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.