"Forme cinesi": Gramsci's Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism

estetica. studi e ricerche Vol. VII, n. 2, 2017 Geograie meridiane. Pensare a Sud a cura di Toni Hildebrandt e Giovanbaista Tusa Introduzione p. 205 Pieter Vanhove «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian hird-Worldism 211 Evan Calder Williams, Alberto Toscano he Southern Line. he Meridione and the Limits to Periodisation 233 Toni Hildebrandt Allegories of the Profane on Foreign Soil in Pasolini’s Work ater 1968 255 Luca Caminati Pasolini’s Southward Quest(ion) 273 Alessia Ricciardi Can the Subaltern Speak in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels? 293 Stefanie Baumann Heterodox mediations. Notes on Walid Raad’s «he Atlas Group» 313 Giovanbattista Tusa Geograie. Della frontiera occidentale 333 Roberto Esposito Fuori del pensiero 347 Varia Enrica Lisciani-Petrini Il tempo dell’estetica 363 Mario Farina Il giudizio e la vita. Sulla logica dell’estetica di Hegel 375 Teresa Catena Eutopie sensibili. Primi appunti per altre utopie 403 Guido Brivio Psychanodia. Vie di eros e della bellezza in «El libro dell’Amore» di Marsilio Ficino 417 Conversazione con Alain Roger, maestro di ilosoia e letteratura (a cura di Rafaele Milani) 204 Indice 435 Pieter Vanhove «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism Abstract. Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are a crucial reference for postcolonial thought. What is perhaps less known outside of Italy, is that Gramsci’s writings were also instrumental for the development of historical Italian hird-Worldism, or what is known in Italy as terzomondismo. In this essay, I show how, during the Cold War, Gramsci’s writings became central for Italian writers and politicians in their engagement with the geopolitics of Decolonization. I examine in particular how Gramsci’s writings shaped Palmiro Togliatti and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s encounter with Maoist anticolonial politics in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split. My analysis is framed by a reading of Gramsci’s notes on education, language learning, and translatability (traducibilità). he question I put forward is to what extent Gramsci’s thought was «translatable» into the discursive context of terzomondismo. I argue that, along with his relections on translatability, Gramsci’s aesthetic of the uninished Notebook complicated these ulterior discursive translations. Keywords: Antonio Gramsci, Postcolonial, hird-Worldism, Translatability, Universality. Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings were notes to self, fragments of a book to be written. In one of these uninished fragments, Gramsci envisioned a state infrastructure of public schools. Gramsci’s ideal school, the «scuola unitaria» or «common», unitarian school1, was to foster creativity from an early age through a non-traditional education rooted in the humanities. hese new schools would teach their students, Gramsci wrote, how to unravel the «forme cinesi» into which social diferences are «crystallized»2. Gramsci’s poetic phrase poses a problem of translation that brings us to the core of his intellectual project. «Forme cinesi» is here best translated – as opposed to Hoare and Smith’s «Chinese complexities» – as either «Chinese shadow plays», «Chinese tangram puzzles», or even «Chinese 1 A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (1948), Einaudi, Torino, 1975, vol. III, Quaderno 12, § 1, p. 1534; A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1948), Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (trans.), International Publishers, New York 1972, p. 29. See C. Borg and P. Mayo, Gramsci and the Unitarian School. Paradoxes and Possibilities, in C. Borg, J. Buttigieg and P. Mayo (eds.), Gramsci and Education, Rowman, Lanham 2002, pp. 87-108. 2 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 40; A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 12, § 2, p. 1547. esteica. studi e ricerche – vol. VII – 2/2017 – 211-232 ©Società editrice il Mulino. ISSN 2039-6635 characters»3. Operating as metaphors for the social fabric under capital, where inequalities are rendered cryptic and indecipherable, Gramsci’s untranslatable «forme cinesi» phrase calls for a popular education solidly embedded in deep language learning, an education that enables its students to decipher the cryptic language of capital in order to transform it from within. Ultimately, as an untranslatable at the heart of Gramsci’s critique of translatability, Gramsci’s «forme cinesi» phrase can be read as one pointing towards a diferent take on universality, an alternative conception of the world. If Gramsci’s notes were mere hints of an uninished book – a discursive world yet to be fully imagined – and as such essentially untranslatable, Gramsci’s writings are among the most translated in Italian cultural history. By «translated» I don’t just mean that Gramsci’s work has been transposed into other languages, sometimes to varying degrees of precision4. Gramsci’s work has also been translated or received into a wide range of discursive contexts. Most notably, Gramsci has been deeply inluential for postcolonial thought. For Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to the scholars associated with the Subaltern Studies Group, Gramsci’s notes have acted as a theoretical catalyst. Critics like Timothy Brennan, and more recently Neelam Srivastava and Baiduk Bhattacharya, have already attempted to trace the complex genealogy of this postcolonial Gramsci5. What is perhaps less known outside of Italy, is that Gramsci’s writings were also instrumental for the development of historical Italian hird-Worldism, or what is known in Italy as terzomondismo. During the Cold War, Gramsci’s writings became a central reference for Italian writers, activists, and politicians in their engagement with the geopolitics of Decolonization. In this essay I show how, speciically for Palmiro Togliatti and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gramsci became instrumental in the Italian engagement with the decolonizing world. hese hird-Worldist reincarnations of Gramsci, I argue, were yet more «translations» of Gramsci’s essentially untranslatable thought. While Togliatti and Pasolini did not read the same Gramsci, and were located on diferent ends of the political spectrum of the Italian let, what they shared was an intuition that Gramsci’s analysis of the Italian situation could be translated into the country’s political and intellectual engagement with the anticolonial struggles that marked the postwar years. Strikingly, for both Togliatti and Pasolini, the role of revolutionary China was crucial in this debate. A country 3 I thank Nadia Urbinati for suggesting these possible translations at a colloquium on Gramsci organized by the Columbia Seminar in Modern Italian Studies on March 27, 2015. 4 I am particularly thinking here of Joseph Buttigieg’s excellent, and sadly uninished, new translation of the Quaderni. Where available, I have used Buttigieg’s translation. 5 See the Introduction to N. Srivastava and B. Bhattacharya (eds.), he Postcolonial Gramsci, Routledge, New York – London 2012 and the chapter on Gramsci in T. Brennan, Wars of Position. he Cultural Politics of Let and Right, Columbia University Press, New York 2006. 212 Pieter Vanhove that self-identiied as an integral part of the decolonizing «hird World», China was not only positioning itself as a major geopolitical force in Asia and Africa – in the 1960s and 1970s it was also drawing increasing attention from the European, and by extension Italian, political let. Togliatti and Pasolini’s disparate and idiosyncratic encounters with this new, Chinese strand of hird-Worldism were colored by their respective engagement with Gramsci. As Paolo Capuzzo and Sandro Mezzadra have pointed out in their contribution to the Postcolonial Gramsci collection, Gramsci’s understanding of the question of universal translatability deeply resonates with a postcolonial sensibility, including in the Italian context6. In more ways than one, then, a re-reading of Gramsci’s notes on language learning and translatability – speciically the «forme cinesi» passage – can help us to make sense of the hird-Worldist reception of Gramsci’s work in Italy. . Gramsci’s Criique of Universal Translatability In his notes on education in Notebook 12, Gramsci took a stance against the kind of «interested» vocational training for a speciic industrial task envisioned by the fascist riforma Gentile of 1923. He believed it transixed the subalterni of Italian society in a carefully assigned spot from where he or she could not move. For Gramsci, the work to be done was the work of training minds and bodies that could undo the cryptic structures behind what Marx has called the «social hieroglyphic» or «gesellschatliche Hieroglyphe»7. Education should in other words foster an understanding of how the exploited are conditioned by the concealed structures of abstract average labor at the heart of capital. Gramsci grasped the importance of learning how to turn the poison of capital into medicine, the signiicance of deciphering «Chinese shadow plays» or «social hieroglyphs». Only a school system that places strong emphasis on deep language learning and fostering creativity – what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has coined as «training the imagination for epistemological performance»8 – would be up to this task. P. Capuzzo and S. Mezzadra, Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci, in N. Srivastava and B. Bhattacharya (eds.), he Postcolonial Gramsci, p. 50. 7 K. Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (1867), vol. I, B. Fowkes (trans.), Penguin, London 19902, p. 167; K. Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1867), Marx Engels Werke, Bd. 23, vol. I, Dietz, Berlin 1962, p. 88. 8 G. Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Harvard University Press, Cambridge – London 2012, p. 122. A irst version of this paper was irst written for a Colloquium organized as part of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Reading Marx seminar at Columbia University in the Spring of 2016. I am grateful for our insightful discussions. 6 «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 213 Gramsci understood that education was quintessentially a constitutive aspect of state formation. In her Gramsci and the State, Christine Buci-Glucksmann has shown how the crux of Gramsci’s work can be pinned down as what she calls in a play on Gramsci’s own term, a «gnoseology of politics», a rethinking of the relation between philosophy, culture, and politics9. Imagining a new type of education as well as the state infrastructure that was to provide it was a central moment of this new «gnoseology». In Gramsci’s mind, a new politics of education could not be imagined without thinking through its cultural and philosophical implications. It is within this «gnoseological» nexus that Gramsci’s discussion of «forme cinesi» as part of his notes on education is nested. Let us have a closer look at the passage from Notebook 12: In the present school, the profound crisis in the traditional culture and its conception of life and of man has resulted in a progressive degeneration. Schools of the vocational type, i.e. those designed to satisfy immediate, practical interests, are beginning to predominate over the formative school, which is not immediately «interested». he most paradoxical aspect of it all is that this new type of school appears and is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social diferences but to crystallize them in Chinese complexities [forme cinesi]10. While Hoare and Nowell-Smith’s translation places the «forme cinesi» passage under a separate heading – thus creating the impression that what they present as the section «On Education» stands by itself – the placement of the «forme cinesi» in the Italian original ofers clearer insight into Gramsci’s thought process. Just a few pages earlier Gramsci had brought up the problem of Chinese script, which in his view was «an expression of the complete separation between the intellectuals and the people»11. For Gramsci, deep language learning, both in a formal educational setting and beyond the classroom, was one of the most tenacious markers of class diference, a dividing line that could only be erased through a relentless commitment to language teaching. Gramsci’s defense of what he here refers to as the «formative school», and elsewhere as the C. Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, D. Fernbach (trans.), Lawrence and Wishart, London 1980, p. 10. 10 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 40; «Nella scuola attuale, per la crisi profonda della tradizione culturale e della concezione della vita e dell’uomo, si veriica un processo di progressiva degenerazione. Le scuole di tipo professionale, cioè preoccupate di soddisfare interessi pratici immediati, prendono il sopravvento sulla scuola formativa, immediatamente disinteressata. L’aspetto più paradossale è che questo nuovo tipo di scuola appare e viene predicata come democratica, mentre invece essa non solo è destinata a perpetuare le diferenze sociali, ma a cristallizzarle in forme cinesi», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 12, § 2, p. 1547. 11 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 23; «In Cina c’è il fenomeno della scrittura, espressione della completa separazione degli intellettuali dal popolo», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 12, §1, p. 1529. 9 214 Pieter Vanhove «disinterested school» [scuola disinteressata]12, embodied a resolute conviction on his part that it is only through an education rooted in the humanities and deep language learning that class consciousness could be achieved. Only if a student is versed in decrypting the «forme cinesi» into which social diference is «crystallized», can society as a whole eventually move beyond what Gramsci a few paragraphs below describes as the «crystallized estates» [ordini cristallizzati]13 of class division. Gramsci’s commitment to language learning was rooted in his own background as a student of linguistics. Linguistics, and the study of grammar in particular, form a red thread through his writings, culminating in his «Notes for an Introduction to the Study of Grammar»14 in the very last of the prison notebooks, Quaderno 29. As Peter Ives has shown in his excellent book Gramsci’s Politics of Language15, Gramsci was highly critical of eforts on the part of Gentile and the broader fascist regime to ban traditional grammar classes from the Italian school curriculum. In a country like Italy where use of standardized Italian only became wide-spread in the latter half of the twentieth century, and dialects were still the irst language of the majority of Italians, preventing the teaching of standardized grammar was efectively a strategy on the part of the fascist regime to curb social mobility. Gramsci begins Notebook 29 with a discussion of an essay of Italy’s most prominent modern philosopher, Benedetto Croce. he Crocean essay, titled his Round Table Is Square, was in many ways a precursor of Noam Chomsky’s later variant in his famous 1956 article hree Models for the Description of Language, where Chomsky proposed a similarly nonsensical but grammatically correct phrase: «Colorless green ideas sleep furiously»16. Croce’s essay is of course a far cry from Chomsky’s proposals for a transformational generative grammar, since it makes antithetical claims, rejects the very idea of a science of grammar, and deems grammar a mere «complex of abstractions and judgments useful for memory»17. In his critique of Croce’s essay, which can be read as a veiled agitation against Gentile’s educational reforms, Gramsci in turn shows A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 27; A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 12, § 1, p. 1531. 13 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 41; A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 12, § 2, p. 1548. 14 Own translation. Note per una introduzione allo studio della grammatica, in A Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 29, p. 2339. 15 P. Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language. Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2004. 16 N. Chomsky, hree Models for the Description of Language, in IRE Transactions on Information heory 2 (1956), no. 3, pp. 113-124. 17 Own translation. «complesso di astrazioni e arbitri, utili alla memoria», in B. Croce, Questa tavola rotonda è quadrata, in La Critica 3 (1905), p. 533. 12 «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 215 how Croce’s argument was «wrong even from the Crocean point of view»18. For Gramsci, grammar was the «“photograph” of a given phase of a national (collective) language that has been formed historically and is continuously developing [in continuo sviluppo]»19. In Gramsci’s view it was important to continually transpose this changing photograph of Italian and world history into concrete pedagogical practice, to expose the oppressed classes of Italian society to this photograph’s secrets. he historical photograph that is grammar was in other words akin to Gramsci’s «forme cinesi». Only when the ruled or governati are able to use the grammar of the rulers, only when the secrets of the «forme cinesi» and the grammatical photograph are exposed, can what Gramsci calls a «coincidence of the rulers and ruled»20 become a reality. In a clear gloss on Gentile’s notion of spontaneous or «living» education, Gramsci continues his notebook with a distinction between what he calls «spontaneous» [spontanee] and «normative» [normative] grammars, or in other words dialects vs. standardized languages21. With this distinction, Gramsci was not advocating for the primacy of dialects, the language of Italy’s rural and working classes. For Gramsci, the teaching of normative, standardized grammar was part and parcel of providing avenues to social mobility, or as Peter Ives puts it in his book, «the act (…) of creating a normative grammar, is that of becoming a “State”»22. Gramsci understood that the subalterni of Italian society should enjoy the same education as the dirigenti. Gramsci’s own reference towards the end of Notebook 29 to his earlier notes on the importance of teaching Latin and Greek23 underscores once again how for him the teaching of languages learned by the children of the élite was a central tool towards achieving cultural hegemony for those on the bottom of the societal ladder. Gramsci’s «forme cinesi» embodied not just a strong commitment to deep language learning. It can also be read as an early precursor to contemporary critiques, voiced by scholars like Emily Apter, of the «translatability assump18 A. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, D. Forgacs and G. Nowell-Smith (eds.), W. Boelhower (trans.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1985, p. 179; «Il saggio è sbagliato anche dal punto di vista crociano», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 29, § 1, p. 2341. 19 A. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, p. 180; «La grammatica è «storia» di una fase determinata di un linguaggio nazionale (collettivo) [formatosi storicamente e in continuo sviluppo]» in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 29, § 1, p. 2342. 20 «Political democracy tends towards a coincidence of the rulers and the ruled», in A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 41; «[…] la democrazia politica tende a far coincidere governanti e governati», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 12, § 2, pp. 1548-49. 21 A. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, p. 181; A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 29, § 2, p. 2343. 22 P. Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language, p. 44. 23 See A. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, p. 186; A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. III, Quaderno 29, § 6, p. 2349. 216 Pieter Vanhove tion»24 at the heart of many universalist cultural constructs. Deeply committed to multilingualism and language learning, Gramsci was a ierce critic of overly emphatic appropriations of translatability – or in his words «traducibilità» – as a catalyst of universality-building. In an early essay for Il Grido del popolo, for instance, Gramsci waged a debate with the editors of the communist publication Avanti! on the question of the artiicial world language Esperanto as proposed by the Polish ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof in 1887. «Esperanto», wrote Gramsci in this 1918 article, «is nothing but a vain idea, an illusion of cosmopolitan, humanitarian, democratic mentalities which have not yet been made fertile and been shaken by historical critical thinking»25. Language should be understood, he argued, as a relection of the «complex social activity of the people who speak it»26. he aesthetics of language and its educational value as a vehicle of popular historicity took in other words primacy over the eiciency of universal communication as embodied by the Esperanto experiment27. Notably, in his Noterelle sulla cultura cinese included in the much later Notebook 5, Gramsci expanded his argument on Esperanto and universal translatability by way of a discussion of the Chinese ideogram. «he ideogram», Gramsci wrote here in reference to Chinese writing as a script used for a variety of languages, «functions somewhat like Esperanto [ha un valore “esperantistico”]. It is a universal writing system [...]. his phenomenon should be carefully studied because it can be used against “esperantistic” infatuations»28. Gramsci argued in other words that, just like Esperanto, the complex system of Chinese script was designed as a means to curb social mobility and class consciousness. In his mind, it functioned as an «element of social stratiication and [...] fossilization»29. Universal languages and scripts like Esperanto and the Chinese ideogram were akin to the «forme cinesi» in Gramsci’s conceptual lexicon. Only if an education rooted in popular lived experience and memory was provided, 24 E. Apter, Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability, Verso New York 2013, p. 3. 25 A. Gramsci, A Single Language and Esperanto, in Selections from Cultural Writings, p. 30; «l’esperanto, la lingua unica, non è altro che un’ubbia, un’illusione di mentalità cosmopolitiche, umanitarie, democratiche, non ancora rese fertili, non ancora smagate dal criticismo storico», in A. Gramsci, La lingua unica e l’esperanto, in Scritti giovanili (1914-1918), Einaudi, Torino 1958, p. 177. 26 A. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, p. 27, «complessa attività sociale del popolo che la parla», in A. Gramsci, Scritti giovanili, p. 175. 27 For a discussion of Gramsci’s notes on Esperanto, see F. Lo Piparo, Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1979, pp. 129-132. 28 A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, J. Buttigieg (trans.), Columbia University Press, New York 1996, vol. II, p. 285; «L’ideogramma ha un valore “esperantistico”. È un Sistema di scrittura “universale” [...]. Questo fenomeno deve essere studiato accuratamente, perché può servire contro le infatuazioni “esperantistiche”», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. I, Quaderno 5, § 23, p. 557. 29 A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 285; «elemento di stratiicazione sociale e di fossilizzazione», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. I, Quaderno 5, § 23, p. 557. «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 217 would it be possible to overcome the attempts of the ruling classes to fossilize and crystallize social diference in complex cultural constructs that claimed universal translatability. In Notebook 11 Gramsci developed his argument on universal languages as he set out to investigate the question of the «traducibilità» or translatability of artiicial scientiic and philosophical languages30. What concerned him here was the question of jargon [«linguaggio»] vs. language [«lingua»]. Artiicial philosophical and scientiic discourses, Gramsci argues in these notes, are marked by a tendency to «build themselves up as an Esperanto or Volapük of philosophy and science», to pursue a «philosophical Esperantism»31. Philosophical claims to universal validity were relected by their quest for universally valid concepts, formulas, and logical constructs. As such, Gramsci argued, they glossed over historically grown phenomena embedded in the particularity of linguistic diversity. Gramsci does not entirely disqualify universality-building discursivity. In his mind, philosophical Esperantism found its counterweight in what he called – using a coded term to elude prison censorship – the «philosophy of praxis», i.e. Marxist philosophy. Only in the philosophy of praxis, only in Marxist thought, Gramsci writes in Quaderno 11, «is the “translation” organic and thoroughgoing»32. Only Marx’s understanding of the historical situation was one that transgressed linguistic and cultural diference without erasing it, only Marxist philosophy had the auto-immune characteristics able to withstand the challenge of (un)translatability. Gramsci knew how language learning was a constitutive aspect of the Marxist philosophical project. he worker had to be educated in such a way that he or she could speak the language of capital, and eventually use the language of capital to build the social. Marx and Marxist philosophy relected in and of itself a deep commitment to language learning, to deconstructing the language of capital. Similarly, providing a state-sanctioned education system enabling the oppressed to read Marx, teaching them how to translate the «forme cinesi» of their crystalized historical situation, was at the heart of Gramsci’s project. 30 For an in-depth discussion of the translatability concept in Gramsci see D. Boothman and F. Frosini’s articles in P. Ives and R. Lacorte (eds.), Gramsci, Language, and Translation, Lexington, Lanham 2010, pp. 107-134 and pp. 171-186. 31 A. Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, D. Boothman (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1995, p. 304; «costruire se stesse come un esperanto o volapük della ilosoia e della scienza [...] esperantismo ilosoico», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. II, Quaderno 11, §45, pp. 1466-1467. 32 A. Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 307; «solo nella ilosoia della prassi la “traduzione” è organica e profonda», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. II, Quaderno 11, §47, p. 1468. 218 Pieter Vanhove For Gramsci, learning a language – in the sense of acquiring a set of discursive conventions that are shared by a given social collectivity – was conducive to world-making or universality-building, to acquiring what he called a new «conception of the world» or «concezione del mondo». Learning the language of capital, deciphering the «forme cinesi» that fossilize it, was crucial if the subalterni of society were to develop class consciousness and put forward a competing world view. «Every language [ogni linguaggio]», Gramsci wrote in Notebook 11, «contains the elements of a conception of the world and of a culture»33. Language learning was in other words an incubator of worldliness, the quintessential locus of philosophical relection that either underwrites a given social situation or makes discursive space for the emergence of a new world view. Gramsci famously held that «everyone is a philosopher [tutti sono ilosoi]»34 and that as a consequence, everyone should «work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world»35. hrough this work of critical self-awareness, a new, organically grown philosophical claim to universality can eventually lit itself into a position of ideological hegemony in deiance of more established philosophies or discourses. Gramsci’s vision for a popular education rooted in the humanities was the irst step in the emergence of such a conception of the world. Only when the «forme cinesi» that fossilize the established world view have been deciphered, Gramsci had intuited, can a new conception of the world force itself into a position of discursive dominance. . Togliai’s Gramsci and the Sino-Soviet Split In the early sixties, the executor of Gramsci’s will, his de facto editor, and his successor as president of the Italian Communist Party or PCI – Palmiro Togliatti – vocally swore of the «Chinese way» in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. he historical tensions between Mao’s China and the Soviet Union had become a major catalyst of Western intellectual and political engagement with Decolonization. hen still claiming to be a «hird World» nation, the People’s Republic of China was rapidly becoming a new beacon for engaged intellectuals who were disillusioned with the long-standing alliance between European Commu33 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 325; «ogni linguaggio contiene gli elementi di una concezione del mondo e di una cultura», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. II, Quaderno 11, § 12, p. 1377. 34 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 323; A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. II, Quaderno 11, § 12, p. 1376. 35 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 324; «elaborare la propria concezione del mondo con tale lavorio del proprio cervello», in A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. II, Quaderno 11, § 12, p. 1376. «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 219 nist Parties and the Soviet Union. Togliatti knew that the Italian let had not been immune to this so-called Maoist turn, and he used all his political power as party leader to stop the bleeding. Remarkably, the discursive arsenal he used in this Cold War-era political struggle included Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. As scholars like Stephen Gundle, Paolo Capuzzo, and Sandro Mezzadra have shown in their recent work on the history of Italian communism, Palmiro Togliatti’s publication of Gramsci’s Quaderni at the height of the Cold War was part and parcel of a deliberate political strategy36. Togliatti had obtained the manuscripts of the Quaderni in Moscow ater Gramsci’s death, without the explicit consent of its rightful owners the Schucht sisters, and with the intervention of the Stalin-controlled Comintern37. Togliatti was intent on using the publication of the Quaderni to embed the eforts of the Communist International in the Italian political and cultural tradition, in other words to use Gramsci to further the political ambitions of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci’s prison manuscripts were a godsend in these eforts to steer the domestic intellectual and political debate on the let into the direction of Togliatti’s vision. «he Notebooks are published», declared Togliatti in a speech twenty years ater Gramsci’s death, «and just as Gramsci’s party had leapt to the centre of political life, so too had Gramsci’s thought leapt to the centre of attention and study»38. Togliatti was singlehandedly responsible for using the publication of Gramsci’s prison writings to promote the PCI at home and to inscribe it within the broader logic of a Soviet-controlled Comintern. In the process he willfully distorted the truth by presenting Gramsci as an early example of Italy’s commitment to the Soviet party line. In the late 1940s, he and his deputy editor Felice Platone began to re-arrange the text thematically, and omitted any references or passages that could be ofensive to either the Soviet authorities or the Italian communist establishment. A staunch Stalinist most of his life39, Togliatti presented the Quaderni as a work that conirmed the link between Gramsci’s con36 See S. Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow. he Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-1991, Duke University Press, Durham – London 2000, p. 51 and P. Capuzzo and S. Mezzadra, Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci, in N. Srivastava and B. Bhattacharya (eds.), Postcolonial Gramsci, pp. 36 f. See also R. Drake, Apostles and Agitators. Italy’s Marxist Revolutionary Tradition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 2003, p. 211. 37 See the Introduction to C. Daniele ed., Togliatti editore di Gramsci, Carocci, Roma 2005, pp. 13-24. 38 P. Togliatti, he Present Relevance of Gramsci’s heory and Practice, in Donald Sassoon (ed.), On Gramsci and Other Writings, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1979, p. 144; «Si pubblicano i Quaderni, e come è balzato al centro della vita politica il partito di Gramsci, così balza al centro dell’attenzione e dello studio il suo pensiero», in P. Togliatti, La politica nel pensiero e nell’azione. Scritti e discorsi 1917-1964, M. Ciliberto and G. Vacca (eds.), Bompiani, Milano 2014, pp. 1103-1104. 39 See E. Aga Rossi and V. Zaslavsky, Stalin and Togliatti. Italy and the Origins of the Cold War, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2011. 220 Pieter Vanhove ceptual apparatus, Lenin and Stalin’s legacy, and ultimately his own domestic agenda. he Gramsci that was read throughout the postwar years – at least until the critical Einaudi edition came out in 1975 – was this Gramsci, Togliatti’s Gramsci40. It is all the more remarkable, then, that the Togliatti who had rewritten Gramsci for the purposes of his domestic political agenda would go on to use Gramsci once more to position himself in the debates surrounding China’s ambitions in the decolonizing world. Togliatti had, perhaps unwillingly, been caught up in the continuous skirmishes between the Soviets and the Chinese Communist Party in the wake of the Sino-Soviet Split. For the Chinese, the Togliatti of the early sixties had become an easy sot target through which they could indirectly attack Khruschev’s stance on peaceful coexistence and propagate their own geopolitical agenda in the decolonizing world. he result was an endless theatrical performance of fulminating newspaper articles and oicial speeches with Togliatti and the Chinese as the main characters. he story of Italy’s Cold War, in other words, would become the story of a Palmiro Togliatti and an Italian Communist Party caught up in the culture battles that were waged between China and the USSR as they sought to position themselves as the primary geopolitical counterpart of capitalist Euro-America. And perhaps most strikingly, Togliatti had written Gramsci into this very story. he debacle began with a speech Togliatti made at the Tenth Congress of the Italian Communist Party in December of 196241. «his is the only alternative», Togliatti remarked in in line with the Soviets, «either peaceful coexistence, or atomic destruction and the end of our civilization»42. he Chinese reaction to Togliatti’s remarks was incendiary. Togliatti’s position would spur the Chinese to break of all diplomatic relations with the Italian Communist Party in a lengthy editorial published in People’s Daily immediately ater the Italian Party Congress, entitled Le divergenze tra il compagno Togliatti e noi in its Italian translation. As Lorenz Luthi has demonstrated in his book on the Sino-SoFor an excellent and rare discussion of Togliatti’s distortion of Gramsci’s textual and political legacy in postwar Italy, see G. Bergami, Il Gramsci di Togliatti e l’altro. L’autocritica del comunismo italiano, Le Monnier, Firenze 1991. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us in an interview printed at the end of Postcolonial Gramsci, «it was Togliatti who chopped up Gramsci in the way in which Europe and Britain received him. In the process, what got lost was Gramsci’s […] articulation of what I have called a methodico-methodological diference under the auspices of the subaltern», in Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in N. Srivastava and B. Bhattacharya (eds.), Postcolonial Gramsci, pp. 222-223. 41 See A. Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti. A Biography, Tauris, London – New York 2008, pp. 279-280 and G. Bocca, Palmiro Togliatti, Mondadori, Milano 1992, p. 601. 42 Own translation. «L’alternativa è questa: o la paciica coesistenza, o la distruzione atomica e la ine, quindi, della nostra civiltà», in Speech by P. Togliatti, X Congresso del partito comunista italiano (dicembre 1962). Atti e risoluzioni, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1963, p. 38. 40 «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 221 viet split, the Chinese party leadership wanted to use the for them fortunately timed dispute with Togliatti to indirectly intensify the ongoing polemic with the Soviets. Penned by the Chinese politburo, Divergenze was allegedly edited and inalized by Chairman Mao himself43, which underscored its central importance to the Chinese authorities even more. he violent indictment of Togliatti by the Chinese in Divergenze was translated into multiple languages and widely read in the West as one of the most comprehensive accounts of China’s postwar hird World politics44. Broadly speaking, Divergenze called for vigorous opposition to the so-called «paper tiger» of American imperialism, strong military and economic support of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements in the decolonizing world, and a condemnation of the nuclear arms struggle. hroughout, the editorial dismissed any notion of the Soviet push for peaceful coexistence, insisting that its implementation would only constitute an acquittal in the face of neocolonialism. he Chinese editorial was in other words not simply an indictment of Togliatti’s stance at the Tenth Congress. It was a pamphlet in which the Chinese party leadership explicitly outlined its international political project in the decolonizing «hird World», or as Dominique Kirchner Reill puts it, «Divergenze was an extension of the Sino-Soviet conlict set on Italian soil»45. Ultimately, then, Divergenze laid out one of the irst eforts on the part of China to extend its economic and political might outside its own borders in the name of anticolonial solidarity – a political project the country is pursuing to this day: Togliatti and those attacking China extend their idea of «peaceful coexistence» [和平 共处, heping gongchu] to cover relations between the colonial and semi-colonial people on the one hand and the imperialists and colonialists on the other. […] Such a way of speaking is really asking the oppressed nations to «coexist peacefully» with their colonial rulers, and asking them to tolerate colonial rule rather than to resist or wage struggles for independence, much less to ight wars of national liberation46. 43 See L.M. Luthi, he Sino-Soviet Split. Cold War in the Communist World, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010, p. 233. 44 I thank Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for pointing out that one of its most notable readers in the US was W.E.B Du Bois, who had a personal copy in his library in Ghana. es for generations,tlined its ingno Togliatti e noi1986 album ference in communist Italian circles for generations,tlined its in 45 D.K. Reill, Partisan Legacies and Anti-Imperialist Ambitions. he Little Red Book in Italy and Yugoslavia, in Alexander Cook (ed.), Mao’s Little Red Book. A Global History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013, p. 187. 46 «he Diferences between Comrade Togliatti and Us» (Foreign Languages Press, Beijing 1963), p. 26: 但是, 陶里 蒂和那 攻击中国的人却把他們的所谓«和平共处»的观点，引申到殖民地 半殖民地人民同帝国主义者，殖民主义者的关系方面。[…] 这种说法, 实际上就是要被压迫民 族同殖民統治者«和平共处»，要被压迫民族容忍殖民統治，而不要进行反抗，不要进行爭取 独立的斗爭，更不要进行民族解放战爭», in Taoliyadi tongzhi tong women de fenqi, in Renmin Ribao, Editorial of December 31, 1962. 222 Pieter Vanhove Divergenze would also become highly inluential for the Italian intellectual encounter with Maoism and hird-Worldism in general. he Chinese authorities’ strong condemnation of Togliatti was kindle to the ire of mostly extraparliamentary Maoist factions like Servire il popolo and the Perugian Associazione Italia-Cina47, later followed by the full-on embrace of Maoism by organizations like Lotta continua, among other groups in the Italian student movement. his clamoring Italian reception of Divergenze did not go unnoticed by Togliatti himself. In his political testament, the so-called Memoriale di Yalta or Yalta Memorandum, which was completed just hours before his death, Togliatti would take a step back and outline a veiled critique of Khruschev’s hard stance on the question of peaceful coexistence. While he still shared the Soviet party line, explicitly distanced himself from the Chinese Communist Party, and like the Soviets insisted on the importance of never suspending the «polemic against the principles and political positions of the Chinese»48, in the Yalta Memorandum Togliatti simultaneously expressed his concern at the deep rit that had grown between the Russians and the Chinese over the question of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles. He was convinced that a soter tone, a stronger emphasis on democratization eforts, and direct collaboration with colonial nations that had recently become independent would be more beneicial for the Communist International as a whole. Attempts needed to made, Togliatti argued throughout his political testament, to keep recently decolonized nations out of the Chinese sphere of inluence. «It would be a way of combating the Chinese», he wrote, «with facts, not just with words»49. It was here that Gramsci once more became a central discursive tool for Togliatti. As critics like Carlo Spagnolo did not fail to notice, the Yalta Memorandum had strong Gramscian undertones. he Memoriale, writes Spagnolo in his insightful close reading of the text, «was the product of a relection on Gramsci’s legacy and on the democratic tasks of socialism»50. In what are perhaps the most 47 For an exhaustive discussion of the Associazione Italia-Cina as an example of extraparliamentary Maoist organization in post-Divergenze Italy, see S. Graziani, L’interesse politico-ideologico per la Cina di Mao sulla scia del contrasto sino-sovietico. Alcune considerazioni sulla nascita dell’Associazione Italia-Cina (1962-1963), in C. Meneguzzi Rostagni and G. Samarini (eds.), La Cina di Mao, l’Italia e l’Europa negli anni della Guerra Fredda, il Mulino, Bologna 2014, pp. 147-173. 48 P. Togliatti, he Yalta Memorandum, in On Gramsci and Other Writings, p. 286; «non interrompere mai la polemica contro le posizioni di principio e politiche cinesi», in P. Togliatti, Memoriale di Yalta, in La politica nel pensiero e nell’azione, p. 1843. 49 P. Togliatti, On Gramsci and Other Writings, p. 287; «Era un modo di combattere i cinesi coi fatti, non soltanto con le parole», in P. Togliatti, La politica nel pensiero e nell’azione, p. 1844. 50 Own translation. «Era il prodotto di una rilessione sull’eredità di Gramsci e sui compiti democratici del socialismo», in C. Spagnolo, Sul Memoriale di Yalta. Togliatti e la crisi del movimento comunista internazionale, Carocci, Roma 2007, p. 23. See also L. Vasconi, I cinesi. In margine al contrasto Mosca-Pechino, Azione Comune, Milano 1964, p. 195. «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 223 striking passages of the Memoriale, Togliatti did indeed distance himself from his earlier, staunchly Stalinist positions and embraced the potential of democratization under socialism. Togliatti seemed to be laying the groundwork here for what eventually would become the historical compromise of the PCI with the Democristiani in the 1970s. More importantly, Togliatti’s was an explicitly Gramscian position, reminiscent of Gramsci’s insistence on the importance of education and deep language learning, on providing access to the state and social mobility without the imperative of overthrowing the existing state altogether. Toward the end of his life Togliatti explicitly admitted that he had not entirely done justice to Gramsci’s writings. In an essay recently rediscovered by Giuseppe Vacca51, written shortly before Togliatti’s death in 1964 and titled Gramsci, un uomo, Togliatti acknowledged that «we may be reprimanded […] for having hidden or tried to counterfeit something»52. Deep down, as Vacca shows in his book, in his later years Togliatti knew that he had efectively created a Gramsci that never existed in an efort to further his political ambitions. Togliatti had rewritten Gramsci and inscribed him in the Stalinist logic of the Italian Communist Party as Togliatti had envisioned it. Now, in his political testament, he once again returned to Gramsci, only this time reading him more closely, less ideologically. In more ways than one, Togliatti saw himself forced to acknowledge Gramsci’s untranslatability into the discursivity that the postwar Italian Communist Party adopted as it took a stance on both Maoism and terzomondismo. Ultimately, Togliatti could not but airm a renewed commitment to Gramsci’s proposals for a transformative gnoseological and pedagogical practice, could not but subscribe to Gramsci’s conception of universal translatability, could not but embrace Gramsci’s «forme cinesi». . Pasolini’s «Third World» and the Gramscian Aestheic of the Uninished In 1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini set out to work on an ambitious project, titled Appunti per un poema sul terzo mondo, or Notes Toward a hird World Epic. he ilm series, which initially would consist of ive episodes set in diferent places around the world, was envisioned as a series of documentaries in the style of cinematographic notes or drats, «appunti» in the Italian. Like his contemporaneous See G. Vacca, Gramsci e Togliatti, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1991. Own translation. «A noi si potrebbe fare rimprovero se […] avessimo nascosto o cercato di contrafare qualcosa», in P. Togliatti, «Gramsci, un uomo», in La politica nel pensiero e nell’azione, pp. 1186-1187. 51 52 224 Pieter Vanhove novel project, the posthumously published Petrolio, the notes were mere indications of an imaginary inished work, sketches for a inal product that would never be realized, or to use Alain Badiou’s terminology in his introduction to Pasolini’s uninished screenplay Saint Paul, a «sacriicial manifesto of […] the seeming impossibility of its efectuation»53. In more ways than one, Pasolini’s deliberate choice for an aesthetics of the uninished that could document what he and his Italian contemporaries still referred to as the «hird World», was once more directly inspired by the uninished appunti of Antonio Gramsci. If Pasolini, who was murdered in 1975, only ever completed two of his planned series of ive ilms on the decolonizing world, his notebooks of the time give us an idea of the scope and the magnitude of the project. Pasolini’s engagement with anticolonial history and thought was that of an informed intellectual engaged with the major debates of his time, referring as he does to Sartre and Fanon, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and «other leaders of Black Power», Gandhi, Castro, Che Guevara, and even Obi Egbuna54. he so-called hird World was also a returning trope in his other writings and ilms from the mid1960s onwards. he uninished African screenplay Il padre selvaggio (1962) is a case in point, as are the epic poem Profezia (1964) and the Indian travelogue L’odore dell’India (1962), among other examples55. his so-called «second Pasolini» of the late sixties was increasingly doubtful about the potential of the Italian subproletarian body as a locus of resistance. With the onset of Italy’s economic miracle of the ities and sixties, the advent of consumer society, and the regime of «false tolerance», the ideal of the uncontaminated subproletrariat – what Raymond Williams has called «residual»56 culture – was increasingly becoming a rarity. It was this disillusioned Pasolini who in the 1960s set course for the decolonizing world. he Gramscian aesthetic of Pasolini’s terzomondismo was rooted in his earlier work. Pasolini had irst encountered Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in 1949 shortly ater the irst installment of Togliatti’s edition of the Quaderni had been published57. Pasolini’s reading of Gramsci was highly inluential for his series of A. Badiou, in P.P. Pasolini, Saint Paul. A Screenplay, E. Castelli (trans.), Verso, London – New York 2014, p. XI. 54 See P.P. Pasolini, Appunti per un poema sul Terzo Mondo, in W. Siti (ed.), Per il cinema, Mondadori, Milano 2001, vol. II, pp. 2679-80. 55 For a discussion of Pasolini’s hird-Worldist writings and ilms, see A. Barbato, L’alternativa fantasma. Pasolini e Leiris, percorsi antropologici, Libreria universitaria, Padova 2010, L. Caminati, Orientalismo eretico. Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del Terzo Mondo, Mondadori, Milano 2007, and G. Trento, Pasolini e l’Africa, l’Africa di Pasolini, Mimesis, Milano 2010. 56 See R. Williams, Dominant, Residual, and Emergent, in Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1977, pp. 121-127. 57 In his biography, Nico Naldini notes that 1949 was also the year Pasolini read Marx’s Capital. See N. Naldini, Pasolini. Una vita, Einaudi, Torino 1989, p. 131. 53 «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 225 poems that came out over the course of the 1950s, Le ceneri di Gramsci, which were published as a collection in 1957. When Pasolini read Gramsci and elaborated his reading in what is still considered his poetic masterpiece, he had just been expelled from the Italian Communist Party on questionable allegations of sexual encounters with minors, forced to abandon his Academiuta di lenga furlana – a research institute and school dedicated to the study of the Friulian dialect that he had founded in the Northern town of Casarsa della Delizia – and was living with his mother Susanna in Rome. he Pasolini of Le ceneri di Gramsci, then, was a quintessentially Roman mind, the writer and cinematographer of the sprawling housing developments that dotted the new landscape of the Roman borgate, the poet of the children of the urban working classes that he afectionately called «ragazzi di vita». For the Pasolini of the 1950s, these young, urban dwellers of the city’s banlieues still represented the same radical political potentiality of the Friulian peasantry, a «irely»-like quality that a decade later Pasolini could only ind outside of Italy, in the decolonizing world. Pasolini had read «Togliatti’s Gramsci», in the sense that he irst encountered the Quaderni in the problematic edition published by the leader of the Communist Party. At the same time however, his Gramsci was not Togliatti’s from a political and interpretative perspective. Over against Togliatti’s consecration and instrumentalization of Gramsci as the «center» of Italian political life on the let, Pasolini imagined Gramsci as an outcast, an outsider, a «coninato». he central poem of Le ceneri di Gramsci, which stages the author Pasolini who addresses Gramsci’s ashes at Rome’s Cimitero degli Inglesi, is very clear in this respect: Between these old walls the autumn May extends a deathly peace as unloved as our destinies. It carries all the grayness of the world, the close of a decade where we saw our keen, naive attempts to remake life end up among the ruins and a sodden, sterile silence… […] you outlined the ideal that sheds its light upon this silence […] Only here you see, on foreign ground, may you rest, still the outcast [ancora coninato]58. 58 P.P. Pasolini, Gramsci’s Ashes, in he Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini. A Bilingual Edition, S. Sartarelli (trans.), he University of Chicago Press, Chicago – London 2014, pp. 167-168; «Spande una mortale / pace, disamorata come i nostri destini, / tra le vecchie muraglie l’autunnale / Maggio. In esso c’è il grigiore del mondo, / la ine del decennio in cui ci appare / tra le macerie inito il profondo / e ingenuo sforzo di rifare la vita; / il silenzio, fradicio e infecondo… […] / delineavi l’ideale 226 Pieter Vanhove he Italian word coninato poses an important problem of translation. Here translated as «outcast», in its primary, literal meaning the word refers to the historical fascist practice of «il conino», whereby political opponents of the regime and notably openly gay people were banned or «coninati». he coninati were oten sent to colonies on islands like the Tremiti or the predominantly gay camp of Ustica, where Gramsci himself was held for a brief period59. he Pasolini of the 1950s very much saw himself as an outcast of the Communist Party, repeatedly describing himself as a «heretic», an engaged intellectual on the let shunned by establishment party politics. he «silence» and «grayness» Pasolini describes here, the «grigiore» upon which Gramsci had shed his light, can be read as a characterization of Italian communist politics ater the war. Disillusioned by a party that had expelled him for his sexuality and that was still subscribing to a Stalinist ideology, Pasolini thought of Gramsci as a kindred, isolated, but critical spirit60. For Pasolini, Gramsci was a coninato who shared with him a suspicion of entrenched power in its manifold manifestations, including on the let of Italy’s political spectrum. his critical spirit indebted to Gramsci would stay with Pasolini throughout his life. Pasolini continued to deine himself as a coninato, as a heretic on the fringes of Italian society broadly speaking and the Italian let in particular. his mistrust of ideological constructs also marked Pasolini’s idiosyncratic encounter with the Italian student movement of the late sixties. In his essays on gay rights, feminism, and the civil rights movement collected in Scritti corsari and Lettere luterani, Pasolini’s critical position was precisely that of a heretic, a «Lutheran» corsaro. Pasolini thought of himself as a tactical thinker in the sense that Michel de Certeau has given to the term, as a pirate or corsair who tactically «insinuates himself»61 in the text of the other in order to put it to work, as a thinker who deliberately transgresses the ideological and identitarian constructs that were shaping the discourses and movements to which at heart he belonged. che illumina / […] questo silenzio. Non puoi, / lo vedi?, che riposare in questo sito / estraneo, ancora coninato», in P.P. Pasolini, Le ceneri di Gramsci, in W. Siti (ed.), Tutte le poesie, Mondadori, Milano 2003, vol. I, pp. 815-816. 59 For a discussion of the «conino» policy during the fascist regime see C. Poesio, Il conino fascista. L’arma silenziosa del regime, Laterza, Roma 2011, as well as D. Renga, Screening Conino. Male Melodrama and Exile Cinema, in «Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies» 5 (2017), no. 1, pp. 23-46. 60 In his excellent book on Pasolini, Antonio Tricomi notes that Pasolini’s reading of Gramsci was that of Gramsci as «un intellettuale segregato dal mondo e un eretico, invece che il padre del Partito comunista», in A. Tricomi, Sull’opera mancata di Pasolini. Un autore irrisolto e il suo laboratorio, Carocci, Roma 2005, p. 146. 61 M. de Certeau, he Practice of Everyday Life, S. Rendall (trans.), University of Los Angeles Press, Berkeley 1984, vol. I, p. XIX. «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 227 Strikingly, it would be Pasolini’s reading of Gramsci as a coninato, as a heretic who like himself had been mistreated and misunderstood by the Italian political establishment, that informed Pasolini’s little-studied engagement with Italian Maoism. Pasolini was not unaware of the signiicance of Mao’s China in the context of Decolonization during the Cold War. His documentary appeal to UNESCO, Le mura di Sana’a (1971), notably features a series of shots that document the impact of the Chinese-led construction projects that were transforming the architectural and cultural heritage of the Yemenite capital at the time. Another of his hird-Worldist documentaries, Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (1970), touches on the impact of Chinese hird World geopolitics on recently independent African nations like Tanzania – Pasolini’s camera dwells, among other instances, on the construction of the new university of Dar es Salaam, which had been coordinated and funded by the Chinese. What is perhaps less known is that Pasolini also made direct interventions in the Maoist intellectual and political debates that were taking Italy by storm in the wake of the publication of Divergenze. Already in Il Pci ai giovani!! Pasolini had directly addressed Maoist and workerist factions within the Italian extraparliamentary let. «I ask for forgiveness», he wrote, «of my one or two thousand young brothers who are working [operano] in Trento or Turin, Pavia or Pisa, Firenze and a little bit in Rome as well»62. Among the cities listed here, Pisa was perhaps the most active hotbed of Maoism in Italy at the time. It was the town of Adriano Sofri, the notorious leader of the Maoist/workerist splinter group Lotta continua. As Aldo Cazzullo has noted in his comprehensive history of Lotta continua, Pasolini’s plea for «forgiveness» in his controversial and highly inluential poem was interpreted by Sofri as a direct interpellation of his organization, or in Sofri’s own words «a sort of calling card of his will to be linked to the kids of those days, and to us in particular»63. While Pasolini was highly suspicious of the broader student movement’s lack of self-criticism, to Sofri it had seemed that at heart he wanted to be on the picket lines alongside them. Ultimately, however, Pasolini’s well-meant critique of the student movement was not favorably received by the students themselves64. Pasolini, while an important reference, was increasingly seen as the grumpy grandfather of the movement, as an inherent part of the generation they were rebelling against. 62 Own translation. «Chiedo perdono a quei mille o duemila giovani miei fratelli / che operano a Trento o a Torino, / a Pavia o a Pisa, / a Firenze e un po’ anche a Roma», in P.P. Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, Walter Siti (ed.), Mondadori, Milano 2008, vol. I, p. 1442. 63 Own translation. «una sorta di biglietto di presentazione della sua voglia di legarsi ai ragazzi di allora, e in particolare a noi», Adriano Sofri cited in A. Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare rivoluzione. 1968-1978, Storia di Lotta continua, Mondadori, Milano 1998, p. 158. 64 On Pasolini and Moravia’s less than favorable reception in the student movement, see E. Siciliano, Pasolini. A Biography, John Shepley (trans.), Random House, New York 1982, p. 326. 228 Pieter Vanhove It is all the more remarkable, then, that in the 1970s Pasolini would publicly endorse and even inancially support the Italian Maoist organization Lotta continua. he encounter between Pasolini and Lotta continua is little-known and even less studied. It was nevertheless a real and prolonged one. Pasolini acted as editor of the organization’s newspaper, and in 1972 he co-directed a Lotta continua-produced ilm, 12 dicembre. In this recently restored documentary, which was a direct response to the terrorist attacks of Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969 and the fraught police investigation into its circumstances65, Lotta continua showcased the kind of activism it had become known for. Much like what was taking place in France, where Maoist and workerist intellectuals had begun working alongside the factory workers of places like Renault’s Billancourt facility, members of Lotta continua had occupied the Miraiori Fiat works in the late 1960s and fought alongside its laborers for better working conditions66. he ilm, then, was a poetic documentation of this and other sites of Italian labor conlicts where Lotta continua had intervened. It was conceived as a road movie travelling from the South to the North of Italy, from the Bagnoli steelworks in Naples, to the marble quarries of La Spezia. Its main message was a propagandistic one – the ilm was to show how Lotta continua, like other workerist factions on the Italian let, was involved with struggles for workers’ rights across the Italian peninsula. In Pasolini’s contributions to the documentary, the camera’s lens focuses on this history, and on the people that made it in particular. At Bagnoli, for instance, Pasolini interviews the laid-of workers of the Italsider steelworks, asking them the question, «contro chi protesta?», «who are you protesting against?» he camera then zooms in on an agitated worker with a speech impediment which makes him nearly impossible to understand, while his fellow workers translate on his behalf, «contro i padroni», «against the bosses». Later on, in a long sequence toward the end of the ilm, the camera travels alongside the 65 he Milan bombing had been one of the irst terrorist attacks of what is known as Italy’s anni di piombo, the «Years of Lead» of generalized terror that marked much of the 1970s and 1980s. Shortly ater the December 12, 1969 bombing, the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli was arrested, and allegedly committed suicide by jumping out of the window of commissioner Luigi Calabresi’s oice. It is the still hotly debated circumstances of this suicide and its atermath that constitute the subject matter of Lotta continua’s ilmic collaboration with Pasolini. Adriano Sofri and his Lotta continua would gain wide-spread notoriety in the atermath of this so-called «State Massacre» or «strage di Stato» that is still the subject of intense debate in Italy today. In 1988, Adriano Sofri was arrested for the 1972 murder of the man who arrested Pinelli, Luigi Calabresi. See C. Ginzburg, he Judge and the Historian. Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice, Anthony Shugaar (trans.), Verso, London – New York 1999. 66 See L. Bobbio, Storia di Lotta Continua, Feltrinelli, Milano 1988. For a discussion of this moment in early 1970s France, see K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, he MIT Press, Cambridge – London 1995, pp. 17-19. «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 229 gates of the massive Fiat factory in Turin, and focuses on a Fiat sign that can be spotted in the distance. he viewer is then taken inside a high-rise apartment building on the outskirts of the city, where Pasolini interviews the members of a family of Sicilian immigrant workers speaking in heavy dialect. «I would go back to Sicily», the mother of the family states, «Ritornerei in Sicilia». To which the younger daughter replies in the closing shot of the ilm, ater discussing how for her Sicily is now a mere holiday destination, «I like everything here», «Mi piace tutto qui». Figs. 1-2. Pier Paolo Pasolini ando‚-1omࢡm†-ķƏƐ7b1;l0u;ŐƐƖƕƑőķCѴlvࢢѴѴvĺ If Pasolini is known for his idiosyncratic criticism of the Italian student movement, his contribution to the ilm clearly demonstrates how he was nevertheless sympathetic to Lotta continua’s eforts to place the workers’ struggles center stage. While the ilm does not abandon the pessimistic language of Pasolini’s critical poems and essays of this period – the inal shot of a daughter of a Sicilian immigrant worker who has learned to appreciate the pleasures of a petty-bourgeois life is a testament to this trope – it shares with the proponents of Lotta continua a concern for the margins of Italian society over the broader demands of the student movement. his basic insight is relected in the documentary’s ilmic language. he ilm uses techniques that are highly reminiscent of Pasolini’s earlier documentary Comizi d’amore (1964), in which he interviewed everyday Italians, mostly from underprivileged backgrounds, about their attitudes towards sexuality – a rough ilming technique that would return in his hird-Worldist ilms as well. he director simply holds a microphone in front of the interviewees, gives heightened cinematic attention to the body, and lets them speak their mind in their language, without superimposing his own views, without intellectualizing their speech, correcting it, or burying it in standardized Italian. 230 Pieter Vanhove At the same time, what set Pasolini apart from the young irebrands of Lotta continua, was his relentless commitment to a Gramscian aesthetic and worldview. It was a sensibility that that clearly comes to the fore in his contributions to 12 dicembre, which like his hird-Worldist documentaries was note-like in its ilmic language, close to the Gramscian aesthetic of the uninished Notebook. his Gramscian sensibility was also relected in Pasolini’s political stance. For the ideologues of Lotta continua and the broader workerist movement, Gramsci’s writings were a philosophical antiquity that no longer ofered viable political tools – I am thinking here in particular of Mario Tronti and others’ notorious «break» with the Togliattian Gramsci who had come to embody the PCI of the postwar67. he Pasolini who became involved with Lotta continua, on the other hand, was still the same heretical mind of the Ceneri di Gramsci, still the coninato, still the critical voice who, like Gramsci, never ceased to deconstruct the political discourses he essentially inhabited68. Ultimately, the question of universal (un)translatability is again crucial here. Pasolini, like Gramsci, never ceased to investigate the problems of translation that existed between the diferent registers of language, between the language of the governanti and the governati, never suspended his research into the political structures that undergird language, discourse, ideology. If in the wake of Togliatti’s clashes with the Chinese Communist Party at the height of the Sino-Soviet split, Pasolini had briely engaged with the history of Italian Maoism, he had once again done so from a Gramscian perspective. He had remembered Gramsci’s plea in the «forme cinesi» passage – only if you commit yourself to learning the language of capital, only if you are able to decipher the complex discursive structures of the established world view, can you begin an attempt to speak that language diferently, and imagine a diferent conception of the world. Pieter Vanhove Columbia University Department of Italian Amsterdam Avenue, MC 8 7 New York, NY 7 USA pjnvanhove@gmail.com 67 On Tronti’s notorious «break» with Gramsci, see P. Capuzzo and S. Mezzadra, Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci, in N. Srivastava and B. Bhattacharya (eds.), he Postcolonial Gramsci, p. 44 f. 68 Fabio Vighi has also noted the Gramscian lineage of 12 dicembre. See F. Vighi, Beyond Objectivity. he Utopian in Pasolini’s Documentaries, in Textual Practice 16 (2002), no. 3, p. 506. «Forme cinesi»: Gramsci’s Translatability in Italian Third-Worldism 231