The Shattered Palingenesis in Carlo Lizzani’s La vita agra

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Carlo Lizzani’s La vita agra reflects the stern, adult lesson a parent imparts to a child the moment he takes up the weapons of Marxian critique or finds himself inhabited by visions of another world. He warns him that the hardships of life lie ahead, ready to lull every revolutionary feeling within him to sleep. That prophecy does indeed come true, and this is precisely the course pursued by the film’s narrative, from which we may begin a different kind of critical reflection, perhaps less sorrowful and filled with hope, yet no less severe or demanding.

By now, after all, revolution seems to be granted to us only in philosophy, in minor literature, which is minor because it can come to fruition only in the author’s silence, in the present oblivion of a work composed of melancholy lines addressed to an audience unknown to him, and in the rediscovery of that same work only after its creator has died. Perhaps not even there, however, because the events it recounts become objects of trade rather than fundamental engines of revolution, which was, after all, their intended purpose. The faces and rock-hewn maxims of Carlo Marx become ornamental motifs on dreary fabrics or plastic figurines placed in some remote corner of our living room.

“We must hope for oblivion; we must repent of having spread our own words!”

Yet the same commerce is also found within revolution itself, which becomes an instrument of profit. Let the skyscraper implode, so long as everything remains within the plan established by the sacred law of profit.

The family, the screaming child, the wife and the parents are the primordial figures of this obstruction, of the bomb’s defusing, because one must attend to one person’s feelings and another’s anxieties. What remains is only the great bourgeois revolution, moving through theft, through “the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,” through the slaughter of family men who stubbornly try to bring gifts home to the families anxiously awaiting them in the evening. This revolution is permitted because the police apparatus, too, is bourgeois. In this sense, the nihilism of the will to power has found its fullest expression only in the brigandage of the bourgeois classes, which, through their management of cultural and social institutions, prevent the lower stratum from allowing the forces at work within the socius to erupt. The lower stratum is torn apart by this tragic collision between the absolute brutality of social production and the strict, moral pacification of the forces arising from that same production, forces that find the exercise of their power only in the autocrat.

“Dionysus, god of intoxication, grant the dance to us who deliver the sacred remains of the god Apollo to those who cannot partake in our ecstasies.”

Meanwhile, the proletarian witnesses or takes part in these misfortunes and allows himself the miserable, consoling revolution of small everyday arrangements, of the clock hanging in the living room, of the creaks in the lovemaking used to offset the strain of the long day.

“One pleasure — grant me at least this much, Sire, however small it may be, so that I may attend to your interests when morning comes.”

This denial of revolutionary vitalism finds cheerful company in the deliriums and rages of everyday life, above all in the speed of production, always subsumed under capital. We wake with our eyes wide and restless and immediately turn them anxiously towards the hands of the clock, setting the rhythm of the day’s beginning. The laws and interests of capital compel the worker to labour at every moment, under every condition and against everything he may say or desire. For four miserable grains of wheat, the prostitute forces herself to make love to the family man, who lets every dream of starry nuptials fade away. Both despise their work and the life that has condemned them to such misery:

“Just as prostitution is no longer beautiful because one is paid, because it is Dionysian, but only because it is a means and instrument for obtaining money. This is why the metalworker hates the lathe, I hate the typewriter and the prostitute hates me.”

This subsumption of labour and life under capital reveals the repression of every form of enthusiasm, including that of Anna and Luciano, who slowly surrender to the triumph of adult life, to its needs and demands, which may be satisfied only by obeying the master’s wishes and customs. He possesses this immense power because he owns every means of production, which has become the sole source of life.

Yet this appropriation also entails the centralisation of weapons and, with them, the entire repressive apparatus, which suppresses not only every revolutionary and subversive act but, even before that, every revolutionary desire and fantasy, every form of enthusiasm. For any apparatus to exercise power and violence over communities pursuing aims opposed to those shared by the dominant class, it is not necessary for it actually to deploy the enormous forces that only an ingenious armoured vehicle can unleash. It is first of all necessary that it possess such weapons and ostentatiously display the capacities at its disposal, so that their magnitude may reach the souls of those who oppose the interests that have long confined them to dilapidated living conditions.

It is enough for the sun’s rays to glance off the jagged angles of these elaborate vehicles, kept in reserve until the day the fanfares sound, so that they may, in all their splendour, pacify the restless impulses that shape these people’s wills. In this sense, whoever instils fear commits brutal acts, because through fear he suppresses the freedom and vigour of those movements of the soul that offer solace to the lives of the innocent poor. The moment thoughts arise that threaten those interests, a long chain of associations begins, and fantasies of freedom and rebellion, obeying a law of immediate correspondence, are translated into the image of the festive pageant of Death’s triumph.

This is what Carmelo Bene meant when he delivered one of his most celebrated soliloquies:

“‘On n’échappe pas’ — he says — ‘à la machine’: there is no escaping the machine. You leave eight hours on the assembly line… […] There is no escape! Once you leave the assembly line, the machine — the assembly, the assembly line — becomes stronger in the street you walk down, then on the tram, then in the car, then at home, within the family. It grows stronger still. The oppression of the assembly line makes itself felt; the nothingness of life makes itself felt! This crushing pressure! ‘On n’échappe pas à la machine’: there is no escaping the machine! Not only within the family, even at work, within revolution; ‘it is felt above all in love — Deleuze says — even more within revolution, and above all the assembly line is felt, felt again obsessively within enthusiasm.’ And above all within enthusiasm!”

When Luciano is finally reunited with Libero, disappointment, the shattered dream of revolution and surrender to the conventions of ordinary petty-bourgeois life are written plainly across his face. That life is measured out in small daily burdens that force a man towards comfort, towards deceptive living-room comforts that keep him far away from revolutionary dreams and consign him to an eternal reactionary fascism.

“Damn, how the average number of average men has increased! It is the triumph of the average: the average engine size has increased, the average rate of devaluation, the average price of call girls, the average height, the average age, the middle class, middle school, Mediobanca, average speed, the average number of legal separations.”

The joys of Libero and Luciano’s youthful utopias come to an end in disappointment. They resign themselves to the reins of a community that, despite its abundance, is incapable of defeating the brutal and petty forces of the few men who hold the fate of others in their hands.

“I know, I know, dear Libero, what you are thinking, but it would have been useless anyway. Nobody would have understood us, because too many people still believe in miracles. The truth is that the only real economic miracle was the one that multiplied the loaves and fishes and fed people for free, in happiness.”

The revolutionary event is therefore prevented not by some divine will or by a constitutive impossibility descending from the laws of all things, but by the absence of collective understanding. Such understanding requires not only a shared capacity to feel and suffer, but above all a common practice of critical reflection capable of discerning the real possibilities for overturning things as they stand. What must motivate us is the renunciation of the belief that only a miracle or some Messiah can redeem us from such a state of affairs, together with a serious commitment to shoulder the burden of such an undertaking.

This will must therefore take the place of the idea of a secular eschatology, of an earthly palingenesis whose fulfilment would be entrusted to the laws of some historical necessity.

André Tosel’s words:

“Without knowledge of the capitalist mode of production, the liberation of real possibilities remains a utopia obsessed with the imagined domination of an amorphous society of total transparency, and loses its prophetic dimension, namely the reasonable announcement of a new form of being-in-common. Without this dimension of real possibility, of learned hope, knowledge is reduced to a positivist sociology founded on the illusion of necessary laws of history. Critique is the unstable unity of knowledge and hope, and it must permanently subject the forms taken by both knowledge and hope to self-criticism. The tendency towards a transformation of our common power is blind without this knowledge and empty without this hope.”

André Tosel, Studies on Marx (and Engels).

In conclusion, Lizzani does not foreclose the coming of the event, of revolution, in order to surrender forever to the paralysing influence of fatalism. Rather, he returns to us the need to think together about the conditions under which such an event may be realised. This must be a thought that does not consign itself to bourgeois lucubrations swollen with rigid, lofty words about Brecht’s theatre or other subjects that may and indeed should interest anyone wishing to commit themselves to such a will, but that must not replace an interest in revolution, about which not a single word is spoken.

This also requires us to rethink style, to reconsider how one wishes to communicate with people of “little account,” reaching their minds and guiding their hearts. Perhaps it is necessary to return to political pamphlets and manifestos, so that philosophy and, more generally, literature do not continue to indulge themselves along the hidden paths of the erudite.

That this free thinking-in-common belongs to the realm of chimeras has been evident from the very beginning of our reflection.

“Before the State, the man of science is today defenceless, naturally submissive. No heroic acts are recorded in the history of modern science. Compare Galileo with Bruno when faced with danger. Leonardo already served princes with his war machines. The scientist often claims to live for knowledge. The reality is more modest: it is a matter of seeking a small corner in which to feel safe, a defensive attitude in an individual of little aggressiveness. It is now too late to hope for an overturning of things. Modern scientists have not yet realised what was obvious to the ancients: that knowledge intended for the few must be kept silent; that dangerous abstract formulas and formulations, capable of fatal developments and disastrous in their applications, must be assessed in advance and in their full scope by those who have discovered them and must consequently be jealously concealed, withdrawn from public view.”

G. Colli, After Nietzsche.

No uttered word can or should escape the paranoid obsessions of the sovereign father of the productive process. Perhaps, then, a miracle is necessary, and only some God can save us.

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The Shattered Palingenesis in Carlo Lizzani’s La vita agra