“A Thickening of the Network”: Joseph A. Buttigieg and “Gramsci's Method”

One of the last talks Joseph Buttigieg gave before he became ill was at Dartmouth College, on the occasion of the journal boundary 2’s Anniversary Conference on April 28, 2018. The talk was devoted to “Lorianism, or the Fragility of Critical Barriers,” a topic that had already played an important role, albeit less developed, in Buttigieg’s pathbreaking essay “Gramsci’s Method,” originally published in boundary 2 in 1990. In both the article and the talk, what preoccupied Buttigieg was how Gramsci interrogated the cultural work and the political function of historical groups of intellectuals, and how “shoddy thinking, crackpot theories, critical carelessness, and general intellectual irresponsibility” can seriously infect any form of political thought, in the early twentieth century as well as today (Buttigieg 1990, 70). Buttigieg’s Gramscian trajectory would thus appear to be framed by a reflection on the historical role of intellectuals and the risk of lacking the “perseverance, intellectual discipline, intense cultural work, and political organization” (Buttigieg 2009, IX) that intellectual labor should instead entail.

This special issue of Italian Culture, entitled “Gramsci’s Method Thirty Year Later,” is meant to celebrate the scholarship and intellectual legacy as well as to commemorate the loss of Joseph A. Buttigieg, who passed away on January 27, 2019. Formerly William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a founding member and past president of the International Gramsci Society, Buttigieg was a formidable scholar as well the translator of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which he published in a definitive three-volume critical edition (1992, 1996, 2007). Yet, for many of us, Joe – as he preferred to be called – was not just a scholar, but also a terrific teacher and an example of intellectual coherence and integrity. Like Gramsci, Buttigieg, too, considered education not only inseparable from culture and politics, but also a crucial element in his inquiry into the function of intellectuals in society and the role they played in history (see Buttigieg 2002, 69–70). For him, this inquiry was not merely theoretical but deeply personal, grounded in his own experiences as a Maltese immigrant who became a professor in the United States. It was also communal, meant to bear witness to a potentially collective mode of action for intellectuals in late capitalist societies. In fact, we can say that for Joe education meant understanding “il proprio valore storico, la propria funzione nella vita, i propri diritti e i propri doveri” both as an individual and as part of the professional category of intellectuals (Gramsci 2004, 119). More importantly, though, this inquiry was carried on through what was probably the most remarkable aspect of Joe as an intellectual, his empathy. What Gramsci called “con-passionalità” and Buttigieg himself renamed “the ability to share, understand, and concretely represent the emotions, ideas, aspirations, and actions of others” (Gramsci Quaderno 7 (VII) § (6); Buttigieg 2009, XVII) was for Joe a crucial quality that he recognized in some of the authors he studied, but that also deeply characterized his behavior toward his colleagues and students. In other words, he once again resembled Gramsci, for whom the entanglement of politics, culture, and education was not a mere abstract model but “a combination of reason with an empathetic disposition” (Urbinati 1998, 382). For some of those who knew him personally, Buttigieg similarly came to embody what Angelo Tasca, who worked with Gramsci at L’Ordine Nuovo, called the proper socialist culture, namely “la capacità … di comprendere la vita, il posto che vi teniamo, i nostri rapporti con gli altri uomini” (Tasca 1919, 55–56).

Buttigieg was not only the talented translator and editor of the English version of the Prison Notebooks, but also an intellectual who, in articles such as “Gramsci’s Method” (1990) and “Philology and Politics” (1994), drew connections between Gramsci’s working method and his entire system of thought. Buttigieg understood to the highest degree the Gramscian concept of “living philology” (Notebook 11, §25), by identifying not only how the seemingly less important little notes and memoranda, scattered throughout the Notebooks, were actually deeply connected with the wider formal and thematic structure of Gramsci’s labyrinthine masterpiece, but also how they contained in nuce his main lines of thought: “What takes place … is an extension and a thickening of the network of connections among the various issues raised in the multitudinous fragments packed inside the notebook” (Buttigieg 1990, 65). Yet there is a third reason why Buttigieg’s Gramscian legacy will be unforgettable. While analyzing the “little notes” on “Lorianism,” rightly connecting them to Gramsci’s critique of positivist sociology, Buttigieg came to understand that the intradiegetic connections between these “little notes” and the general meaning of the Notebooks actually mirrored the dialectics between the particular and the universal that is at the core of Gramsci’s interpretation of Marxism. Overcoming the abstraction of the bourgeois-universalistic philosophical systems as well as the hypertrophy of the “particular” in positivism (and also of Marxist-ish positivism as in Bukharin), this dialectics opened up an understanding of history where the concreteness of the particular vivified universalist temptations and kept them in check, and also where every specificity must be understood within the context of a universal philosophy of praxis: a philosophy that could not presuppose a universality, because its universality was the day-by-day making of the workers’ movement and of its party.

“Gramsci’s Method” is thus Buttigieg’s method, as David Forgacs argues in the first essay in this special issue. For Forgacs, the “attentive reader” whose approach to Gramsci Buttigieg lucidly described in his essay was, in a profound sense, Buttigieg himself, seizing on the telling detail, linking it with other details and other notes scattered throughout the Prison Notebooks, then redescribing the Notebooks themselves as well as the initial detail that had first grabbed the reader’s attention. That is certainly the way Buttigieg read Gramsci; in his wake, it has become the way scholars across disciplines read Gramsci as well. In this issue’s second essay, for instance, Francesca Antonini demonstrates how Buttigieg’s method can illuminate Gramsci’s thinking on bureaucracy. Tracing connections across the Notebooks, Antonini shows how Gramsci’s analysis of bureaucracy connects with his analyses of hegemony, caste, the role of the intellectual, parliamentarism, and Caesarism, among other problems. These connections reveal bureaucracy to be a far more integral facet of Gramsci’s work than has previously been recognized. Roberto Dainotto, in his contribution, focuses on a discipline long recognized as integral to Gramsci’s thought, literary criticism. Yet, with Buttigieg, Dainotto reads Gramsci’s literary analysis against the grain, identifying comparisons with – even the direct influence of – Soviet formalism in the Prison Notebooks. Indeed, Dainotto explains how Gramsci’s formalism, and in particular his emphasis on point of view in the novel, grounded his radically political mode of reading. Kate Crehan likewise explores an unexpected comparison in her essay for this special issue, relating Gramsci to the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski as another thinker of the fragment. The comparison shows that Gramsci’s work is meaningfully ethnographic; Crehan draws on Buttigieg’s insights to locate in the Prison Notebooks a mode of thought applicable to contemporary anthropology. Like Gramsci and Malinowski, she insists, today’s anthropologists “must always begin with the fragment, not the theoretical model.”

Reconsidering Gramsci as a postcolonial thinker in her contribution to this issue, Neelam Srivastava makes a related claim, insisting on the emancipatory possibilities of the philological retrieval of the concrete particular and arguing that, as a result, “Buttigieg’s reading of the Gramscian method offers several important insights for postcolonial studies, and bears obvious connections to the work of the Subaltern Studies historians.” For Srivastava, in fact, it is the very specificity of Gramsci’s reflections on his historical and geographical location, as well as his contingent political situation, that reveal his thought to be not just relevant to Third World anticolonialism, but also itself anticolonial. The reach of Gramsci’s thought well beyond Italy’s borders is also the focus of Yuri Brunello’s essay in this issue. Mapping Gramsci’s Latin American reception, Brunello traces a transnational and decades-long path that moves from Argentina, where Gramsci’s Lettere dal carcere were first translated in 1950, to Brazil, where several of Gramsci’s works were translated in quick succession in the 1960s, to Mexico, which became in the 1970s and 1980s what Brunello terms a “great laboratory for Gramscian ideas.” Brunello thus confirms, often in arresting detail, Buttigieg’s insight regarding the specificity and vitality of Latin America’s engagement with Gramsci. In the final essay in this special collection, Mauro Pala likewise seeks to reaffirm one of Joseph Buttigieg’s lasting insights. Returning to Buttigieg’s 1987 study of James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective, Pala argues that this work represents a profoundly subversive challenge to the formalist New Critics. Particularly striking is Pala’s insight that the critical awareness that led Buttigieg to mount this challenge would subsequently inspire his efforts as translator and interpreter of Gramsci. Pala arrives at this insight through a reading of Buttigieg’s study of Joyce that contextualizes and connects seemingly disparate details in a manner that recalls nothing so much as Buttigieg’s “Gramsci’s Method,” which was also – and always – “Buttigieg’s Method.” The insight that there is substantial overlap between Buttigieg’s own interpretive framework and the methodology that he identified across Gramsci’s notebooks is shared by all of the contributors to this issue, even as they disagree about some of the specifics. Rather than being an obstacle, such discrepancies seem to us instead to confirm one of Buttigieg’s main arguments, namely that intellectual labor is not made of conciliatory and idealistic unanimity but of perseverance, care, and responsibility, all qualities capable of engaging dialectically with the at times contradictory conditions of politics and history.

An ethical as well as a scholarly ideal, Joseph A. Buttigieg’s articulation of “Gramsci’s Method” has exerted a lasting influence well beyond Italian Studies, as the essays collected in this special issue attest. We are grateful to the issue's contributors, and to the editors of Italian Culture, for joining us in celebrating Buttigieg's work. We hope that this special issue will prompt others to carry further Joe's intellectual legacy.

 
Mimmo Cangiano and Charles L. Leavitt IV 2022 American Association for Italian Studies https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2022.2057019

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Notes on contributors

Damiano Benvegnù

Damiano Benvegnù is a Senior Lecturer at Dartmouth College, where he teaches in the Department of French and Italian and the Comparative Literature Program. As an environmental humanist, his research ranges from critical animal studies and posthumanism to landscape theory, soundscape studies, ecocriticism, and political ecology. Benvegnù is an Association Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the Creative Writing and Art Editor for the European Journal of Literature, Culture and the Environment.

Mimmo Cangiano

Mimmo Cangiano is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at University of Venezia Ca’ Foscari. He taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Colgate University, and he has been Lauro De Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He published the volumes L’Uno e il molteplice nel giovane Palazzeschi (Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011), La nascita del modernismo italiano. Filosofie della crisi, storia e letteratura (1903-1922) (Quodlibet, 2018), The Wreckage of Philosophy. Carlo Michelstaedter and the Limits of Bourgeois Thought (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Cultura di destra e società di massa. Europa 1870-1939 (Nottetempo, 2022).

Charles L. Leavitt

Charles L. Leavitt IV is Associate Professor of Italian and Film and Associate Director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. A Faculty Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and a Research Fellow of the University of Reading, UK, Leavitt studies modern and contemporary Italian culture in a comparative context. He is the author of Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), which won the 2020 Book Prize in Visual Studies, Film and Media from the American Association for Italian Studies.