Topography of Anti-Fascism | poster

It is not the passage of time that leads us from the past to the present, but quite the opposite. Inasmuch as we do not really seek what has happened, but obstinately, we ask ourselves what we have become, also and above all through those who have gone before us as well as for its own reasons remaining in us today.

In this asynchronous interweaving, between a concrete past and the misery of our present, undoubtedly lies an unresolved nostalgia, not of what was but of what today can no longer be. That is, to become a horizon. For true nostalgia is only that which commemorates a mythical time, as not fake but according to the “principle of hope” (Ernst Bloch).

So the same block“The important thing is to learn hope. The act of hope is not defeatist because it in itself wishes to succeed, not to fail. Hope, higher than fear, is not as passive as this feeling nor, in fact ever lower, is confined to nothingness. The emotion of hope expands, expands men rather than constrains them, and never satisfies the knowledge of what makes them inwardly inclined toward a goal and what externally may be their ally. The work of this affection requires men to throw themselves actively into the new that is forming and to which they themselves belong. Precisely something that opposes, at its intimate core, the political entrepreneurship of fear, the obsessive reiteration of a threat that comes from the past, which is instead the true essence of the era of populism we live in.

In the memory of any human being’s life there is his individual time, understood as that period of experiences he personally lived, as a completely subjective existential path, as well as the concrete space of his individual action. In either case, everything in the plural can be declined. The fact remains, in itself devastating, that in the undying memory what tells us about the past is not only who the protagonist was, in his physical and human presence, but what he did and thus represented to his contemporaries. which – above all – is revealed by the things and places that have somehow escaped him. Because they both bear the imprint of natural persons.

Longtime historian and essayist Antonella Tarpino has made a habit of working on places and things from the past, with her latest work titled note. The anti-fascists said in their newspaper (Einaudi, pp. 194, Euro 17) He works to reconstruct the terrain of anti-fascist memory across the passage of time and to express, with a new awareness, the multiple meanings of places. It is not so approaching sins of thought as some may be tempted to hastily assert. If anything, it is a very different semblance of those that have been deduced by purely political assumptions. or historical. In fact, the volume focuses on comparing what remains of the past with the way we live today, and thus a long time later. The author writes: «It is a continuous play in the play – in the huts of Paralop – between the world of yesterday, or even the day before yesterday, and today, marked as it is by a violent cesarean period between the various periods of time: between the fleeting momentary time of our present and the already distant time, which is in its origins».

Also for this reasonThe book constitutes a kind of travel diary in one’s memory, that is, in the ways, places, and times in which anti-fascist consciousness is renewed. The text is, in fact, quite foreign to any imperative discourse on the ‘duty of memory’, and ‘never again! , and “values” (and the so-called “crisis”). Tarpino understands, if anything, that our era is not only a period of political disillusionment but also a radical change in relation to materialism, that is, the concrete materiality of the past. However, the two things go hand in hand. No substantive regret, then, but the questioning, in a semiotic key, about the changing meaning of the relationship that binds each of us to the components of the past, especially when they are reference pointers for emotions and passions that remain unquestioned to this day.

Because memory Anti-fascism is studded with “tacit elements of moral knowledge without which it is difficult to understand even the extraordinary nature of party choice”. In this sense, the journey between times and places serves above all to understand what Giorgio Boca defines, with invaluable intellectual honesty, as an anti-fascism that sprouts within fascism itself, emanating from it: “It existed while we were still hoping for external conquests, which were not outside fascism, but rather a slow journey within fascism”. And again, it was not a matter of a new ideology that went against the ideology of the regime, which was now partly in decline, but of “growing fatigue and suffering from lies.”

There is, therefore, something beyond Mussolini’s twenty years, if anything that questions the meaning of feeling “Italian” not because it was against something or someone but in order to eventually become something. The realization of the conditions—and therefore—of the true design of the time arose not from a pre-existing ideological framework but from the concrete confirmation of the unbridgeable gap that existed between proclamations and reality, dreams of glory and everyday misery, imperial horizons and ordinary deprivation.

note, from this point of view, does not respect any chronological order. It is not the story of the gradual acquisition of consciousness, as if such a phenomenon as anti-fascism, and then partisanship, in the war of liberation, could be surrounded, and therefore told in such terms. So following a path is, at the same time, linear and cumulative. Anti-fascism – in fact – was not only the rejection of that “fascist regime” that immediately presented itself as such, but the search for a different reason to live. This condition we call today as “identity”. Not national, not Italian, least of all patriotic but personal: that is, the self-knowledge that corresponds to one’s moral milieu, fashioned through the realization that what is derived, also and above all, from the knowledge of the inevitability of others.

Thus Immanuel Kant: “Two things fill the soul with new and growing admiration and reverence, the more often I treat them and the longer I contemplate them: the starry sky above me, and the moral law within me. I do not need these two things and simply suppose as if they were shrouded in darkness, or were in the transcendental beyond my horizon; shih then as today.

AuthorIn this regard, writing a book is by no means easy. Because it enters into the labyrinth of many components, and therefore many contradictions, of militants and therefore anti-fascist partisans. Like is not immediately and exclusively solvable on the political and ideological level, otherwise we would wish it were. Given that we are mostly talking about people who have reached a certain point in their existence, maturity and realization that they would never have been able to reach.

Fascism, from this perspective, was a limitation as well as, paradoxically, an opportunity. Especially for that generation that lived and grew up in the shadow of its stubborn primacy. From this point of view, the book is not limited to the illusory nature of the need to get lost in group exhibitions. Basically, if anything, it’s like a kind of handbook on how, through photographs of places, to find the remnants of time, the signs of those who came before us. It is not a trivial matter, after all, if we think instead of our bewilderment, that which crosses the present with anger as muffled as it is trivial.