serious academic attention. And this difficulty might be a true point of
affinity with Guattari who himself, while always a rigorous, complex and
stunningly fertile thinker, kept a busy political and personal agenda that
might have made him appear a much more volatile thinker than he really
was. The openness of Bifo and Guattari’s multiple engagements was
indeed what made their encounter possible – it would be difficult to
imagine Bifo actually becoming a friend of the more reserved Gilles
Deleuze – but we should not forget that this happened when their intel-
lectual and political development had already made it possible for them
to recognize each other as philosophical and political interlocutors.
Bifo was 27 when he first met Guattari in Paris during the summer of
1977 as the latter gave him refuge during his judicial travails. As Bifo
himself says: ‘I was already sufficiently trained to feel him as someone I
understood perfectly’ (Interview, 155). Trained, one should add, in the
different but intimately related fields of conceptual and political cre-
ation. This double training was also at the very core of Guattari’s own
life and work.
As political activists, both Bifo and Guattari started their militant
practices in their teens as members of Communist youth groups, and
both left the Communist Party very early and contributed to the for-
mation and the functioning of less hierarchical, authoritarian and
politically compromised leftist groups. Bifo, in particular, became one
of the early members of Potere Operaio(Workerist Power), together with
figures such as Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri. This
movement had a theoretical and practical importance within the tra-
dition of Marxist thought which is only recently being appreciated by
a large international audience.^3 At the beginning, following Gramsci’s
example, the movement focused on industrial workers, and it is against
this bias that Bifo would later wage one of his most interesting crit-
iques of Potere Operaio. While the group itself had a relatively short life
(1969–72), its reflection on the autonomous power of subjugated groups
had a long-lasting influence on Italian leftist political practices.^4 In parti-
cular, the different groups active around Autonomia Operaia, which was
founded in 1973 and saw in Bifo one of its most influential members,
sanctioned the divorce of revolutionary thought and practice from the
sclerotic Italian Communist Party, and started paying very close attention
to the changing nature of production and subjugation in late capitalist
societies.
It is in this context that Bifo’s contribution was to be essential: recog-
nizing that the capitalist domination of media technologies was finan-
cially overwhelming but ontologically less than real, Bifo started focusingPreface ix9780230_221192_01_prexvi.pdf 10/3/08 11:31 AM Page ix