Toward the Creative Nothing is a combination of poetic literature, fiery manifesto, and individualist rant. This collection of writings from Renzo Novatore (1890-1922) turns the knife of criticism on religion, democracy, war, fascism, socialism, and, indeed, society.
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”.
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.