The Brooklyn Rail

Radical thought has lost one of its most corrosive voices. Gianfranco Sanguinetti, legendary member of the Situationist International (SI) and implacable critic of the society of the spectacle, died in Prague on October 3, at the age of seventy-seven. A key figure in the political and aesthetic debates that marked the generation of 1968, Sanguinetti was not only a theorist who was uncomfortable with power, but also a writer of rare precision and irony, whose work simultaneously challenged the Italian state and some of the revolutionary movements of his time. His career, marked by an uncompromising commitment to the work of the negative, leaves a legacy that continues to challenge, ethically and politically, all forms of indulgence with the “generalized lie” that structures the world of spectacle decoded by the Situationists.

Born in Switzerland in 1948, Gianfranco was the son of Teresa Mattei and Bruno Sanguinetti, both active partisans of the anti-fascist Resistance in Italy. Teresa, a teacher by training, was elected to the Constituent Assembly by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1946. His father, Bruno, was of Jewish origin and the son of a large food industry owner. An intellectual specializing in French literature, with a background in engineering and physics, he helped found the Gruppo Antifascista Romano and became one of the main financiers of the PCI during the Resistance.¹

From an early age, Gianfranco’s life seems to have wandered along the “circumference of time toward the center of opportunity” described by Baltasar Gracián. His political and cultural education took place between the end of the anti-fascist Resistance—in which his parents were protagonists—and the return of the workers’ and students’ struggles in the “hot autumn” of 1969. This new cycle of struggle brought back into play revolutionary aspirations that had been dormant since the biennio rosso (red biennium) of 1919–1920 and which, ironically, would lead the young Sanguinetti—then twenty years old—to a radical break with the Communist anti-fascism of his parents’ generation.

 

1. The pre-Situationist years

Before he turned fifteen, Gianfranco already understood the new forms taken by class struggle in his time. These transformations were shaped not only by the crisis of bourgeois society and Italian capitalism in the postwar period, but above all by the emergence of a new proletariat. Precarious and disconnected from the direct interests of production, this group began to threaten the dominant position of industrial workers as the revolutionary subject par excellence. This called into question the hegemony of the Communists at the head of party and labor union organizations, as well as the prevailing Marxist orthodoxy itself, which privileged economic and political struggles to the detriment of the sociocultural aspects of conflicts and social struggles.

Aware of the collapse of traditional values, both bourgeois and working class, Gianfranco began attending, around 1966, the meetings of Gruppo 63—a movement of young writers who broke with the academic framework of Italian neorealism through an experimental appropriation of language. Inspired by Joan Baez’s pacifist organizing in the United States, the beatnik counterculture, and the Dutch provos, he formed, together with a group of young hippies, the Italian counterpart Onda Verde (Green Wave). The Milanese beatniks defended issues linked to the interests of youth, such as the abolition of compulsory military service, the right to abortion, divorce, and gay marriage. Their field of action was high schools, and their methods were occupations and political-aesthetic happenings. At the end of 1966, the alliance between Onda Verde and a similar group called Mondo Beat represented a qualitative leap toward situationist theoretical formulations. When the magazine of the same name published by this group had its latest issue published by Feltrinelli—Italy’s largest left-wing publisher—the bells of “recuperation” rang. This concept, appropriated in collective readings of the Situationist International magazine, imposed itself as the antidote to the appropriation of student struggles by subjects outside them.

In 1967, Gianfranco and other high school classmates—including Claudio Pavan and Paolo Salvadori, future members of the IS—joined the project of the magazine S. This publication, an initiative of Milanese professor Carlo Oliva, proposed to renew the economic Marxism that predominated in left-wing parties. It was through S that Situationist theory reached Italian universities, spreading in the context of the broad movement of university occupations that broke out in Turin at the end of that year and spread to other cities. Driven by May 1968, social unrest in Italy dragged on for a decade, becoming known in France as the Mai rampant (creeping May). Although the SI magazine still had no more than twenty subscribers nationwide, its theory nevertheless had a profound impact on Italian high school and university students.²

 

2. The Situationist years

At the end of autumn 1968, Gianfranco’s group wrote Dialettica della putrefazione e del superamento, an analysis of the student movement strongly influenced by Situationist theory, as well as the councilist theses of the German-Dutch left of the first half of the twentieth century (Pannekoek, Gorter, and others). While in France the revolutionary movement was defeated by the impact of the “Grenelle agreements,” Italy was moving toward a situation of revolutionary crisis. At a time when the French Situationists were taking stock of the crisis of May–June 1968 and engaging in a debate on organization and the role of the IS in future struggles, Sanguinetti, Pavan, and Salvadori established contact with the French section of the organization, led by Guy Debord. This is how the Italian section was formed, even though it consisted of only the three Milanese members.³ The first—and only—issue of the magazine Internazionale Situazionista was published in July 1969. The material impressed the members of the French section, especially Debord, who wrote at the time: “I don’t think anything so powerful has been written in Italy since Machiavelli.”⁴

Gianfranco had the clearest vision and the most solid theoretical repertoire among the young members of the Italian section, which, to its small tendency would also welcome Venezuelan Eduardo Rothe, the only South American to join the IS. The intensification of workers’ struggles between 1968 and 1969—marked by anti-union strikes at FIAT, Pirelli, Workshop 32 in Mirafiori, and RAI; by the erection of barricades in Milan, Caserta, Turin, and Naples; prison rebellions, the Battipaglia insurrection, street riots in Sardinia, and the creation of factory committees—led to the calling of a general strike on November 19, 1969. On that occasion, Italian situationists posted a manifesto on the walls of Milan entitled Avviso al proletariato italiano sulle possibilità presenti della rivoluzione sociale, which summarized the main aspects of the ongoing revolutionary crisis, explained the interests at stake, and called for the formation of workers’ councils.

When, on December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded at the Agricultural Bank, also in Milan, the Situationists denounced, still in the heat of events, the provocation of the Italian state—which, however, would only be proven in 1990 by then Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. From then on, as McKenzie Wark observed, Sanguinetti’s experience with revolutionary politics and the state “was, even more than Debord’s, mainly of a police nature.” In fact, as a teenager, Gianfranco had been arrested (on the orders of Milanese police chief Luigi Calabresi, who was assassinated in 1972) for raising the flag of the Spanish Republic of 1936 in front of Francoist minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne at the Royal Palace in Milan. In 1971, he was deported from France, a period in which he also faced a series of police and neo-fascist provocations in Italy. For this reason, Sanguinetti is listed as co-author of the SI dissolution document, written by Debord and published in 1972, as an expression of solidarity and support for his Milanese friend. Between 1975 and 1976, Gianfranco was again arrested in Italy and expelled from France, but this time for another affair.⁵

 

3. The post-Situationist years

In March 1975, Gianfranco was intercepted on his way to Florence, along with his partner Katharine Scott, and arrested for illegal possession of weapons—naturally “placed” in the vehicle by the police. During the four days of detention and interrogation, several searches were carried out at the homes of former members of the Italian section of the IS. Mario Masanzanica, owner of the car Gianfranco was driving at the time of his arrest, was also charged under “anti-terrorism” legislation and detained on the unusual accusation of being the “killer” of the SI, although he was released two months later due to lack of evidence. During that period, the Italian State orchestrated a smear campaign in the press, seeking to associate the Situationists with both anarchist “black terrorism” and the “red terrorism” of the Brigate Rosse. But Gianfranco and Katharine carried something more important than bombs or weapons of war: the manuscript of the pamphlet Rapporto veridico sulle ultime possibilità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia.⁶ In 2017, Gianfranco revealed how Katharine hid the manuscript in her violin case, which went unnoticed by police screening at the women’s prison in Florence. At that juncture, the subversive nature of the pamphlet could have cost Gianfranco and his partner more than twelve years in prison—the penalty for illegal possession of weapons. Safe from the hands of the state, the manuscript was carefully edited by Gianfranco at the Bergamo Library.

Once completed, Sanguinetti’s report was first published in Italy under the pseudonym Censor, a fictional cynical and ultra-conservative bourgeois. Its aim was to demonstrate how useful it was for the Italian state to resort to terrorism to save capitalism from bankruptcy and proletarian subversion, which was dragging the country into civil war. At the same time, the text criticized the successive police and legal errors committed during the investigations into the Piazza Fontana massacre, while advising Christian Democratic leaders to use the vast experience acquired by the Communists in controlling the working class to their advantage.

Planned with the collaboration of Debord—who translated the pamphlet into French—Gianfranco revived a method used in 1841 by Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx against the Hegelian right, proposing to “provoke a State of provocateurs.”⁷ Both texts use irony and denunciation to reveal the contradictions of the dominant ideological forms that mask social reality. Bauer and Marx criticized the philosophy of the Hegelian right for its ideological function, while Sanguinetti and Debord used irony strategically to expose the hypocrisy of the Italian elites. The latter, represented by the figure of the “humanist banker” Raffaele Mattioli (to whom Censor dedicates Rapporto), perfectly symbolized the contradiction between the benevolent appearance and oppressive reality of capitalism.

In December 1975, after fooling the entire Italian press—which inadvertently reproduced the pamphlet—Sanguinetti came forward to announce that Censor did not exist, revealing the true motives behind his provocation. The operation aimed to demonstrate, in an experimental and rigorously logical way, how easy it is to deceive the population using the same staging methods employed by state terrorism. To do this, Gianfranco applied the enemy’s method against himself, creating a false flag pamphlet as a cover to “say the unspeakable.” By revealing the hoax, he deceived the state’s habitual professional deceivers, further discrediting institutions in the eyes of the working classes.

Gianfranco would be the target of a second expulsion from French territory when he was recognized by border authorities aboard a night train bound for Italy. The episode infuriated Debord, who persuaded his Italian friend to purchase, through Gérard Lebovici—owner of Champ Libre editions—half a page in the newspaper Le Monde. On February 24, 1976, it published a statement of support for Sanguinetti. Laden with a humor that André Breton would describe as “Swiftian”—that which provokes laughter without, however, participating in it—Debord’s media intervention was part of the search for a new theater of operations for Situationist theory after the end of the organization. This precursor form of modern anti-advertising expressed, through a détour (detour), a post-Situationist strategy of action: turning the weapons of the spectacle against the spectacle itself.

It was during these years that the qualitative strength of the theory formulated by the SI had its greatest impact in Italy, driven by the strategic partnership between the two. This friendship, which Debord used to compare to that between Marx and Engels (Gianfranco being the wealthy friend in the relationship), lasted in the years following the end of the IS, until it began to deteriorate due to a smear campaign conducted by Debord against Sanguinetti.

In 1979, both published their analyses of the Italian situation, in which they directly addressed the problem of terrorism in the country, with an emphasis on the actions of the Red Brigades and the kidnapping and execution of Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party. Debord wanted his former SI comrade to publish his theses in Italy while the kidnapping was ongoing, in order to expose to public opinion the manipulation of the Brigades by the state secret services. However, Sanguinetti only did so after the episode had ended, five months after Debord had published his own theses in France—in which both the 1977 movement and Sanguinetti’s 1975 book are omitted.

From that moment on, Debord not only broke off relations with Sanguinetti, but also began to harbor and spread suspicions about him. Convinced that his friend had not followed his instructions due to the influence of his lawyer—a person viewed with suspicion by the former French situationist—Debord, without ever presenting any evidence to support this suspicion, spread misinformation among translators and publishers in Western Europe that this person might be a state agent. It was only in November 2012 that, in a letter addressed to the former Tunisian situationist Mustapha Khayati, Gianfranco spoke out about the controversy, revealing the identity of his legal advisor and the reasons for his silence in the face of the slanderous statements spread by Debord.

Ariberto Mignoli (the “Doge”) was an Italian jurist and university professor, with significant experience in corporate law and important financial transactions. He had a deep humanistic culture: he knew classical (“dead”) and modern European languages, read literature in several languages, had a highly developed memory, and a very strong moral stance. Although he was not a revolutionary in the classical sense, he was not a conformist and maintained a critical attitude toward political power and the ruling classes. Sanguinetti sought him out as an “incorruptible” lawyer in 1971 to resolve family issues. However, Mignoli would end up playing a decisive role in Operation Censor, suggesting that a limited, deluxe edition be produced on special paper with a hard cover, and even providing a list of recipients to whom the pamphlet would be sent (among them, Pope Paul VI). Mignoli also defended him legally at various times of persecution, helping Sanguinetti escape police and criminal traps. Censor is, after all, a character inspired by both Debord and Mignoli, mirroring the idiosyncratic figure of a reverse Kropotkin: not as a subversive aristocrat, but as an aristocratic subversive.

Sanguinetti responded to Debord’s suspicions with irony and contempt, treating them as absurd, unfounded, and revealing of Debord’s paranoid degeneration in the years following the dissolution of the SI. He categorically denied that Mignoli could have been a state agent and, on the contrary, described him as a man of integrity, cultured, generous, and of superior intelligence, whose life and character would be incompatible with any espionage service: “That man whom Debord, in his drunkenness and delirium, dared to call a ’secret agent’ was, in reality, the most transparent and noble of human beings. An incorruptible lawyer, a free spirit, incapable of selling himself to any power. That Debord, with his growing persecution complex, came to see him as a spy only confirms the state of confusion and ruin into which he had fallen." In another passage, Sanguinetti also notes—with irony—that if Mignoli were really an agent, “we would then have to revise the entire history of Italian intelligence, for there has never been a spy so wise, so generous, and so uninterested in money.”

At the age of twenty-eight, Sanguinetti actively participated in the 1977 movement in Rome and Bologna, witnessing the unprecedented repression that defeated that experience. Continuing his work of demystification, which began with the 1975 Report, Gianfranco published Del terrorismo e dello Stato in 1979. In this book, he denounced for the first time the use of false flag terrorism by state apparatuses, especially in Italy, with the aim of repressing and suppressing the radical protest movements of 1969 and 1977. The book was reissued in the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and was seen as a premonitory theory about the modus operandi of the “war on terrorism” that inaugurated the twenty-first century.

 

4. The final years

Conspiracy theories aside, in the final years of the Cold War, between 1989 and 1991, Gianfranco conducted independent research in Russia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic. He settled permanently in the latter, in the capital Prague, where he lived until his death, traveling frequently between Paris (where he collaborated with his friend Gérard Bérreby at Allia Publishing) and the Tuscany region to manage the family’s rural properties. After a ten-year hiatus from public appearances, Sanguinetti returned to publishing political essays in the European alternative press, denouncing the emergence of a new form of domination: “Western despotism.”⁸

This despotism would be the rival of the old “Oriental despotism,” analyzed by German theorist Karl August Wittfogel in the late 1950s. According to Sanguinetti, the new despotism arose from the dissolution of the USSR and, simultaneously, from the death of the constitutional state in the Western countries. This gave rise to a perpetual and widespread state of emergency, marked by the orchestrated proliferation of silent coups involving co-optation and infiltration of social struggles, as well as techniques of legal and political stabilization and destabilization of minimally democratic governments in favor of their replacement by autocratic regimes.

In 2017, Sanguinetti took part in a major exhibition held at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere, entitled “77.” On that occasion, he wrote the essay Un Orgasmo della Storia: il 1977 in Italia, published as the opening text of the volume Il Piombo e le Rose, organized by Tano D’Amico, Pablo Echaurren, and Claudia Salaris, among others, in the same year. As this text contains important autobiographical information, I recommend it to anyone interested in his “life-work”—a term that defines the extension of his experience in the field of creation, which, when it emerges as a work, in turn engenders new forms of existence.

In this sense, Sanguinetti can also be considered a precursor of contemporary prankster or jamming cultures.⁹ Shortly after Operation Censor, Pier Franco Ghisleni published a fake edition of Einaudi in Italy, “signed” by Enrico Berlinguer, then secretary-general of the PCI. Following this line, the group that edited Il Male magazine published a series of fake newspapers in the country, such as the popular Corriere della Sera.

In an as yet unpublished interview—only the second and the last he ever gave—Gianfranco reported meeting Jacques Servin (pseudonym of Andy Bichlbaum), a member of the American group, Yes Men, in Paris on more than one occasion. Servin attested to the influence of Operation Censor on his films and the creation of situations, which they called identity correction, and which Gianfranco, in turn, called “subversive imposture.” Seeing this form of activism as an extension of contemporary “hybrid struggles” and “asymmetric wars,” Sanguinetti argues that: “By usurping a ’respectable’ identity, because it is respected by the mainstream, and then making it say things that are as unspeakable as they are true, we force them to admit scandalous evidence: a little like Jonathan Swift did when he proposed cooking the surplus of poor Irish children to definitively solve the problem of poverty in Ireland."¹⁰

It is well known that posthumous fame is the lot of the unclassifiable, as Hannah Arendt observed when paying tribute to the memory of Walter Benjamin. However, there is no guarantee that the same will happen with the iconoclastic figure of Sanguinetti. His personal archives are now preserved at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in the United States—the model country of the new despotism he denounced in his final years. This context has made it difficult, in various ways, for researchers on the periphery of the spectacle to access this veritable treasure trove of international subversion. A good way to honor the memory of Gianfranco Sanguinetti would therefore be to find ways to expand access to his archives. What is happening today is exactly the opposite: there is a reduction in the number of scholarships available to independent researchers and restrictions on immigration visas for foreigners. The question remains: by what means, then, would it be possible to access them?

Sanguinetti’s intellectual and political biography offers no answers or models, only clues and enigmas that dispense with the need for heirs or successors. Just follow the insignia: DISSIMILIVM INFIDA SOCIETAS.¹¹