The Unseen
For a brief explosive period in the mid-1970s, the young and the unemployed of Italy’s cities joined the workers in an unexpectedly militant movement known simply as Autonomy (Autonomia). Its “politics of refusal” united its opponents behind draconian measures more severe than any seen since the war.
Nanni Balestrini, the poet of youth rebellion, himself a victim of that repression, has invented a remarkable fictional form to express the hopes and conflicts of the movement. In spare but vivid prose, The Unseen follows Autonomy’s trajectory through the eyes of a single working-class protagonist—from high-school rebellion, squatting and attempts to set up a free radio station to arrest and the brutalities of imprisonment. This is a powerful and gripping novel: a rare evocation of the intensity of commitment, the passion of politics.
Paperback, 254 pages
ISBN: 9781844677672
January 2012
$16.95 / £9.99 / $21.00CAN
Other Editions
Ebook, 254 pages
ISBN: 9781844678372
January 2012
$12.99
Paperback, 272 pages
ISBN: 9780860912422
January 1989
$24.95
Reviews
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“Lucid, poetic, unforgettable.”
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“The Unseen isn’t documentary writing, but it tells us far more than any documentary about a troubled phase in our history; how it was experienced, and most of all how it was lived in the imagination.”
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“Not just a beautiful novel...it is the story of part of a generation in our country, who dreamed a different future and believed in it, believed in the possibility of making it real.”
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“What [Balestrini] narrates is not a fairy tale, but a terrifying experience. Not just his own, but also that of a lost generation who thought possible another world beside the world, who dreamt of workers’ power, of autonomy, who revolted against everything, school, family, clergy, political parties, “historical compromise,” State, police, boredom . . . The Unseen is, perhaps, the first true novel of the European Left.”
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“Balestrini offers a very lucid document, which is both the memory and the assessment of a disoriented generation. The Left now has its novel.”
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“We should be grateful to Nanni Balestrini for having engaged his writing with this cruel sentimental education of a young man living in the seventies.”
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“The political passion of the rebel Balestrini is equalled by his literary vocation...the finale is not unworthy of Bontempelli or Calvino.”
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“The political passion of the rebel Balestrini is equalled by his literary vocation...the finale is not unworthy of Bontempelli or Calvino.”
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“A work of high literary quality. Among many novels and elegantly crafted pieces of fiction...The Unseen has the courage to face an incandescent matter of reality, rich in implications that involve not only the literati but also a wider public.”
Blog
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Nanni Balestrini's The Unseen: "The language of the multitude"
From Antonio Negri's new foreword to The Unseen by Nanni Balestrini
Nanni Balestrini's book tells of unseen actors in the class struggle between the 1970s and '80s, particularly in northern Italy, and inside the jails of the Realm. These subjects are invisible because they are elusive, mutating beings in the act of metamorphosis. But what can we say about them today (and also about this novel) if not that rather than being an old, outdated story this is now very much of the present moment, one caught sight of at that time and followed in the course of its unfolding? The republication of The Unseen therefore has the advantage today of telling us about proletarian subjects whose class nature has finally been revealed: the unseen individual of yesterday is the proletarian of today, the immaterial worker, the cognitive precariat, the new figure of the worker as social labour power in the movements of the multitude. Those poor wretches did it, they managed to get through a revolution in the composition of labour and a ferocious political repression and to struggle on from the factories to society and (still productive) from society to the jail (still fighting back). And now where will they go? The elite of the working-class movement who betrayed and dragged the unseen into prison now look around, fearful and unable to build a politics, afraid of losing out if they do not resume contact with that age-old movement of transformation; but that elite will never win! Indeed, regardless of this betrayal by the working-class movement (which has been so serious, especially in Italy), the unseen have gone forward. In the '80s, they were organizing prison revolts and the first autonomous social centres in the cities; in the '90s they organized the Panther movement; in the late '90s they turned into Zapatistas and tute bianche, the anti-globalization movement and everything else that has happened and will happen.
