In this second part of his autobiography, Toni Negri recounts the period in his life when the professor and activist for the Autonomia Operaia movement became the protagonist of what Michel Foucault called "a new Dreyfus affair in Europe." Chosen by prosecutors close to the PCI as the mastermind behind the entire armed struggle during Italy's "Long '68," the massive raid of April 7, 1979, landed Negri in prison, along with him a large part of Italy's autonomous militant movement. Italy's commitment to a revolutionary Europe ended in this way. In the midst of the prison ordeal, the Italian and European political and social landscape experienced the devastation of the neoliberal counterrevolution, whose primary task was the disfigurement of the past and memory. The signifier "years of lead" was responsible for coating executioners and victims alike, state terrorism and the self-defense of workers' and proletarian struggles, with a sinister patina.
In this labyrinth, Negri learned to collectively resist prison as the only way to survive. He had to resist attempts to turn him into a pentito, the suicidal dynamics of the Red Brigades that condemned him to death, and the spread of postmodern nihilism as an aesthetic of survival. After his election as a deputy for the Radical Party in 1983, he did not waste the only real chance to escape hell and life imprisonment. Not without internal devastation, he fled to France where, after many vicissitudes, he obtained political refugee status.
Exile in France was a difficult and at times almost impossible personal and political reconstruction. Without documents, with a broken family, with little chance of finding a job or resuming theoretical practice, threatened with expulsion for any directly political expression, Negri traces the milestones of an experience of refoundation that is not only personal, but marked by the savage renewal of the communist project initiated by the experience of operaismo and autonomia operaia.

Antonio Negri (Padua, 1933) is one of the most notable exponents of heretical Marxism and communism. A professor of State Doctrine at the University of Padua since the 1960s, he has been a member of key journals such as Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, and Futur antérieur, and an activist in organizations such as Potere Operaio and the Autonomia Operaia project. His essays and studies on Marx, Spinoza, and the new labor and communist movements from the 1970s to the present have been translated into all major languages. His work has been the source of countless debates, raising unresolved problems for the communist project.