different from itself and identity is only the continuous negation of the
inadequacy of existence; it is the subject that remains itself by becom-
ing different. Any reality is therefore a realization, a development of
subjectivity. The latter attains itself in history when its development
becomes rational ... Dialectical thought began with the admission that
the world is not free, that is, that man and nature exist in conditions of
alienation, different from what they are ... Thought corresponds to
reality only if it transforms practice itself by understanding its con-
tradictory structure. Here the principle of the dialectic carries thought
beyond the limits of philosophy. Understanding reality means under-
standing what things are, and this in its turn includes the non-
acceptance of their belonging as raw facts. The non-acceptance, the
revolt, constitutes the process of thought as well as action. (Marcuse,
Ragione e rivoluzione, 44–5, our translation)^3The notion of truth here submits to an historical, dialectical twisting:
the truth is no mere recognition of givenness, of being present, but is
an integral process of becoming true, a process that givenness negates
by putting actuality into being, which is finally the same process.
Givenness, the immediacy that we can experience in daily existence, is
the locus of an alienation, that is, in being other than oneself, of a dis-
crepancy between what exists and its ideal destination, its having to
be, or even its being able to be, its possibility, that will become actual
only through the work of the negative. Hegel can affirm that all that is
real is rational only because all that is true has passed through the
work of the negative that introduces reality and brings truth to reason.
The phrase ‘all that is real is rational’ is not the recognition of a given
condition, but the vision of a process of realization that brings being to
truth [porta a essere la verità] only insofar as it brings truth to being
[porta la verità in essere].*****Truth is the purpose of history and at the same time promises to be the
end of history.
Twentieth-century utopia arises from this dynamic and dialectical
conception of truth as becoming true. Revolutionary movements have
tried to realize this promise, and ’68 can be seen as the moment in
which this dream of realization found itself closest to fulfilment.
But today, as has been revealed undeniably by 1989, we know that
this utopist dream accompanying twentieth-century revolutionary80 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_09_cha08.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 80