Title: Beyond the Two Anarchies
Author: Renzo Novatore
Source: The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore, Ardent Press 2012
Notes: Vertice, La Spezia, Translated by Wolfi Landstreicher

The social thought saturated with the revolutionary dynamic that the social-political concept of libertarian communists radiates breaks through the universal depth of human pain to intertwine in an almost monistical embrace with the higher and vaster psycho-spiritual concept of anarchist individualism yearning for the definitive and radical Anarchy.

But Anarchy being a “final absolute” in full harmony with the infinite idea and communism a “relative” social, juridical passage flowing into economic empiricism—therefore prelude and promise but not full musical harmony and epic finale—it happens that the flourishing children of the two theoretical currents of social becoming continue to wrangle, still contending with each other—now tempestuous and now calm—the philosophical-spiritual heritage of pure Anarchy. It is the ancient dualism that, dressed up again in apparent logic, still goes round in the vicious circle where the merry-go-round of dogma and utopia spin on the inauspicious axle of the dream that truth deforms and life transfigures.

And it is from this vicious circle, which neither one of the two parts has yet boldly dared to escape, that I want to decisively free myself to later immerse myself in the bath of a new sun.

The anarchist who aspires to communism and the individualist who aspires to Anarchy don’t notice that they are gripped, violently, in the shackles of castrating sociology and in the jaws of the humanism that is a slimy blend of individual non-will and pseudo-christian morality.

Anyone who accepts a social, collective, and human cause is not in the pure Anarchy of the free, virgin, and original instinct of the anthropocentric inassimilables and negators.

I—anarchist and individualist—don’t want to and cannot embrace the cause of atheist communism, because I don’t believe in the supreme elevation of the masses and therefore I refuse the realization of Anarchy understood as a social form of human life together.

Anarchy is in free spirits, in the instinct of great rebels, and in great and superior minds.

Anarchy is the innermost animating mystery of misunderstood uniquenesses, strong because alone, noble because they have the courage of solitude and of love, aristocratic because scornful of commonness, heroic because against all...

Anarchy is nectar for the psychic I and not sociological alcohol for the collectivity.

The anarchist is the one who refuses every cause for the joy of his life radiating from inner spiritual intensity.

* * * *

No future and no humanity, no communism and no anarchy is worthy of the sacrifice of my life. From the day that I discovered myself, I have considered myself as the supreme PURPOSE.

Now I wrap myself in the rising trajectory of my liberated and liberating spirit, I cast off the harness of the pure nakedness of instinct to soar above the arch—ideal sociological inspiration—that joins and combines the dogmatic utopianism of the two pale dreaming anarchies to glorify—between the clash of the winds and the feasts of the sun—the egoarchic and powerful lordship of myself.

Beyond the tragic bridge of the Nietzschean overman, I catch sight of a summit even freer and more phosphorescent on which no god-man ever celebrated his birth or his easter resurrection.

Beyond the people and humanity, the absurd and sublime mystery of the undefined UNIQUE lives and throbs.

I—crazed human eagle—flash across the gloomy darkness of this black night, where the storm of ideas howls and the winds of thought roar, to later soar beyond the arms of the earliest glimmer of the dawn, among the raging flames of the noontime sun, sensing myself in the voluptuous and dionysian throbbing of the vital, amoralistic instinct where the light of the spirit and the passion of emotion get drunk in the wild and virgin springs of blood and flesh.

* * * *

Joy is—above all—a special way of feeling life.

For the higher man who feels elevated, there is the sublime joy of sorrow and the deep sadness of happiness. Zarathustra who, through the painful and sublime solitude of the peaks, eagerly seeks the keen joy of knowledge, and encounters crazed, divine madness; Jules Bonnot who, through “Crime” and “Transgression,” exalts the will of the Unique who, beyond Good and Evil, rises toward the sky of the heroic Art of living and dying; Bruno Filippi who is annihilated in the titanic effort, who claims the right of the “I” against the social constraints of the unctuous bourgeois and plebeian collectivities; these are the radiant jewels that compose the libertarian garland of my vital amoralism, as well as the protagonists of my spiritual tragedy.

In life I seek the joy of the spirit and the luxurious voluptuousness of instinct. And I don’t care to know whether these have their perverse roots in the caverns of good or in the whirling abysses of evil. I rise, and if in rising I encounter the tragic lightning of my destiny, life and death will bend on my twisted lips to later follow me into the supreme turmoil where Art glorifies the strong, misunderstood rebels whom morality reviles and condemns, whom science calls lunatics, and whom society curses.

* * * *

I am therefore the rejoicing liberated instinct. Lending an ear to myself I hear the thunderous howl of my liberator spirit that sings the epic and triumphant song of the final victory.

All ARCHIES have fallen shattered. Now I love myself, I exalt myself, I sing myself, I glorify myself. My old dreams have found rest on the pale and fragrant skin of women. My passionate, pagan mind is that of an uninhibited poet and is voluptuously reflected in their perverse eyes where the spirits of Pleasure and Evil dance the maddest dance. Only the twinkling of stars, the flowing of rivers, the whispering of forests say something of what lives in me. Anyone who can’t comprehend the strange symphonies of nature can’t comprehend the resounding verses of my enchanting songs.

* * * *

Mine is not a thought or theory, but a state of mind, a particular way of feeling. When I feel the need to decisively set my Centaurs and my raging stallions free, there will be around me a mad orgy of love and blood, because I am—I feel it—what the inhabitants of the moral swamps of society call a “common criminal.”

* * * *

Madman? As you will! Normal beings have never enjoyed my affections. Among human beings, the ones I love most are the “criminals” of Thought and Action (Artists, Thieves, Vagabonds, Poets).

Among women I love the perverts. I love them dressed in blue in the evening sunset. I love them dressed in red among the golden rays of the coming dawn; I love them naked and perfumed on the bed of love, I love them dressed in white on the small bed of death.

Poor, small, great sisters of mine who I have always loved and never possessed. I love you! I love you! I love you!

Tell me, oh my living sisters, oh my deceased sisters: who? who among you was the most famous, the greatest, the most perverted?

Ah, I remember, I remember!...

Clara, it was you!... But where are you now?

I knew you once through Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden. I knew you and I loved you! You are the strangest and most delicate creature, the most romantically and deeply human and cruel, who has known how to feel life keenly, to feel love exquisitely amidst the moaning of the tortured and the aroma of the flowers. When I think of you running, mad and light, under the blonde prelude of the golden twilight to find green sod reddened with blood and make yourself a wedding bed from it to grant yourself the deepest loving embrace, I feel exalted by admiration for you.

Ah, romantic and refined creature, how you are able to penetrate the divine miracle of flowers and how the sensual perfume of the Chinese meadow rue teaches you to exalt….

Only a great voluptuary and a great pervert could hear as your equal—still amidst the heartrending and terrible cries of the tortured—the strong and powerful voice of instinctive nature that cries: “Love yourself!... Love yourself!... Make yourself also like the flowers... In truth, there is only Love!” And I understand it and I feel it, oh Clara, your wicked and amoral love, damned and abominated by the castrated purity of the morality of the chaste and of men. I feel it, how it rises, mad and impetuous, from the most subterranean depths of instinct, to spread—with the musical harmony of eagerness and mysteries—uninhibited and superb before the cruel and barbarous spectacle of human sacrifice and to celebrate the supreme and vigorous throb of the most painfully profound JOY, resonating in the bleeding heart of the fullest, most tragic life.

* * * *

Oh perverse heroine of Octave Mirbeau, I exalt you and sing you because I am the barbarous singer of Evil.

Above the two Anarchies of Reason and Good—glorious and triumphant—I raise the banner of the Anarchy of Instinct and Evil.