A Thickening of the Network Joseph A Buttigieg and Gramsci s Method, Introduction to“Gramsci’s Method” Thirty Years Later: A Special Issue of "Italian Culture" Dedicated to the Memory of Joseph A. Buttigieg (original) (raw)

One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the occasion of the journal boundary 2's Anniversary Conference on April 28, 2018. The talk was devoted to "Lorianism, or the Fragility of Critical Barriers," a topic that had already played an important role, albeit less developed, in Buttigieg's pathbreaking essay "Gramsci's Method," originally published in boundary 2 in 1990. In both the article and the talk, what preoccupied Buttigieg was how Gramsci interrogated the cultural work and the political function of historical groups of intellectuals, and how "shoddy thinking, crackpot theories, critical carelessness, and general intellectual irresponsibility" can seriously infect any form of political thought, in the early twentieth century as well as today (Buttigieg 1990, 70). Buttigieg's Gramscian trajectory would thus appear to be framed by a reflection on the historical role of intellectuals and the risk of lacking the "perseverance, intellectual discipline, intense cultural work, and political organization" (Buttigieg 2009, IX) that intellectual labor should instead entail. This special issue of Italian Culture, entitled "Gramsci's Method Thirty Year Later," is meant to celebrate the scholarship and intellectual legacy as well as to commemorate the loss of Joseph A. Buttigieg, who passed away on January 27, 2019. Formerly William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a founding member and past president of the International Gramsci Society, Buttigieg was a formidable scholar as well the translator of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which he published in a definitive three-volume critical edition (1992, 1996, 2007). Yet, for many of us, Joeas he preferred to be calledwas not just a scholar, but also a terrific teacher and an example of intellectual coherence and integrity. Like Gramsci, Buttigieg, too, considered education not only inseparable from culture and politics, but also a crucial element in his inquiry into the function of intellectuals in society and the role they played in history (see Buttigieg 2002, 69-70). For him, this inquiry was not merely theoretical but deeply personal, grounded in his own experiences as a Maltese immigrant who became a professor in the United States.