Introduction

Boys, girls and a dog in front of Vinca Cemetery

August bank holiday 2015, in a village in the Apuan Alps. In the summer of 1944 Vinca was one of the small Tuscan settlements to be most tragically hit by the SS death squads, actively supported by the local Fascist milizia from Carrara. They shot around 170 people, most of them women and children, over the three days between 24 and 26 August. The Nazi-fascists packed twenty-nine women and their children into a little sheep pen called Il Mandrione. Insensitive to the cries, the begging and the tears of their victims, they gunned down every one of them.

Seventy-one years later, the village was full of people. This was quite a rare occurrence, given that small settlements like Vinca have suffered a second, demographic death - obviously a less terrible death than that inflicted by the SS, but a no less lethal one.1 Visitors of Vinchese extraction come back to spend the weekend in houses that are left abandoned from one August to the next, former homes of the families who left the village in the years following the massacre. They come in their cars, many of them black and shiny vehicles with chrome wheelrims, rather too big for the size of the village itself. An occasional flash of wealth, if a modest one. There's quite a hubbub; on the church square people are playing tombola and a group of drunken male youth tell anyone within earshot that they need to 'have a piss'. All this seems quite normal; or is it?

Heading away from the medieval centre of the village, we come across a quite different scene. Five or six youngsters of both sexes are sitting in the lane in front of the cemetery. They are very young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, and probably still in school. There is a big dog with them, tame and affectionate, with its paw in one of the girls' hands. This is a relaxed, tranquil group, set apart. We say hello and say how much we like the dog, which they are rather pleased about; but we don't stop to chat. Only later do we wish that we had done so. It would have been nice to ask them what they were doing, whether they had perhaps a grandmother or great-grandmother killed in the massacre, whether they thought that the passions that led to that act of unspeakable cruelty - first and foremost, the hatred and disdain for human life - could reappear, as history suggests. Who knows whether the kids in front of the gates of Vinca Cemetery, and all those like them, are aware of the great threats that loom over us like black clouds, the first signs of a storm ready to wipe out our civic coexistence and our democracy. Thinking back to that group, tender and reflective to all appearances, there comes to mind another group - the Turin youth who were to join the anti-fascist Resistance of the Second World War. Natalia Ginzburg recalled how at a certain point her young friends saw their school buildings, the city squares and the regime's rhetoric in a completely different light:

The words patria and Italia, which we had found nauseating within school walls because they were always accompanied by the adjective 'fascist', because they were pumped up with emptiness, suddenly appeared to us without adjectives, and so transformed that it seemed that we were hearing and thinking them for the first time.2

We can compare the two groups of youngsters, from Turin and from Vinca. Some of the former were destined to become famous, while the latter were unknown and partly imaginary; the former were typical children of the twentieth century, the latter of the twenty-first. But this comparison sparks the following burning question. How can we ensure that small groups like these will not bend their culture and intelligence to convention and prejudice, but will instead celebrate diversity? Will they have the necessary ability and preparedness to connect with other, wider groups, but also with smaller ones, mere family groups?

Paradoxically, it was easier to connect with one another in the dramatic years of Natalia Ginzburg's youth than in it is in our own time; for, just like the photographs, the options of that era were expressed in black and white. The situation under neoliberalism is very different. Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of the present, is driven by consumerist passions. It projects an enfeebled imitation of democracy. It seems to make all of us into consenting victims of its own power. The growth of this diffuse inability to feel alternative passions is one of the key themes in this book. Our text is motivated by a concern for politics itself; for politics' only remaining strength seems to be its power to disconnect rather than to construct shared passions that are able to react to the dissatisfaction over the present state of things. To resist by ourselves is no simple feat.

Despite the difficulties, we urgently need to encourage new connections and enable small, secluded groups to do more than passively submit to the choices posed by the dominant ideology. A new beginning demands new tools, because there is no point in repeating the same old rituals from the past.

This short book hopes to be such a tool. It concentrates above all on passions: not only base ones like hatred, anger and the desire to destroy whatever is different from oneself - passions so horribly unleashed in the Vinca massacre - but also higher passions, such as love, tenderness and compassion. Above all, it investigates the connection between passions and politics. It is unusual to see these two being connected - and passions and democracy even more so. But, if we question what the emotional life of a democracy could be, we see that a new field of reflection emerges. Of course, we do not deny that this is a complex world, but also one extremely useful to deal with - or so we hope, for all those small groups that are now growing and resolved to build something new, but not in the old way.3

The seductive power of neoliberal passions

Let us set our reflection within the context of the prevalent economic system of our time, namely neoliberalism. In our view, it cannot be treated just as a simple economic and political ideology. Rather, we maintain that it has such reach and influence that it pervades our everyday existence, our material and cultural consumption, our passions and our choices. We hold, moreover, that a new beginning must necessarily be laid down in discontinuity with all this.

We do not want to give in to the temptation to point to neoliberalism as the cause of all evils and all the crises that are now underway. This is too complex a historical phenomenon to be simply reduced to a single mechanism of oppression. Above all, we ought not underestimate the variety of neoliberalism's expressions or reduce it to a sequence in which an essential phenomenon comes first and then all the others, as its immediate consequences. For example, for an economist it would be tempting to believe that neoliberalism is fundamentally a process reorganising society's economic structures and that all the other consequences - political, anthropological, social, ethical, cultural - are inevitable corollaries of this same reorganisation. Similarly, for scholars of politics, the essence of neoliberalism is to be found in the transformation of political institutions and their sovereignty and, for philosophers, in a specific model of social rationality.

These are all parts of the truth. But they are also typical - each in its own way, of course - not just of neoliberalism but all of capitalism's historical phases. It is not new for the economy to tend to swallow up all the dimensions of society, changing its structures in the direction of increasing inequality. Nor is it new for capitalism to show an always more direct intolerance of democracy. Why, then, are all these tendencies, more or less present over the history of the last two decades, being realised with ruthlessness right now, without meeting obstacles or prompting too much indignation - if only in a spontaneous or, on the contrary, elitist form - and in the absence of a well-organised political and democratic front of conflict (a conflict that in fact explodes in the form of war)?

Our answer is that the factor that has contributed to this development in neoliberalism, making it an era in which capitalism advances without being held back by any politically well-organised conflict, is above all the imposition of a unique governance of the passions. Its secret, underhand weapon is the ability to reap the benefits of a slow taming of our hearts, by now inexorably attracted to neoliberal passions. It is difficult indeed to subvert a system that has so effectively perfected its self-defence mechanisms through the seductive embrace of consumption and through control over our passions. Democratic electoral contests are now unable to release us from the system's iron grip - contests organised by a handful of people, with the help of larger and larger economic resources and through a rigid control of media that are increasingly wanting in ideas and devoid of pluralism. And even the politicians who come forth with the best of intentions end up being knocked back to the place they came from.

It is at this basic level that neoliberal government uses our passions. After all, we don't choose our passions; nor are they rational or completely free. They are called 'passions' also because we are in some sense forced to...