A man that wants to take a fortress by assault can't do it merely with words, but must dedicate all his forces to the task. Thus must we accomplish our task of silence. -- Jakob Frank, The Words of the Lord

Those who are simply happy because such a state of war gives them faith once more in the possibility of new epic sagas of struggle are not going beyond a superficial comprehension of what happened there. Because these Turin “antagonists” gave rise to much more than damages, lynchings, and frightened people: they laid open the way for crossing the line, the way towards the exit from nihilism. At the same time, they also forged the weapons that lead beyond it. We recognize the passage over the line in the fact that a protest like all the rest, like people are so used to seeing, was suddenly changed by the introduction of new factors. And so the silence of the antagonists was no longer the traditional aphasia of the leftist protestors, nor that of Bloom, but something qualitatively new. The remarkable and mute tension that they gave rise to throughout the course of their marches must be essentially understood as the confrontation between two types of silence that are radically different from one another. On the one hand, there is the natural, negative, and to put it plainly, animal silence of the solitary crowd of Blooms who never really express anything of their own at all, anything that the Spectacle has not already said; the silence of the inorganic mass of consumers on their knees, who are not supposed to speak, but just respond when they’re spoken to; the silence of the bleating flock of those who think they can peacefully go back to being simply the representatives of the most intelligent of animal species since there are no real human beings to denounce their degeneration. And on the other, there is strategic silence, the full, positive silence of the “antagonists,” deployed as a tactical device so as to manifest the existence of negativity, so they could erupt into visibility without allowing themselves to be frozen into any petrifying spectacular positivity. (Perhaps we should clarify here that for them there was a vital need to appear out in the open: the need to break the encirclement that domination had subjected them to, which was threatening them with the same fate that Massari had, the same fate suffered by those who Nanni Balestrini calls the invisibles: the discreet physical elimination, in unanimous indifference, of those whose existence Publicity never recognized.) Perhaps we sound like we’re saying that the “antagonists,” after some mature deliberation by an omniscient general staff, chose that silence. But nothing could be more false: they were cornered into it by the objective modalities of domination. And it is precisely because these modalities have generalized themselves throughout the whole of all industrialized societies that the way silence took on a new character in their hands and became an offensive tool/weapon deserves our attention. All reality’s mode of disclosure and Publicity, all mankind’s linguistic essence, have been radically alienated into an autonomous sphere which holds a monopoly on the production of meaning, i.e., the Spectacle. And in such conditions, when anything is explained or shown it is by that simple fact immediately exposed to being metabolized by said Spectacle, as long as that serves its ends. The “antagonists” are the first – and it hardly matters whether they’re consciously aware of this or not – to draw the practical consequences from this situation. By refusing to take any recourse to any of the codes, to any of the accepted signifiers or meanings, which are all managed and controlled by the occupier, and by manifesting that refusal, they established in acts that wherever the Spectacle reigns, silence is the necessary form in which true contestation - the Imaginary Party - must appear. They brought into existence what lucid minds, like Jünger in his Crossing the Line, had already observed: “the tyrants of today,” he wrote, “no longer fear speechifiers. Maybe they used to in the good old days of the absolutist State. Silence is much more terrible – the silence of millions of men, and also the silence of the dead, which the drums cannot drown out and which gets deeper every day until it sparks off the Judgment. As nihilism becomes more and more the norm, the symbols of emptiness spread much more terror than those of power do.” Silence on its own, however, can only become a war-machine by becoming conscious silence. All its effectiveness is suspended until it recognizes itself as a critical-metaphysical sabotage device directed against the triumph of positivity and the defeat of Being by its forgetting. “In order to be able to be quieted, Dasein (being-there) must have something to say; it must have a veritable and rich openness to itself. Then the silence it had kept bursts out, and quiets the impersonal voice of the ‘people say,’” said the old swine [Heidegger] in his jargon. -- Tiqqun, Silence and Beyond, Segment 2

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