"Gossip": an English word with an unpleasant sound (in Italian it is
translated as "petty gossip" but it would be more correct to do so with"impertinent chatter", underlining the communicative dimension so
exalted by post-situationists) that is well suited to the excellent work
dedicated by Valerio Lisi, a non-academic scholar from Taranto, to the
"vanishing of love and ideal" of Carlo Cafiero for the beautiful,
learned and provocative Anna Kuliscioff at the time when she was still
linked to another attractive but faithless internationalist, Andrea
Costa (Svanire d'amore e d'ideale, Les Flâneurs, Reggio Calabria 2024).
The charm and intellectual vivacity of Kuliscioff - the one who, having
become Turati's companion, will be caustically defined by Labriola as
"the only man of Italian socialism" - had already bewitched and will
continue to bewitch countless anarchists (including Kropotkin) and
socialists (even Collodi who will draw from her the features of the
"blue fairy" in Pinocchio) without any other consequences than the
breaking of some shaky or self-interested friendship. But Cafiero's
overwhelming passion, which according to Lisi was hidden for a decade
and resulted, on New Year's Eve 1881, in some timid advances, a kiss or
perhaps something more, certainly in an awkward marriage proposal, and
the subsequent refusal of Kuliscioff - who returned to make peace with
"her" Andrea -, instead led to the mental upheaval of the anarchist from
Barletta, to his progressive abandonment of anarchist militancy and to
his early death in a mental asylum, with incalculable consequences for
the history of Italian anarchism and socialism.
The writer has dealt in the past, on the pages of "Sicilia Libertaria",
with another alleged love triangle, that between Luigi Galleani, Maria
Rallo and Giuseppe Prestandrea, noting how it triggered, among the
anarchist slaves on the islands of Sicily, an intense debate, albeit
tinged with chauvinism, on questions of moral order. But many other
events raised by "impertinent chatter" deserve greater historiographical
fortune, not to recount scabrous details and emotional reactions as is
fashionable today, but to grasp the effects, sometimes disruptive, on
the thought and ideology, behavior and culture of individuals or entire
militant communities. We can start from Carlo Pisacane and the discovery
of the betrayal of "his" Enrichetta with Enrico Cosenz; to move on to
the "founding fathers" of anarchism: Proudhon, misogynist and familyist
to excess, and Bakunin, the complete opposite, putative father of three
if not all four of his children; dwelling on the Malatesta
triangulations, the peaceful one with the Defendis, the more troubled
one with the Pezzas, or on the "uterine" anarchism of Nella Giacomelli,
targeted by Paolo Schicchi; ending with the thousand similar stories of
humble companions, both male and female, balanced between the reasons of
the heart and those of morality.
A vast and largely unexplored field of study, which is well connected,
among other things, with the preaching of "free love", characteristic of
anarchist internationalism, experimented without great success by
Giovanni Rossi in the Cecilia colony (as Isabelle Felici attested years
ago in a study of hers that however remained without a follow-up). In
the gossip stories of anarchism, as in the experimentation of "free
love" by Giovanni Rossi, an evident short circuit emerges between the
ideals professed by anarchists and the difficulties of various kinds
that arise in transposing them into daily practice.
To stick to the case study of Carlo Cafiero, investigated in his time
also by Pier Carlo Masini, alongside psychological reasons that are best
left to the experts in the field, it is the intersection of the capital
question of the coherence between the means and the end of anarchy with
the typical contradictions of emotional life (falling in love with
someone else's woman, the betrayal of one's dearest companion) that
provokes that clash between Cafiero's original ideological fixity and
the reality of the feeling that shakes everything, a probable prelude to
the emergence of schizophrenic personalities. The overcoming of this
dichotomy, which today we would call between the public and the private,
remains among the great challenges of the revolutionary movements of the
present. Hence also the urgency of undertaking initiatives that reclaim
dignity and a historiographical status for anarchist and revolutionary
"gossip".
Nor can it be ignored that it represents only a fraction of those
events, shocking and unpredictable, that intersect the life of every
human being - including the political and social militant - to the point
of modifying their existential itinerary, their ability to judge, their
linearity of conduct, and, on a broader level, the very reality that
surrounds them, also subject to the perturbations of the human soul, to
climatic and climacteric variables, to the game of adversities to be
avoided and opportunities to be seized. It is these events that
"humanize" the Cafiero on duty, loading him with fears, insecurities,
fragility, and force him to confront his own daily life and that of the
society in which he is immersed.
Valerio Lisi is therefore right to retrace in minute detail the events
and especially the places (boulevards, parks, lakes, streams...) crossed
by Cafiero, Kuliscioff and the small community of Russian
internationalists and populists that surrounded them, recreating
together with the environmental context also the spiritual and
supportive atmosphere, and the suffering (and again the gossip
suggestions) in which they lived. How far away from a recent
biographism, conveyed by academic historians of anarchism, which
proposes stainless superheroes as an example and yardstick for future
generations, unable to escape the perverse call of determinism. But with
a different perspective also compared to that of the so-called
"historiography of emotions" which, after having discovered hot water
(for example the gap existing between generations), ends up placing the
anarchist ideal on the same level as the Mazzinian, socialist, communist
and even fascist ones. While Lisi, and we, are rather interested in
exploring the conflictual relationship existing between the political
ideal of the anarchist soldier/militant and his most intimate,
affective, friendly, group reality, and in detecting the repercussions
of a political and social nature.
"Anarchist gossip" could thus act as an embryonic piece for the
construction of a new historiography that privileges ruptures rather
than permanences (for example between internationalists and Mazzinians),
distinctions rather than compatibilities (between anarchists and
socialists), non-submission rather than servility (to the State and
capital), critical thought rather than conventional thought, and
projects of radical change rather than those of mere reform or
conservation of the status quo. In essence, what constitutes the very
essence of anarchism and its being an alternative to the world of
domination.
Natale Musarra
http://sicilialibertaria.it
_________________________________________
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