Gramsci - Recent Trends in European Philosophy Series -1 The New Mission Possible: Reflections from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (original) (raw)

Cover page and contents, International Gramsci Journal No.2 2010

2010

The International Gramsci Journal (IGJ) is produced in electronic format. It aims to publish scholarship on aspects of Antonio Gramsci’s life and writings, and on contemporary applications of his theories to the modern world. IGJ aims to publish in Italian, Spanish and English. We publish both peer-reviewed articles and shorter “Gramsci notes”. In the future we aim to publish book reviews of works that employ Gramscian concepts and theories. As a new journal IGJ relies on the efforts of a small group of colleagues in Australia, but we aim to be a global journal. To make IGJ work we need your help. If you have a piece of writing that you think would be suitable for IGJ, or have students who you could encourage to submit to IGJ, we would welcome the opportunity to review and publish new scholarship or shorter pieces in translation. IGJ No. 2 for the first time has original research in Italian, Spanish and English. On behalf of the editorial team I hope that you find something of inter...

Antonio Gramsci: Toward an Intellectual Biography

Telos, 1977

Alastair Davidson's new biography of Gramsci is on the whole balanced in judgment, straightforward in style, and, unlike many other works on Gramsci, departs from no sectarian parti pris. As a general introduction for the uninitiated, it is eminently readable without being simplistic, flawed only by a propensity to toss off casually the term dialectical to embellish rank truisms (e.g., "Naturally there was a dialectical relation between how he felt and what he wrote at the time"). If Davidson's narrative will disappoint those expecting to learn something new either conceptually or factually, it nevertheless has the virtue of presenting a clear snapshot of the foremost Italian Marxist; then again, snapshots are by nature superficial. Davidson opens his book with an obvious question: Why another biography of Gramsci? Aside from the fact that more information has become available since the Cammett and Fiori volumes, Davidson quite rightly asserts the need for an intellectual biography, one that would reconstitute Gramsci's theoretical development in light of his political engagement within the twentieth-century Italian historical context. This certainly struck a responsive chord. Given the present "Gramsci craze," what we clearly do not need is simply another work descriptively laying out what Gramsci the man did and wrote, but rather a critical analysis that might: (1) rigorously treat formative intellectual influences upon the young and imprisoned Gramsci, while at the same time lending interpretive coherence to the often disjointed, fragmentary nature of Gramsci's writings; (2) dispassionately reconstruct the historical framework within which he operated (long-term developmental patterns, opposing forces, contending ideologies, leading beliefs, etc.); and (3) judge the theoretical and strategic adequacy of Gramsci in light of all this. Measured against such criteria, Davidson's book falls short of what one might reasonably expect. While he is at times effective in chronologically specifying some of the mediations between theory and practice in Gramsci's life, his study as a whole lacks theoretical and historical depth. If this is, as he suggests, an intellectual biography, it is not a critical one. Too intent upon, as he puts it, doing "justice to a great man," Davidson instead does injustice to the reader who seeks to go beyond the narrowly descriptive. Not once in more than 270 pages can the author find a single flaw or, for that matter, make a significant judgment as to Gramsci's perception, analysis or practice. Theoretically, we are offered wooden caricatures of Spaventa, Labriola and Croce; conceptual affinities or divergences with Gramsci are shallow in treatment. Historically, we are one-sidedly presented with Gramsci's analysis of events, as if it were a foregone conclusion that such analysis was itself accurate or, in the heat of battle and polemics, even intended to be accurate. Biography, especially intellectual biography, is no mean task. Not only must the author have an intimate knowledge of the personality in question, but an objective and intuitive sense of his times-the effects of major events, changes in public opinion, nuances, the gray areas of life. While Davidson demonstrates an admirable command of Gramsci and material immediately related to Gramsci, he shows little comprehension of the broader historical context-not even phenomena about which Gramsci wrote and upon which Gramsci acted (the peculiar nature of Turin's industrial development, the 1919-20 biennio rosso, the rise of fascism and its subsequent consolidation of power). One gets the distinct impression that Davidson, outside of Gramsci proper, has yet to consult any primary sources (newspapers of the

Global Gramsci. Practical Guide to the interpretations of Gramsci in the world, intro + first chapter, 2011.

A specter is haunting the globalized world: the specter of Antonio Gramsci. Too many people evoke it: subversive intellectuals and rapper philosophers, staid political analysts and acute scholars of cultural phenomena. Survived by the defeat of his official commentators, the author of the Prison Notebooks continues to enjoy a popularity that seems a posthumous triumph. At the crossroads of narrative form and argumentative rigor, Michele Filippini examines the guidelines of the many gramscisms. From the rebel languages of African- American communities to the hegemonic strategies of neo-conservative think tanks, from the reflections on postcolonialism to the folds of mass culture, from left to right, from right to left, an unprecedented and unknown portrait of Gramsci comes out from this analysis. An iconography light-years away from the liturgical black and white image of the twentieth century. The cosmopolitan, metropolitan, prophetic, cinematographic, radical, reactionary, distorted, hallucinatory, paranoid, but always pop interpretations considered in these pages give back to us the image of a Global Gramsci.

Gramsci and the Theory–Praxis Nexus: Creating Spaces for Intellectual and Political Elaboration

Notebooks: the journal for studies on power, 2023

Among the journal's objectives, two are of particular significance to us. The first is to offer a space for encountering and critically reflecting on social and political phenomena by engaging with Antonio Gramsci's analytical categories and method. The second aim is to highlight the importance of the connection between the theory and praxis of political action, recognising that the potential of actualisation in the latter can offer significant developments for Gramscian epistemological frameworks. The epistemological and heuristic potential of Gramsci's method, a knowledge process capable of providing pathways for the interpretation of society, is not invalidated by the transformations of the processes of accumulation that have found new spheres and modes of realisation, and the systems of social stratification that characterise contemporary society, none of which could not have been known to Gramsci. The historical-philosophical framework of his method, including its comparative orientation, makes it particularly fruitful in a wide range of studies. A Gramscian lens offers a unique perspective on interpretations of space and time, since it pursues a chronological development of events together with the identification of processes that can then be transposed to other social contexts or other historical phases. Gramsci's categories are not elaborated in the mere ideal sphere and later dropped into an empirical study; but, rather, they are derived by abstraction from observed historical contingencies. In this process, the categories are reinforced and defined, as shown in Gramsci's writings, in which the continuous process of intellectual elaboration clearly emerges in the light of specific socio-historical experiences. The creative and innovative capacity of the Gramscian method also makes it particularly fruitful in the field of political contestation, social antagonism, and movements. Gramsci's thought is often used as a toolbox to facilitate the

Review: Gramsci in the World ed. by Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson

H-Italy, 2021

On July 19, 1928, Antonio Gramsci — a rabble-rousing factory organizer originally from Sardinia and, perhaps most important, the founder of the Communist Party of Italy (CPI) — walked through the gates of Turi Prison on the outskirts of the southern Italian city of Bari to begin serving a twenty-year sentence. Hunched and disfigured from a life-long struggle with arteriosclerosis, the then thirty-seven-year-old Gramsci was not being incarcerated by Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship for any violent offenses. Indeed, Grasmci’s only “crime” had been his influential role as Italy’s — and, increasingly so, Europe’s — preeminent Marxist intellectual. As one of the regime’s prosecutors in Gramsci’s case phrased it, illustrating the fascist regime’s anxieties with respect to the middle-aged Sardinian’s revolutionary program in Italy, “for twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.” Despite the efforts put forth by Il Duce’s regime in silencing him, however, Gramsci’s mind, unencumbered by his increasingly poor health, would go on to produce some of the most brilliant and deeply influential political philosophy of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1929 — the year after his arrival at Turi Prison — and ending in 1935, Gram‐ sci produced over thirty notebooks consisting of some three thousand pages of short essays, notes, and conceptual fragments on a wide variety of topics and themes, ranging from the many roles played by “organic intellectuals” in forging bourgeois modernity (as well as in sharpening the industrial proletariat’s revolutionary potential in overcoming capitalism) to, perhaps Gramsci’s most lastingly influential concept, the significance of “cultural hegemony” in manufacturing and controlling any given society’s collective beliefs, values, and practices. Volumes of historiographical and political scientific literature have been written on Gramsci’s life and work in Italy. But what about the Italian revolutionary’s various posthumous, global influences in places well beyond Europe’s geopolitical boundaries? When and in which sociopolitical contexts did Gramsci’s writings gain traction among the global Marxist Left? And what were the factors behind Gramsci’s presences, as well as absences, among Marxist thinkers during the eighty- four years since the CPI founder’s untimely passing? Such are some of the questions taken up by the various studies featured in Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson’s rich and intellectually ambitious edited volume, Gramsci in the World.

The role of educative thought in the life and work of Antonio Gramsci

2010

Many philosophers have propounded a vision of an improved society, what distinguishes Antonio Gramsci is his continuous effort to make it happen by understanding the process in order to put into practice. Gramsci"s conviction about the importance of educative development came from both theory and experience. While there has been considerable examination of Gramsci"s work in relation to the Prison Notebooks, this study will seek to address a lacuna in Gramsci scholarship. Using Gramsci"s philological method, I analyse Gramsci"s pre-prison activity; his pre-prison articles and letters, which, together with his letters from prison, formed part of his educative mission. This educative process was necessary, in order to construct a new party which would develop a collective will, collaboratively, with the masses. In this study therefore, I explore the contexts and formative experiences of the first part of his life together with the intellectual sources from which Gramsci developed his later theories, making central hitherto underemphasised connections between them which informed his writing and ideas. I intend to illustrate that Gramsci"s underlying purpose in his writing, and political activity, was not only practical, on how to create a new socialist ruling class, but also educative in forming the mindset and values of his comrades. So that in addition to outlining his vision of a new order, he implicitly guided or explicitly explained the processes by which the necessary changes in social relations and moral climate could be made in order to achieve it. Each person had to engage with the values of the new order so that each could contribute to the construction of a new robust state.