The Left according to the Ashes of Gramsci

In the beginning was Gramsci's body whose brain fascist judges wanted to stop from functioning for at least twenty years. Those were the good, old days when the left's enemy was so visible and so explicit about its undertakings that the tribunal's sentence still enrages those who care to remember. Gramsci's body and brain ended up in a fascist prison, to be released shortly before death. His body was cremated, his ashes gathered in the English cemetery in Rome, his writings published and variously re-kindled at each subsequent reading. In the 1954 poem entitled Le ceneri di Gramsci, P.P. Pasolini used the sight of Gramsci's ashes as a springboard for his unorthodox marxism.1 From our perspective, Pasolini's poem does more than look back at the author of the Prison Notebooks, since the four words Le Ceneri di Gramsci will be re-ashed by Giordana's Maledetti Vi Amer6 (Bastards I Will Love You), a 1980 film staging a suicidal self-reflection of the left in the body of a 68 veteran.2 At a party sadly connoting the 'reflux' of revolutionary hopes, an excomrade on the road to yuppiedom pulls out a tray full of cocaine and says: Brothers, friends, comrades, a little present for you: the ashes of Gramsci.3 Following the path traced by these four words, from theory to cinema, from ashes to cocaine, I will tell a story about the becoming of the Italian left spanning across three different signifying practices. According to Nowell-Smith, Gramsci's body of theoretical writings represents a welcome exception within the left, for: Most marxist writing-and this would include Gramsci's own writing prior to prison-is highly directive. It is produced by writers-individuals or groups-with points to make, theses to prove, polemics to engage, tactics and strategies to lay down: in brief it pursues a line. Gramsci's writings in the Notebooks are like a network, or a web. Although there is a coherence to them, this coherence is not linear; it is established through multiple branchings out, with arguments that double back on themselves and reconnect laterally rather than in sequence. As a result the sort of univocal reading that we expect to be able to make of writings in the marxist tradition is difficult to achieve in the Notebooks. They require a different sort of suspended attention, an openness of reading to match their openness of writing.4 There is a sense in which Gramsci's writings were always ashes, ready to be disseminated out in the openness. Pasolini, who had little patience for Marx's writ

Political science · Sociology · Cultural Studies and Postmodernism · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Political theory and Gramsci

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