He's always understood me to be a kind of Bartleby of politics, W. says. I would prefer not to: that's what my indifference to social questions says. Or, better: Fuck off, I'm eating.
I’m antisocial: that much is clear. Reclusive. He’s seen the expression on my face during longer conference presentations. He seen the wild desire for freedom that burns in my eyes. I want to vault the walls! To scream! To escape! And doesn’t he want to escape with me, a whelk on the side of a whale?
I find the company of academics intolerable, W. says. Unbearable! And isn’t he the same? Doesn’t he share something of my dread, and my urge to flee? Isn’t he also becoming something of an academic savage?
But there are other ways of being-together, W. says, that's what I have to understand. Political friendship: do I have any sense of that? Of what it means to band together against a common enemy? Of what it means to share a commitment, to be part of collective work, free from all personal ambition?
W. remembers what Tronti recalls of the early days of operaismo, of sharing ‘a common knot of problems as “lived thought”’. In their meetings, Tronti says, ‘we would spend half the time talking, the rest laughing. We brought together a fine old madhouse’. Political joy; political laughter, W. says: can I imagine that?
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