Authors:Giulia La Rocca Abstract: This is the abstract of the English-language review of the volume Un confronto mancato: Walter Benjamin e Antonio Gramsci. The book (Macerata, Quodilbet, 2023) publishes the proceedings of a conference in Rome on the two Marxists held in Autumn 2022 which continues explicitly the earlier Vienna conference, the contributions to which are collected together in “International Gramsci Journal” 3(4), 2020. The proceedings fall into four sections. The first one deals with the philosophy of history and historical materialism, as elaborated by Gramsci in his “philosophy of praxis”; despite different starting points and apparently different assessments of historicism, there turns out in the end to be a convergence based on an anti-determinism. The second part focuses on revolution, counter-revolution and passive revolution, taking in the questions of the political subject and contemporary situations. Subjectivity is then the theme of the third section, as forms of life appropriate to the capitalist mode of production and as regards subjects attempting to emancipate themselves from this mode. The fourth section includes the two thinker-revolutionaries’ approaches to the question of the various types of intellectual, including their conceptions of the artistic vanguards, folklore and kitsch, and the translation of experience from one country to another. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 02:03:19 PDT
Authors:Giulia La Rocca Abstract: This is the abstract of the Italian-language review of the volume Un confronto mancato: Walter Benjamin e Antonio Gramsci. The book (Macerata, Quodilbet, 2023) publishes the proceedings of a conference in Rome on the two Marxists held in Autumn 2022 which continues explicitly the earlier Vienna conference, the contributions to which are collected together in “International Gramsci Journal” 3(4), 2020. The proceedings fall into four sections. The first one deals with the philosophy of history and historical materialism, as elaborated by Gramsci in his “philosophy of praxis”; despite different starting points and apparently different assessments of historicism, there turns out in the end to be a convergence based on an anti-determinism. The second part focuses on revolution, counter-revolution and passive revolution, taking in the questions of the political subject and contemporary situations. Subjectivity is then the theme of the third section, as forms of life appropriate to the capitalist mode of production and as regards subjects attempting to emancipate themselves from this mode. The fourth section includes the two thinker-revolutionaries’ approaches to the question of the various types of intellectual, including their conceptions of the artistic vanguards, folklore and kitsch, and the translation of experience from one country to another. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 02:03:15 PDT
Authors:Giovanni Mimmo Boninelli Abstract: The term folclore appears infrequently in Gramsci’s pre-prison writings, but is an important feature of the Prison Notebooks, the word appearing first as “folklore” and later in its Italianized form “folclore”, in all appearing there around a hundred times. It is often linked to a “conception of the world” belonging to “given strata of society […] not touched by the modern currents of thought”. A linkage exists between folklore, common sense and philosophy with each successive philosophy leaving a sediment of “common sense” which is then the “folklore” of philosophy, standing midway between real folklore, as it is understood, and philosophy. Several points of contact can be singled out between Gramsci’s treatment of folklore and that of a contemporary of his, Giovanni Crocioni (cf. Q 1 § 89 and its “C” text Q 27 § 1), a review of whose volume Problemi fondamentali del Folklore seems to have been one of the stimuli for Gramsci’s reflections. Both recognize the dynamic aspect of folklore – its adaption to circumstances, and also the need to study it at school level in order to go beyond it (cf. Q 12 § 2). As conception of the world and life folklore is not merely a curiosity, and something merely “quaint” but, as Gramsci observes, is “very serious and to be taken seriously” (Q 27 § 1) and moreover produces innovative effects in the strata of the population able to express their own organic intellectuals; hence, by production of a new “common sense”, culture and conception of the world, they can transform their social context. Editorial Note: see also the dictionary entry “Common Sense” in International Gramsci Journal, 4(2), 2021, 125-129. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 02:03:11 PDT
Authors:Francesco Marola Abstract: Nachdem sie aus den ersten beiden Ausgaben der Quaderni del Carcere (1948-1951, 1975) ausgeschlossen worden waren, wurden die von Antonio Gramsci zwischen Februar 1929 und Januar 1932 zusammengestellten Quaderni di traduzioni 2007 als erster Band der neuen Nationalen Ausgabe der Schriften von Giuseppe Cospito und Gianni Francioni herausgegeben. Sie enthalten Übersetzungen aus den Kinder- und Hausmärchen von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, welche anfänglich als unbedeutendes Werk, als Ergebnis einer rein entspannenden Tätigkeit beurteilt wurden, der sich Gramsci zur Erleichterung seiner Haftbedingungen gewidmet hätte. 1981 wurden diese Übersetzungen jedoch in einem Aufsatz kritisch neu bewertet, als die Germanistin Lucia Borghese darin eine systematische Anwendung der von Gramsci in Abschnitt V von Quaderno 11 (Q 11: 46-49) formulierten Übersetzbarkeitstheorie der wissenschaftlichen und philosophischen Sprachen erkannte. Mit der Herausgabe der Quaderni di traduzioni wurde diese Lesart später in weiteren Veröffentlichungen diskutiert. Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, diese kritische Debatte zu rekonstruieren und eine Interpretationshypothese für die Übersetzungen in Bezug auf Gramscis Theorie der Übersetzung und Übersetzbarkeit sowie auf die Konzeption der Folklore, wie sie in den Quaderni und Lettere zum Ausdruck kommt, vorzuschlagen. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 02:03:07 PDT
Authors:Francesco Marola Abstract: Dopo essere stati esclusi dalle prime due edizioni degli scritti carcerari (1948-1951, 1975), i Quaderni di traduzioni compilati da Antonio Gramsci tra il febbraio del 1929 e il gennaio del 1932 sono stati pubblicati nel 2007 come primo volume della nuova Edizione Nazionale degli Scritti, a cura di Giuseppe Cospito e Gianni Francioni. In essi sono contenute le traduzioni dai Kinder- und Hausmärchen raccolti dai fratelli Jacob e Wilhelm Grimm, noti al pubblico di lingua italiana sotto il titolo di Fiabe del focolare. Giudicate inizialmente una produzione minore, frutto di un’attività puramente distensiva a cui Gramsci si sarebbe dedicato per l’alleviamento delle proprie condizioni carcerarie, queste traduzioni furono rivalutate criticamente da un saggio della germanista Lucia Borghese (1981), che vi lesse un’applicazione sistematica della «teoria traducibilità dei linguaggi scientifici e filosofici» formulata da Gramsci nella sezione V del Quaderno 11 (Q 11, 46-49). Con la pubblicazione dei Quaderni di traduzioni, questa lettura è stata in seguito discussa da nuovi interventi. Scopo del presente saggio è ricostruire il dibattito critico, proponendo quindi un’ipotesi interpretativa delle traduzioni in rapporto alla teoria gramsciana della traduzione e della traducibilità nonché alla concezione del folclore testimoniata dai quaderni e dalle lettere. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:50 PDT
Authors:Anita Helena Schlesener Abstract: This article is the result of research in development and presents a reflection on the concept of the “philosophy of praxis” in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. The theme involved questions regarding the method, a gnoseology or theory of knowledge and the articulation between economics, politics and philosophy. The first part discusses the limits of liberalism in its formal structure; the second explains the articulation between economics, politics and philosophy; the third takes up the criticism of the double revisionism of Marx from Notebook 4. The main targets of Gramsci’s critique of this “double revisionism” of his time are, on the one hand, the followers of Max Adler and others of the “Austro-Marxist” school, influenced by philosophically idealist currents (neo-Kantianism in particular), and, on the other, the mechanicist and deterministic current represented by Bukharin and others in the Soviet Union. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:46 PDT
Authors:Francesco Colucci Abstract: Cultural hegemony is placed in relation to Kurt Lewin’s action research and the psychological theories of social conflict by Lewin himself, Carolyn Wood Sherif and Muzafer Sherif, and Henri Tajfel. Consonances between Gramsci’s ideas and these psychological theories are brought to the fore. Assuming this theoretical perspective, the results of an action research conducted in Arab Israeli schools to reduce dispersion highlight the heuristic value of Gramsci’s ideas in the Israeli Arab conflict context. Thus the contradictions of that conflict emerge and, together with them, the possibility of a solution. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:42 PDT
Authors:Antonio Di Meo Abstract: Nel 1976 lo storico delle idee e della scienza Paolo Rossi prese in considerazione un articolo di Mario Missiroli pubblicato nel 1919 sull’Ordine Nuovo nel quale si collocava la scienza - insieme all’intera dimensione superstrutturale della società - all’interno di un antagonismo irriducibile fra borghesia e proletariato. Per Missiroli, infatti, tale antagonismo doveva essere radicale e permanente, in maniera non storicistica e non dialettica: quasi in una prospettiva di classe-contro-classe, senza possibilità di mediazione sintetica. Altra sarà la posizione di Antonio Gramsci e Palmiro Togliatti. Come sottolinea Rossi in Missiroli si può ravvisare la presenza di una riducibilità della scienza a ideologia, e come tale non assimilabile nei contenuti, nelle sue forme di produzione, di applicazione e di insegnamento da parte dei proletari; poi un rapporto strutturale e necessario fra scienza e autoritarismo; infine il carattere inevitabilmente non comunicabile delle teorie scientifiche in quanto irriducibilmente relative ai soggetti creatori, al limite del solipsismo e senza alcun valore conoscitivo liberatorio. Per Gramsci, invece, sebbene i proletari non fossero ancora in grado di sfidare la borghesia sul terreno più generale dell’alta cultura e della scienza, tuttavia, essi si preparavano ad assumere la scienza come parte della formazione di classe per sé, ovvero come personalità individuale e collettiva dotata di una coscienza che la proiettava in una dimensione mondiale attraversata da conflitti all’interno stesso dei ceti borghesi, che quindi non potevano proporsi come portatori di interessi universali. Questa degli ordinovisti, dunque, era una prefigurazione di un diverso “uomo”, caratteristicamente diverso da quello più diffuso e precedente alla apparizione del pensiero di Marx. Un uomo empiricamente universale che vedeva anche nella scienza un momento di liberazione. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:39 PDT
Authors:Antonio Gramsci Abstract: The subject of Gramsci’s essay, here in its English version, is taken from a paraphrase of words in Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People: “Truths, in getting old, become errors”. Each generation has had its syntheses, truths following one another, each believed by its supporters but excluding the others. Intellectual ruins and contradictory substrata of human consciousness are the outome, and even science has not escaped this débacle. Contradictory truths have led even to massacres and reprisals, with the destruction of society’s dynamic and progressive aspects. Some truths are long-lasting, such as the Ptolemaic universe or the existence of God, whose mummi-fied corpse can still however make its presence felt. Many contemporary problems can be traced back to old truths which – through official compromise and hypocrisy – still have to be respected. Humanity will construct other, more rational truths, in order to reach some destiny, but we cannot know if this will consist of annulment or deification. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:35 PDT
Authors:Antonio Gramsci Abstract: The subject of the essay, here in its English version, is taken from Giacomo Leopardi’s poem to Count Carlo Pepoli (Canti, 1841) and reads in English, “… the truth, when known, / Though sad, has yet its charms”. One type of person accepts the world as it is, seeing only its beautiful side, is transported by dreams and refuses to take into account cruel truths. Others detach themselves from the human herd, not being content with vain appearances; they are driven by the desire to know but risk becoming total sceptics. A third type looks at the world as it is, knowing that the truth they see may be hard to accept, but reason rather than an attack on spurious targets must be used to find it. The real heroism of the “man of thought” is a knowledge of the world as it really is, which entails not hiding unpleasant sides from outsiders, which would amount to a hypocritical “Jesuitism”. Wrong and harmful positions must be attacked, as for example in Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” letter and, in Italy, Giosuè Carducci’s diatribes against the “patriots” who were ruining the young Italian State. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:31 PDT
Authors:Antonio Gramsci Abstract: This is the English version of Gramsci’s essay based on the phrase “Man Must not be Content to do Good Things” from the sixteenth century author Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (The Rules of Polite Behavior in modern English versions). This starting point leads into a discussion of aesthetics, art and beauty and their accessibility to the different classes and strata of society. Only in galleries and museums, the preserve of the “initiated”, were art forms accessible. The lower strata of society adopted forms of adornment and decoration which, although aesthetically ugly, in a primitive way showed the yearning for beauty. The styles needed channelling to realize beauty; the nascent garden cities in England indicated what could be achieved while, in contrast to the luxurious mansions of the rich in Italy, or even the aesthetic content typifying ancient Greece and Rome, the working people were confined to fetid alleyways and squalid housing, showing up in the stress of modern life: for the Aristotelian catharsis to come about the artistic spirit must predominate. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:27 PDT
Authors:Maria Luisa Righi Abstract: This article introduces the three newly discovered essays written by Gramsci while still at the Dettori high school in Cagliari and goes into why they have only recently come to light, to then be published in 2022 in the Italian newspaper “Il fatto quotidiano”. The essays turned up in the family papers of a Communist Party parliamentarian from Milan, Francesco Scotti, a Spanish Civil War veteran and after that a partisan leader (in the French Maquis and then in Italy) among whose friends in Milan were prople associated with Gramscian activities, among them Carlo Gramsci, the younger brother of Antonio. It seems likely that Scotti was given these essays by someone in this group to hand them over to the PCI in Rome, probably to Togliatti, but neglected to do this and so they remained forgotten for years. The essays themselves can with certainty be dated to Gramsci’s last year at the high school since the signature of the professore is Vittorio Amedeo Arullani, who had replaced Raffa Garzia as Gramsci’s Italian teacher. The essay subjects assigned were quotations from the sixteenth century writer Giovanni Della Casa’s treatise Il Galateo (in recent English versions The Rules of Polite Behavior) and two of Italy’s most important poets, Giacomo Leopardi and Giosuè Carducci. For all these essays by Gramsci, Arullani gave positive judgments and very high grades. One sees a student very open to the contemporary currents of thought, whose essays prefigure themes that later come explicitly to the fore both in his journalistic work and in the Prison Notebooks (artistic currents and aesthetics, Americanism, the “mummification” of culture, the figure of Stenterello, Kant’s “beheading” of God, Jesuitism and so on). PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:23 PDT
Authors:Antonio Gramsci Abstract: The subject of Gramsci’s essay, here in its Italian version, is taken from a paraphrase of words in Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People: “Le verità, invecchiando, diventano errori”. Each generation has had its syntheses, truths following one another, each believed by its supporters but excluding the others. Intellectual ruins and contradictory substrata of human consciousness are the outcome and even science has not escaped this débacle. Contradictory truths have led even to massacres and reprisals, with the destruction of society’s dynamic and progressive aspects. Some truths are long-lasting: the Ptolemaic universe or the existence of God; his mummified corpse can still however make its presence felt. Many contemporary problems can be traced back to old truths that – through official compromise and hypocrisy – still have to be respected. Humanity will construct other, more rational truths, in order to reach some destiny, but we cannot know if this will consist of annulment or deification. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:19 PDT
Authors:Antonio Gramsci Abstract: The subject of the essay, here in its Italian version, is taken from Giacomo Leopardi’s poem Al Conte Carlo Pepoli and reads “… Conosciuto, ancor che tristo, / Ha suoi diletti il vero”. One type of person accepts the world as it is, seeing only its beautiful side, is transported by dreams and refuses to take into account cruel truths. Others detach themselves from the human herd, not being content with vain appearances; they are driven by the desire to know but risk becoming total sceptics. A third type looks at the world as it is, knowing that the truth they see may be hard to accept, but reason rather than an attack on spurious targets must be used to find it. The real heroism of the “man of thought” is a knowledge of the world as it really is, which entails not hiding unpleasant sides from outsiders, which would amount to a hypocritical “Jesuitism”. Wrong and harmful positions must be attacked, as for example in Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” letter and, in Italy, Giosuè Carducci’s diatribes against the “patriots” who were ruining the young Italian State. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:15 PDT
Authors:Antonio Gramsci Abstract: This is the Italian version of Gramsci’s essay based on the phrase “Non si dee l’uomo contentare di fare cose buone” from the sixteenth century author Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo. This starting point leads into a discussion of aesthetics, art and beauty and their accessibility to the different classes and strata of society. Only in galleries and museums, the preserve of the “initiated”, were art forms accessible. The lower strata of society adopted forms of adornment and decoration which, although aesthetically ugly, in a primitive way showed the yearning for beauty. The styles needed channelling to realize beauty; the nascent garden cities in England indicated what could be achieved while, in contrast to the luxurious mansions of the rich in Italy, or even the aesthetic content typifying ancient Greece and Rome, the working people were confined to fetid alleyways and squalid housing, showing up in the stress of modern life: for the Aristotelian catharsis to come about the artistic spirit must predominate. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:11 PDT
Authors:Maria Luisa Righi Abstract: This article is the Italian Introduzione to the three newly discovered essays written by Gramsci while still at the Liceo Dettori in Cagliari. It goes into why they have only recently come to light, and then published in 2022 in the newspaper “Il fatto quotidiano”. The essays turned up in the family papers of the Milanese Communist Party parliamentarian, Francesco Scotti, a Spanish Civil War veteran and then partisan leader (the Maquis and then in Italy). In Milan he had friends associated with Gramscian activities, among them Carlo Gramsci, the younger brother of Antonio. A likely explanation is that Scotti was given these essays by someone in this group to hand them over to the PCI in Rome, probably to Togliatti, but neglected to do this and so they remained forgotten for years. The essays themselves can with certainty be dated to Gramsci’s last year at the high school since the signature of the professore is Vittorio Amedeo Arullani, who had replaced Raffa Garzia as Gramsci’s Italian teacher. The essay subjects assigned were quotations from the sixteenth century writer Giovanni Della Casa’s treatise, Il Galateo, and the two poets, Leopardi and Carducci. For all of these essays Arullani gave positive judgments and very high grades. One sees a student very open to the currents of thought of the period, whose essays prefigure themes that later come explicitly to the fore in his journalistic work and even in the Prison Notebooks (artistic currents and aesthetics, Americanism, the “mummification” of culture, the figure of Stenterello, Kant’s “beheading” of God, Jesuitism and so on). PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:58:07 PDT
Authors:Derek Boothman Abstract: This is the Abstract of the Table of contents / Tabella dei contenuti of IGJ 19. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:57:59 PDT
Authors:Derek Boothman Abstract: This is the abstract of the cover page of the International Gramsci Journal, issue 19, showing the Liceo Dettori, the high school in Cagliari, attended by Gramsci before he registered for a degree course at the University of Cagliari. PubDate: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 01:57:55 PDT