Abstract
Antonio Santucci is relatively unknown to exclusively English language readers. Until his untimely passing in 2006, Santucci was perhaps the most renowned Italian scholar of Antonio Gramsci’s life’s work, known for editing numerous collections of Gramsci’s writings and producing countless commentaries on the Sardinian’s life and political activities. We are extremely fortunate to have Graziella Di Maruo’s and Salvatore Engel-Di Maruo’s extremely lucid translation of Santucci’s 1986 book, entitled Antonio Gramsci: Guida la Pensiero e Agli Scritti (Antonio Gramasci: A Guide to His Thought and Writing), to which they added a chapter from his 1996 book, which was simply entitled Gramsci.
What separates Santucci’s work from the vast body of literature on Gramsci is his attention to how Gramsci’s conceptual innovations were literally grounded in his political involvement in Italy and the International. Again, Santtuci’s book, unlike most writings on Gramsci, considers the Italian’s pre-prison work and his carceral writings, which include his personal letters and his famed Prison Notebooks. A discussion of each body of writing anchors the three main chapters of the book. Santucci’s ability to concisely discuss the movement of Gramsci’s emotions, thought and practice throughout his life allows the reader to become acquainted with Gramsci the person, the political actor, and lastly, the theorist. I cannot recommend a better book to those uninitiated to Gramsci’s work. The book is written in a style that is inviting to the reader and provides an incredibly clear, concise and philologically accurate introduction to Gramsci’s political life and distinct style of Marxism. At the same time, an experienced reader of Gramsci will similarly be rewarded by Santucci’s text, likely coming away with a deeper sense of his personal motivations and an enriched understanding of how different aspects of his work fit within his complete oeuvre.
The introduction answers the perennial question of how to read Gramsci. Similar to other commentators, Santucci suggests that notes cannot be plucked out and used instrumentally. Rather, we need to ascertain what Peter Thomas (2009) describes as the ‘historical image’ of Gramsci, achieved through a philological reading of Gramsci that attends to the theoretical and political continuities running through his pre-prison and prison writings. Santucci produces a historical image of the Sardinian as a communist philosopher and political actor deeply concerned with the intellectual and cultural ‘moments’ of political struggle, which, he argues, animate Gramsci’s work and define his contribution to Marxist theory and politics.
In the second chapter of the book, Santucci takes the reader through a political biography of Gramsci’s life up until his imprisonment, articulated through Gramsci’s Political Writings. Santucci starts with Gramsci’s adolescent years, spent in Sardinia, and suggests that his experiences of marginalisation and exposure to the peasantry contributed to his critical consciousness. Gramsci left Sardinia in 1911 to attend university in Turin, where he was plagued by poor physical and psychological health, yet he nonetheless excelled in his linguistic and philosophical studies. Santucci presents Gramsci as a tireless revolutionary whose positions developed in response to conjunctural changes. For instance, Gramsci initially railed against the parliamentarian turn of the Socialist Party, yet, as Santucci explains, the rise of Fascism forced Gramsci to reconsider the separatist politics of the
In Chapter 3, Santucci shifts his attention to Gramsci’s Letters from Prison. Santucci makes a strong case that a detailed reading of the letters deepens our understanding of how Gramsci’s notebooks developed. For instance, writing to Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci (1994: 83) explains that he wanted to produce ‘something für ewig [for eternity]’, in contrast to his pre-prison notebooks, which, he argued, were written ‘for the day’. Santucci allows the reader to understand how the conceptual and analytic concerns animating his notebooks stemmed from his personal experience of incarceration. I was struck by how Gramsci’s preoccupation with psychological and physical energy in his notes on Americanism and Fordism reflected his anxieties over his own deteriorating physical and mental state (see Gramsci, 1971: 303-5, Q22§11). In his letters, he uses the Hegelian term ‘becoming’ to describe this experience, which emerges again in his philosophically oriented writings in ‘What is Man?’ (see Gramsci, 1971: 351-57, Q10§54). Santucci perhaps overlooks these connections. At one point, he argues: ‘From the page of the Notebooks, the mind of [Gramsci] appears disconnected from the agony of his body. Any reference to his plight is virtually absent’ (p. 127). I cannot help but disagree; but nevertheless, his careful examination of Gramsci’s Prison Letters propelled me to make new connections between different parts of Gramsci’s work, which in my mind, testifies to the strengths of Santucci’s book.
The fourth chapter examines the notebooks Gramsci composed in prison. Gramsci argued that engaging with texts required identifying ‘the leitmotiv, the rhythm of thought’, which he argued is ‘more important than single, isolated quotations’ (Gramsci, 1996: 178, Q4§1). Santucci does a brilliant job of succinctly capturing the rhythm of Gramsci’s notes. For the most part, the chapter discusses well known aspects of Gramsci’s work, including his understanding of the philosophy of praxis, ideology, hegemony and ‘the party’. However, Santucci’s contribution is his capacity to produce an integral image of Gramsci that highlights his distinct contributions to Marxist theory and practice. Gramsci is presented as a writer who paid close attention to lives, lived and felt, as articulated in his discussion of common sense. Santucci argues that the task of the democratic philosopher and the party, both understood as the embodiment of the collective will, is to start with common-sense understandings of the world and produce a new culture and new social relations capable of undercutting the hegemony of the bourgeoisie throughout civil society and the state. Overall, Santucci highlights Gramsci’s anti-reductionist style of Marxism, which takes seriously the constitutive dimensions of ideology.
The book concludes with a short chapter that discusses the challenges of reading Gramsci in a different conjuncture in which communist social movements have all but disappeared. Santucci suggests that the current conjuncture requires an engagement with the politics of truth, not in the Foucauldian sense, but rather as an honest appraisal of false promises of bourgeois democracy. Santucci argues that Gramsci’s legacy to the left is not simply a nuanced understanding of the politics of truth, but equally importantly, a recognition that political movements must be expansive in covering the spectrum of intellectual, cultural and economic processes.
There is very little to quibble with in Santucci’s book, which is not surprising given the exhaustive research Santucci conducted on Gramsci’s life. However, his book represents what Adam Morton (2007) might describe as a form of ‘austere historicism’, which generally approaches Gramsci through a strict historical and philological lens. Santucci invokes Gramsci to warn against attempts ‘to push [a] text, that is, to make “texts say more than they really say, just for the sake of supporting a thesis”’. Obviously, Gramsci should not be instrumentalised. However there are many moments in which Gramsci pushed other texts, such as Croce’s work, and reworked concepts within a historical materialist framework. As Morton (2007: 201-13) asks of Gramscian scholars, engaging with different historical conjunctures and political movements involves working with and against Gramsci, which sometimes may mean pushing his texts in directions he could not have considered.