Submitted by Berrin Chatzi Chousein
Call For Submissions:a special issue of ’Décalages’ (2015)
Turkey Architecture News - Jul 24, 2014 - 20:29 3960 views
Last Reminder:CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | a special issue of 'Décalages' (2015)
Call for submissions
Althusser and Gramsci, Gramsci and Althusser A proposal for a special issue of 'Décalages' (2015)
(http://scholar.oxy.edu/decalages/)
Coordinated by Fabio Frosini (Università di Urbino) and Vittorio Morfino (Università di Milano Bicocca)
Publication languages: English, French, Italian or Spanish
The issue will be published in 2015 and will among others include articles by: Etienne Balibar, Alvaro Bianchi, Fabio Frosini, Mariana Gainza, Mikko Lahtinen, Christian Lo Iacono, Miguel Mellino, Vittorio Morfino, Panagiotis Sotiris, Peter Thomas, André Tosel.
We invite proposals for articles (maximum length: 500 words), along with a CV (maximum length: 1000 words), by July 31, 2014.
Please send these documents via e-mail to:
Deadline for submission of proposals: 31 July 2014
Notification of acceptance:31 August 2014
Deadline for submission of articles: 31 December 2014
Issue publication: June 2015
The time of the Althusserian critique of Gramsci seems definitively past, given that in the last twenty years our sense of both thinkers has so radically changed. Since Althusser wrote "Marxism is not a Historicism" (1965) three years after Nicola Badaloni's Il marxismo come storicismo, the significance of Gramsci's thought has been subject to a profound revision. In 1985, from within the Althusserian universe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy contributed to a dissolution of the image of the historicism that Althusser had attributed to him,an image that corresponded more to Italian culture in the fifties than to what Gramsci had begun to develop in the thirties. Defining the "absolute historicism" of the Prison Notebooks as "the radical rejection of any essentialism or any a priori teleology," Laclau and Mouffe also marked a turning point in the history of the possible relations between Gramsci and Althusser and contributed to a reactivation of at least one of meanings of the idea of a radical break with the entire philosophical tradition.Today we see the final effects of this turn: between "Italian theory",made up in part of operaismo and in part of a Gramsci passed through the sieve of Postcolonial studies, and a confrontation between Gramsci and Foucault, it appears that we are moving towards a total confusion of historical and theoretical distinctions. It is this that necessitates a reflection on Gramsci and Althusser that re-examines Althusser's judgments on the basis of our expanded knowledge of Gramsci, but also a rethinking of Althusser's biography in the light of the new materials that have recently become available.
To explore this set of questions, we propose three lines of inquiry:
a) A historical reconstruction of Althusser's encounter with Gramsci, and through this encounter, the diverse theoretical legacies of Althusser that appear in the work of Poulantzas, Balibar, Macherey, and Buci-Glucksmann. This would include examining the events that led Althusser to conduct his own intervention in a specific Italian conjuncture defined by the crisis of Communist historicism, the struggle between Luporini and Della Volpe, as well as the beginnings of a reflection on the new forms of communication in Communist circles. This inquiry would further involve ascertaining in what way in the work of Balibar and Poulantzas favored a reactivation of important aspects of Gramsci's thought.
b) The encounter between Althusser and Gramsci possessed an extraordinary importance-in part through the mediation of Laclau-for an entire series of contexts in which the analysis of mass culture, the means of communication and the hegemonic forms of politics occupied a central place. We refer here, without pretending to be exhaustive, to Stuart Hall and "cultural studies," the development of a discursive theory of of hegemony and ideology and to the question of "populism" and its logic, especially in Latin America.
c) Only on the basis of the foregoing inquiries can we, in conclusion, propose a new theoretical reflection on Gramsci and Althusser. Some of the recent readings of Gramsci and Althusser allow us to establish a truly new dialogue between the two authors that moves beyond the old oppositions. We believe that developing this dialogue may prove crucial in rethinking Marxism in contemporary terms.