In order to adequately deal with Gramsci's view of education, we can't remove the constitutive link of this theme with another issue, so crucial for him: the question of hegemony. We need therefore to quote the original debate that, in the second half of the Twentieth century, fixed the crucial importance of this term. But we need also to pursue our analysis of Gramsci's work in a rigorous diachronic perspective, looking at the whole evolution and route of his thought. Only (...) in this way we can avoid partial interpretations of the question of hegemony. A partiality that fails the authentic perspective of Gramsci's pedagogy: emancipation, in a strong and universal sense that is strictly linked to philosophy of praxis. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the scientific literature that has argued about the presence of possible relationships and similarities between Gramsci and Foucault. In particular, I will focus on the notions of hegemony, power, governmentality, ideology, discourse.

Alcune delle principali categorie politiche che hanno accompagnato l'evoluzione del pensiero e della prassi della rivoluzione e del conflitto.

Lavoro e diritti dalla Costituzione alla "Riforma Fornero".

The aim of this paper is to examine Althusser’s and Poulantzas’s confrontation with the work of Antonio Gramsci regarding in particular questions of hegemony and State theory. I try to retrace their various encounters and missed encounters with the work of Gramsci in order to show both the profound influence it had upon them but also how they both in fact misinterpreted crucial aspects of Gramsci’s work. Regarding Althusser, I stress the influence Gramsci had upon his conceptualization of the Ideological (...) Apparatuses of the State but also his inability to discern the non idealist and non teleological character of Gramsci’s historicism and his tendency to underestimate the complexity of the notion of hegemony and Gramsci’s conception of the integral State. Moreover, I try to see this in the context of Althusser’s interventions in the debates on the State and strategy of the 1970s. Regarding Poulantzas, I stress his continuing dialogue with Gramsci, and how Gramsci influenced his theory of the State. I also stress that one of the contradictions of Poulantzas’s work was that the closer he came to thematic and conceptualization that were compatible with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the integral State, the more critical he tended to be towards Gramsci. Based on this elaboration, I try to stress the need for new theorizations of both State and strategy based upon both Gramsci and the work of Althusser and Poulantzas. (shrink)

The 2008 crisis and economic transformations fuelled significant political phenomena, such as a deep distrust of politics, electoral volatility and the decline of bipolarity and/or bipartisanship in the face of growing outsider party affirmation. In this context, the dialectical model of the Gramscian ‘social totality’ provides an analytical tool capable of analysing those ‘transition’ phases characterised by a fracturing ‘dominant historical bloc’, in itself a precursor to an organic crisis of traditional political parties’ separation of social classes.

The Marxian announcement of the imminent revolutionary conquest of power by the subaltern classes of the whole world has not occurred; however, it is not possible to understand the history of the second part of the Nineteenth and the entire Twentieth centuries without referring to the dynamics identified for the first time by the Communist Manifesto. It will be Lenin who gives effect to Marxism, bringing socialist revolution to completion in a country that was still largely agricultural and settling class (...) struggles in capitalist countries to the national liberation struggles of countries subjected to Western colonialism. If the consequences of the October revolution will affect the liberal West itself, massively favoring the development of the Welfare State, the start of the neoliberal counter-revolution, inaugurated by Thatcher and Reagan, will coincide largely with the crisis of the political system founded by Lenin. Likewise, the end of the Soviet Union will coincide with the start of a dangerous phase of re-colonization, in which the nuclear horror of the Cold War will be followed by the daily horror of the imperialist wars disguised as humanitarianism. (shrink)

While Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” has long been considered one of the fundamental texts of translation theory, Gramsci’s important remarks on the question of translatability were not noted in the canonical studies of the history of translation theory nor, for a long time, in Gramscian studies themselves. Nevertheless, the notion of translatability plays a crucial role in the general economy of the Prison Notebooks. This paper proposes a dialogical reading ‘against the grain’ of three constellations of (...) some of Gramsci and Benjamin’s key concepts regarding the nature of translation and its philosophical presuppositions and implications. These constellations revolve around the Gramscian notions of hegemony, of translation between ethico-political contexts, and of reciprocal translatability; they are here read through the Benjaminian notions of translation as generative of the ‘afterlife’ of a literary work, as participating in a ‘pure language’ that functions as translation’s ‘horizon’, and as constituting an ‘echo’ of the original text in a new linguistic and historical context. The encounter of Gramsci and Benjamin is not only on their points of clear convergence but also on those points where they might seem to diverge: this forms the basis for translation and transposition between their respective thought-worlds – a translation that at the same time represents an attempt to open their works up to their immanent transformation. (shrink)

Lavoro e i diritti nei proccessi della produzione/riproduzione sociale.

In this essay we set off on the quest for “translation-translatability” leitmotiv, remembering that Gramsci was “a revolutionary, a historicist” and, at the same time, a student with a solid background in glottology at the University of Turin. A first starting point, long before the prison years, is the debate on Esperanto, in which Gramsci took part in January 1918. Parallel to this, as from 1919, revolutionary political action came more and more to be presented as a form of translation. (...) At the theoretical level, the thought of Labriola was one of the other important sources for the centrality of the idea of translation in Gramsci. Gramsci’s account consideration is also based on certain texts of Marx’s, and was developed in a particularly thoroughgoing way in October and November 1930. 1932 was the year of the further and last detailed development of the notion. In the end, translatability appears as the instrument that allows one to think the unity of theory and practice that, for Gramsci, belongs typically to the thought of Marx and which is the foundation of the superiority of the philosophy of praxis over any other philosophy. (shrink)