Abstract
I was born in 1967, during roughly the same days as the humanities students at the University of Turin began occupying their building and jubilantly disrupting the established order of things. It seems strangely necessary to state this, although the coincidence of the dates doesn’t tell us very much. It is perhaps a way of marking a certain belonging to feminism – by some scholars’ definitions, I belong to the ‘third wave’ simply by dint of having been born between 1963 and 1974, 1 meaning that my feminist attachments are precisely shaped by having missed ‘1968’ 2 and having come of age in the wake of women’s liberation, during the ‘winter years’, as Felix Guattari (2009) once named them, of the 1980s. In this reading, to ‘belong’ to the third wave is by definition to have missed the second. And yet, as Luisa Passerini’s phenomenally moving and still resonant text Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 so clearly demonstrates, the form that belonging takes has its own complex temporality, complicated by the workings of memory, loss and identification. Belonging, and especially generational belonging, is never as simple as a matter of dates, any more than the history of feminism is reducible to a series of chronologically ordered waves. Passerini’s text, as it shuttles between personal and political testimony, between the scene of 1968, the scene of her psychoanalysis and discussions with former members of the movement in the 1980s, and that of her childhood in the Italy of the 1940s, takes time as its central subject: time as history, as event, as memory, as intimate encounter, as collective experience, as narrative, as praxis.
Originally published as Autoritratto di Gruppo, the shift from ‘gruppo’ to the English translation of ‘generation’ brings to the fore the notion of a group that has a particular relation to temporality. A generation is a body of individuals who may not know one another, who may never cross paths, but whose collectivity is premised on simply sharing the same temporal period, on sharing time. More than this, there is something rather personal about a generation – we often talk about ‘my’ generation, and therefore it is a collectivity that needs to be owned, identified with, related to as mine, as yours, as theirs. The collective that is a generation, in other words, cannot constitute itself without this act of claiming, in which individuals must sign up to belonging to it. And yet it is not quite the same as what we might describe as group identity. Although we may be able to identify distinct political generations – groups of people who share formative social conditions at approximately the same point in their lives and develop a common interpretive framework shaped by those historical circumstances 3 – generation also signals towards something less localized than this. A generation recalls Alphonso Lingis’s ‘community of those who have nothing in common’ (Lingis, 1994), in which what is shared by a community is something like the ‘noise’ of time – what will come to have been a historical period when the noise of the present has subsided. Of course, a generation can also be understood as roughly the 30-year period in which children grow up and have children of their own. It is the time taken to regenerate, or to start anew. My generation, by definition is not my parents’ generation, even though I might live roughly at the same time as my parents. So, a generation points towards the time shared by siblings, peers and lateral relations, rather than the vertical relations of parents and children. To regenerate is to enact a beginning, which engenders a future. The term ‘generation’, then, names the intersection between the collective experience of sharing the noise of time, and the periodicity of regeneration. Generation engenders a future, and to belong to a generation is to notice, be touched by, or become attached to a historical period that, as you live it, is not yet history. Both meanings of generation include a kind of suspension of the flow of time, perhaps thought of as marking the intersection between vertical and horizontal conceptualizations of time.
It is exactly this intersection that haunts Passerini’s text. It is not simply that Passerini demonstrates that the personal is political, in the sense that Carol Hanisch first meant it, that ‘personal problems are political problems’ (Hanisch, 1970), and that politics must attend to nuanced, embodied, gendered and affective lived experience. Passerini is more concerned with the temporal dimensions of both personal and political life, and the ways that a structure of delay operates to allow personal and political affiliations to form and affect one another. What emerges from Passerini’s text is neither ‘1968’, nor an autobiography of a generation, nor an autobiography of Passerini, but a series of time lags or delays that appear to be part of how belonging works: what we sign up to when we passionately join a movement, especially a movement that seeks to change the present in the name of a yet unknown and unknowable future, is not the same thing as what we turn out to have signed up to, any more than an analysis can predict in advance what it is that will turn out to be significant in a personal history. Indeed, Autobiography of a Generation remains one of the clearest demonstrations of the psychoanalytic notion of Nachtraglichkeit, showing how belongings, especially the traumatic elements of attachment, can only emerge from the perspective of a later scene that renders the first one traumatic through the capacity of the later scene to bring the first one to light (for the first time, both Freud [1939] and Lacan [1975] would say 4 ), and in doing so, to reveal the repressed elements of the earlier scene that come, by definition too early, before we can understand their meaning, before we really know what’s going on. As we read Autobiography of a Generation in 2011, we therefore read back through three postwar generations, each later scene making possible a rendering of the earlier one. Passerini attempts to apprehend the political events of 1968 through the personal narratives of those looking back on a political scene from a second political scene located in the 1980s, the first of which can only be understood retroactively through the actual work of forming a political narrative. Thus, ‘1968’ can be read as a symptom, produced to ward off the anxiety of a ‘generation’ that comes to be understood to have been traumatic in the context of a later political scene – one that has to come to terms with a partial collapse in the ideological underpinnings of the political left and a backlash against post-’68 thinking. Passerini therefore does not ‘psychoanalyse’ history any more than she historicizes her own psychic processes. Rather, she narrates the unfolding experience of analysis, with its longings and dead-ends as a political project, and she collects narratives of political belongings to reveal their personal investments. There is no ‘outside’ of either political or personal attachments, but we can track them, she suggests, if we pay attention to the effects of delay in both.
Two time lags structure the text: the occupation of the University of Turin occurs while Passerini was in Africa at the end of 1967, and much of the political testimony she collects in the 1980s seeks to fill in the details of this missed event. The other is the death of her mother at the age of six, which occurred some months before she was informed, meaning that she continued to believe her mother was alive long after she was indeed dead. The text is an exercise in both reconstruction, and what Lacan calls ‘rememoration’; the resurrection of the grammar of memory rather than its content, that then tells us how things are psychically positioned in relation to the Real, rather than what the memory means, and in doing so, preserves a certain distance, or we could say a temporal delay between an event and its recollection that enables the event to exert meaning and signification into the future.
The first missed event is that of ‘1968’ itself. ‘Why talk about something I didn’t share, in what’s supposed to be an autobiography, albeit a collective autobiography?’ Passerini asks (p. 60). She immediately, in other words, opens the question of generation – of sharing a temporal frame with others, without sharing a geopolitical location. My biography and therefore my autobiography, my self-narration she insists, is a thoroughly collective issue, and a political one at that. I don’t have to have been there in order to remember an event. Furthermore, the events of 1968, she claims, marked a turn from the individual to the collective, from the private to the public, and have continued to have effects worldwide, and for generations to come. Returning to an event that was so seminal, regardless of the fact that she herself missed it, is a way of continuing this influence, and trying to track its further development. It is not important whether she was there or not – this would be only an individual concern. What really matters is the shift to the collective that the generation who were politically active in 1968 produced, but that can only be ascertained retroactively, through the process of collecting testimony some years later. The generation who lived through 1968, in other words, are the generation through whom the ideal of the collective returns.
As she speaks to those who were involved in the occupation of the University of Turin, and in so many subsequent political actions, movements and events through 1968 and into the early 1970s, the disintegration of the collective spirit of the student movement emerges as the repressed symptom of the generation. As one of her participants, Franco-Apra, states:
Sixty-eight had been a utopia of organizing a huge collective effort, in which I personally participated most willingly. Because I was a little disgusted by a way of coping with the world, a way that later imposed itself as predominant and almost necessary – aggressive individualism. After ‘68 this working hypothesis was destroyed. (p. 127)
Passerini, by interviewing those involved in 1968 in 1983, understands fully that the traumatic aspects of being involved cannot be comprehended as traumatic until some time has passed, until a second scene, that of 1983; a time, after all, in which neoliberalism has taken hold in many European countries, when many of those involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement and the left more generally are exhausted and disillusioned. It is through the process of giving testimony on events some years earlier, that those events can come to be understood and felt as traumatic.
The second missed event is that of Passerini’s mother’s death. As 1968 emerges in its traumatic after-effects, Passerini’s own psychoanalysis is unfolding along similar lines. The opening scenes of the analysis are full of reminiscences – we get the ‘story’ of Passerini’s early life, the development of intense and vital friendships after her mother’s early and untimely death when she was six, her first loves, her engagements with politics, her travels and political work in Africa, her return to Italy and so on. Alongside this life story is a love story, both a literal one with a new man, and the love story that is an analysis. In the opening stages of her encounter with her analyst these are vital narrative pathways, allowing the tentative processes of attachment, idealization, dependency, helplessness and care to be tolerated. However, the unintegrated trauma of her early childhood – the structuring effects of her mother’s death – remains untouched, despite other therapeutic gains. The shift occurs when her analyst, usually laconic, erudite, witty and reserved, makes, in his own terms, a ‘mistake’ that allows the possibility for access to what Freud calls ‘historical truth’ – the grammar or syntax, that is, of Passerini’s psychic life which revolves a time lag between her mother’s death and her knowledge of her mother’s death. Her analyst’s ‘mistake’, which turns out to have profound therapeutic consequences, is to simply notice that the loss of her mother has left its mark on her. He remarks:
Coming to get you from the waiting room, I had the perception that the premature loss of your mother has really left its mark on you. (p. 114)
This sends Passerini into a emotional state in which she appears to relive the shock and trauma of her mother’s death:
In bed, alone, at night, all of a sudden it is as if past time were wiped out, more than forty years. A growing hiccup, an almost asthmatic breathlessness, an absence that takes my breath away: why did you go away, why aren’t you here, why did this happen to me? Rancor, hate, terror, I won’t be able to survive. Instead, I do survive, groping, like a stump, a wounded part. Scenes come back as vivid as if they were yesterday; the withered roots become painful. A night spent reliving images of rejection and abandonment. (p. 114)
What is it that occurs here? At one level Passerini’s analyst, in his intervention, simply says ‘I can see that you are a child whose mother has died, even in the middle-aged woman who sits in my waiting room’. He names her loss and its lasting impact, and in doing so, collapses the 40 years that have passed, putting his patient in touch with the abandoned child that has never fully felt the loss, who has never allowed herself to feel the rancour, hate and terror of being alone. In splitting off this aspect of her psychic life, Passerini has lost touch with the traumatic elements of that loss that have structured her entire life – her relationships, her politics, her passionate attachments of all kinds. And yet this reading misses another – that Passerini’s mother’s death is redoubled by the shock of being told months after the event that she had in fact died. The ‘dead time’ between the actual death and being told of her mother’s death is the time that is wiped out by the news of the death, and is repeated by the therapeutic ‘mistake’. It is an absence of time itself that takes her breath away: I thought you were here all this time, but actually you were already dead. Like an unintended necrophiliac, she finds herself to have been still in relation to an already dead mother.
What her analyst’s intervention does then is to notice that at some level Passerini is still waiting for her mother to come home from hospital. As she sits in the waiting room, what he sees is just that – a child waiting, rather than a bereaved child. He stumbles, that is, not on the impact of the loss, but its absence. The mother is not lost in Passerini’s psychic life – she is still alive, in hospital, and Passerini is still waiting for her to come home. Passerini’s psychic decision to continue to wait for her mother to return from hospital means that she cannot fully claim her place within her own generation. She is frozen within her own mother’s generation, waiting to grow up. In placing herself, through her own political testimony and gathering that of others, within her own generation, she can take in the analyst’s intervention as important. She is ready, she tells him, to know what a part of her already knows but can’t think about.
This section of Autobiography of a Generation is in dialogue with Passerini’s own political testimony that grapples with the 1970s. What emerges as the participants begin to talk about the exhaustion and ideological struggles of the early 1970s and then the violence on the political left of the late 1970s, is a capacity for ambivalence, an integration, perhaps of both hope and profound disappointment that may require the time delay of the third scene, that of 2011, to become fully visible.
Of 1978–1979 Passerini writes:
The terrible years . . . I couldn’t raise my own eyes, given all those things that hadn’t been cleared up, such as the derivation of terrorist violence from our intellectual and existential milieu. Like many others, I had always assumed that terrorism couldn’t come from anywhere but the right, that it was Fascist by definition. (p. 121)
By situating her story within the stories of the generation of 1968, her generation, Passerini can write her story, and the story she writes is not just her political story, but the story of recognizing a disavowed loss that has structured her political life. The analysis is the remembering of that loss.
Only now is the complementary nature of my two undertakings evident. If I had not heard the life stories of the generation of ’68, I would not have been able to write about myself; these stories have nourished mine, giving it the strength to get to its feet and to speak. But I couldn’t have borne them, in their alternation of being too full and too empty, if I had not confronted myself and my history with the double motion of analysis and the exercise of remembering. (p. 124)
Thus, the slogan of Passerini’s generation, that the ‘personal is political’, is shown to cut both ways. It is through grasping her place in her own generation and revealing its repressed traumatic elements that Passerini can make use of her psychoanalysis, a process that in its turn can support what is otherwise unsupportable – the knowledge that it is only after the event that one can know something of the events one has lived through.