Toward the Creative Nothing

It is difficult to find anarchist works in English that are at the same time "individualist" and explicitly revolutionary, that emphasize the centrality of the aim of individual self-determination to a revolution that will "communalize material wealth" as it will "individualize spiritual wealth". For this and other reasons I chose to translate Toward the Creative Nothing by Renzo Novatore and publish several of his shorter pieces. Written shortly after World War I, as a revolution was occurring in Russia and uprisings were happening in Germany and Italy, this poetic text responds to the upheaval of its time with a call for a revolution that could truly move the human race beyond the spiritual impoverishment, the equality in baseness that democracy and socialism offered. Bourgeois society seemed to have reached its dusk, and Novatore saw the hope for a new dawn only in such a revolution-one that went beyond the mere economic demands of the socialists and communists--a revolution moved by great ideas and great passions that would break with the low values of bourgeois democratic civilization. -From the Translator "In our time when the 'great dusk' of democratic society that is heralded in this text seems to have become an eternal dusk making the entire world a dull grey nightmare of survival, Novatore's call to a destructive revolution based on great passions and ideas, on the dreams and desires of a might strong-willed 'I' seems more necessary than ever if we are able to move beyond this pathetic swamp of mediocrity. Of course, no revolution can go very far without the insurrection of the exploited against their condition. But this is precisely the point: when the proletarians rise up against their proletarianization, this means taking their revolt beyond the demand for full bellies to the active appropriation of full lives. Novatore's text is a light of poetry and passion which may help us to pierce through the gloom of the capitalist technological dusk that surrounds us—a ray of singularity breaking through the dinginess of the present mediocrity with its call for the revolution of the mightiest dreams."