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Il Desiderio Dissidente was originally published in the February 1968 issue of Quaderni Piacentini (QP), three months after protests erupted at the Catholic University of Milan and a few weeks before the occupation of the administration of Paris X Nanterre. Originally a puckishly provincial sibling of the workerist journal Quaderni Rossi, QP evolved into one of the most creative and influential New Left publications in Europe. A typical issue (no. 28) carried messages from Stokely Carmichael and Cuban revolutionaries, an essay by Sebastiano Timpanaro on materialism, erudite disquisitions on Freudian philosophy, dispatches from student demonstrations and excerpts from Berthold Brecht's Ma-Ti. Fachinelli could reasonably imagine, therefore, a readership that could do without a mini course in movement history, but which would also include leftists from his own generation - leftists weaned during Fascist rule - who were theoretically sympathetic to young rebels but practically sceptical about ‘excesses’. Weaning and excess are, consequently, at the centre of this piece.
In substance, if not in tone, Desiderio Dissidente can be compared with Marcuse's ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, which was discussed in QP 32, and the language shows signs of long exposure to the unforgiving lucidity of One-Dimensional Man (Jervis, 1967). Two key differences should be noted. Marcuse portrayed the conflict between capitalism and socialism as a clash between a soulless system that could, nevertheless, ‘deliver the goods’ and a truly beautiful society (Marcuse, 2015[1967]). Fachinelli was more concerned with the contest between different forms or phases of socialization. Moreover, the Italian psychoanalyst did not place much stock in radical needs or objective possibilities. If change was going to come, Fachinelli argued, it would be thanks to the unrooted and their dis-objectifying desires. In short, Marcuse took reformist talk about ‘eliminating want’ seriously; Fachinelli took it