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Italian Cultural Institute, London
Fondazione Gramsci Onlus
ANTONIO GRAMSCI: PRISON NOTEBOOKS
Monday 30 October – Friday 10 November 2017
39 Belgrave Square, London, SW1X 8NX
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On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Antonio Gramsci’s death, his Prison Notebooks, important expressions of the Italian political, philosophical and literary theory, will be displayed at the Italian Cultural Institute in London, for the first time outside of Italy.
Curated by Silvio Pons and Francesco Giasi, President and Director respectively of the Fondazione Gramsci Onlus in Rome, the exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the Fondazione Gramsci and the Italian Cultural Institute in London, with the support of the Fondazione di Sardegna.
Since the mid-fifties, and especially since after the publication, in 1971, of the anthology Selections from the Prison Notebooks, the interest in Gramsci in the UK has increased constantly. Even before 1971, Gramsci’s influence had led to the introduction of the expression “class hegemony” at a time when the word «hegemony» was still unusual in the British political lexicon. But then most importantly it starts an intellectual exchange with philosopher and linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein, through Piero Sraffa, the Italian antifascist and economist who taught at Cambridge at the same time of the Austrian philosopher.
Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and praxis are redrafted with Wittgenstein’s notion of linguistic play, thus starting the analysis of the fundamental relationship between language and power.
Gramsci is extremely popular in the UK and in many anglosaxon countries, both within the academic world and in the popular culture )renowned folk singer Billy Bragg had written some songs based on texts by Gramsci, and artist Thomas Hirschhorn has worked on several public art projects inspired by Gramsci).
At a time when Italian literature is enjoying an unprecedented success in the UK (in the last two years, English translations of Italian works published here have increased from 15 to 62), it is all the more important to display a work such as the Notebooks, especially the original manuscripts, a complex and fascinating work, of immense not only historical but also literary worth..
The exhibition
The Exhibition, part of the series of events organised by the Fondazione Gramsci to mark the 80th anniversary of the great ideologist’s death, presents to the public the 33 manuscripts of the notebooks that he compiled between February 1929 and the summer of 1935. Gramsci was granted permission to write in January 1929, while at Turi prison, in Bari, where he had started to serve his term of over 20 years imprisonment, as per sentence by the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State of 4 June 1928.
The original manuscripts are being exhibited in the UK for the first time, having never been on public display outside of Italy before. This exhibition aims at renewing the relationship between Gramsci’s thought and the British cultural world, a relationship that had been kindled by the publication of the first anthology of the Notebooks, the Selections from the Prison Notebooks, curated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).
The exhibition will also create the opportunity, through a series of collateral events, to look at the current state of studies and circulation of Gramsci globally, as well as the manifold (many-faceted?) influence of Gramsci’s thought in the United Kingdom.
The Notebooks
Antonio Gramsci, arrested in Rome on 8 November 1926, was sentenced to over 20 years imprisonment by the Special Tribunal established by the fascist emergency laws, for his political and journalistic work carried out while Member of Parliament and top executive of the communist party. Held in custody in Turi prison, in January 1929 he was granted permission to write about literature and culture.
Already on 8 February he listed on the first notebook all the themes he wanted to delve into, about Italian history, the purpose of the intellectual, popular literature and other philosophical, historiographic and political “quistioni” (themes). These themes are often mentioned in the letters to his wife Giulia, in Mosow, and to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht who assisted him during the detention years. As well as compiling the notes, he devoted himself to “translation training”, from German, Russian and English. After about 3 years of writing, often stimulated by reading magazines and books that he was allowed to receive in prison, he started to re-arrange the notes in new notebooks, that he called “special notebooks” as they were devoted to a single subject (Benedetto Croce’s philosophy, the Italian Risorgimento, Notes on Machiavelli’s politics, etc), while deleting the previous ones with long pen strokes.
In 1933, due to his deteriorating health he was moved to a hospital in Formia, and he could only get back to writing after a few months. In the summer 1935 he was admitted to the Quisisana Hospital in Rome, where he died on 27 April 1937. The 33 notebooks (including 4 of translations) were taken by Tatiana who, prior to sending them to Moscow, catalogued them and numbered them with Roman numerals.
Published between 1948 and 1951 in a thematic edition requested by Palmiro Togliatti, in 1975 the Notebooks came out in the critic edition curated by the Istituto Gramsci. The National Edition of Antonio Gramsci’s writings, which is about to be published, splits them into Translation Notebooks, Miscellaneous Notebooks and Special Notebooks. The extraordinary richness of Gramsci’s thoughts is proven by the increasing number of translations of the notebooks and by the over twenty thousand titles, in 41 languages, recorded in the Gramsci Bibliography.
Collateral events
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of talks and lectures, with many important Gramsci’s scholars, both Italian and English.
Monday 30 October, 7pm
Opening talk, by Silvio Pons
Silvio Pons, curator of the exhibition, Presidente of the Fondazione Gramsci, and Professor of Contemporary History at the Universitá di Roma Tor Vergata, has written several works and historical analysis essays on communism, the cold war and contemporary Italy. He has curated A Dictionary of 20th Century Communism, published in the US by Princeton University Press. His latest book is The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917-1991 (Oxford University Press). He is General Editor of The Cambridge History of Communism, published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press.
Monday 6 November, 7pm
Presentation of the book “Gramsci in Gran Bretagna”, by Giuseppe Vacca
Talk with the author
Giusepe Vacca is an Italian politician and historian. After obtaining his degree in Philosophy of Law, he devoted his studies to the history of contemporary Marxism. Since January 1988 he has been President of the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci di Roma, which has acquired several documents from the Comintern and PCUS archives in Moscow and the whole historical archive of the Italian Communist Party – PCI. Giuseppe Vacca’s works are translated in the main European languages. His work as a lecturer, his writings and thought are well known outside of Italy. He is a University Professor, working especially on Idealism in 1900 and Italian Hegelism in the second half of the XIX Century, with special reference to the genesis of Marxism in Italy.
Thursday 9 November, 7pm
Talk by Donald Sassoon - "The modern Gramsci, theorist of the time of defeat”
Thursday 7 December, 7pm
Talk by David Forgacs – “Gramsci and the history of the subordinate classes in Italy”
The date of the talk by Amartya Sen is to be confirmed.
We are grateful to:
“Fondazione di Sardegna” and “Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory”
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Dr Katia Pizzi
Institute of Modern Languages Research
School of Advanced Study
University of London
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