like Guattari, the powers-that-be would be turned into laughingstocks if they threw them in prison, but they did nevertheless end up in court. A lawyer friend of Gérard Soulier, Michel Tubiana, a future president of the League for Human Rights, pleaded the case for most affairs concerning free radio stations.

They were often made fun of. More than once, while leaving court, we would have ourselves interviewed with transmitters in a car. I’ll always remember what happened in the Seventeenth courtroom. We had brought around forty witnesses to the stand, and the session that started at 1:30 p.m. needed to end by 11:00 p.m. TDF’s lawyer, who was leading a civil-action suit, finished her plea by requesting the symbolic one franc in damages. The Seventeenth courtroom was a rather long room, packed with people. Someone in the back of the courtroom rolled a one-franc coin that ended up dropping at the lawyer’s feet. It was a very funny moment.67

Created at the end of 1980, in the middle of the presidential campaign, Radio Tomato brought together the CINEL activists. “First we broadcast from Félix’s kitchen, then we found a kind of cellar in the basement of the France Foundation on rue Lacépède.”68 The radio broadcast twenty-four hours a day, offering cultural programming on film, music, and theater, in addition to more sociopolitical programs on Monday afternoons. There were also reports on squatters, and an African man presented The Argument Tree at night. The news took up a lot of time, and Gisèle Donnard, a committed CINEL activist, oversaw this sector, when there were regular debates on Poland, the war in Lebanon, or on the Israel-Palestine question. But the quality of the equipment was not high enough to allow for good reception, and the coverage remained weak. Radio Tomato never reached the audience that it might have.

This airwave experiment corresponds to a practical extension of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas. It is a model of a transversal rhizomatic system that breaks with State- and market-based vertical logics. As with any rhizome, connections can be made at any point, which makes for rather stunning and always original cartographies, like the one that linked Radio Bastille to its neighbor Radio Onz’Débrouille (Radio “Wefigureitout”), which collaborated with Radio Fil Rose. “Thanks to this rhizomatic organization of stations and individuals, the free-radio movement developed as a genuine war machine on the broadcast media field.”69

When François Mitterrand was elected president of the French Republic on May 10, 1981, he decided to open up the airwaves. Those who had been speaking from the shadows could finally take full advantage of this media. However, other problems welled up. Consolidations had to be effectuated to keep on broadcasting. But who would join forces with Radio Tomato? Radio J (Jewish) was originally suggested, but there were too many pro-Palestinians at Radio Tomato to pull off a friction-free coupling. Tomato finally settled on Radio Solidarnosc, “but there were anti-Semites there, and that ended in blows. In the end, we found a place for us alone.”70

A more serious problem weighed on the associative creation of free radio stations when a host of commercial radio stations and their greater resources arrived. As Guattari put it, “On the surface of the aquarium there are radio-loving minnows, but below, there are fat advertising sharks.”71 To defend his conception of socially experimental radio stations, Guattari invited Jack Lang, the minister of culture with whom he had a good rapport, to a live debate on Radio Tomato with himself, Jean-Pierre Faye, and François Pain. La Quinzaine Littéraire published a part of the debate.72 At the end of 1981, the minister’s point of view was close to Guattari’s: “Liberty must not be the fox in the chicken coop. . . . Yes to liberty, but on the condition that it not profit the powerful, and that it be a liberty for those who create and have something to say.”73

The conquest of new liberties also jumped the wall separating the communist world from Western Europe. In the late 1970s, a series of Soviet and eastern European dissidents found refuge in France. The CINEL and the CERFI help distributed the story of their prison-house experience. Recherches devoted an issue to them, organized by Natalia Gorbanevsikaia, a Soviet born in 1936 in Moscow.74

For Guattari, the CINEL represented the possibility of demonstrating the efficiency of a micropolitics endowed with minimal organizational means and simply linked to action, thereby breaking with traditional schemas. It would have been the political branch of the CERFI, whose activity dealt with the humanities. A bit like the March 22 Movement, CINEL was about assembling personalities from diverse backgrounds around a common goal, thus staving off circular thinking during those “somber years.” With no real organization or program but with a regular meeting place, the CINEL “machine” managed to mobilize and raise awareness and also proved its political efficiency during certain crises.


Notes

  1. Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), “Basque Homeland and Freedom.”
  2. Poetere Operaio dates from 1969 but dissolved itself in 1973. The leaders of this
    organization, which had a true influence in its time, included, among others, Toni Negri, Oreste Scalzone, Franco Piperno, Nanni Balestrini, and Sergio Bologna. Lotta Continua, created at the same time, also dissolved itself a bit later, in November 1976.
  3. Fabrizio Calvi, Italie 77, le mouvement, les intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 29.
  4. Isabelle Sommier, La violence politique et son deuil. L’après-68 en France et en Italie (Rennes: PUR, 1998), 102.
  5. Fabrizio Calvi, Italie 77, 34.
  6. Félix Guattari, preface to Collectif A Traverso. Radio Alice, radio libre (Paris: Editions Jean-Pierre Delarge, 1977),
  7. Franco Berardi (“Bifo”), interview with Virginie Linhart.
  8. Ibid.
  9. Les Untorelli, Recherches 80 (November 1977): 19.
  10. Franco Berardi (“Bifo”), interview with Virginie Linhart.
  11. Gianmarco Montesano, interview with Virginie Linhart.
  12. Collectif A Traverso. Rasio Alice, radio libre
  13. Gianmarco Montesano, interview with Virginie Linhart.
  14. Along with Félix Guattari, CINEL members included the lawyer Gérard Soulier, the painter Gérard Fromanger, Yann Moulier-Boutang, Eric Alliez, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jean Chesneaux, and Gilles Deleuze.
  15. Franco Berardi (“Bifo”), interview with Virginie Linhart.
  16. Ibid.
  17. Ibid.
  18. Gérard Fromanger, interview with the author.
  19. Ibid.
  20. Hervé Maury, interview with the author.
  21. Christian Bourgois, interview with the author.
  22. Yann Moulier-Boutang, interview with Virginie Linhart.
  23. Gérard Fromanger, interview with the author.
  24. Ibid.
  25. Ibid.
  26. Ibid.
  27. Ulrike Meinhof was considered the mastermind of the RAF. Born in 1934 in Oldenburg, she studied philosophy, sociology, and pedagogy in the 1950s, then became a journalist and participated in the liberation of Andreas Baader on May 14, 1970, as well as several bombings.
  28. Jean Chesneaux, L’engagement des intellectuals 1944–2004. Itinéraire d’un historien franc-tireur. (Toulouse: Privat, 2004), 259–260.
  29. Gérard Soulier, interview with the author.
  30. Bernard-Henri Lévy, interview with Eric Conan, Denis Jeambar, and Renaud Revel, L’Express (January 10, 2005).
  31. Eric Alliez, interview with the author.
  32. Jean Chesneaux, interview with the author.
  33. Ibid.
  34. Toni Negri, Marx, au-delà de Marx (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979).
  35. Toni Negri, “Surpris par la nuit,” radio broadcast with Alain Veinstein on France Culture (April 23, 2002), INA archives.
  36. Yann Moulier-Boutang, interview with Virginie Linhart.
  37. Gisèle Donnard, interview with Virginie Linhart.
  38. Gilles Deleuze, “Lettera aperta ai guidieri di Negri,” La Repubblica (May 10, 1979). Reprinted in Gilles Deleuze, Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2003), 115–159.
  39. Ibid., 156.
  40. Ibid., 157.
  41. Ibid., 158.
  42. Gilles Deleuze, Le matin de Paris (December 13, 1979). Reprinted in Deleuze, Deux régimes de fous, 161.
  43. Toni Negri, letter to Félix Guattari (Trani, July 18, 1980), IMEC archives.
  44. Toni Negri, letter to Félix Guattari (Rome, November 28, 1980), IMEC archives.
  45. Toni Negri, letter to Félix Guattari (Rebbibia, Rome, July 10, 1982), IMEC archives.
  46. Toni Negri, interview with the author.
  47. Ibid.
  48. Toni Negri, interview with Virginie Linhart.
  49. The “Mitterand Doctrine” concerns commitments made by President François Mitterrand in 1985 to not extradite former activists with links to the far left who had broken with their “somber years” past.
  50. Toni Negri, interview with the author.
  51. Félix Guattari and Toni Negri, Les nouveaux espaces de liberté, “Communists Like Us?” (New York: Semiotexte).
  52. Félix Guattari and Toni Negri, Les nouveaux espaces de libertés, 7.
  53. Ibid., 12.
  54. Ibid., 15.
  55. Ibid., 98.
  56. Ibid., 103.
  57. Ibid., 108.
  58. François Pain, interview with the author.
  59. François Aubral, interview with the author.
  60. François Pain, interview with the author.
  61. Ibid.
  62. Gérard Soulier, interview with the author.
  63. Jean-Pierre Faye, interview with the author.
  64. Paul Virilio, interview with the author.
  65. François Pain, interview with the author.
  66. ALFREDO is a combination of ALO (“Association for Freedom of the Waves”) and
    the Italian FRED (“Federation of Italian Associative Radio Stations”).
  67. Michel Tubiana, interview with the author.
  68. Gisèle Donnard, interview with the author.
  69. Mathieu Dalle, “Les radios libres, utopie deleuzo-Guattarienne,” French Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (February 2006): 67.
  70. François Pain, interview with the author.
  71. Félix Guattari, Libération (August 27, 1981).
  72. “Entretien avec Jack Lang sur les radios libres,” in La Quinzaine Littéraire (November 16–30, 1981).
  73. Ibid.
  74. “Nous, dissidents,” in Recherches 34 (October 1978).

taken from Blackout

Nach oben scrollen