Radicalità

Et habebant omnia communia. / And [they] had all things common.

Acts of the Apostles, 2:44.

 

 

Only the authentic subject of history casts a shadow. If he projects it forward as collective invention.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie: Buenaventura Durrutis Leben und Tod, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972. The passage has been translated from the Italian edition, La breve estate dell’anarchia, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972.

 

 

The New Year will bring us what we will be able to win for ourselves.

Il Potere Operaio, 29 December 1968.

 

And suddenly I had an idea: why not change sex?

Marcel Duchamp, in Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967.

 

Beat out in the street the footfalls of revolt.

Angelo Maria Ripellino, Intolleranza 60, 1961, from the libretto for Luigi Nono’s opera of the same name.

 

 

One committee planned a sit-in at the offices of the management company responsible for Chelsea Marina’s abysmal services, but most of the residents were now set on a far more radical response to the social evils that transcended the local problems of the estate. They had moved on to wider targets – a Pret A Manger in the King’s Road, Tate Modern, a Conran restaurant scheduled for the British Museum, the Promenade Concerts, Waterstone’s bookshops, all of them exploiters of middle-class credulity. Their corrupting fantasies had deluded the entire educated caste, providing a dangerous pabulum that had poisoned a spoon-fed intelligentsia.

J. G. Ballard, Millennium People, Flamingo, London 2003