Share / SaveExhibitions, Italy, Sassari, 20 December 2017
Writing a short text on the figure of Antonio Gramsci could appear to be a mere exercise of historical reconstruction, given the amount of compiling studies on his personal and political life, his activity as a militant journalist of the New Order and the controversial and contradictory ideological studies on the writings collected in the voluminous notebooks. In reality this task is anything but simple.
The figure of Antonio Gramsci is one of the most complex in the historical scene of the '900, both for his activism and political protagonism of international (and internationalist) and for his complex (and implicitly determinant) personal reality, which to his ideological image , political and intellectual, acts as a background and a base.
Our exhibition on Gramsci, wanted to highlight the perhaps most known moment of his life, that period of time chosen by the fascist magistracy, which in his collective memory determines his memory, the period of imprisonment. Emblematic captivity and exemplary detention.
But the relationship between Gramsci and the "galleys" is a relationship that precedes this historical period.
Gramsci was born imprisoned in a prison. The prison of his physical malformation, which from his early childhood determines his intellectual and human development. The pages of his biographies give us an incredibly "modern" family atmosphere in front of his difficulty, which tries in every way to soothe his pain and the pain of his diversity. It gives us back the image of a child with a different development that plays, as far as he can, physically with others, but that immediately sharpens his mind, creating boats of paper, of reeds: little engineering works that he was proud of, for transporting his playmates into less physical and more related games. Games of mechanical perfectionism to which he devoted hours, and which refined his skills of construction and reconstruction, which later will play a fundamental role in his historical and political studies.
A stubborn child, determined to correct in every way his malformation, so much to build with his hands the weights and dumbbells, with which to do gymnastics, to strengthen his weak physical structure.
With that willpower that kept him up until the last day.
The pages on his childhood give us the image of a child dedicated to study, a voluntary prison, a choice, in which he locked up almost immediately, very young. Golden prison that gave relief to his body and nourished his mind.
A child who did not surrender to his physical limitations and at the same time, at a very young age, developed this visceral passion for study, to which he devoted himself with method and discipline for a long time, often preferring to the company of his peers and brothers, a child who strongly sought an organic synthesis between his physical limitations and his great cognitive capacity. A look at the already holistic, syncretic, organic world of the person as the mind and body. It is in this period, during the days of games, corrective training and the first report cards, at the moment perhaps more delicate than its growth, that the first real meeting with the royal prison took place: the imprisonment of his father, accused of illicit work .
Moment that determines for the family a new captivity, the social one.
The family will find itself having to face a change in its social status, with the lack of paternal income they will find themselves living in a condition if not of misery, of narrowness that will affect Nino more precisely, a situation that will almost occlude the possibility of do you study. Perhaps it was at this moment that Gramsci was born a real rebellion, as he himself said: "because I could not study, I had taken ten in all subjects in elementary schools, while the son of the butcher, the pharmacist, went , of the shopkeeper in fabrics ... ". Gramsci after the imprisonment of his body, he experiences social imprisonment given by the lack of money.
Despite the immense efforts of his mother, who alone will succeed in supporting the family with dignity, this fact will crack the father's image in the eyes of Gramsci.
The relationship between Tonino and his father will always be a difficult relationship. In the years of the University of Turin, lived with very strong intellectual needs, but even more concrete economic and physical needs, their relationship will always be marked by peremptory demands of the child, and the not always present response of the father. The letters to the family of that period are the expression of a great effort derived from studies, where for the love of glottology the cold suffers in coats not suitable for the Piedmontese cold and the lack of food. The whims and provocations of a little more than adolescent towards the family, are the grievances of a young man determined to improve intellectually that badly accepts the status of a poor student. In the following years the concept of economic imprisonment will reinvigorate his philosophy of social justice and his vision of a different society. In Turin his ideological militancy will become his way of life.
Here he will become a militant journalist, here he will make contact with the factory proletariat, here he will develop his political strategy, while in Russia Lenin took power and the new Russia came out of the First World War, declaring it was contrary to a conflict that placed workers of different states against each other on a field of war. Inconceivable situation for the socialists who considered the workers to be one international class, linked by relationships of brotherhood and solidarity. The proximity to the Russian line will lead to the escape from the golden prison of the PSI, with a historical tear in 1921, declaring itself completely alien to the reformist dynamics, lived by him as the cage, the prison that stopped the advance of proletarian consciousness.
His political history continued as a representative of the PCI in the USSR, where he married and had two children from a Russian musician, whom he was in love and fascinated: "I thought a lot about you, that you entered my life and you gave me the love and you gave me what I had always missed and it often made me bad and murky ".
He will establish unity and return to Italy protected by parliamentary immunity. He was arrested here in 1926, accused of conspiratorial activity, instigation of civil war, apology of crime and incitement to class hatred. He will never see his children again.
His activity in prison will be to write. Write and study. Studying, commenting, reconstructing uninterruptedly. Gramsci inside a prison writes thousands of pages, necessary, influential, struggling to break the system that had locked him inside that prison.
From the production of these years emerges the figure of an integral man. A man firmly convinced of his choice of militant life, convinced of his positions before history, endowed with a human sensitivity, and of a very high conscience and self-consciousness. Profound connoisseur of history, he knew himself profoundly: "The conscience that I myself have, in these years, become more" bookish ", to assume sometimes a preaching tone and an elementary teacher". For him, a philosopher of praxis, it was a limitation. For this reason he continues to inquire about life on the outside, reads numerous texts, catalogs notes, writes letters and criticisms also addressed to the outside world. Search for intellectual confrontation incessantly. He needs his family, always present in his life, asks for the presence of their affection with strong need. He suffers from not being able to know the dialectic of the life of his loved ones, he is anti-determinist and deeply convinced of the development and the history of personal development, he encourages his children to study, to play, to knowledge. But also to affection. And it deeply feels their lack, its not being able to be present during their growth.
".. only one photograph gives an image fixed once and for all. A series of photographs allows us to reconstruct, in certain limits, a personality in development, that is, the real personality. "
He feels loneliness and suffers from it. What emerges is that he himself calls neurasthenia in some letters. It is gruff, difficult to approach even by his own companions. He prefers to study, tries to make himself useful again, chooses to close himself in one of his prison inside the prison. He isolates himself in his single cell, a privilege granted by his famous jailer, who also sends him special, forbidden texts.
Try again to be useful. In the role assigned to him by his great capacity as a scholar. The organic intellectual theory fully reflects the whole life of this monumental character. "There is no human activity from which we can exclude any intellectual intervention, we can not separate homo faber from the man sapiens." Being intellectual for Gramsci meant living one's time, in an organic way to the emancipation of the integral man , in defense of the subaltern classes. It meant working to establish a new form of relationship that allowed the recovery of the being for oneself, in themselves and in the world as the foundation of the change of the historical course, no longer passively and not as protagonists of history, no longer livable as subordinates. The task of intellectuals is to direct this process with responsibility. He will try to do it from prison. In a certain way, it will do so in spite of death.
The last four years of his life he will spend in a clinic where he will find death in 1937.
Overlapping words and images related to Gramsci to the photos of a decommissioned prison and apparently linked to the past, brings to mind the thought of the eternity of punishment and the deprivation of freedom. It becomes an archetype, linked to the greatest fears, those of physical stabilization in a single walled, armored, not approachable, depersonalized and destructive place. It makes the consciousness emerge that the absolute value of the mobility of one's body, of the privation of the emotions of the steps decided even by chance and, in these places, arranged in a perimeter of solitude in the multitude, of silences that are confused with commands, at the shouts and words of more or less occasional companions, of stunned, watchful, frightened or challenging looks, we perceive the exercises of power, in a few square meters. Eternal as eternal is the dialectic between the ruler and the dominated, between the guard and the inmate, between the law and the transgressor, between those who command and those who suffer. Between injustice and justice.
We return to the duty-law of supervising and punishing, to the crimes and crimes, we return to the social value of punishment and to the individual weight of guilt. Whatever it is.
And Gramsci becomes the very symbol of the disvalue of the place. He who had proposed the concept of hegemony as a revolutionary foundation, he knew well that the repressive and restrictive value of some places could not eradicate the deeper reasons that move behavior and ideas that oppose the system.
He knew very well that in order to create a socially accepted system the only way to achieve the goal was to persuade with consent, with education, with culture. Spreading non-repressive ideas and actions, working towards the progressive and organic construction of a new form of social relationship: the new man, no longer exploited and no longer exploiting.
The walls were able to retain his body, where the disease played by a skilled ally, placing him in a state of inferiority. Those walls have held this man in a physical condition not active and not participatory in the facts of history that competed him, for his historical choice and immense capacity. He was held back. But it has not been possible to confine his tireless pursuit of intellectual and human knowledge; it has not been possible to limit his influence in society both in the era and in the decades to follow. It was not possible to hold back and contain its dialectical capacity.
It was not possible to exile it from history. PHILOSOPHER, POLITICIAN, WRITER.
Antonio Gramsci
MAN
(history)
Alessandra Ruggiu
The figure of Antonio Gramsci is one of the most complex in the historical scene of the '900, both for his activism and political protagonism of international (and internationalist) and for his complex (and implicitly determinant) personal reality, which to his ideological image , political and intellectual, acts as a background and a base.
Our exhibition on Gramsci, wanted to highlight the perhaps most known moment of his life, that period of time chosen by the fascist magistracy, which in his collective memory determines his memory, the period of imprisonment. Emblematic captivity and exemplary detention.
But the relationship between Gramsci and the "galleys" is a relationship that precedes this historical period.
Gramsci was born imprisoned in a prison. The prison of his physical malformation, which from his early childhood determines his intellectual and human development. The pages of his biographies give us an incredibly "modern" family atmosphere in front of his difficulty, which tries in every way to soothe his pain and the pain of his diversity. It gives us back the image of a child with a different development that plays, as far as he can, physically with others, but that immediately sharpens his mind, creating boats of paper, of reeds: little engineering works that he was proud of, for transporting his playmates into less physical and more related games. Games of mechanical perfectionism to which he devoted hours, and which refined his skills of construction and reconstruction, which later will play a fundamental role in his historical and political studies.
A stubborn child, determined to correct in every way his malformation, so much to build with his hands the weights and dumbbells, with which to do gymnastics, to strengthen his weak physical structure.
With that willpower that kept him up until the last day.
The pages on his childhood give us the image of a child dedicated to study, a voluntary prison, a choice, in which he locked up almost immediately, very young. Golden prison that gave relief to his body and nourished his mind.
A child who did not surrender to his physical limitations and at the same time, at a very young age, developed this visceral passion for study, to which he devoted himself with method and discipline for a long time, often preferring to the company of his peers and brothers, a child who strongly sought an organic synthesis between his physical limitations and his great cognitive capacity. A look at the already holistic, syncretic, organic world of the person as the mind and body. It is in this period, during the days of games, corrective training and the first report cards, at the moment perhaps more delicate than its growth, that the first real meeting with the royal prison took place: the imprisonment of his father, accused of illicit work .
Moment that determines for the family a new captivity, the social one.
The family will find itself having to face a change in its social status, with the lack of paternal income they will find themselves living in a condition if not of misery, of narrowness that will affect Nino more precisely, a situation that will almost occlude the possibility of do you study. Perhaps it was at this moment that Gramsci was born a real rebellion, as he himself said: "because I could not study, I had taken ten in all subjects in elementary schools, while the son of the butcher, the pharmacist, went , of the shopkeeper in fabrics ... ". Gramsci after the imprisonment of his body, he experiences social imprisonment given by the lack of money.
Despite the immense efforts of his mother, who alone will succeed in supporting the family with dignity, this fact will crack the father's image in the eyes of Gramsci.
The relationship between Tonino and his father will always be a difficult relationship. In the years of the University of Turin, lived with very strong intellectual needs, but even more concrete economic and physical needs, their relationship will always be marked by peremptory demands of the child, and the not always present response of the father. The letters to the family of that period are the expression of a great effort derived from studies, where for the love of glottology the cold suffers in coats not suitable for the Piedmontese cold and the lack of food. The whims and provocations of a little more than adolescent towards the family, are the grievances of a young man determined to improve intellectually that badly accepts the status of a poor student. In the following years the concept of economic imprisonment will reinvigorate his philosophy of social justice and his vision of a different society. In Turin his ideological militancy will become his way of life.
Here he will become a militant journalist, here he will make contact with the factory proletariat, here he will develop his political strategy, while in Russia Lenin took power and the new Russia came out of the First World War, declaring it was contrary to a conflict that placed workers of different states against each other on a field of war. Inconceivable situation for the socialists who considered the workers to be one international class, linked by relationships of brotherhood and solidarity. The proximity to the Russian line will lead to the escape from the golden prison of the PSI, with a historical tear in 1921, declaring itself completely alien to the reformist dynamics, lived by him as the cage, the prison that stopped the advance of proletarian consciousness.
His political history continued as a representative of the PCI in the USSR, where he married and had two children from a Russian musician, whom he was in love and fascinated: "I thought a lot about you, that you entered my life and you gave me the love and you gave me what I had always missed and it often made me bad and murky ".
He will establish unity and return to Italy protected by parliamentary immunity. He was arrested here in 1926, accused of conspiratorial activity, instigation of civil war, apology of crime and incitement to class hatred. He will never see his children again.
His activity in prison will be to write. Write and study. Studying, commenting, reconstructing uninterruptedly. Gramsci inside a prison writes thousands of pages, necessary, influential, struggling to break the system that had locked him inside that prison.
From the production of these years emerges the figure of an integral man. A man firmly convinced of his choice of militant life, convinced of his positions before history, endowed with a human sensitivity, and of a very high conscience and self-consciousness. Profound connoisseur of history, he knew himself profoundly: "The conscience that I myself have, in these years, become more" bookish ", to assume sometimes a preaching tone and an elementary teacher". For him, a philosopher of praxis, it was a limitation. For this reason he continues to inquire about life on the outside, reads numerous texts, catalogs notes, writes letters and criticisms also addressed to the outside world. Search for intellectual confrontation incessantly. He needs his family, always present in his life, asks for the presence of their affection with strong need. He suffers from not being able to know the dialectic of the life of his loved ones, he is anti-determinist and deeply convinced of the development and the history of personal development, he encourages his children to study, to play, to knowledge. But also to affection. And it deeply feels their lack, its not being able to be present during their growth.
".. only one photograph gives an image fixed once and for all. A series of photographs allows us to reconstruct, in certain limits, a personality in development, that is, the real personality. "
He feels loneliness and suffers from it. What emerges is that he himself calls neurasthenia in some letters. It is gruff, difficult to approach even by his own companions. He prefers to study, tries to make himself useful again, chooses to close himself in one of his prison inside the prison. He isolates himself in his single cell, a privilege granted by his famous jailer, who also sends him special, forbidden texts.
Try again to be useful. In the role assigned to him by his great capacity as a scholar. The organic intellectual theory fully reflects the whole life of this monumental character. "There is no human activity from which we can exclude any intellectual intervention, we can not separate homo faber from the man sapiens." Being intellectual for Gramsci meant living one's time, in an organic way to the emancipation of the integral man , in defense of the subaltern classes. It meant working to establish a new form of relationship that allowed the recovery of the being for oneself, in themselves and in the world as the foundation of the change of the historical course, no longer passively and not as protagonists of history, no longer livable as subordinates. The task of intellectuals is to direct this process with responsibility. He will try to do it from prison. In a certain way, it will do so in spite of death.
The last four years of his life he will spend in a clinic where he will find death in 1937.
Overlapping words and images related to Gramsci to the photos of a decommissioned prison and apparently linked to the past, brings to mind the thought of the eternity of punishment and the deprivation of freedom. It becomes an archetype, linked to the greatest fears, those of physical stabilization in a single walled, armored, not approachable, depersonalized and destructive place. It makes the consciousness emerge that the absolute value of the mobility of one's body, of the privation of the emotions of the steps decided even by chance and, in these places, arranged in a perimeter of solitude in the multitude, of silences that are confused with commands, at the shouts and words of more or less occasional companions, of stunned, watchful, frightened or challenging looks, we perceive the exercises of power, in a few square meters. Eternal as eternal is the dialectic between the ruler and the dominated, between the guard and the inmate, between the law and the transgressor, between those who command and those who suffer. Between injustice and justice.
We return to the duty-law of supervising and punishing, to the crimes and crimes, we return to the social value of punishment and to the individual weight of guilt. Whatever it is.
And Gramsci becomes the very symbol of the disvalue of the place. He who had proposed the concept of hegemony as a revolutionary foundation, he knew well that the repressive and restrictive value of some places could not eradicate the deeper reasons that move behavior and ideas that oppose the system.
He knew very well that in order to create a socially accepted system the only way to achieve the goal was to persuade with consent, with education, with culture. Spreading non-repressive ideas and actions, working towards the progressive and organic construction of a new form of social relationship: the new man, no longer exploited and no longer exploiting.
The walls were able to retain his body, where the disease played by a skilled ally, placing him in a state of inferiority. Those walls have held this man in a physical condition not active and not participatory in the facts of history that competed him, for his historical choice and immense capacity. He was held back. But it has not been possible to confine his tireless pursuit of intellectual and human knowledge; it has not been possible to limit his influence in society both in the era and in the decades to follow. It was not possible to hold back and contain its dialectical capacity.
It was not possible to exile it from history. PHILOSOPHER, POLITICIAN, WRITER.
Antonio Gramsci
MAN
(history)
Alessandra Ruggiu
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