Althusser and Italy: A Two-Fold Challenge to Gramsci and Della Volpe

Abstract

During the 1960s, the “exchange” between Louis Althusser and Italian Marxist philosophers developed around the theme of the autonomy of Marxism. Harmony between the theories of Althusser and Galvano Della Volpe (and his students) was short-lived, and there was a definitive break around the relationship between science and ideology. The chief intermediary for introducing Althusser's thought to Italy was Cesare Luporini, a philosopher and an active member of the Italian Communist Party who brought For Marx and Reading Capital to Italy. Althusser's grappling with Gramsci was constant, and after the critiques of historicist Marxism, the author of Prison Notebooks came to hold influence over the French philosopher with regard to political matters. As Althusser's thought developed, considerable weight was also held by the reading, mediated by Gramsci, of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, which consolidated his relationship with Italian political and philosophical culture. Althusser managed to catch a glimpse of the philosophical significance of the Gramscian conception of reality as relations of forces (the philosophy of praxis) beyond the historicist and humanist schema within which he had enclosed Gramsci in Reading Capital. But his reading of Machiavelli would develop in the direction of so-called aleatory materialism, also because to Althusser (for deeply-held political reasons: his attachment to classism and to the division of the world into two adversarial camps), the Gramscian category of hegemony would always remain extraneous.

Keywords:

• Louis Althusser
• Galvano Della Volpe
• Antonio Gramsci
• Italian Communist Party
• Marxism

Notes on Contributor

Francesca Izzo is a former professor of the history of political doctrines at “L'Orientale” University of Naples, and the member of Fondazione Istituto Gramsci (Rome). From 1996 to 2001 she was a member of the Italian parliament (Chamber of Deputies). She is the author of many essays and articles, especially on Thomas Hobbes, Ugo Grozio and Antonio Gramsci, including Forme della modernità. Antropologia, politica e teologia in Thomas Hobbes (2005, Rome-Bari: Laterza) and Democrazia e cosmopolitismo in Antonio Gramsci (2009, Rome: Carocci).

Notes

¹Lo Iacono's (2011, 27) correspondence, published only in part, bears ample testimony to this.

²See the preface to Althusser (1969).

³Letter of March 10, 1963. In a letter a few days earlier on the subject of his difficulty in writing,

 … all because of Colletti and Bolvano della Peppe [sic], who have given me some complexes (and complicated ones, what's more!!) (it seems that Vulcano della Dolce [sic] is a little wrinkled old moaner, malicious too … in any case I must say he's determined, I've found a little book of his, from Bologna, yes ma'am, 1947, in the library of the École, strong stuff and in advance of its time!!). (Althusser 1998, 382)

⁴Written on the front is piece of Cahiers marxistes-léninistes.

⁵“All the problems … the relation of the logical and the historical, empiricist ideology of knowledge, reading Capital” (Althusser and Balibar 1968, 125–26).

⁶Colletti would say some years later,

At any rate … the articles which later made up For Marx otherwise seemed to show a pronounced convergence with the classic theses of the Della Volpean current in Italian Marxism. Then Althusser sent me Reading Capital. I started to read it and found—I say this without any irony—that I could not understand the presuppositions and purposes of the book. (Colletti 1974, 16)

⁷See Luporini (1974, 117):

One can split hairs as much as one likes about the Marx-Hegel relation but what is essential is this: Marx gives a critico-materialist response to a problem that had been posed by Hegel (the relation of humanity's present with its past), to which he had given a speculative-idealist response. The diversity of the response … is not simply a theoretical mutation: it expresses the point of view of the new class …

⁸See Pierre Macherey's Introduction to Althusser (1994); and also Negri (1997).

⁹Althusser (1998, 224) then remarks (letter of April 26, 1963): “How to begin? What is it that begins when what begins does not exist?”

¹⁰Just a brief note: insofar that he is a theorist of the modern state, Machiavelli is simultaneously the first intellectual to be aware of his political, intellectual and moral role (the place from which he speaks and for whom he speaks).

¹¹See De Giovanni (1970, 149–50):

The present, that is “modern bourgeois society,” is the point at which the relative relation of the single historical/natural successions meets. The direction of reading indicated by Althusser … presents the risk of considering “result” and “temporal succession” as nothing more than correlative concepts, and consequently isolating the logico-theoretical dimension … from the historico-genetic dimension. … Whereas I believe that the real problem that Marx is posing here, is that of logico-historical connection, where the present-past relation is resolved in the same moment in which he criticises the chronological foundation by the logical one.

Indeed Althusser himself acknowledged the “intelligence” of the author: “I have received a book from (quite) a young philosophy professor from Bari about Hegel in which he criticises me copiously. I am trying to read it step by step. It's intelligent” (Althusser 1998, 767).