Renzo Novatore

Renzo Novatore was the pen name of Abele Rizieri Ferrari (Arcola, 1890 – Teglia, near Genoa, 1922), an individualist anarchist with illegalist leanings who remains little known outside libertarian circles. He is chiefly remembered for Toward the Creative Nothing (Verso il nulla creatore), published after his death, and his thought drew on Max Stirner, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Baudelaire and Wilde.

Born into a poor peasant family, he left school after his first year and educated himself in poetry and philosophy while working his father's land. From 1908 he embraced individualist anarchism. He was charged with several offences, and after the First World War he deserted his regiment in 1918, which led to a death sentence in absentia. In La Spezia he joined an anarcho-futurist collective, wrote for many anarchist papers and fought alongside the city's insurgents in 1919. After a prison sentence that was cancelled by an amnesty, he returned to the underground and joined a gang led by the anarchist Sante Pollastro. He was killed in a clash with the carabinieri in 1922.

His philosophy centres on the creative self, an individual who submits neither to bourgeois morality nor to proletarian discipline. Against Christian nihilism, which he thought denied life, he advocated an affirmative nihilism that tears down lies and phantoms so that full individuality can emerge. His influence was slight during his lifetime, but Severino Di Giovanni championed his work, and more recently currents of post-left anarchism have revived it.