Buttigieg’s Method

Abstract

Joseph Buttigieg’s introduction to his uncompleted edition of the Prison Notebooks is one of the best things ever written about Gramsci’s prison writings. The last section reproduces, with minimal changes, Buttigieg’s 1990 article “Gramsci’s Method,” and it has the same title. That title, however, is misleading, since what Buttigieg reconstructs is not so much Gramsci’s method of writing the notebooks as his own process, as editor, of reading them, which is far from being a factual report of how Gramsci “actually wrote.” It involves, instead, a set of interpretive hunches, which in turn presuppose a prior knowledge of all of Gramsci’s texts, without which it would not be possible to make the connections he makes between different topics or to rank them, to identify some – such as the critique of positivist sociology and the idea of the philosophy of praxis – as more important, more overarching than others. Symptomatic here is Buttigieg’s use of an apparently insignificant note, of just twenty words, “L’ossicino di Cuvier,” generally overlooked by Gramsci scholars, as a point of entry into a set of interconnected notes and from there to the whole intellectual edifice of the Prison Notebooks.

Keywords:

• reading
• writing
• interpretation
• method
• “law of correlation
• legacy
• Joseph Buttigieg
• Antonio Gramsci

Notes

1 The 1927 French translation of Bukharin’s text was among the books Gramsci listed in his letter to Tatiana of March 25, 1929, and asked to have sent to him. A note in Gerratana’s edition (Gramsci 1975, 2539) suggests that Gramsci had probably read this text, in Russian or in translation, during his time in Moscow in 1922-1923.

2 Gerratana’s edition here transcribes “Lumbroso” from Gramsci’s ms; the endnotes (1975, 2461, 2464) identify this as the historian Alberto Lumbroso, the partial subject of a later note (§32) in the same notebook. Buttigieg also gives the name as “Lumbroso” in the boundary 2 article (1990, 60), whereas in volume I of the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 42, 116) he writes it as “Lombroso”, and his introduction and an endnote (Gramsci 1992, 44, 398) both reference the criminologist Cesare Lombroso.

3 On Cuvier and the law of correlation, see Dawson 2016, 1-14. Gramsci discusses Cuvier and his method at greater length in Quaderno 14 §29, acknowledging that Cuvier’s theory needs to be studied more carefully in order to be accurately expounded (Gramsci 1975, 1687-1688). There is also a brief reference to Cuvier in his letter to Julia Schucht of December 30, 1929 (Gramsci 1996, 306).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Forgacs

David Forgacs is Guido and Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò Professor of Contemporary Italian Studies at New York University. He taught previously at Sussex, Cambridge (Fellow, Gonville and Caius College), Royal Holloway London, and University College London (Panizzi Chair of Italian, 1999–2011). His recent books include Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge University Press, 2014, published in Italian as Margini d’Italia. L’esclusione sociale dall’Unità a oggi, Laterza, 2015) and Messaggi di sangue. La violenza nella storia d’Italia (Laterza, 2021).