Provincializing the Italian reading of Gramsci

The "Italian reading of Gramsci" this chapter seeks to provincialize is deeply rooted in the political and intellectual history of the country after the Second World War. The reading of Gramsci was never a neutral scholarly exercise in Italy. His thought was always part of the stakes in the elaboration and discussion of the particular politics of the Communist Party. Gramsci was "appropriated" by the Party (particularly by its leadership gathered around its secretary Palmiro Togliatti) soon after the end of the war, and his reading (as well as the editorial work around his unpublished works) became a cornerstone in the building of an "imagined continuity" of the history and politics of the party since its foundation in 1921. For long time, dealing with Gramsci meant dealing with this political stake in Italy. And it should not be surprising that in the early 1960s, while Gramsci began to "travel" and to nurture creative and Heterodox intellectual and political projects in different parts of the world, the break with Communist orthodoxy in Italy often expressed itself in the form of a break with Gramsci.Mario Tronti was actually referring to this point when he wrote in 1959 that the author of the Prison Notebooks had to be considered a "typically Italian thinker", he was also setting the agenda for the years to come. This chapter aims at reconstructing (and deconstructing) the history of the "Italian reading of Gramsci" since the end of the Second World War (first section). The second section discusses the ways in which one of the most significant Marzist heresies in Italy, "workerism," dealt with this Gramsci reading tradition. The third section examines the ways in which, with the political defeat of the Italian Communist Party at the end of the 1970s and then its dissolution in 1991, Gramsci "came back home" and a new season of Gramsci studies in Italy began. The discovery of the world relevance of his thought and the very relation of Gramsci to the Italian context began to be investigated in new ways. The fourth and last section discusses some of the issues at stake in recent developments of Italian Gramsci studies and outlines a research agenda for the near future.