Paper short abstract:

This paper ethnographically focuses on the No TAV movement in Val di Susa, in the Italian Alps. It highlights the formation of subjectivities, collective and meaning through the convergence of visceral affects and appetitions that bring politics beyond the subjective, opening up future possibility.

Paper long abstract:

This paper ethnographically explores the emergence of subjectivities, collective and meaning in the No TAV movement in Val di Susa, in the Italian Alps. Protesting against the planned construction of a new high-speed railway, and through that against the political economy of infrastructural mega-projects, the political party system and environmental destruction, the No TAV movement is Italy's most enduring, most vigorous and largest contentious mobilisation. It is also an extremely heterogeneous movement, bringing together local residents, catholic church-goers, university professors, environmentalists, pacifists, radical communists, anarchists and members of local authorities—people of all ages and walks of life. This paper looks at the activists' continuous efforts at maintaining a community of objectives without imposing any reductive identity. It is largely owing to this effort that the No TAV movement continues to pose a radical challenge to the state-capitalistic system. I focus on direct action; commensality; assemblies where one never votes, choosing instead a fragile, reiterative process of consensus—and also on violent confrontations with the police. Against recent critiques of social movement politics allegedly weakened by individualisation and the break-up of former class-based alliances (Edelman 2002; cf. Razsa 2015), I argue that it is trough the convergence of visceral affects and appetitions (Massumi 2014, drawing on Whitehead 1978) that militant subjectivities are formed, politics becomes meaningful and one becomes one with the collective. By creating a transindividual force, the movement offers hope for a political transformation beyond the present horizons of possibility, beyond the subjective and into an open future.