Giulia La Rocca

This is the abstract of the English-language review of the volume Un confronto mancato: Walter Benjamin e Antonio Gramsci. The book (Macerata, Quodilbet, 2023) publishes the proceedings of a conference in Rome on the two Marxists held in Autumn 2022 which continues explicitly the earlier Vienna conference, the contributions to which are collected together in “International Gramsci Journal” 3(4), 2020. The proceedings fall into four sections. The first one deals with the philosophy of history and historical materialism, as elaborated by Gramsci in his “philosophy of praxis”; despite different starting points and apparently different assessments of historicism, there turns out in the end to be a convergence based on an anti-determinism. The second part focuses on revolution, counter-revolution and passive revolution, taking in the questions of the political subject and contemporary situations. Subjectivity is then the theme of the third section, as forms of life appropriate to the capitalist mode of production and as regards subjects attempting to emancipate themselves from this mode. The fourth section includes the two thinker-revolutionaries’ approaches to the question of the various types of intellectual, including their conceptions of the artistic vanguards, folklore and kitsch, and the translation of experience from one country to another.

This is the abstract of the Italian-language review of the volume Un confronto mancato: Walter Benjamin e Antonio Gramsci. The book (Macerata, Quodilbet, 2023) publishes the proceedings of a conference in Rome on the two Marxists held in Autumn 2022 which continues explicitly the earlier Vienna conference, the contributions to which are collected together in “International Gramsci Journal” 3(4), 2020. The proceedings fall into four sections. The first one deals with the philosophy of history and historical materialism, as elaborated by Gramsci in his “philosophy of praxis”; despite different starting points and apparently different assessments of historicism, there turns out in the end to be a convergence based on an anti-determinism. The second part focuses on revolution, counter-revolution and passive revolution, taking in the questions of the political subject and contemporary situations. Subjectivity is then the theme of the third section, as forms of life appropriate to the capitalist mode of production and as regards subjects attempting to emancipate themselves from this mode. The fourth section includes the two thinker-revolutionaries’ approaches to the question of the various types of intellectual, including their conceptions of the artistic vanguards, folklore and kitsch, and the translation of experience from one country to another.

With the Science of Logic, Hegel poses a radical challenge to philosophy: a self-presentation of thought that, by not assuming anything outside itself, achieves its self-knowledge. From the possibility of such a project depends that of the autonomy of thought, that is, of a thought that gives itself its own law.Some classical readings consider this enterprise to be unsuccesful or not to be fully accomplished in the Logic. According to Dieter Henrich, Hegel's Logic would fall into a circle, because would be burdened by the presupposition of the structure of thought itself, which should rather result from the logical process. For Robert B. Pippin or Terry Pinkard, instead, the instance of autonomy of thought would be realized not in the logic, but only at the level of the spirit.In contrast to such interpretations, we will try to show that precisely in the Logic the thought determines itself as autonomous. In its self-presentation thought, that has itself as its object, produces its own structures, which are not prior to the movement. And once it has come to know itself as such a process, thought ceases to presuppose itself as an object and poses its own form for itself.