The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini

The Unseen Book Club

Balestrini’s breathless novel of student and worker rebellion during the upheaval of the 1970s in Italy follows its unnamed narrator through student occupations, wildcat strikes and sabotage, the formation of squatted social centers, and the fracturing of left autonomism into armed bands of would-be urban insurgents. The joy of young people claiming space and infrastructure contrasts with crushing scenes of prison brutality on the part of a state attempting to wrest control back from its populace, and women militants begin to self-organize, challenging the chauvinism of their male counterparts.

We talk about official and autonomous communism, anti-work feelings, the experience of aging, machismo, armed movements, the malignance of the U.S. anti-Communist order, alpine skiing as a fugitive tactic, and the political possibilities of reading and writing.

**This episode was recorded in May 2021, weeks prior to the George Floyd uprisings.**

The Unseen: https://www.versobooks.com/books/1033-the-unseen

Notes and references:

Bergman and Montgomery’s Joyful Militancy: https://joyfulmilitancy.com/

A nice general reflection on the politics of joy and sadness. Check out the full interview with Silvia Federici in the appendix.

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics https://libcom.org/library/autonomia-post-political-politics

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, this is a collection of (mostly theoretical) texts from Italy’s Autonomist movement in the 1970s.

Italy 1977: Living with an Earthquake https://libcom.org/library/italy-1977-8-living-earthquake-red-notes

Paul Ginsborg: A Contemporary History of Italy

https://bookshop.org/books/a-history-of-contemporary-italy-society-and-politics-1943-1988/9781403961532

https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub

Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/

Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/