Red Brigades

The Red Brigades are cited as an Italian example of the mid-1970s turn to political terrorism that followed the exhaustion of the emancipatory sequence of 1968. The book presents the group not through an organizational history, but as part of an argument about how revolutionary energies were redirected toward direct action and an imagined encounter with the Real.

Historical Placement

The Red Brigades enter the account amid a wider shift that the book locates in the mid-1970s, after the political possibilities opened by 1968 had been exhausted. They are named alongside the Red Army Faction in Germany as an instance of Leftist political terrorism. The passage gives no account of the Red Brigades’ membership, internal structure, or particular operations; its focus is the historical and theoretical meaning assigned to this turn toward violence.

Political Logic

The book describes the wager behind this form of terrorism as a response to the belief that the masses were immersed in capitalist ideological sleep and that standard ideological critique could no longer awaken them. In this account, direct violence was taken to offer a more immediate route to political awakening. This is the rationale attributed to the broader tendency in which the Red Brigades are placed, not a detailed statement of the organization’s own program.

Place in the Argument

The Red Brigades are one of three examples of a mid-1970s search for direct contact with the Real. The other two are the pursuit of extreme sexual pleasure and a turn toward inner experience through Eastern mysticism. Despite their differences, the book groups these responses together as withdrawals from concrete sociopolitical engagement. The reference therefore frames the Red Brigades less as a discrete organizational case than as an instance in a wider diagnosis of how political action was redirected when the emancipatory moment of 1968 seemed spent.